by Ann Ripley
“Lannie was McCormick’s former wife—and there’s a child involved? How sad for the child. She is not bad, Louise. In fact, I could see liking her if she were associated with someone else. She is just caught up in a business that has its own agenda. She would never get her hands bloodied, so to speak; she has too much to lose. That woman makes close to a million dollars a year.”
Louise did a quick mental calculation: Lannie made about fifteen times as much as she did with her two jobs.
“Thanks, Mary. I felt a certain empathy for the woman myself, though I could see she can be tough as nails.”
“So you’re sleuthing again, Louise. We’ll be back home in a few days, and I’ll be delighted to go out on the detective trail with you. In the meantime, I want to commiserate with you on the loss of your dear old friend. And there’s one more thing I need to talk about.” She paused. “Louise, how can I say it? I hear these lurid accounts from police regarding the body, I mean, Jay. I hate to upset you with them, but yet there are the living to be considered. Uh, Jay floated in my pond all night, I guess, until you found him. The police also gave me some garbled story about hamburger scraps fed to my koi.”
Louise had an intake of breath. Why did they have to mention Jay’s fast-food dinner scraps?
“I’m afraid so.”
“Well, if it isn’t too crass to bring up at a time like this, how have the koi survived it all?”
Louise realized she hadn’t fed the fish all day.
“I think they’re doing just fine,” she answered smoothly. “But just for insurance, I’m going to have a koi doctor look at them and be sure they’re okay.”
Then her call waiting buzzed, and Louise was frankly grateful, for her falsehoods about the fish were stressful. She devoutly hoped that she wouldn’t have to manufacture more of them.
“Hold on, Mary, I’ll be right back.” When she put the second call on the line, a quavery young voice said, “I’m Melissa McCormick, Mrs. Eldridge.” Louise’s heart leaped in her chest and her feet came off the chair.
She scribbled the girl’s number down on her pad. “I will call you right back,” she promised Melissa. “Don’t go anywhere.” Then she flashed back to Mary Mougey.
“Hi, Mary, I’m back. A friend of mine is a koi doctor—he’s an expert on them. He’ll make sure that yours are nice and healthy.”
“I’ve never heard of a koi doctor. How kind of you, my dear,” said Mary. “See you soon.”
“And Mary, that call on the other line—I think it could be a break in the case.”
“Wonderful. Go for it, Louise! But do be careful.”
Twenty-Four
SHE TAPPED IN THE PHONE NUMber that Jay McCormick’s daughter had given her. The phone rang only once before Melissa answered. “Hello!” Breathless. A small clattery noise indicated that someone else had picked up another extension.
“Hello—”
“Hold a minute,” interrupted the girl, as if talking to a friend. She was a canny one, just like her father had said. Louise could hear a pleasant conversation in the background, obviously a smooth attempt to assure the other person, perhaps a housekeeper, to stay off the extension phone.
How did this thirteen-year-old become so crafty? Was it genetic, straight through from father to daughter?
Melissa returned to the phone. Still as if talking to a girlfriend, she said loudly, “It’s cool you called. Gotta see you. Can we get together?”
“Well, I’m in my home south of Alexandria.”
“I—hold on another sec.” Louise could hear only silence, as the girl perhaps checked out to see who might be listening on the phone extensions. Louise remembered jay saying that Lannie and Melissa lived in a huge house overlooking the Potomac.
After a couple of minutes, Melissa returned to the line. “Whew! She’s gone home. The maid, I mean. I live way out in Great Falls. How will we ever get together?”
“Why don’t I drive up right now? It should only take about a half hour.”
“You would do that? That’s cool.”
“Melissa, you have been told about your father, of course.”
“Yes.” The girl’s voice choked. “Mom told me last night, after she visited the morgue to be sure it was him. And now you and I just have to meet. I’m following my Dad’s instructions.”
“He told you about me?”
“Yes. But we can’t be seen together, so let me meet you at the beginning of our street, okay? There’s a little park where you can pull your car in.” She gave Louise exact directions to her house.
“I’ll see you there.”
Louise hopped into her Honda wagon, rolling down the windows because the air conditioning had broken down again. She drove through the crowded northbound traffic of Route One, which was becoming more gentrified each year. The two-hour sleazy motels, the halfway houses, the down-at-the-heels trailer courts, the fortune-teller ensconced in an old house, and even the one-of-a-kind Dixie Pig barbecue restaurant with its pig-graced sign were all threatened by encroaching fancy town house developments. It made Louise rather sad. She liked the diverse character of the Route One strip and hated to see the entire area homogenized, the only people left with whom to interact the upper middle class, who sometimes bored her to tears.
Then she caught the Beltway, filled with Friday going-home traffic, until the turnoff onto the Memorial Parkway that would take her to Great Falls.
Things now had been set in motion. No matter what the police had done or not done, she herself had learned a little more today about the people who might have harmed Jay. And now, through none of her own efforts, but rather through the dead man’s wiliness, she might get a genuine lead from his daughter.
But an uncomfortable feeling kept dogging her. Paul Mendoza, the Sacramento reporter Al Kirkland had mentioned, would soon be contacting her. And she didn’t doubt that other reporters were soon going to make some connection between her and Jay. For one thing, she hadn’t asked the police to withhold that kind of information. And just the words “Sylvan Valley” conveyed memories for the media of the mulch murder. Unfortunately, that severed body had been discovered in leaf bags Louise had pinched from her neighbors for yard mulch. It was one thing to try to find Jay’s killer, and another to be involved publicly.
She was also quite humble about what she could learn about this affair. For instance, how could she possibly breach the Goodrich campaign and find out which of the three men might have done jay harm: Upchurch, French, or even Rawlings?
Louise turned off the parkway onto a narrow secondary road. This quiet neighborhood, only a few blocks from the parkway, was protected with signs that kept commercial vehicles and most ride-by traffic out, making it into an almost private enclave. Louise missed a turn, and took the next street, although it was one-way and had a DO NOT ENTER sign. She entered anyway, and within a few blocks saw the small, grassy public park Melissa had described. She pulled her car onto the side of the narrow road.
The girl soon appeared, taking her time, playing a role. Laughable looking, really, with her tinted sunglasses that were so huge that they must have been filched from her mother. Her hair was curly and long, a glorious strawberry blond, a combination of Jay’s pale blond and Lannie’s red hair, and her thin face behind the sunglasses was pale and anonymous, like her father’s. Her slight frame reminded Louise of her own daughter Janie about two years ago, before Janie grew taller and rounded out with breasts and hips. The overalls and T-shirt gave Melissa a kind of small scarecrow look.
With rolling hips, she slouched toward Louise’s car like a miniature movie star. Smoothly, she whipped off her sunglasses, only to reveal pale blue, vulnerable child eyes. Then her patina of sophistication abruptly cracked, and she became a kid again. “Mrs. Eldridge, is that you?” she asked timidly.
“Yes. Melissa, I’m so happy to meet you.” Louise extended her hand, and the girl formally shook it.
Then she looked around suspiciously and said, “I can’t trust anyo
ne.” Her eyes opened wider in alarm and she pointed to the glasses. “That’s why I wore these.”
“Hop in right now.”
Melissa hurried around the car and got in the passenger seat. Then she gave Louise a long look.
Louise smiled at her. “You sound a little frightened. Is everything all right at home?”
Melissa let out a sharp breath. “As all right as it can be. Nobody’s hurting me, if that’s what you mean. My mother’s always real nice to me.”
Louise stretched out a hand and touched the girl’s thin arm. “First, I want you to know how terrible I felt when your dad died.”
The pale eyes turned to her in anguish, and tears formed and fell onto her cheeks. “He didn’t just die, Mrs. Eldridge. He was killed. I know it. Someone was after him and they got him.” All of a sudden her thin shoulders began to shake. Louise reached over and hugged the girl in her arms and held her tight. After a few moments, Melissa stammered, “I’m sorry. My dad told me to be strong, that we would start a new life together. And then he went and got killed.”
“And you think he was afraid he would be killed by someone?”
The plaintive eyes looked at her. “No. He thought they would beat him up or run him out of town and swipe his work.”
“His work. You mean, his story.”
“Yes. It was the best story he’d ever had, that’s all I know about it. He swore me to secrecy. I’ve been sneaking out to see him for months now, ever since he got that custody decree. I’d come here to the park, and he’d pick me up. He wanted to stay close by, because he was afraid my mother would take me away somewhere.”
“Take you away for good?”
“Yes. He was scared stiff. And he had his reasons. She got me a passport, and hers was always ready. It was like a threat, that she’d move us to England or maybe Ireland. She even bought a house there. It’s a real cool house; I really wouldn’t mind living there, if Dad had been with us. She even had me pack my fall and winter clothes in a suitcase and keep them in the closet.”
“And you told your father this, of course?”
“Yes, and that drove him nuts, which is just what Mom wanted, I think.”
That’s pretty mean
The girl’s gaze dropped to the hands in her lap. “But you don’t understand. My mom loves me. I hurt her feelings when I got up there on the witness stand and told the judge who I wanted to live with. My mother cried, and my mother never cries.” Again, her voice choked with emotion.
“You told the judge you wanted to spend most of your time with your father?”
“It wasn’t that I hated my mother. But life with my dad is so much better.”
Louise stared bleakly out into the tall forested neighborhood and wondered how she would feel if Martha or Janie renounced her. “It’s a hard thing for you to have had to do, making that kind of choice.”
She gave Louise a hunted look, like a small animal. “They fought over me for years. It was terrible. And now look what’s happened.”
“But you love your mother. And now you’ll live with her.”
“I guess so. Except I don’t completely trust her. She’s said too many things about my dad that I know are not true. And now she’s even started locking me out of her bedroom, like I was a spy. Not that she’s mean or anything—she stayed home the whole morning comforting me.”
She peered at Louise closely again, as if to be sure this new person wasn’t going to be another disappointment. “My father told me that once you and he used to date. And that you and Bill would be my friends forever if anything ever happened to Dad.”
“Indeed we will. We will do anything for you that we can. But your mother will take good care of you.”
“I know. But that doesn’t mean I can’t do what my Dad wanted me to do.”
“Which was what?”
The girl reached into her overalls pocket and pulled out a computer disk in a Ziploc bag. She handed it to Louise. “To give you this if anything happened to him. It’s his backup disk. Every time he saw me he gave it to me and then he’d take it back the next time. It had his new writing on it. And I would take it and hide it in the tree outside if my mother was home. If she wasn’t home, I would hide the disk in my room where the maid doesn’t clean. Last week, I think Mom finally figured out that I was meeting my dad, which I’d been doing for months.”
Louise fingered the disk and felt its precious quality, as if it were the Rosetta stone. This was the key to Jay’s murder. A great weight seemed gone from her shoulders, for though she may have inadvertently put Jay in danger by sending him from her house, at least now there would be some redemption for her. She could help make his story public. And by doing so, perhaps make some sense out of the loss of her friend.
“Melissa, you are incredible. Do you know how like your father you are?”
The thirteen-year-old smiled faintly. “Yeah, we’re both sneaky. You should have seen how I convinced our housekeeper I was talking to my friend. My dad and I are just alike. We used to say that it would be fun to live together. Also, we’re both slobs, not like Mom. We both have the same habit of hiding things. So, between us, we thought we’d have a fine house, all tucked away with hidden objects. And with soda cans and Dad’s coffee cups lying around. And we’d sit around and read books and stuff.”
Then she put her head down and began crying again in earnest.
Louise put her arm around the girl, and she leaned into her chest and sobbed. Louise rested her chin gently against the girl’s soft, curly hair. After a while, when the crying stopped, Louise told Melissa, “I think you had better go home and try to act as normal as possible. I don’t know why, but your mother wants this disk very badly, and you don’t want her to know you gave it to me.”
“Dad told me not to let her have it.” She heaved a big sigh, “Actually, he was still in love with Mom, I could tell, and she loved him, too, at least a little bit. But she would never get back with Dad after he took her to court to get custody of me. Trouble with Mom, she has to win all the time.”
She suddenly noticed the old car she was sitting in, and her nostrils twitched. “This car rules. Dad said you were a really good gardener; it smells like a farm.”
Louise laughed. “It’s what I use until some day I get something better, like a pickup, for instance. I haul biosolids in this one.”
“He also told me you solved some murders.”
“Yes, I guess I helped, anyway.”
“I wish you could help find out who killed my dad.”
“I’m doing my best, Melissa. I’ll turn his disk over to the authorities. And I’ll also let your dad’s newspaper know that his story is safe. The story might tell us who the murderer is, and it will all be thanks to you.”
The girl looked up at Louise. “Dad was always more interested in his story than in anything else. Except me, maybe. But no story is … worth what happened to Dad.”
Louise’s heart went out to the child; she wished she could take her to her own home in Sylvan Valley. Yet Lannie had been a good mother to her, and her mother was with whom the girl belonged.
So she remained silent, and Melissa began to reminisce about her father. The time she spent with him in California seemed to be the highlight of her life, though she seemed to like her private school and her foreign trips with her mother.
“Sometimes Mom takes me to parties and I have to get dressed up and act as if I were all grown up. Company things, sometimes, and sometimes just things that happen in Washington. Tonight, for instance, I’m supposed to go with her to a big reception for Congressman Goodrich. She said it would help me to get out of the house.”
“So you’re going.”
The girl stared out of the passenger side window. “Oh, sure. Political things are sort of interesting, even though I don’t like Congressman Goodrich, but he’s my mother’s good buddy. I couldn’t get out of it. You don’t know how much trouble it is to get out of things once Mom’s mind is made up. She either totally i
gnores me, or she’s all over me like a blanket.”
“Maybe she wants you to like her more.”
“Yeah. As if I could like her as much as a guy who took me shelling on the beach and fishing in the surf. Y’know, I didn’t want to read that story on the disk. Dad said not to, because it could put me in danger.”
“So you didn’t read it?”
“I started to, but then I felt too guilty, so I stopped at the first page. But I think it’s about that Congressman Goodrich.”
“I think it is, too, Melissa. But let’s keep that to ourselves for now, okay?”
Jay’s daughter grinned at Louise, giving her the kind of bright, happy face kids were supposed to have, and which hadn’t been much in evidence with Melissa this afternoon. “I might have something else of my dad’s that you’ll want.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry, I’ll give it to you, but I just don’t want to give up everything I have of his all at once.” She reached a slim hand over and touched Louise’s arm. “But I’ll tell you what it is—a key.”
Louise gave Melissa a little hug good-bye. “Be careful, and don’t forget, you can call Bill and me anytime, night or day.” Then the girl hopped out and waved good-bye and walked quickly toward home, a little bounce in her step, her thin arms stretched out gracefully, as if she were walking on a balance beam. Just a child now, enchantingly innocent, but probably knowing more than she should at the age of thirteen. A child who was trying to cope with loss, but at least knowing she had some friends her father trusted. She headed for an enormous Georgian house perched on the bluff at the edge of the Potomac. More than a home, thought Louise. This was the mansion of Lannie Gordon.
Louise made a U-turn, and as she completed it, she saw the patrol car, its lights ominously flashing. Here it was approaching five o’clock, with about a million commuters in cars going home on Friday night on the nearby GW Parkway. Surely, this patrolman was not going to stop her for wrong-way entry to a quiet neighborhood? But he was, for the way she had been parked was a dead giveaway.