“Ma’am, do you need some help?” someone asked. I couldn’t see anything but I guessed it was mall security.
“No. I’m just in a hurry to get Granny back to the rest home. She gets unruly if I don’t have her back in time for tapioca pudding night.”
We didn’t speak during the drive home, not unless you count the hiccupping gasps coming from Augusta every time she glanced in my direction. Pulling into the driveway forty-five minutes later, I broke the silence.
“We can hope the orange will come out with a good shampooing.”
“What we can hope is that it all falls out and Santa brings you a wig for Christmas.”
“He already offered me a hat.”
“You must be on the naughty list, because if you’d been nice he’d be bringing a wig.” I lowered the visor and peeked in the mirror. I looked like I was related to Hugh. It was a good thing I’d spent so many years knitting hats. I was going to need them all if I was going to hide this mess.
“Can’t we just dye it again? We could just pick up one of those kits at the drug store.”
“Do you want your hair follicles to commit suicide? Any more chemicals, and it will fall out.”
“Are you saying there’s nothing we can do?” That explained the gasping.
“I may be able to track down a specialist, but don’t get your hopes up. I can’t believe you did this.”
“What are you talking about? This was your idea.” Damn, damn, damn.
Augusta shuddered. “This was not what I had in mind.”
Nineteen
Augusta had another date with Gene so I decided to console myself with fast food from Dinah’s. One great thing about winter is no one notices if you pull a hat down tightly on your head. Nobody could see any hair at all. They could barely see my eyes.
Dinah was sliding out a pizza when I arrived. Despite the low temperature outside, Dinah’s cheeks were flushed, and sweat ran down the gully of her cleavage. She was always generous with her cleavage display. She used it to pacify the geezers at the lunch counter. It was harder for them to give her lip when their tongues were lolling out.
“I’m just pulling your order out now. Give me a minute to box it up.”
“No hurry.” I grabbed some soda and chips and placed them near the cash register. “I stopped in to see Harold today and heard something from Bernadette that I hoped you could clear up.”
“What’s that?” Dinah neatly sliced the pizza into eight wedges.
“An argument between Bill Lambert and Ethel the day she was killed. Bernadette said it was loud enough that you couldn’t hear her on the phone.” Both Dinah and I are in a position to spread a lot of rumors and cause a lot of grief. Neither one of us does. I would have understood if she declined to answer.
“Ethel accused Bill of using the town plow to make money plowing private customers. She said Beulah told her he did it for the Museum as well as some other people.”
“Why would she care?”
“She said it was an abuse of power and she wasn’t going to stand for corrupt town officials.”
“How did she think she was going stop him?”
“She said she’d convinced someone else to run against him for road commissioner. The last thing Bill needed just before the election was accusations about using the plow for private purposes.”
“Who’d she have in mind for the job?”
“Clive,” Dinah said grinning. “He was having a thing with her.”
“A thing? With Ethel?” I was astonished. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I caught them coming out of the bathroom together.” Dinah’s bathroom is a one-holer that makes airplane bathrooms look spacious.
“Maybe there was a plumbing problem,” I suggested.
“Ethel’s blouse was untucked and buttoned wrong, and her magenta lipstick was smeared onto her chin. And from the goofy look on Clive’s face there wasn’t anything wrong with his plumbing.” Dinah slapped the pizza box shut and handed to me.
Wind flapped up the lid of the pizza box. Within sight of the house my fingers froze into the gripping position around the shopping bag. My hat had crept so far down my forehead it was nearly impossible to see. Wobbling up the steps while balancing the bag of junk food and the pizza, I squinted through pinpricks in the hat to see where I was going.
Turns out I was going down. A patch of ice had formed on the third step. My feet slipped, and my ankle crumpled beneath me as I skidded to a stop at the base of the stairs. The pizza shot out of its box and landed in my lap. I pushed up my hat and looked around.
Headlights swept into the driveway, and Hugh pulled in next to Peter’s old red truck. “Was that your dinner?” He studied the mess covering me.
“Help me up.” I stuck out my hands and waited for Hugh to show what a state fire fighter was made of.
“What kind was it?” I had to admire his priorities.
“Loaded, extra cheese.” I stepped forward and felt my ankle give out from under me.
“Hold up there.” Hugh put an arm around my waist. “Let’s get you inside and see if you fared worse than the dinner.”
“Watch out, the third step is glare ice.”
“You ought to put down some salt.”
“I can’t seem to remember. Peter always took care of those sorts of things.” I surveyed the mess and thought that it was more likely I’d remember in the future.
Hugh helped me into the kitchen and parked me in the rocker next to the wood stove. I unzipped my coat and yanked off the dangerous hat.
“Wow, I thought my hair was red.” Hugh patted my head experimentally, like he was evaluating a carpet he might purchase.
“I left my sense of humor out under the pizza.”
“Enough said, Raggedy Ann. Which ankle is it?” he dragged over a chair from the table and lifted my legs onto it.
“The left one.” I held my breath as he worked my boot off. He raised an eyebrow as he peeled off my sock and pushed up my trouser leg.
“Not a complete makeover, I see,” he said staring at my hairy calf.
“Is your bedside manner always so tactful?” I asked.
“I can give you a list of references.” Hugh grinned as he flexed my foot and rotated my ankle.
“Careful!”
“It’s pretty banged up, but I don’t think it’s broken.” He walked to the fridge and dug round in the freezer. “Have you got an ice pack?”
“Probably not. The boys always poked holes in the blue kind. I switched to bags of frozen peas years ago and never went back after they moved out.”
“I don’t see any peas either. Were you saving these cranberries for anything important?”
“I was hoping that someone would appear and turn them into muffins.”
“So your dream guy is the muffin man, I assume.”
“Just give me the bag.” Hugh wrapped the bag in the dishtowel and dropped it in my lap.
“Not much chance of frost bite with the pelt you’re sporting, but it never hurts to be careful.” He strode back out onto the porch and disappeared from view. I contemplated my ankle and the whereabouts of Augusta. She hadn’t mentioned being gone at dinner time. I scanned the room as best I could from my rocker. No note propped against the toaster. No light blinked on the answering machine. And no smells emanated from the oven. I was thinking about licking the pizza sauce off my jacket when Hugh returned. A plastic bag releasing the unmistakable smells of Chinese takeout hung from his hand. He deposited the bag on the table and started pulling plates and wine glasses from the cupboard. Rooting around in a drawer, he scrounged up a couple of forks and serving spoons.
“And you thought dinner was a total loss.”
“How did you know I love Chinese food?”
“I tapped your phones and tallied up the number of times you called Lo Mein’s for takeout in the last month.”
“Well, then, you must know exactly what I always order.”
“Crab rangoons, v
egetable lo mein, Schezuan chicken and egg rolls. The beef and broccoli and the moo goo gai pan are for me, no sharing allowed.”
“I’m impressed. Maybe you’re a real detective after all. How’d you really do it?”
“Your pajamas gave it away. Can you get to the table on your own, or should I carry you?”
“I think I can manage.”
He found a corkscrew in the cutlery drawer. With the skill of a trained hunting dog, he zeroed in on a bottle of Pinot Grigio I’d been saving in the back of the fridge. Expertly pulling the cork, he poured out a glass for each of us as I lurched toward the table.
“Wow. It really hurts when I put pressure on it.”
“I’ll take another look at it after dinner. Shoot! I left the report on Ethel’s death in the car. Seeing you splattered all over the driveway aroused my knight in shining armor side, and I forgot why I was here in the first place.”
“I should try that more often if it will make takeout magically appear on my table.”
“I’m not sure how many of those kinds of falls you should attempt without a stunt double.” Hugh headed out the door again.
I settled myself at the table and propped my foot up once again with the bag of cranberries in place. Reaching across the table I opened the takeout boxes and tucked spoons into each. While he was gone I snitched a piece of broccoli out of his beef and broccoli. My cheeks bulged with crunch and MSG when Hugh returned with a file folder.
“I thought I said no sharing.”
“How do you know I was eating your food?”
“I’m a detective, remember?” He tossed the folder on the table between us and handed me a wine glass. “Wash down the pieces of broccoli stuck between your teeth with a swallow of this.” I gulped the wine and opened the folder. I skimmed the jargon and gave my attention to the medical examiner’s report. While I was reading he snagged an egg roll from a carton, bit off the end and dunked it knuckle deep in the duck sauce.
“That constitutes double dipping.”
“That’s to get back at you for helping yourself to my broccoli.”
“So it was a head injury,” I said. Her head had been a mess. The thought of it was enough to make me lose my appetite. Well, almost enough. I reached for an egg roll of my own.
“Something hit her prior to her death.”
“The diagram in the report shows an injury to the back of her head. Could she have fallen against something as she was losing consciousness?”
“The wound is on the back of the head, and she was found on her stomach. If she had hit the stove and fallen, the wound would have been on the front of her head, or we would have found her on her back.”
“What do you think happened, then?”
“Either someone decided to kill her and blame it on the fire bug, or someone killed her and someone else felt like starting a fire. It seems to me unlikely that it would be two separate perpetrators, but I guess we can’t rule it out quite yet.”
“If anyone was going to be the target of two different hostile neighbors, it would be Ethel.”
“Either way, it’s a homicide.”
“How does that affect Ray’s involvement?” I asked
“It’s complicated. I think the best thing to do is to wait and see how involved Ray wants to be and in which way we can each contribute to the case.” Hugh gestured toward my leg.
“How’s the ankle?”
I shifted the bag of cranberries to get a better look. “I think it’s swollen to twice its normal size.” Hugh reached over and poured me another half glass of wine.
“Where do you keep the pain relievers?”
“In the downstairs medicine cabinet.”
He plunked the bottle of ibuprofen on the table in front of me. I twisted off the cap and downed two pills with a gulp of wine.
“Still no real idea who’s been starting the fires?” I asked.
“You’ve heard something?”
“People at the post office keep mentioning the DaSilva kids as the likeliest possibility. Harold said something like seventy percent of fires are set by juveniles.”
“Unfortunately, that’s correct.”
“I don’t want it to be them,” I said.
“Anyone you’d rather it was?”
“No one except Ray,” I said, “or maybe Clive. I really hate his dog.”
“I don’t think the statistics show dog owners are more likely to start fires.”
“Speaking of Clive, I heard something interesting from Dinah while I was getting the pizza,” I said. “She says Clive Merrill was romantically involved with Ethel.”
“Had you heard about this before?”
“It was a total surprise.”
“Then I guess we’d better go talk to him. Are you up for it with the ankle?”
“Miss out on hearing from the one guy who liked Ethel? No way.”
Twenty
The weathermen had been right. In the time it had taken to finish dinner and round up a pair of crutches left in the barn from the winter Josh broke his ankle skiing, the flakes had piled up at least three inches. I was grateful for the four-wheel drive on Hugh’s truck when we turned onto the road that led to Clive’s camp. Most of the lake residents cleared out by Labor Day, but Clive lived here year round. The road was private so the town didn’t plow it. A rutted track had been ground down by Clive’s jeep. No street lights lit the way, and it wasn’t salted or sanded. It looked as bad as my porch steps.
He had bought the property on the cheap from a couple getting a divorce. The house crouched below the level of the road, and the driveway hadn’t been plowed. Hobbling down with crutches and a bum leg was not going to be a pleasure. Hugh put the truck in park and peered down the hill.
“Do you want me to go in alone,” he asked, “or should I give you a piggy back ride?”
“I’m not about to just sit here,” I said, “and I’m too big to be carried.” I pushed open the truck door and swung my legs out. I was hip deep in a drift before I remembered my crutches were in the back of the truck. Stepping out on my good leg, I made a grab for the truck bed and failed.
Hugh called down from above me, “Most people lie on their backs to make snow angels.” He watched me struggling to turn over.
“Are you staying in the truck,” he asked again,” or am I carrying you?”
“I’m not within ideal parameters on the height and weight charts,” I said. “You’ll never be able to carry me.” Hugh crossed his seven-foot wingspan across his chest and grinned down through his red mustache.
“They don’t even list my parameters on the charts,” he said. “Besides, I’m a fireman, remember? I have to be able to carry helpless women out of burning buildings no matter what size they are.” He reached down, hoisted me out of the hole I’d created, and slung me over his shoulder. “Stop swinging your leg like a caged elephant,” he said,” or we’ll both go down this hill like Jack and Jill.”
“I may be a little plumper than I ought to be,” I said, “but I think calling me an elephant is going too far.”
“I didn’t say I thought you were an elephant,” Hugh said. “You worry too much.”
“You’d worry, too,” I said, “if you had to explain things like this to my customers.”
“No one will know.” Hugh raised his free hand to knock on Clive’s door. Before he landed the first blow the door popped open. Hugh slid me off his shoulder, and I grabbed his arm for support since we forgot my crutches in the truck.
“Mr. Merrill?” said Hugh. “I think we met at the fire the other night?”
“You’re the one whose boots got the tail end of Gwen’s lunch,” Clive said.
“That’s right,” Hugh said. “We’d like to ask you some questions about Ethel Smalley.”
“I just can’t believe she’s gone.” Clive still looked a little shook up. His shirttail was untucked on one side, his shoelaces were flapping, and he wasn’t wearing his fishing hat. Clive doesn’t even take off his hat in
church. He wore it at Beulah’s funeral.
“Could we come in, sir?” Hugh asked. Clive stepped back and pulled the door open wide. A large fish mounted on a wooden plaque hung on the wall. It looked like Clive had stolen it from one of the neighborhood grill-type chain restaurants steadily invading the lower third of the state. A coat rack constructed of deer antlers from salvaged road kill loomed near the door.
At the ready next to him was his dog Brandy. She had a long reddish coat and loved to bite anything that wandered by. Kids in town called her Brandy Snap and ran in the other direction whenever they saw her. I felt like running too. The last time we met, I was out for a walk, and Brandy had nipped at me and growled until I managed to flag down a passing car for a ride. Hugh squatted and started stroking her fur. She promptly dropped down and exposed her belly for a full massage.
“I’ve never seen her do that with a stranger before,” said Clive. “Do you have a dog?”
“No,” Hugh said, “not anymore.” Hugh dug in with both hands and finished off the scratch. Brandy lolled, nearly comatose with joy. As I limped past her she barely managed a gurgle down low in her throat where the growl should have been. Hugh had obviously missed his calling. He could have been the Pied Piper of dogcatchers.
At the end of the short hall I saw a large brick hearth with a working wood stove settled on it. I hobbled toward it and flopped onto a disreputable easy chair. Russet dog hairs made up the dominant color scheme in the room. Hugh sat opposite me on a drooping plaid sofa. He grimaced at me when a snapping sound erupted from the sofa’s underpinnings as Brandy jumped up to lay her head in his lap. Clive took the rocker and turned on the television.
“’Fishing with Walter and Earl’ is just starting.” Clive said looking at the television. He didn’t need to worry. Between the sofa that was threatening to bust out under him and the journey back up the hill lugging me on his shoulder, Hugh probably wanted to get a move on.
“I’m sure you’ve heard that Ethel’s death has been determined to be a homicide.” Hugh stopped stroking Brandy’s head to tug his notebook out of his shirt pocket.
Live Free or Die Page 13