Rosemary Remembered - China Bayles 04

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Maggie asked if we ought to organize one, we looked at each other questioningly.

  "I don't think so," Sheila said. "I really didn't know her. Did you?"

  Maggie shook her head. "I didn't know her at all." She glanced at me.

  I caught myself thinking that I knew more about Rosemary now that she was dead than I had when she was alive. Something was drawing me to her. Perhaps it was the fact that we resembled one another, or that I had found her body. Perhaps —

  Ruby cleared her throat. "Now that I've thought about it," she said, "there was something almost. . . well, crafty about Rosemary. About the way she did her work, I mean. I'm not saying she did anything wrong, and I'm certainly happy with my tax refund. But she knew every angle. Even some that weren't. .." She twisted a corkscrew of red hair around her finger, a little embarrassed to be speaking ill of the dead.

  Pam nodded. "It's hard to describe, but I certainly felt it when she set up the books for my practice. She said I ought to take advantage of all the loopholes. I asked what would happen if the IRS decided to audit, but she said not to worry, she'd take care of it." She made a wry face. "I think I'd better go back to doing things the old way. At least I understand it."

  I knew what Pam and Ruby meant. I'd admired Rosemary's skill in manipulating numbers and interpreting the rules when she used it to cut my taxes, but was it so admirable after all? Maybe I wasn't entitled to the moral high road, though, since I'd hired her to use that talent on my behalf. I expected her to wring the last deduction out of my tax records, and if she'd missed any, I probably wouldn't have hired her again. I was jolted by the thought that Rosemary and I had something else in common in addition to a similarity in appearance. My former clients certainly expected the best defense money could buy, whether that was morally right or wrong. That's why people hired professionals—to help them beat the system.

  Ruby turned to Pam. "Did the paper say anything about her ex-husband abusing her?"

  "Only that the police questioned him." Pam pushed her plate away, shaking her head. "You know, I'll bet that the spousal abuse I see in my counseling practice has tripled in the last few years."

  Sheila nodded. "I read the other day that one out of three women will be physically assaulted by their partners during their lifetimes."

  We traded uneasy glances. There were six of us. Which two had been slapped around?

  "And something like three-quarters of the women who are killed by their abusers are murdered when they move out or get a divorce," Pam said. Her eyes darkened. "One client actually told me that his girlfriend deserved to die if she left him."

  "What did you do?" Ondine asked in her resonant voice. It was almost the only thing she'd said all evening. She leaned forward intently. "Whom did you tell?"

  Pam lifted one shoulder, let it fall. "I couldn't say anything. The court sent him to me for mandatory counseling as part of his sentence for battery. Therapists are required to protect client privilege." She gave me a half-smile. "Just like lawyers."

  Ondine looked steadily at Pam. She did not speak, but her glance said it clearly. Privilege or no privilege, you should have intervened. If the woman died, you'd be guilty.

  I shifted uncomfortably. Ondine's unspoken indictment suggested that Pam was somehow responsible for what

  her client might do. But that wasn't right, any more than I was responsible for what my clients had done. Once we started accepting responsibility for other people's actions, where would we stop? Wasn't this just another version, hardly disguised, of McQuaid's taking care of me? People have to be responsible for themselves, damn it!

  Ruby, as usual, saw the other side. "It's tough, Pam," she said sympathetically. "Knowing that somebody's in danger and not being able to help. But what can you do with somebody like your client? Or with Robbins, who'll kill a woman before he'll let her leave him?"

  Sheila set her glass down carefully. "That bothers me, Ruby. What you just said, I mean. Robbins may have had a motive, but there's no physical evidence to tie him to the crime. No gun, no prints, no blood drops, no witness, nothing. And he's got an alibi. Rosemary was killed while he was with his sister."

  "His sister!" Ruby exploded angrily. "I keep telling you, you can't trust a sister!"

  "Ruby!" Pam and Sheila and I protested, and Ruby subsided. "Not our kind of sister," she muttered. "You know what I mean."

  Maggie crossed her arms on the table and leaned on them. "If her ex-husband didn't kill her," she said softly, "who did?"

  "I wonder if she was involved with somebody," Ruby mused. "That would've made Robbins see red." When Ruby gets her teeth into something, she holds on.

  "She was seeing Jeff Clark," Sheila said, almost reluctantly.

  "Jeff Clark. That's the man who owns The Springs Hotel, isn't it?" Pam asked. "I met him when our department hosted a seminar there."

  "Jeff Clark?" Ruby asked. "No kidding. I went to high school with Jeff." Unlike the rest of us, Ruby was born and raised in Pecan Springs.

  I looked at Sheila. "I guess you and McQuaid are the only people who knew about that," I said. "How did you find out?"

  "She told me. We went out to happy hour a few weeks ago, to celebrate finalizing my taxes. She'd just come from — " Sheila hesitated. "She was, well, sort of excited about something. Otherwise, I don't think she would have told me about Jeff Clark. She never talked about her personal life."

  "Kind of late filing your taxes, weren't you?" Pam asked teasingly.

  Sheila grinned. "That's what accountants are for—to file extensions."

  "What did she say about Jeff Clark?" Ruby asked, shamelessly curious.

  "Apparently they met when he asked her to straighten out a few things in the hotel books. The relationship was pretty serious, but she was keeping it quiet. I gathered that she didn't want her ex-husband to know. Or maybe he wasn't her ex, at that point. I don't remember when they were divorced." Sheila paused and I thought she might say something else. But Ruby spoke up again.

  "There, you see?" She pounded her fist on the table. "She was afraid of Robbins. She was scared he'd be violent."

  "Well, maybe," Sheila said thoughtfully. "Or maybe she just didn't want to hurt him."

  Ruby didn't pay any attention. "There's the motive," she said excitedly. "Robbins was already upset about her getting a divorce. When he found out about Jeff Clark, he came unglued and — "

  "You're guessing, Ruby," Maggie said firmly. "As

  Sheila says, there's no evidence. And you can't know what was in the man's heart. Nobody can know what's in anyone's heart."

  I turned to Sheila. "Anything new from the PSPD on the investigation?"

  "Nothing, as far as I know. If they've found the gun, I haven't heard about it."

  Ondine stirred, and I turned to look at her. Her silver-flecked eyes were intent, her gaze turned inward, as if she were seeing something we could not see. We stopped talking, and the noise of the conversations around us seemed suddenly muted, as if somebody had lowered a glass dome over our table. Ruby leaned forward to speak, but Ondine made a gesture that established distance. Ruby sat back as abruptly as if she'd gotten an electrical shock.

  "They will find it tomorrow," Ondine said. She spoke in the ringing oracular voice used by La Que Sabe, a voice rich in harmonic vibration and overtone, full of portent.

  "Find what?" Sheila asked curiously. She had not yet been introduced to Ondine's supernatural buddy and had no way of knowing that this was supposed to be a Significant Pronouncement.

  Ondine impaled Sheila with a long look. "They will find the weapon beside the river."

  "How the hell do you know?" Sheila asked incredulously.

  Ruby twisted. "Sometimes Ondine has .. . well, intuitions."

  Pam put her hand on Sheila's arm. "I'll explain later," she said, sotto voce.

  Sheila ignored Pam. "Intuitions are one thing," she said in a steely cop voice. "Flat-out claims are something else." She leaned forward. "You can't assert where and when som
ething will be found unless you — "

  "Well," Ruby broke in hastily, "I'm sure they'll find it sometime." She gave an embarrassed laugh. "And the riverbank is as good a place to look as anywhere."

  Sound was getting through to us again. Dishes rattled in the kitchen, and at a nearby table a woman laughed. We were awkwardly silent, and then all spoke at once, on different topics. Maggie asked Ondine how long she would be in town. Pam asked Ruby when her next tarot class was scheduled. But Sheila turned to me, not wanting to leave the subject of Rosemary's murder.

  "We're forgetting McQuaid's theory," she said. "Does he still think his ex-con is the killer?"

  "He's even more convinced than he was," I said. My eyes fell on my watch, and I gasped. It was after eight. McQuaid had expected me at six, and I hadn't called.

  "Talk about domestic violence!" I pushed my chair back. "McQuaid will kill me."

  "In a manner of speaking, I hope," Pam said.

  "Maybe not," I said. "If I don't show up tomorrow, you'll know who to question first." I took out my wallet and dropped a ten and three ones on the table.

  "Tell him you tried to call but the phone was out of order," Ruby said.

  "Tell him we tied you to your chair so you couldn't get to a phone," Sheila suggested wryly.

  "Tell him the truth," Maggie said, meeting my eyes.

  I would have, but he didn't give me a chance. I will draw the curtain of personal privacy over what happened when I got home. It's enough to say that our debate was as savage and slashingly staccato as a championship handball match, and we were both exhausted by it. We didn't speak or touch as we undressed, and when we were finally in bed, lying remote and apart, last night's shadowy gap had widened into the Grand Canyon.

  The window was open to the warm, still darkness and the perfume of the golden rain tree beside the porch was heavy, almost suffocating. I lay for a long time with my eyes open, anger and despair like a hot, sour geyser in my belly, thinking of all the things I should have said to him and rehearsing all the things I was going to say in the morning.

  And then, when I finally crossed the ragged, unquiet verge of sleep, I was once again standing beside The Beast's open door. Rosemary was lying on the seat, brown hair matted with blood and crawling with flies. But suddenly it was not Rosemary's face at which I stared in mounting horror, it was my own, my face, and I was lying on my back, my own blood splattered all around me. When I tried to protest that I was alive, that I could speak and breathe and move, the words were bottled up with my breath in my throat, and my body lay unmovable, while the shadowy figures of Bubba Harris and Maude Porterfield and Grace Walker and McQuaid—yes, McQuaid — stood laughing and trading jokes outside the truck.

  Finally, with a gasp and a strangled cry, I wrenched myself out of Rosemary's body and sat upright, my eyes staring into the dark.

  "Whazzat?" McQuaid mumbled. He came fully awake in an instant and reached for the gun he keeps in the drawer of his night stand. "Somebody outside?"

  I pulled in a shuddery breath. "No," I said. "I just had a bad dream."

  He looked at me. "You sure? You didn't hear anything?"

  "I'm sure I didn't hear anything."

  I thought he might reach out and touch me, but he only shoved his gun under the pillow and lay back down. Both of us lay awake for a long while, McQuaid flat and rigid, staring up at the dark ceiling, I lying apart, staring in at my heart.

  By the next morning, we were speaking again, but only to the extent of trading guarded remarks about neutral subjects. It was difficult to say whether we had gone too far in last night's quarrel. The fabric of a relationship is fragile, and ours hadn't been tested in enough tough situations to know how sturdy it was. It might be ripped beyond repair, and neither of us knew it yet.

  The shop is closed on Mondays. I pulled on shorts and an old tee and went down to the kitchen to make coffee, noticing that the thermometer on the porch already registered eighty degrees. The sky was a metallic blue and the sun a golden coin above a copper horizon. I turned on the ceiling fan. The day was going to be another scorcher.

  Brian came down a few minutes later, wearing a sullen look on his face and his iguana, Einstein, on his shoulder. Without saying a word he submerged a shredded wheat biscuit in a bowl of milk, and disappeared up the stairs with the bowl, a banana, and the dead mouse. The mouse, presumably, would be breakfast for one of his snakes. Ivan the Hairible, a furry black tarantula, would get part of the banana. I had never asked what Einstein ate.

  A little later, McQuaid came downstairs, gritty-eyed and unshaven. He gave me a curt nod that I returned equally curtly, and went out to the shop. I took orange juice out of the refrigerator, and three eggs. I was getting out the skillet when Harold, of Harold's Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration, called to ask what time he was supposed to meet me at the shop. We agreed on eleven, and

  I went back to the eggs. I'd broken two into a bowl and was holding the third when the phone rang again.

  "They've found the gun," Sheila said without preamble.

  "No shit," I said, and immediately thought about On-dine and La Que Sabe.

  "No shit." Sheila was grim. "You'll never guess who it belongs to."

  I hate youll-never-guess games, even when they're played by my friends. "Who?" "Jeff Clark." I dropped the third egg.

  Chapter Six

  Raspberry leaves have a long tradition of use in pregnancy to strengthen and tone the tissue of the womb, assisting contractions and checking any haemorrhage during labour.

  David Hoffman The Holistic Herbal

  "Jeff Clark?" I repeated, stunned. Egg yolk was dripping off the edge of the counter.

  "Yeah," Sheila said. "Ain't that a stunner?"

  McQuaid, his tee shirt already sweaty, came into the kitchen and began to rummage in the cupboard beside the refrigerator. "I'm looking for the cleaning fluid," he said. "Do you know where it is?"

  I held up the phone. "It's Sheila. They found the gun that killed Rosemary."

  McQuaid's head snapped up. "All right," he said. "Where'd they find it?"

  "Where'd they find it?" I said, into the phone.

  "By the river, under the 1-35 bridge. A couple of guys were bank-fishing. Around midnight, one of them relieved himself in the bushes. He peed on it."

  "Under the 1-35 bridge," I repeated to McQuaid.

  "Where's the cordless?" McQuaid asked, and I pointed to the dining room. He came back with the phone to his ear, speaking into it. "What's this about a gun?"

  "A couple of fishermen found it," she said. "They called Bubba. He figures it was tossed off the bridge, maybe out of a car window, with the idea that it would land in the river. He recognized it right away."

  "Recognized it?" McQuaid was startled.

  "Yeah," Sheila said. "Apparently you don't forget this gun, once you've see it. A nickle-plated Smith & Wesson .38 with an elaborate monogram carved into a rosewood grip. The initials are C. C."

  "Damn," McQuaid said under his breath.

  "Those aren't Jeff Clark's initials," I said.

  "No," McQuaid said. "They're his father's initials: Charles Clark."

  "Right," Sheila said. "Bubba recognized the gun because Big Chuck shot an armed robber at the hotel some years ago, and he impounded it for a while."

  "Who says it's the murder weapon?" McQuaid asked. "If it was found at midnight, they haven't run ballistics yet."

  "The chief himself took it up to DPS in Austin," Sheila said. "At six this morning. He dragged somebody out of bed. It's the gun that killed Rosemary, all right."

  We were all three silent. I was thinking about Ondine and La Que Sabe and wondering how the hell she knew. McQuaid's face was working. I knew he was thinking about Jeff.

  "Prints?" he asked finally.

  "Plenty," Sheila said. "Whose, they don't know yet. Clark's aren't on file. He's been clean—until now."

  "Just a damn minute, Sheila." McQuaid sat down abruptly on a kitchen chair, elbows on his knees, shoulde
rs hunched, back turned to me. "You're saying that Bubba thinks Jeff Clark murdered Rosemary Robbins? That's ridiculous!"

  "Tell him that," she replied. "He's up at the hotel right now, questioning Clark and taking prints. If it's a match, he's got his killer."

  McQuaid pulled at his lip. "Where'd you get this information?"

  "I ran into Bubba at the Doughnut Queen about fifteen minutes ago."

  "I just don't see Jeff doing something like this." McQuaid rubbed his head and his dark hair stood up. "He'd asked Rosemary to marry him, and she'd said yes. They were only waiting until her ex cooled down some. Robbins was ticked off about the divorce."

  "Jeff wanted to marry Rosemary?" I asked, surprised. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  McQuaid jerked around, his eyes dark, narrowed. "Because he told me to keep it to myself. Is there a law that says I have to tell you everything I know?"

  Sheila jumped into the breach. "Rosemary told me they were seeing each other." She paused, then added with greater deliberation, "She also told me she was pregnant."

  McQuaid gave a startled grunt.

  "Pregnant!" I exclaimed. "Why didn't you tell me before?"

  "Because I haven't seen you alone. It wasn't something Rosemary would want blabbed all over town." "How far along was she?"

  "Almost three months. It was a month or so ago when she told me, the night we did happy hour."

  There was another silence. I was trying to square the out-of-wedlock pregnancy with the cool, matter-of-fact businesswoman who had whipped my Schedule C into submission. It didn't seem like a mistake Rosemary would have made. Did that mean it wasn't a mistake? Was the pregnancy deliberate?