Deadly Gamble

by Linda Lael Miller

  “No more of them cards,” Felicia ordered. “Mrs. Travers ain’t havin’ a very good day.”

  I could have been pissed off, but I knew Felicia’s main concern was her patient’s welfare, so I didn’t go for her jugular. Anyway, I was too worried to bother with drama. I held up both hands to show I wasn’t trying to smuggle in a Tarot deck, Ouija board, or Magic 8-Ball. “What’s the matter with Lillian?”

  “Starin’ at the ceiling,” Felicia said stormily. “Won’t take a bite of food. Don’t you go in there and upset her, now.”

  I hurried past Nurse Ratchet and into Lillian’s room.

  My self-appointed mother lay utterly still in her bed, small under the thin white blanket, and she’d aged a year since I’d seen her the day before yesterday. Her hair looked straggly and thin, and her skin was papery.

  My heart lurched. I went to her bedside, took one of her hands gently in both of mine. “Hey, there, Diamond Lil,” I said, using the nickname Ham had given her soon after they got together. “How ya doin’?”

  Lillian looked up at me with an expression of helpless, befuddled fear. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out.

  I held her hand a little more tightly. Blinked back tears.

  “I’m still trying to figure out those Tarot cards you gave me,” I said.

  Felicia crepe-footed it up beside me. “Mrs. Travers’s been like this since I started my shift this morning,” she fretted.

  “I want to see her doctor,” I answered.

  Lillian’s eyes drifted closed, as though the lids were just too heavy to manage.

  “She’s down the hall,” Felicia answered. “I’ll get her.”

  Lillian began to snore.

  I tucked the blanket around her, leaned down to rest my forehead against hers for a few moments, then straightened, sucking up all my angst. Falling apart wouldn’t help.

  Dr. Alice Bilbin was standing in the doorway when I turned from Lillian’s bed. Bilbin was small, with plain features and a severe hair-style, and she had that jumpy look typical of the permanently harried.

  I approached and offered my hand. Bilbin took it, her grasp firm, and let it go just as quickly.

  “Your mother’s vital signs are good,” the physician informed me. I guess she didn’t have either the time or the energy for preliminaries. “I’m convinced she just needs to rest.”

  “Rest?” I echoed. The word came out high and thin. I cleared my throat, took a steadying breath, and tried again. “Doctor, it isn’t as if Lillian’s been running marathons. She does nothing but rest.”

  “The vital signs are good,” Bilbin insisted, in the same monotone as before. “According to the night staff, she hasn’t been sleeping well for the past two or three days. I plan to administer a sedative before I leave the facility this afternoon. I’m sure she’ll be right as rain by tomorrow.”

  “What if she isn’t? What if she’s taking a turn for the worse?”

  The doctor tried to smile, but she must have been out of practice, because it didn’t quite fly. “Try not to worry,” she said. “The elderly are fragile.”

  I looked back at Lillian, ignoring Bilbin’s convoluted statement. I wanted to protest that Lillian wasn’t “elderly”—until the stroke, she’d been active, if a little depressed. Now, she didn’t even seem like the same person. “I was planning on leaving town for a few days,” I said, “but now…”

  “You go ahead,” Dr. Bilbin told me, when my voice fell away. “We have your contact information. If there’s anything to report, we’ll notify you immediately.”

  I bit my lower lip, turned to study Lillian again, lying there in that spartan bed. “Maybe I should sit with her for a while,” I said.

  “She won’t know the difference,” Bilbin assured me. I supposed her words were intended to be comforting, but they weren’t.

  What broke my internal stalemate was knowing what Lillian would say if she were in full command of her body and mind. You go and spend some time with Jolie. It wouldn’t do for the two of you to grow apart.

  Grimly, I nodded. I went back to the bed, kissed Lillian’s forehead, and forced myself to walk away. After making absolutely sure my cell number was on file at the desk, and that it was correct, I left Sunset Villa, got into my car and followed the signs to the 10 East.

  An hour later, the Cactus Bend exit came in sight.

  My foot automatically pressed down on the gas pedal. Keep going, I thought. Just keep going!

  I let up on the petrol, determined not to wimp out, and merged onto the off-ramp. By the clock on my dashboard, which was right, give or take twenty minutes, I wasn’t due at Uncle Clive’s for over half an hour.

  I decided to drive around a little. Acclimate myself.

  My cell phone played its ditty-of-the-week just as I made a right turn onto Center Street. Certain that something dire was going on with Lillian, I dived for it. The trucker behind me leaned on his air horn, and I swerved to the side of the road, parked.

  “Hello?” I cried breathlessly.

  “It’s Tucker.”

  I closed my eyes, dizzy with relief. No bad news about Lillian. At least, not yet. “Tucker,” I repeated numbly.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. He was always asking me that, and I always gave him the same answer, whether it was true or not. This time, I was fine, or I would be, anyway, once the echo of that eighteen-wheeler’s air horn stopped reverberating through my nervous system.

  “Sorry about cutting you off earlier,” Tucker said. “I was in the middle of something.”

  At the time, I’d thought he was working. Now, I wondered if he’d been with the ex. “If you’re busy, you’re busy,” I said coolly.

  “You’re going out of town?”

  “I’m already out of town. I’m on my way to Tucson to see my sister.”

  Long silence. “Probably a good idea,” he said, though he didn’t sound thrilled about it. “What’s with the litter box?”

  For a moment, I was stumped. Then I remembered the sticky note on the fridge door, back there in my kitchen in Cave Creek. “I already told you—I’m thinking of getting a cat.”

  He absorbed that, but didn’t make a comment one way or the other. “We need to talk when you get back,” he said.

  A sick feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. This was it. He was going back to the wife and kids. Maybe he and the missus would renew their wedding vows, then they’d all go to Disneyland. The wife would graciously forgive Tucker everything he’d done since their divorce, including me, and Tucker would forget I’d ever existed.

  “Mojo?” It was a verbal nudge.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “I’m going to be undercover for a few days. Don’t call me unless it’s really important.”

  My eyes burned. He was moving home, or at least planning on spending some time there. I blinked rapidly and sucked in a deep breath, so my voice wouldn’t sound shaky when I answered. “You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do,” I told him.

  “You sound weird. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Oh, I’m just terrific. “I told you—I’m fine.”

  “I’ll call you if I get the chance.”

  That was big of him. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. That way, he could make sure the kids and the little woman didn’t get the wrong idea. Naturally, he’d lie to them, too.

  “Don’t knock yourself out,” I said, and hung up.

  The ditty started up again almost instantly.

  I peered at the little screen. Tucker, all right.

  I ignored the cheerful tune until it stopped, and pulled back onto the road. The car seemed to be driving itself, and it went straight for the local cemetery. Since it was still light outside, I let the vehicle have its way.

  I didn’t have a lot of time, but Cactus Bend is a small place, so I had enough. I stopped at the cemetery office, a small, stucco cottage, and went inside. The keeper-of-the-plots was a man of indeterminat
e age, as wide as he was tall, and dressed more like a mechanic than a graveyard official. Maybe, I reflected, he did some of the digging.

  “I’m looking for the Mayhugh graves. Evelyn and Ronald.”

  The mechanic didn’t bring out a dusty tome, or tap into the computer at the end of the counter. He merely stared at me, as though I’d just wafted up out of the nearest buried coffin.

  “You kin of theirs?”

  I checked my watch. Cocktails in ten. Why had I thought I could make this detour and still get to the mansion on time?

  “I’m doing some research,” I said. “And I’m in kind of a hurry, so if you’d just give me a map—”

  “Horrible thing,” Cemetery Man broke in. “I remember it like it was yesterday. Ron and Evie were both hometown kids. Grew up right in Cactus Bend. Evie had that boy out of wedlock, and we all knew he was a bad seed.” He plucked a sheaf of papers from a stack, flipped through until he came to the page he wanted, and drew X’s on two small squares, amid dozens of anonymous others. “Killed them in cold blood, he did. And they sent him to one of those country club jails out in California. Ask me, they should have fried him.”

  I shuddered, though it was warm in the office, and my hand shook a little as I took the map. Deciding to dig into my past was one thing, and actually discussing my parents’ grisly fate with one of the locals was another.

  “Thanks for your help.” I’d come back to the cemetery, I decided, after I’d checked in at Casa Larimer, and perhaps ask a few questions.

  “I didn’t get your name,” Cemetery Man said, tagging alongside me all the way to the car. He walked with a funny little hopping trot.

  “Mojo Sheepshanks,” I answered. I even managed a smile.

  “Boomer Harrison,” he supplied. I supposed watching over a cemetery was solitary work, and a person had to take his conversations wherever he found them. “You say you’re doing research? You writing a book or something? I know a lot about that case, if you are. They had a daughter, those folks. Prettiest little girl you ever saw. Somebody found her hidin’ in her mama’s dryer after the murders. Blood from head to foot. She wasn’t right in the head after that—well, you can just imagine—then darned if she didn’t go and get herself abducted! My wife and me, we always thought there must have been a curse on that whole Mayhugh outfit.”

  “I’m not writing a book, Mr. Harrison. Just checking facts for a friend’s genealogy project. I’d like to come back and talk to you again, if you wouldn’t mind. Say, tomorrow?”

  Boomer’s whole face lit up. “Well, that would be fine, Miss Sheepshanks. It would be just fine. I’ll be watchin’ for you.”

  As I got into the Volvo, I was thinking that Boomer was smarter than he looked. He’d heard “Sheepshanks” once, and he’d used it, several minutes later, without stumbling. Usually, when I met a stranger, I had to go into my spiel about how it was English, spelled just like it sounded, and weren’t those British names quaint?

  The Volvo knew its way to the Larimer place, as it happened, as well as the cemetery. At five minutes after four, I drove up a circular driveway and under a portico that made Greer’s seem downright miniature by comparison.

  The house itself looked antebellum, and therefore wildly out of place in a shit-heel town in the belly button of Arizona. I must have been there often, as a child, but I couldn’t work up a memory to save my life. Maybe, I speculated, my folks and the Larimers hadn’t been close. The disparities between their lifestyles would surely have made things awkward.

  I left the cemetery map on the seat, grabbed my purse, and headed for the massive front door, with its lion’s-head knocker. If there was a butler, I could send him to fetch my garbage-bag suitcase.

  As if. My real plan was to wait until it got dark, sneak out, and carry my stuff into the guesthouse by the back door. If guesthouses had back doors.

  Before my hand came to rest on the gleaming lion’s head, the great portal opened, and Clive stood in the gap, flanked by marble floors, a grand, curving staircase and a very beautiful woman seated in a wheelchair.

  “You came,” he said fondly.

  I smiled, though my stomach was quivering. I hadn’t even stepped into the house yet, and already I felt like an impostor, up to no good. God, why hadn’t I bought a suitcase, or better yet, borrowed one of Greer’s gold Halliburtons?

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said. “Traffic.”

  “Come in,” my uncle commanded good-naturedly. “We’ve been waiting for you.” He turned, looked down at the aging goddess in the wheelchair. Blond hair perfectly coiffed. Makeup artful. Pearls at the neckline of her black St. John suit. “Barbara, look who’s here. It’s Mary Jo.”

  I didn’t correct him. In a place like that, “Mary Jo” sounded a lot better than “Mojo.” I met Barbara’s blue eyes, nodded and waited. She went over me like a CAT scan, but I supposed it was natural, after all that had happened.

  “Welcome home, Mary Jo,” she finally said. I don’t think I imagined the faint note of reserve in her voice.

  The Larimer mansion was about as likely to be my home as the White House, but I figured it would have been rude to say so. The woman had problems enough, stuck in that wheelchair, without some long-lost relative giving her back-talk in her own foyer.

  “Thank you,” I said. The author of the Damn Fool’s Guide to Proper Etiquette would have been proud.

  A young man in jeans and a green polo shirt appeared from the periphery of my vision. I figured him for the senator’s bodyguard, or maybe a traveling massage therapist. He didn’t look like any butler I’d ever seen.

  Not that I’d ever actually seen one, except in the movies.

  “Joseph will move your car, if that’s all right,” Clive said diplomatically.

  Right. No good having my battered Volvo hunkered in the middle of the drive when the next limo rolled in. Besides, the neighbors might see it, and by now, they probably had their binoculars out. I handed over the keys.

  Joseph looked me over like he thought Clive and Barbara ought to check my pockets before I left, but he had the good grace not to say anything.

  Barbara wheeled into a cavernous parlor, to the right of the entryway, and since Clive followed, so did I. My mind was on Joseph, however. He was about to get an eyeful of my luggage, and I wouldn’t put it past him to go through my glove box, either.

  Cocktails were served by a maid in an honest-to-God uniform, complete with ruffled apron and one of those little white hats. They must have paid her extra to wear it.

  After the elegant and costly booze, there were little quiches and things wrapped in bacon, and after that, an eight-course dinner.

  I kept waiting for the probing questions, but it seemed none were forthcoming. The Larimers talked about their wonderful children—a doctor, a lawyer and a couple of Indian chiefs.

  “Mary Jo is in the medical field,” Clive told Barbara, at one point. The way he made it sound, I was doing neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins instead of punching in Medicare codes.

  “Isn’t that nice?” Barbara said sunnily, but every once in a while, I caught her looking at me the same way Joseph had.

  When dessert was served, Mrs. Larimer announced that she was feeling a little ill.

  Clive excused himself, as well as his wife, and wheeled Barbara out of the dining room. I sat there, staring down at my Bananas Whatever, and wondered whether I was expected to wait until Clive came back to get lost or just go ahead and make myself scarce right away.

  I heard a whirring sound in the near distance and decided it was an elevator.

  I was about to get out of my chair and go looking for the guesthouse—or just hightail it for Jolie’s place in Tucson—when Joseph came through the door that probably led to the kitchen.

  He fixed me with a glare and snapped, “Who are you and what the hell are you trying to pull?”

  CHAPTER

  6

  W ho are you and what the hell are you trying to pull?

  Joseph’s
question pulsed between us. It was merely rude on the surface, but I sensed a more disturbing undercurrent, and my body was sending subtle, visceral read-outs from some database deep in the subterranean regions of my brain.

  I pushed back from the Larimers’ dining room table and stood to face the militant massage therapist. No need for him to know that my knees were a little unsteady.

  I was intimidated; Joseph was maybe thirty and very fit, and even though I’d practiced on Bert, I hadn’t mastered the techniques from The Damn Fool’s Guide to Self-Defense for Women to the degree that I could fend off anybody who really wanted to hurt me.

  My m.o. in situations like that was simple and to the point: bluff to the big dogs.

  “Who are you?” I retorted. “And what gives you the right to talk to me like that?”

  Joseph flushed, not with embarrassment, but with rage. He had a buzz cut, and the skin underneath turned pink. “I’m the senator’s personal assistant,” he answered, “and bodyguard.”

  “And you perceive me as a threat?” I asked, with a lightness I didn’t feel.

  “I’ve worked for Senator and Mrs. Larimer for five years,” Joseph replied, “and in all that time, he’s never mentioned having a niece. Now, all of a sudden, when he’s about to declare his candidacy for governor, you turn up, out of nowhere.”

  “Either you’re not a local, or you didn’t do your homework,” I said mildly, but with an edge.

  Joseph cast a glance toward the great arched doorway leading into the entryway and lowered his voice a notch. “I know about the Mayhugh murders, if that’s what you’re talking about. Senator Larimer’s sister and her husband were killed. I also know that you—if you really are his niece, that is—disappeared twenty-three years ago. My question is, what brings you back now, after all this time?”

  “My answer is, it’s really none of your damn business, and if you want to pursue the subject further, you’d better ask my uncle.”

  Joseph glared at me.

  The faint mechanical sound came again, and it was a good bet Clive was riding the elevator back down to the main floor.

  I smiled a little. I could see that Joseph had no intention of asking his employer about me in the immediate future; he turned, without another word, and disappeared into the kitchen.