“Please get out of my house,” Danielle whispered.
“Does this mean you won’t be at the book club meeting?” I asked, reaching for the doorknob. I saw her knuckles whiten as her grip tightened on the thick spine of the tome.
She didn’t answer. Probably a good thing.
“I’ll let myself out,” I said in parting.
I’d swear I heard Threshings strike the door as soon as I closed it behind me.
The other guests had long since left, but Madge Rathburn was waiting on the sidewalk. Her maroon Camry stood at the curb and, given Madge’s air of urgency, subtle though it was, I was surprised the motor wasn’t running. She looked like a woman who thought she might need to make a fast getaway.
“You really pissed her off,” she said in a pleased whisper, nodding in the direction of the house.
“All in a day’s work,” I answered, sounding more confident than I felt. I had a badge in my purse, but I was new in the investigation business. It would take some time to refine the process.
“I could give you a ride home if you want,” Madge suggested.
I was only a few blocks from Cemetery Lane, and it was a nice night, warm and still and starry, suitable for walking off too many macaroons; but it was obvious Madge had more to say, and I wanted to hear it.
“Thanks,” I said.
She nodded and went around to the driver’s side, and I got in from the sidewalk. The ashtray was overflowing, and the smell of stale smoke felt solid in my nostrils.
“Tell me about the skeletons in Danielle’s dining room,” I said, as soon as we were rolling.
“Not much to tell,” Madge replied. I knew she wanted a cigarette by the way her eyes kept straying to the pack on the dashboard, but she didn’t indulge, and I appreciated the courtesy. “You mind riding around for a little while?” she asked. “I talk better when I’m driving.”
Sonterra was working, and Emma, I hoped, was busy with her homework. “I’d like to see where those bodies were found, if the place isn’t off-limits,” I said. That was me. Respecter of law, order, and crime-scene tape.
Madge tossed me a curious glance. “Bodies?”
“The coyote victims.” Jimmy Ruiz had been one of them, which made it a kind of personal pilgrimage, but I felt no need to confide that in Madge.
“Oh,” she said somberly. “It’s a ways out of town. Dave said it was the worst mess he’s seen in all his years with the department.”
Sonterra hadn’t given me many details, other than that the bodies had been shot execution style, but my imagination filled in the gaps. It seemed, in that moment, as if Jimmy’s soul passed through mine like a cold wind, and I shivered.
“Why would you want to see that place?” Madge asked. It was a reasonable question. Normal people aren’t drawn to murder scenes.
But, then, I’m not normal.
I wasn’t exactly sure how to put the need into words, without scaring her off, so I made something up. I decided to tell a partial truth. “Just to get a sense of what happened there, I guess.”
“Those poor people,” Madge murmured, with a shiver of her own. “It’s a problem, all these illegal immigrants flooding into the country, but you can’t help feeling sorry for them. Especially when something like that happens.” She pulled onto Main Street and we whizzed through Dry Creek, heading northeast, into the desert. Madge clearly wasn’t worried about getting a speeding ticket; like me, she had an in with the cops.
“How long have you known Danielle?” I asked, when a few moments had passed. I was back to wondering about the skeletons, but it was more idle curiosity than anything else.
“She moved to town five years ago,” Madge answered, with another longing glance at the cigarettes. “Don’t know where she came from, though. She and Oz were an item back in the day. That’s Oz Gilbride, the former chief of police.”
I nodded. Sonterra had said even less about Gilbride than the coyote victims, since we’d arrived in Dry Creek, a sure sign that the investigation was more sensitive than I’d guessed.
“They were an unlikely pair,” Madge mused, and the cigarettes slid across the dash as she made a hard right onto a rutted track through the desert. “He didn’t have anything but his pension, which I’m here to tell you wasn’t much, knowing what Dave’s going to get, and she was pretty high-toned, so we didn’t know what to make of it. Danielle had the shop built, then Bobby Ray turned up one day.”
“An even stranger pair, I imagine,” I put in, as we bounced past a tall cactus with part of its skeleton showing. A lot of people think cacti are just pulp inside, but they have an intricate wooden structure.
“Dave ran a background check on him, on the q.t., of course. Found out he’d been in jail in Oklahoma—did three years for assaulting some old lady. It was odd how Oz got so friendly with a yardbird like that.”
“Did Bobby Ray work?” I asked, remembering Micki’s assertion that he’d never made a payment on her trailer.
Madge made a harrumph sound. “He made some deliveries for Danielle once in a while. Packed stuff for shipment, things like that.”
“Dry Creek’s pretty small to support a store like hers,” I observed.
“The locals don’t buy much, that’s for sure,” Madge agreed, barreling through the darkness. Her headlights caught on various cacti as we jostled along; with their arms extended at all angles, it looked as if they were either trying to hitch a ride or wave us off. “We get our share of tourist traffic coming through this time of year, though. They spend plenty, on the way to and from Tucson.”
I recalled how crowded Danielle’s store had been when I drove into town for Sonterra’s swearing-in, and she’d been selling things hand over fist when I’d stopped in.
“She does a big business on the Internet, too,” Madge put in.
I made a mental note to go online when I got home.
Just then, a coyote—the four-legged variety—trotted into our path, and Madge laid on the brakes. The desert dog didn’t break his stride.
“What was it you wanted to tell me, Madge?” I ventured, guessing that the moment was right. “You were obviously waiting for me to come out of Danielle’s place.”
She sighed, maneuvering between potholes. I wondered if she’d go home and tell Deputy Dave that the new chief’s pesky girlfriend was a few cans short of a six-pack. “I just wanted to warn you about Danielle,” she said quietly, almost reluctantly. “She’s probably all right. But she’s got influence in this town, and if she takes a dislike to you, she can make things mighty uncomfortable.”
Too late, I thought.
We hit another pothole, and I braced myself against the dashboard with both hands. “Maybe we ought to turn back,” I said. Now that I knew the approximate location, I could find the crime scene on my own, in the daylight.
“We’re almost there,” Madge said, and sped up. “Hold on. Here comes the gully.” We were airborne for a second or two, and landed hard on the other side of a chasm, bouncing on the Camry’s shock absorbers.
Once my heart slithered back down out of my throat, I asked, “Is Danielle involved with anybody now?”
“Those women at the meeting tonight? She’s been to bed with half their husbands. Far as I know, there’s nobody special.”
I digested that. There weren’t many secrets in towns like Dry Creek, at least not among longtime residents. Surely some of the members of the book club knew about Danielle’s penchant for married men, and it seemed strange to me that they’d want to socialize with her. Human nature being what it was, they probably thought their own husbands were immune to her charms. That kind of thing always happens to somebody else.
Ask Loretta.
Suddenly, we were at the mouth of what appeared, in the headlights, to be a huge dry wash, and Madge brought us to a quivering standstill.
“Here it is,” she said. She opened her door and reached for the cigarettes on the dash. Lit up as soon as she was clear of the car. “I don’t like thi
s place. I think it’s haunted. Lots of caves and potholes out here, too. Every once in a while, some hiker gets swallowed up, and the search-and-rescue folks play hell finding the body.”
I peered into the darkness. I saw tatters of yellow tape hanging limply in the glow of Madge’s headlights, but not much else. The air seemed heavier, and colder, as I stepped closer, taking care to avoid rabbit holes and the sharp thistles that seem to jump off certain varieties of ground cacti, as if magnetized to human flesh. The bodies were long gone, of course, but the fear lingered, like some nebulous, ghostly force.
I couldn’t help thinking of Jimmy, so young and so afraid. I blinked back tears and swallowed the lump of grief that constricted my throat.
Madge was right—the place was haunted. The silent cries of the victims still throbbed in the air.
“You be careful,” Madge called after me, and hers might have been a disembodied voice, for all I could see of her. Just a vague shadow and the orange tip of a burning cigarette. “Dave would wring my neck if he knew I brought you out here.”
Sonterra wouldn’t be thrilled about the idea, either. Not that I intended to tell him, just yet, and it was safe to assume Madge wouldn’t let the story slip to Deputy Dave, either.
I stood just inside the wash for several minutes. Although I had come to that awful place on purpose, it was an unwilling vigil. My feet had grown roots, it seemed, tangling around sharp plates of bedrock far beneath the dry, unyielding sand.
“We’d better get out of here,” Madge said, uncertainly cheerful, her tone in direct contrast to her daredevil driving on the way out. “Dave’ll be wondering where I got to. Tuesday nights, we usually catch up on our TiVo.”
I nodded. I wanted to leave, too.
But I’d never forget that desolate place.
Fourteen
I was aware that I was dreaming. I knew I was lying in my own bed, safe beside Sonterra. I even knew that it was after midnight, though my eyelids were too heavy to lift.
I sat in the back pew of Father Morales’s little church, surrounded by candlelight, flickering ineffectually against the shadows, by wafting incense and plaster saints. Francis of Assisi teetered on my right, cradling a blue bird with a chipped beak in the palm of one hand. The Virgin Mary, her delicate feet balanced upon a crescent moon, graced my left.
Up near the altar, a bride and groom stood with their backs to the odd congregation, the bride in full regalia, the groom standing straight in a rented tuxedo. Sonterra and me, I remember thinking, and nudged Mary to make sure she was paying attention.
“I now pronounce you man and wife,” a male voice announced.
I felt a swell of anxious anticipation.
With a whoosh of flapping wings, St. Francis’s blue bird took off, circled the sanctuary twice, then nose-dived into the middle of the wide aisle, shattering audibly into shards.
Meanwhile, organ music swelled to the rafters. I was sorry about the blue bird, but shit happens. My attention was riveted on the bride and groom, my breath raw in my throat.
I saw Sonterra’s profile as he turned to face me—that was me up there, swathed in silk and lace, wasn’t it? He was so handsome, so earnest, that I felt my heart quiver in my chest.
“You may kiss the bride,” said the priest who wasn’t there.
Sonterra tenderly lifted the veil, bent his head for the kiss, and recoiled. A skull grinned up at him from where my face should have been, brown like the ones in Danielle’s dining room, with chunks of what looked like mummified flesh stuck to its cheekbone.
I screamed and shot bolt upright.
“Clare.” Sonterra laid a hand on my arm. “Clare!”
I was still fighting my way out of the dream.
Sonterra switched on the bedside lamp, said my name again.
I blinked, and the bedroom came into dizzying focus. My whole body shook, slick with clammy sweat, and my breathing was so rapid and so shallow that I thought I was going to pass out from lack of oxygen.
“Easy,” Sonterra said gently. “You were dreaming, Babe.”
I was afraid to turn and look at him, in case he’d morphed into a skeleton, or I had.
He slipped an arm around me, pulled me against his warm, solid chest. “You’re soaked,” he said, brushing his lips against my temple.
I started to cry. I wanted to tell him about the nightmare, but I couldn’t seem to assemble the words. I felt cold and, at the same time, feverish.
Sonterra used the edge of the top sheet to dry my cheeks. “Easy,” he said again.
“I’m f-freezing,” I managed.
He held me more tightly. “Want to tell me about it?”
“It was awful!”
“I gathered that much.”
“Just hold me. I-I need a few minutes—”
He waited, and when I stopped shivering, he got up, fetched a hand towel from the bathroom across the hall. I was vaguely aware of Emma, standing in the doorway, and I heard Sonterra tell her everything was all right, just a nightmare, go back to bed.
By then, my skin had dried to a goose-pimply chill, so the towel was unnecessary. I stayed on the bed while Sonterra helped me out of my nightshirt and into sweats. He even put socks on my feet.
“Better?” he asked.
“I love you,” I said.
He grinned, standing over me, and leaned to kiss my forehead. “I know,” he answered. “You do your best to hide it, but word’s leaked out. Want a glass of water or something?”
“How about a Blizzard?”
He chuckled. “No Blizzards,” he said, lying down beside me. “Not at this hour.”
I sniffled. “I dreamed I was sitting in the back pew at St. Swithin’s. You and I were up in front of the altar, getting married. When it came time to kiss me, and you lifted my veil—” I stopped, and another shudder ran through me. Get over it, I thought, it was a freaking dream. But of course it wasn’t that easy. “My head had turned into a skull.”
Sonterra gave a low whistle, and I noticed he left the bedside light on. I was inordinately grateful for that.
I told him about St. Francis, and the Virgin Mary, and the kamikaze blue bird.
“Joseph Campbell would have had a field day with that one,” Sonterra said. He was addicted to PBS. “Since he’s not around, I’d have to say it means you’re really scared to get married.”
I looked at him, studied his face. His eyes were sad and watchful, and one corner of his highly kissable mouth curved in a forlorn attempt at a smile.
I shook my head. “That isn’t it,” I said, and I was fairly certain it was true.
“Okay, Sigmund,” he agreed. “What’s your take on it?”
“Danielle Bickerhelm has a pair of skeletons sitting at her dining room table. They’re having a tea party, and she calls them Uncle Fred and Aunt Doris.”
“Holy shit,” Sonterra said. “What’s with that?”
“Who knows? I ate a lot of macaroons, too.”
Sonterra grinned. This time it was real, and there was nothing sad about it. “I’m not sure I follow your reasoning, Counselor.” He rested his head in one hand, elbow pressing into the pillow. Something squeezed inside me.
“I think my subconscious mind took the skeletons and the sugar rush, poured on a few prenatal hormones, and made nightmare stew.” I’d scanned Danielle’s Web site and various online auction postings earlier, too, and even though nothing had really jumped out at me, it had left me with the niggling feeling that I was missing something important.
Sonterra reached out to turn off the light, pulled me back into his arms, and kissed the top of my head. “That’s a recipe for crazy, all right,” he agreed. His voice was low and sort of thick. “I’ll be a good husband, Clare. I promise you that.”
My eyes burned. “Yeah,” I said. “But will I be a good wife?”
“It would be nice if you could cook,” he teased sleepily.
I bit my lower lip. I felt safe, nestled in his arms, though ragged shreds of t
he dream were still with me. “I got Madge Rathburn to take me to the crime scene tonight, after we left Danielle’s,” I confessed in a whispered rush. “The one in the desert, I mean.”
End of cozy domestic moment. Sonterra sat up so fast he nearly sent me rolling off the other side of the bed, and snapped the lamp back on. “What?”
“Where the bodies were found.”
“Christ,” Sonterra rasped, and shoved a hand through his hair. “What possessed you to do that? What could you possibly have expected to find in the dark?”
“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “I just had to go there.” I paused, trying to summon up my inner lawyer. All I got was the street kid from Tucson, and she wasn’t up to her usual fancy verbal footwork. “No harm done, Sonterra. You and the feds have surely been over the place with a magnifying glass. Found all the evidence there is to find.”
Sonterra’s face softened, in the dim light of the quarter moon, but only slightly. “That’s coyote country, Clare,” he said. “Now that the heat’s off, they might come back.”
“That doesn’t sound very likely,” I reasoned. “They’d expect you—or the feds—to be watching the place.”
“They know damn well we don’t have the manpower,” Sonterra said. There was something guarded about his tone, and I knew he wasn’t telling me everything.
“Spill it, Sonterra. I’m not going to leave you alone until you do.”
He must have believed me. “It’s a dumping ground,” he admitted. “The last batch of bodies was found there, too—about four years ago. Nice conversation to follow up a nightmare.”
“Danielle’s pretty pissed, too,” I admitted, thinking I might as well get it over with. “I told her, in so many words, that I was going to book her baby brother a seat on Death Row. In my capacity as an investigator for the prosecutor’s office, I mean. She told me to get out of her house.”
“Did it ever occur to you, Sherlock, that if Bickerhelm is in contact with Lombard, she might be a lot more careful about dropping the ball, now that you’ve run off at the mouth?”
One Last Look Page 16