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The Trouble With Tulip

Page 27

by Mindy Starns Clark


  Danny closed his eyes, wondering if he could ever be as surrendered as she was.

  “But why would God give me the desire to be a professional photographer if He wasn’t going to let that dream come true?” he asked softly.

  “You are a professional photographer, Danny.”

  He shook his head.

  “You know what I mean. I want the big leagues, Ma, the Scene Its and the National Geographics and the recognition and the respect. Do you know how hard it is to snap pictures of drooling babies all day and pretend I’m making some kind of art?”

  “You’re touching people’s lives, honey. Can’t that be enough?”

  Touching people’s lives. Danny thought of the kid in the wheelchair and how he had stood up to the boy’s mother. Maybe in some small way, he was doing some good in the world. But what about doing good for himself, for his career?

  “As a man, I can’t let this go,” he said slowly. “My dreams are just too big. Too important to me.”

  He expected her to sympathize. Instead, she simply pursed her lips and then opened the door.

  “You need to surrender your ambitions,” she said. “And while you’re at it, you need to surrender your relationship with Jo as well.”

  He looked at her, surprised that she knew.

  “What?” she asked. “You didn’t think your sisters would tell me? Like they had to? I’ve known for a long time.”

  He had to laugh, hating that the women in his life seemed to know him better than he knew himself.

  “What if I tell her I love her and she says she doesn’t love me back?” he whispered.

  “Sur-ren-der, Danny,” his mother replied slowly. “God will work it out.” Then she climbed out of the car and got into her own and drove away, leaving him there in the parking lot, alone.

  “I believe we have a match,” the coroner said, peering into his microscope. “Good job, Miss Tulip.”

  Her hunch had been correct. The killer had used the brick to kill Edna. Chances are, the coroner said, this brick had also been used to make the dent in the windowsill as well.

  “You’ll call the chief and let him know?” Jo asked.

  “I’m calling right now,” he replied, one hand already on the phone.

  When she was finished there, Jo drove back to Edna’s, wondering if they would ever know whose hand had wielded that brick. It must have been a crime of passion, a spur-of-the-moment impulse followed by a quick bit of damage control that included pouring some bleach into the ammonia, or vice versa. Considering the danger of the fumes, the murderer must have had to cover his or her mouth and nose and then run away as quickly as possible once the deed was done.

  It also had to be someone Edna had let come into her home voluntarily. More than likely, it was someone who balked at the notion that Edna was going public with what she’d done.

  Which brought Jo back around to the same list of suspects she’d had before.

  Who killed Edna Pratt?

  There was a strange car parked in the driveway of Edna’s house when Jo got there, a shiny white Chrysler. Jo parked along the street and headed up the walk, hearing Chewie barking furiously from the backyard. Jo wasn’t quite sure what to do, but the front door swung open before she had to make a decision. Sally Sugarman was standing there, and she didn’t look happy.

  “For starters,” she said, “would you explain to me why there’s a dog in my mother’s backyard?”

  “He’s mine,” Jo replied defensively. “I had to run out for just a minute, so I left him here.”

  “Well?” Sally said, stepping back from the doorway. “Come on in. I guess we need to talk.”

  Jo hesitated, feeling strangely afraid. She glanced toward the house next door, relieved to see Betty peeking from behind a curtain. At least if Sally did her in, there would be a witness who saw Jo going inside.

  She mounted the steps and went through the door, putting her keys and purse on the small front table. Sally gestured toward the couch and then sat on the chair beside it.

  “Murder,” Sally said once Jo had sat down. “The police are telling me my mother was murdered.”

  “She was hit on the head by a felt-covered brick,” Jo replied. “Then whoever did it set things up to make it look like an accident.”

  “You knew I didn’t want you to pursue this,” Sally said softly. “You knew this had the potential for derailing the entire election for me. But you did it anyway.”

  Jo glanced toward the door, wishing someone would walk in.

  “Your mother was murdered, Sally,” Jo said. “Even if you hated her, you can’t tell me that whoever did it shouldn’t be caught. Election or not, you can’t tell me your mother doesn’t deserve justice.”

  Sally stood and began pacing.

  “My mother deserved a lot of things,” she said. “But I don’t know if justice was one of them. Certainly, I never had any justice growing up. Do you know what she would do if I spilled my glass at the dinner table, or accidentally tracked mud into the house? She’d spank me and send me off to bed without any supper, my only real ‘crime’ being a typical kid. Her clean floors were more important to her than I was.”

  “I’m sorry, Sally,” Jo whispered. “That must have been difficult for you.”

  “The sad thing is, all those years, I kept expecting her to change. As a teenager, as an adult, somehow I just thought that one day she might turn to me and say, ‘I love you’ or ‘I’m proud of you.’ But no. Even when I was elected a senator for the state of Texas, all she had to say was that the skirt I was wearing on television made my hips look big. Can you imagine?”

  Sally started crying, the tears spilling freely down her face.

  “You know,” Jo said, “your mother may not have encouraged you to your face, but she was forever bragging about you to everyone else.”

  “You’ve told me that before.”

  “It’s true. I used to avoid her in the grocery store because I just didn’t have the time to stand there and listen to her go on and on about ‘my daughter the senator this’ and ‘my daughter the senator that.’ ”

  “Really?”

  “Really. She was proud of you, Sally, even if she never let you know.”

  Sally dabbed at her eyes.

  “What is it about you, Jo, that makes me pour out my heart?” she asked finally. “Do you know what my first thought was when the police called last night to tell me that my mother had been murdered?”

  Jo shook her head.

  “I thought, ‘It serves her right.’ ”

  “It serves her right?”

  “Had I been a braver person, I might have killed her years ago myself.”

  The room was silent except for Sally’s weeping. Jo didn’t know what to make of it, whether Sally was trying to make a confession or just unburdening a bitter heart. Before Jo could form a reply, her cell phone began ringing from her purse.

  She excused herself and answered it, surprised to hear the voice of Keith McMann, the handsome—and persistent—professor from the college.

  “I wonder if you have a minute to get together with me,” he said. “It’s not a date. I need to ask you a favor.”

  She looked over at Sally, who had found a tissue and was cleaning herself up. Suddenly, she wanted more than anything to be out of that house.

  “Sure,” she said. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “Wherever you want,” he said. “Pulio’s? I could buy you lunch.”

  The popular campus hangout was convenient, and it would probably be half empty at this hour of the day.

  “Okay. I can be there in ten minutes.”

  After Jo hung up the phone, Sally seemed like a different person. She had stopped crying, and now she was standing and walking around the room, peeking into all of the boxes.

  “I’m sorry,” Jo said. “I have to leave in a minute. Something urgent has come up.”

  “That’s okay,” Sally replied. “I assume you’ll keep the things I told you h
ere confidential.”

  Jo didn’t reply. If Sally murdered her mother—or had had her murdered by someone else—then nothing she had said was confidential.

  “I have some boxes in the bedroom I was planning to send to you,” Jo said instead. “And everything in the sewing room is tagged for a yard sale, if you want to look through that.”

  “You’ve accomplished so much so quickly,” Sally said. “I’m very impressed.”

  Jo shrugged.

  “A friend helped me,” she said. “Together we’ve really made some progress.”

  Sally nodded, seeming at loose ends. Jo wondered why she had come.

  “The police wanted me here to ask me some questions,” she said, as if she could read Jo’s mind. “I guess I need to get down to the station.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Come on,” Sally said. “We can walk out together.”

  Simon knew the drill. He remained silent, almost in a daze, as they photographed him, printed him, and locked him in a cell. He didn’t speak a word to anyone, not even when they brought him into an interrogation room and started peppering him with questions. It wasn’t until they said the word “murder” that he seemed to snap out of it.

  “What?” he asked, focusing in on the detective.

  “Why did you murder your sister?”

  Simon tugged at his ear, wondering if he had heard correctly.

  “Why…what?”

  The detective put his hands on the table and leaned forward.

  “Why did you murder your sister?”

  Simon’s head started spinning. Edna had been murdered?

  “I didn’t,” he replied. “She killed herself.”

  “Killed herself,” the detective repeated sarcastically, glancing at the other cop. “By whacking herself in the back of the head?”

  Simon’s heart pounded.

  “My sister committed suicide, did she not?”

  “No, she did not. You hit her in the head with a blunt object. Why’d you do it?”

  Simon’s mind was spinning. Someone had killed Edna. Someone had done her in.

  “I…why do you think it was me?” Simon asked.

  “I’m asking the questions here. Were you mad at her, Simon? Was she going to tell the cops all about your little con game?”

  Simon didn’t know what was going on here. All he knew was that Edna was dead by someone else’s hand, not her own.

  Not her own.

  Simon didn’t know why that made his heart soar. He didn’t know why tears of joy sprang into his eyes. Most of all, he didn’t know why the pressure in his chest returned, tighter than before. No matter how guilty he may seem to these cops—no matter, even, if he ended up going to prison for a murder he didn’t commit—just knowing she hadn’t taken the easy way out, that she hadn’t had “too much” as their mother had—made all of the difference.

  Before he realized it, Simon was on the floor, the pressure in his chest unbelievably tight. He thought someone was sitting on him or pressing him down, but when he opened his eyes, all he could see was the two detectives, their faces swimming above his, their mouths moving but no sound coming out. He saw something roll into his peripheral vision, some kind of machine, and instinctively he knew it was a defibrillator.

  Simon was having a heart attack.

  He closed his eyes, unable to breathe. Then everything around him simply went black.

  29

  Keith McMann was more handsome than Jo remembered, with one dimple in his cheek when he smiled. He was in the restaurant when she got there, sitting at a table beside the window. He rose until she was seated and then sat again himself.

  “Thanks for coming,” he told her. “I went ahead and ordered a pepperoni pizza for us. Hope that’s okay with you. I’m a little pressed for time.”

  “Sure,” she replied, though pepperoni wasn’t really her preference. “What did you need to see me about?”

  He rolled his eyes, and Jo could tell that he was embarrassed.

  “I saw your picture splashed all over the TV this morning,” he said. “And I realized you might be able to help me. I hope you don’t think it rude of me once you hear my request.”

  Jo studied his face, thinking she’d be happy to help out anyway she could, feeling surprised at her rather gut-level reaction to this man. Less than a week ago, she had been about to exchange lifelong vows with Bradford. Now she was already sitting here with someone else, thinking how very good-looking he was?

  What was wrong with her?

  “I’m coming up for review with the university,” he said. “From all indications, they’re going to promote me from assistant professor to associate professor. This is part of the tenure track, something I’ve been working toward all along.”

  “I understand,” Jo said, nodding. Among her grandfather’s chemist friends, academic standing had always been a frequent topic of conversation.

  “This…um…problem with Edna Pratt’s murder and the whole con game and everything…”

  “Yes?”

  He shook his head, taking a sip of tea.

  “Well, it’s not going to do me any favors. The university hates scandal of any kind. I’m afraid if I get lumped into this whole thing in the media, then not only will my promotion be at risk, but the job I have now will be at risk as well.”

  Jo’s pulse surged. The university hates scandal of any kind. Would he have killed Edna to keep her from going to the police?

  “Keith,” Jo said, reaching for her water glass, “are you asking me to keep your name out of this? Because I can’t lie to the police.”

  “Oh, gosh, no,” he said. “I’ve already been contacted by them, and I gave a statement about what happened and everything. They were very nice.”

  “What is it, then?” she asked. “What do you want me to do?”

  He leaned forward, looking at her hopefully.

  “You’re just so media-savvy, Jo. I wondered if you could tell me how to keep myself and the stories of my involvement in this thing off the news and out of the papers.”

  Simon could hear screaming.

  No, it wasn’t screaming. It was a siren.

  He opened his eyes, understanding that he was inside an ambulance. To his right was a man in white, probably a paramedic. To his left was a uniformed policeman.

  Simon closed his eyes, realizing as he did so that he was probably dying of a heart attack.

  Was this how it had been for Edna? Did she have any warning before she was killed? Did she lay on the floor in the dining room, her head in massive pain, conscious for even a few seconds before she passed, understanding that she wasn’t going to live?

  Most importantly: If she had, had she been comforted by her newfound faith?

  Simon didn’t like to think about eternity. Life on earth was hard enough without the prospect of eternal damnation. As far as he was concerned, God had pulled the ultimate con: Believe in Me and you’ll have eternal life!

  Yeah, right. That “eternal life” was about as real and available as the immortality-on-earth he had sold to the women of Mulberry Glen.

  He opened his eyes again, looking around at the tools that were keeping him alive. Was this what it came down to in the end, all of these machines, working to keep his heart pumping?

  The pain was so far beyond anything he had ever felt that he could hardly breath. There was a mask over his face, and for a moment Simon thought maybe it was choking him. He reached up to take it off but the paramedic stopped him, held down his hands, and spoke words of comfort.

  Simon couldn’t hear much of what he said.

  “Almost there. Hold on. Just a minute.”

  The screaming lessened. The feeling of motion ended. Suddenly, instead of the ambulance, he was looking up at the clear blue sky. Had he just sat on the front stoop this morning, waiting for his check to arrive? What had gone wrong? How and when?

  Was he really going to die?

  The blue sky turned into a white tile ceiling.
Simon felt a piercing in his arm and he knew he’d been given some kind of shot. He was floating then, floating through the carnival, watching his father calling out for people to play the game.

  “Time for some ring toss. Just land a ring around a bottleneck and win a great big prize!”

  Each week, one of Simon and Edna’s jobs was to sit down after closing and go through the rings in the ring toss game, making sure that almost every single one of them had a clear stripe of glue on the inside of the circle, just enough to make it impossible for the ring to fit on the neck of the bottles. Simon’s dad kept the three ringers, the sample rings that were slightly bigger than the others and always landed correctly. But the rest of the rings were rigged. People would plunk down their money and try and try and try to get the rings around the bottles’ necks. But it never worked because the game had been fixed.

  This thing that seemed so simple was actually impossible.

  Jo and Keith talked easily, finding common humor in the world of academia. When their pizza came, Jo tried to make some suggestions as to how he could avoid the media.

  “The problem,” she said, “is that if they get a look at you, then they’ll be all over it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not…exactly…unfortunate-looking. Television to an attractive person is like a heat-seeking missile to a fire. It will find you. If you’re really concerned about it, you should probably get out of town until this thing blows over. That would be the safest move if you need to avoid reporters at all costs.”

  He seemed flattered by her compliment.

  “That’s funny,” he said. “Because when I saw your photo on television this morning, I thought to myself, ‘She’s made for that medium.’ Even in a still picture, you have quite a presence on screen. Heat-seeking missile indeed.”

  Their eyes met and held. Oh, yes, there was definitely a spark between them.

  But the spark was misleading. The more they talked, the more Jo decided she might not be interested in him after all. Yes, he was good-looking, and yes, he was smart. But he was also a bit too self-absorbed, talking endlessly about his work, his home, his life. Twice he quoted Taoist sayings, and Jo got the distinct feeling that he was more New Age talk than anything substantial. When she mentioned her Christian faith, he just smiled.

 

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