by Gayle Roper
Intelligent pets can be trying.
When I left the apartment, I met Mrs. Anderson, my next-door neighbor for the past three months, on the little porch we shared. An elderly lady who was to her generation what Jolene was to hers, Mrs. Anderson had an extremely active social life. I rarely saw her, but when I did, she was always dressed to the nines for some meeting or luncheon or dinner. Upon occasion I had seen her and other of her blue-haired friends at Ferretti’s.
Not that Mrs. Anderson had blue hair. No, sir. Her hair was suspiciously golden-brown with patches of a strange purple at her temples that I finally figured out came from her rouge, which she brushed on with a little too much enthusiasm. She wore bright, youthful colors and while she didn’t trot along at the same clip as Mrs. Wilson, she was pretty spry. She was a friendly, alert, intelligent woman. I wanted to be like her when I grew up.
Which is why I was so startled to see her in her bathrobe with her hair uncombed and her face devoid of makeup.
“Did you hear him, Merry?” she whispered. “Or see him?”
“Who, Mrs. Anderson?” I looked around for an interloper.
“That man last night.” She peered over my shoulder as if she expected to see him standing behind me. “He was skulking around the house.”
Our carriage house held four apartments, two down and two up. An extremely quiet teacher, who was currently in France for the summer, lived above Mrs. Anderson. A pimply faced, very young couple whose ambition was to be roadies for a rock group used to live above me. Last month they’d gotten their wish and were on the road with a local band called Don’t Rush Me. No new tenants had taken their place, assuming they had broken their lease.
That left Mrs. Anderson and me, and I would be gone in another week.
“What was this man you saw doing?” I asked, fighting the urge to look over my shoulder, too.
“I don’t know.” She hugged herself and rubbed her hands up and down her upper arms. “I was having one of my sleepless nights—I have about two a week—and I was sitting in the rocker by my bedroom window that looks out on the alley when I saw him. He was dressed in black and slinking along.” She pursed her lips. “Anyone slinking along at three in the morning is up to no good.”
I had to agree with that thought. “Did you call the police?”
She shook her head. “All I saw was a man in black. I didn’t see him do anything. I don’t think they come for everyone who sneaks down alleys. He’d have to commit a crime for them to be interested.”
I nodded. “Maybe it was just a husband stealing home and he didn’t want his neighbors or his wife knowing he’d been out so late, especially if he’d been with another woman or something.”
Mrs. Anderson relaxed visibly. “See? It could be something that innocent, couldn’t it? Though if Mr. Anderson ever tried to sneak in like that, I’d have had a word or two for him, let me tell you.” She sniffed. “Innocent, my foot.”
I grinned. I was willing to bet that Mr. Anderson had had no more chance of stealing in late than Sergeant Major Wilson.
“I’ll just keep my ear out for any reports of trouble and if I hear something, then I’ll call the police. I wrote it all down—the times and all—so I wouldn’t forget.”
“He didn’t see you, did he?” I don’t know why, but the thought that he might have made me nervous. Finding dead people tended to activate any latent tendencies toward anxiety.
“No, no. I was sitting in the dark. A glass of warm water and a good rock and I’m usually back to sleep. If I turn on the lights, I’m awake for the rest of the night.” She reached for her door. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer, dear. I feel much better for having talked with you. Have a good day.”
With a wave, I headed for the parking area located on my side of the building. I pulled out my keys and hit the button to unlock the driver’s door. I loved the little electronic gadget. It was so cool to open the car when you weren’t even near it yet.
I slid behind the wheel and slipped the key in the ignition. The engine turned over without protest. I was about to slip the car into Reverse when Mrs. Anderson appeared on the walk, waving her arm frantically at me.
Uh-oh. I undid my seat belt and slid out, leaving the motor running in my hurry.
“What’s wrong?” I called as I jogged toward her.
“I forgot to tell you,” she began, holding out a piece of paper.
What she was going to tell me was lost in the roar of a great explosion very close by. The force of it sent air waves rushing at Mrs. Anderson and me, and we were both thrown through the air. I ended up in the lilac bush, the branches poking at me even as the leaves cushioned my fall.
I clawed my way out of the lilac, slashing my left palm on a freshly pruned length of old growth. Mrs. Anderson! She was a little old lady. Fragile bones and all that. What did this fall do to her?
And what had exploded?
I staggered away from the tree and saw Mrs. Anderson sitting on the ground looking dazed, holding her right arm.
“Are you all right?” I asked as I dropped down beside her.
“I’m fine, dear. Just knocked my arm.”
That’s when I noticed that I was dripping blood on my white slacks. My new white slacks, slated for the honeymoon.
“Oh dear,” Mrs. Anderson said. “Your hand!”
I stared at the blood welling in my palm. The landlord who wouldn’t even give us higher-wattage lightbulbs in the parking area and the front walk had had the lilac pruned, leaving sharp, jagged branches for a person to fall on?
“I’m fine,” I said, knowing the cut wasn’t serious.
She looked beyond me. “I’m afraid your car isn’t.”
I turned and caught my breath. My wonderful little car was blazing and it hit me that if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Anderson, it would have been my funeral pyre.
I began to shake.
THIRTEEN
William and his people arrived in a dead heat with Curt, whom I called as soon as I hung up from 911. We all stood around the dead carcass of my vehicle and stared at it as it smoked and made groaning noises as it settled and the metal contracted. I was pressed hard against Curt’s side, my injured hand wrapped in a kitchen towel and held up in the air so it was higher than my heart.
“It’ll lessen the bleeding,” Mrs. Anderson assured me.
With my good hand I held Mrs. Anderson’s hand, in which she clasped the piece of paper she’d waved at me, consequently saving my life. She held her other arm to her chest, her wrist already swelling.
“Mrs. Anderson needs to go to the hospital to have her wrist checked out,” I said.
“An ambulance is on its way,” William said.
Mrs. Anderson straightened her shoulders. “I do not need an ambulance, young man.”
He grinned, his face undergoing that fascinating seismic shift. “I’m sure you don’t, ma’am, but please let the EMTs tell you whether you need a physician to look at your injury, okay?”
Mrs. Anderson seemed mollified, if only barely, and we turned our attention back to my car.
“What could have happened?” I asked. “I never heard of a car just blowing up like that.”
“I’d guess it was intentional, sweetheart,” Curt said, looking pale and strained. “Right, William? She’s right that cars don’t just explode.”
One look at William confirmed that he agreed with Curt’s analysis and that he didn’t like the fact one little bit.
Come to think of it, neither did I.
“Do you think it has something to do with that dead girl you found?” Mrs. Anderson asked. “Maybe you saw something that would incriminate someone.” She had rallied amazingly well from her short flight in the air, her injured arm aside. But then it wasn’t her car that had fried.
“I didn’t see anything!” I exclaimed.
“Maybe you did and just don’t realize it,” she persisted.
There was a small silence as we all thought about that.
Then I shook my head emphatically. “I saw nothing.”
“Then why?” she asked.
No one had an answer, so we just stood and watched the car smolder while we waited for the EMTs.
When they arrived, they checked out Mrs. Anderson, who insisted she was fine.
“But you have a broken wrist,” one of the EMTs told her. “You need to get it set.”
“So set it,” she told him.
He bit back a smile. “We don’t set bones, I’m afraid.”
“You can save my life, but you can’t set my bones?”
“I’m afraid that’s right,” he said.
“Ridiculous,” she muttered. “But I’m not riding in any ambulance. I am not sick.”
Another EMT examined my cut palm. “It’d be a good idea for you to get stitched up,” she said. “Only take a few minutes in emergency.”
I didn’t want to ride in an ambulance any more that Mrs. Anderson did. I looked at the unhappy woman and the equally unhappy EMT trying to talk her into climbing aboard the ambulance.
“How about we take Mrs. Anderson to the hospital with us when I go for my stitches?” I suggested.
This happy solution let the EMTs leave and let us watch when the bomb squad from the state police arrived in answer to William’s call. They circled the car, but they couldn’t do much of anything until the smoking metal skeleton cooled. They talked briefly among themselves, then offered their consensus that there were two possible scenarios. One was a timed device activated when the engine turned over.
“Thirty seconds, max, from when I turned the key until the explosion,” I said. “Why the delay?”
Everyone shrugged.
The other option was that the bomb was activated by my cell phone, which I carried in my purse like most other women.
“Like in Iraq?” Curt said. “IEDs?”
“What?” Mrs. Anderson and I looked at him without understanding.
“Improvised Explosive Devices. You call a cell phone near the device and the ring detonates it.”
“Did you hear your phone ring?” William asked me.
I shook my head. “But then I had gotten out of the car.” A chill ran through me. “How could he know that I had gotten in the car? He’d have to have been watching, wouldn’t he?” Talk about eerie, weird, strange, odd, uncanny, bizarre. I took a deep breath. When I started with the list of synonyms, it was time to take a firmer grip on my emotions.
William nodded. “He saw you get in but not out. He could have moved someplace for cover and placed the call.”
“He must have planted the device during the night,” Natalie Schumann said.
“He did.” Mrs. Anderson held out her paper. It had taken her some time to find it after the blast had blown it out of her hand. She’d finally discovered it in the garden of the house two doors down.
Now she offered it to William. “I saw him for the first time last night at—” she peered at the paper “—2:54 a.m. He was sneaking down the alley toward the parking area, though I didn’t realize then where he was going. He was carrying a black bag.”
She turned to me. “That’s what I wanted to tell you when I yoo-hooed you after you got in your car. He carried something the first time I saw him, when he went to the parking area. The second time I saw him—” she peered at the paper William held “—was 3:14. And the bag was empty. He had it crunched in his hand.” She crunched a make-believe bag in her hand. “So he wasn’t a husband trying to slip home like we thought, because he went down and then back. That’s the other thing I wanted to tell you, Merry.”
So many questions and no answers swirled through my mind as we waited in the emergency room for treatment with Curt as our Good Samaritan and chauffeur. Mrs. Anderson’s X-ray confirmed she had a broken wrist bone. While they set and casted her, I got shot in the hand to numb the palm and then got stitched up after they painted the area thoroughly with bright orange disinfectant.
“Will this stuff wear off soon?” I asked, thinking of the wedding.
The doctor shrugged and we left, Mrs. Anderson wearing a handsome sling over her housecoat.
“Did you see Millie Long in there?” she asked as we walked across the parking lot. Her voice was full of distress.
I shook my head. “I don’t know Millie Long.”
“She came in an ambulance because they thought she had a heart attack.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Is she a good friend?”
“Sure, but that’s not the point. She saw me looking like this!” She looked down at her bathrobe and slippers. Her good hand went to her head. “And my hair!” She groaned. “I can’t stand it!”
“I’m sure she understands,” I said, though if she came in with a possible heart attack, I doubted that she even noticed Mrs. Anderson, let alone her appearance.
Mrs. Anderson sighed. “You’re too young and beautiful to understand. At my age a woman must be vigilant if she wishes to preserve her image.”
“Sounds like Jolene sixty years from now, doesn’t it?” Curt asked and I had to laugh. Then a thought struck me.
“Curt! If it was the murderer who planted the bomb—and I don’t know who else it would be—what if he tries to do something to Jo, too? She was with me when I found Martha.”
“Then he must have a personal death wish,” he said, his voice dry.
“I’m serious! Is Jo in danger? We have to warn her. We have to talk to William.”
I borrowed Curt’s cell and called Jo. Mrs. Anderson listened avidly.
“Reilly,” Jo yelled without moving the phone and I thought my ear would pop. “You’ve got to save me!”
When I could hear again, I called William. “Thank you, Merry,” he said. “The thought has occurred to us, too. I would suggest that you not go anywhere alone until we know what’s going on. In fact, why don’t you just move in with Curt?”
“Can’t. It wouldn’t be right.”
“Oh, come on, Merry. Everyone lives together these days. And everyone knows you’re getting married, so it’s not like you’re shacking up.”
“Can’t, William. He and I are both committed to premarital chastity, just like the Bible says.”
“Well, just live there if you don’t want to sleep with him.”
I looked at Curt’s strong profile as he drove us homeward. “We’re chaste, William. Not dead.” I hung up to his laughter.
After we helped Mrs. Anderson into her apartment and got her settled with a nice pot of tea, we went to my place and I called Mr. Hamish, owner of a local car dealership that also handled rentals. In the months I’d lived in Amhearst, he and I had become good friends.
“What happened this time?” he asked eagerly as soon as I identified myself. He had rented me cars on numerous occasions and he thought I lived a very interesting life.
“A car bomb.”
“Wow!” he said with awe. “How fascinating.”
“That depends on whether or not it’s your car,” I reminded him.
Curt, who drove me to Mr. Hamish’s, waited while I got my car, then followed me to work. He even escorted me inside. When I get there, Jo was on the phone with Reilly. She was pouting prettily, so I assumed he was telling her something she didn’t want to hear. As soon as she spied Curt, she said, “Well, Curt’s here to protect Merry.”
Curt gave me a goodbye kiss. “Just please don’t go wandering off alone. Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Jolene, tell Reilly goodbye,” Mac yelled. “We’ve got to get some work done here.”
Jo pulled her phone from her ear and stared at it. She looked floored. “He said I’m not to call him again! And then he hung up on me! On me! His wife! I only called a couple of times.”
“Five.” Edie held up a hand with the fingers splayed.
“Six,” Mac corrected. “Now get to work, all of you!”
In response to Reilly’s and Mac’s perceived mistreatment, Jo went on a crazed bit of deadheading, pruning and watering. Edie igno
red Jo but insisted on mothering me, bringing me Coke and snacks and offering her sixteen-year-old son, Randy, as bodyguard. Larry the sports guy pontificated on all the things he’d learned from reading Tom Clancy books on the Special Forces. He obviously saw some connection between my bomb and infiltrating and exfiltrating without the enemy’s being aware you’d been there, though I missed the correlation myself.
When things finally calmed down a bit, Mac beckoned to me.
I went to his desk and stared when he offered me a seat.
“Mac, are you sure? You’ve never done this before. Will you regret it in the morning?”
“Just sit, Kramer.”
I did, grinning.
He touched his picture of Dawn with his forefinger, then looked at me. “You realize what this attack means, don’t you?”
“Somebody doesn’t like me? But that’s okay because I don’t like him very much, either.”
He gave me his bored look. “It means I’m innocent. I didn’t murder Martha.”
“My car getting blown up proves that you’re innocent?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay,” I said, uncertain of his logic. Not that I thought he’d done the crime—either crime. I didn’t. Then it hit me. “Is it because you like me too much to blow me up?”
He rolled his eyes. “It’s because I wouldn’t have failed.”
I stared at him, appalled. “What?”
He let his head fall back against the headrest on his big chair. He stared at the ceiling as if beseeching the suspended tiles to give him patience. He sat up. “That was supposed to be a joke, Kramer.”
“Oh. Of course.”
He touched Dawn again, then grinned at me. “I have an alibi!”
Thank goodness! Then I had second thoughts. “For 3:00 a.m.?”
He nodded. “I was at the hospital with Dawn and one of her girls. And lots of people saw me.”
“That’s wonderful, absolutely wonderful!” And it was. What a relief! By turning in the diary, I hadn’t condemned a friend to the state pen after all.
“I was at His House to pick Dawn up for a movie and just before we left, one of the girls went into labor. I drove her and Dawn to the hospital and waited for the baby to be born. It was a boy about this big.” He held his hands six inches apart. “Cute little thing with lots of dark hair sticking up all over. Sort of like he’d stuck his finger in an outlet.”