Groundwork for Murder

by Marilyn Baron

  Alex breathed a sigh of relief. At least Nick had survived the storm.

  “I’d suggest you worry less about the lawn man and more about yourself. The guard also remembers that Nick had blood on his hands. If that’s Mark’s blood, then we have our killer. If not, then you’re in a world of trouble.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Feels Like Home

  Nick was exhausted, mentally and physically. He felt guilty about leaving town and leaving Alexandra behind. She must have been traumatized, having weathered that storm alone without truly knowing where her husband was. When he’d left, Alex believed Mark was with his mistress, but she surely didn’t know he was dead. Soon she would know the truth and maybe suspect his role in Mark’s death.

  He knew Alexandra needed time to mourn, time with her daughters, and time away from him. He was of no use to her as a homeless man. He would only be a burden. He was falling in love with Alex, and if he ever wanted to begin a serious relationship with her, he would have to get his life in order. He would have to get off the streets, get his art career going again, and become the man she deserved, if she’d have him.

  He tried to shut out all his thoughts of Alexandra. Maybe she hated him for leaving without saying goodbye or telling her where he was going. Maybe she didn’t care about him one way or the other. Maybe she was glad to get rid of him. Did she think he was a coward, or that he was just smart for leaving before the police took him in as a suspect? He hoped the last drawings he’d left at her doorstep would help keep her from being implicated in her husband’s death. But had she found the drawings? Had the police?

  He glanced out the bus window as the rural landscape rolled by, registering only the colors of the trees, the grass, and the sky. The objects, like his thoughts, were becoming fuzzy. The colors, which started as viridian, yellow ochre, lemon yellow, cerulean blue, and raw umber, merged together and turned muted and muddy until he fell asleep with his rear sticking to the hot faux leather seat and his cheek nestled against the windowpane, trying to absorb the little bit of air-conditioning that could be had on the bumpy bus headed south.

  “Wake up, mister!” the bus driver shouted.

  “W-what, where am I?” answered Nick, dazed.

  “You’re in Sarasota, Florida. Didn’t you buy this ticket? Now, get out. I have to clean this stinking bus, let on some more stinking people, and turn it east.”

  “Okay, okay,” Nick mumbled, after waking up from one of the best and deepest sleeps he’d had in a long time on this mobile homeless shelter.

  But get out and go where? That was the million-dollar question. He didn’t know which way to walk, and he certainly didn’t have a million dollars. Being the first bus out of Jacksonville the morning after the storm was the main reason he’d landed in Sarasota. He hoped he would be welcome in his new home.

  Reluctant to roam the streets and sleep on the ground this evening, he felt he didn’t have a choice. He had to lie low and hide so the authorities didn’t find him, assuming they were looking for him.

  He had enough money to last a few days. He ate and wandered and met a few street people who were down on their luck. Same stories, different town. Nick inquired about shelters and soup kitchens. He found what seemed to be a pleasant enough place to crash, and after the sun went down he found a spot behind an ice-cream shop with an overhang that offered protection from the rain. Resourceful about surviving in the streets, he rounded up a few collapsed brown cardboard boxes from the garbage bin to fashion a makeshift bed and made a pillow out of discarded ice-cream tubs. It felt like home.

  The next morning, Nick wandered over to the soup kitchen for some hot coffee and a piece of bread. He decided he’d better make his money, Mark’s money, last a few weeks instead of a few days. There was a newspaper on the table, and when he turned to the State news he saw an article about a body that had washed up onto the beach and the murder of a man in Jacksonville Beach. There were three suspects, and he was one of them. His picture was staring back at him from the newsprint, the same picture that had been displayed at the gallery.

  Nick swore in Italian under his breath as he read the article about renowned artist Dominick Anselmo, a person of interest in the case, who might be implicated in a murder. Authorities were anxious to talk to him. He knew enough to know that “a person of interest” was code for “primary suspect”—you’ll be arrested as soon as you turn yourself in. He wasn’t particularly worried about himself, but in the article it said the victim’s wife, Alexandra Newborn, had been arrested.

  Had she not seen his sketches? Alex didn’t kill Mark; the angry ocean did. Nick didn’t know what to do. If he tried to contact Alex, they would find him. No one was going to believe “the homeless lawn guy” who had stupidly left his edger at Elizabeth Diamond’s house. He decided to do nothing but blend in with the walls and garbage cans and on park benches where he felt most comfortable, where he could think things through. Surely the truth would come out in the next couple of days.

  Nick wished he could hold Alexandra and comfort her and protect her, but he felt helpless. And he was still homeless. But he wasn’t heartless. If Alex was still in jail in the next few days, he was going to go back to Jacksonville Beach and take his chances with the law.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Loneliness

  Lonely and scared, Alex huddled in her jail cell with nothing but time to contemplate her uncertain future. What was wrong with this picture? She was a good mother and she’d been a decent wife, yet her husband had cheated on her, and she was the one stuck behind bars and treated like some kind of an ax murderer.

  Then there was Elizabeth Diamond, who had stolen her husband and her life. She was probably lounging on her pool deck, watching the sandpipers skip freely along the shoreline, feeling the warmth of the sun on every pore of her perfect skin. And Alex was languishing on a cot as uncomfortable as a marble slab in an ice-cream parlor.

  What she wouldn’t give right now for a coffee ice cream with chocolate chips and toasted coconut, scooped into a freshly baked waffle cone and dipped in hard chocolate. But that particular item didn’t happen to be on the prison menu. They were big on starch around this place.

  There was no TV or radio, just a couple of outdated Golf Digest and Sports Illustrated magazines and a Bible. A Bible? Where was God now when she needed him? Where was Nick, for that matter? Neither one of them were showing any signs of life.

  Besides her girls, what Alex missed most about life on the outside was painting. She hoped her mother remembered to bring her art supplies from the house. If she didn’t get out of this place soon, she was going to have to draw a mural to decorate the walls and introduce some color, like she had in the girls’ bedrooms.

  “You have a visitor,” announced the guard, interrupting her pity party.

  “Oh, my gosh, where is my daughter, my little girl? I want to see her now!” Alex’s mother’s voice grew louder as she made her way down the dim hallway, her sensible shoes clippety-clopping like a noisy shadow.

  “Calm down, Mom. I’ll be okay,” said Alex, trying to modulate her voice as the guard led her into a holding room so she could meet with her mother.

  “Oh, dear, I hope these almost home-baked chocolate chip cookies will make you feel better. You know, they say if you put your own butter and eggs in the box mix it tastes like you made them from scratch, and psychologically it makes you feel like you really did make them from scratch. Break and bake is easier, but not quite the same. Maybe I should have made more homemade meals for you when you were growing up. I guess I wasn’t much of a mother.”

  “You were fine, Mom, and thanks for the cookies,” said Alex, biting into one as she wrapped her arms around her mother. She had been craving some kind of chocolatey-chippy concoction. Somehow her mother had sensed that. And she’d been craving her mother.

  Unlike Alex, who was more traditional, her mother was a tie-dye kind of woman. Apparently the retro look skips a generation, because Ella typi
cally dressed in outfits that looked like a throwback from her grandparents’ Woodstock days. Everything old is new again, she thought. Emory, Ella’s other half, was more at home in preppy clothes.

  “And I brought you a wishbone. I had to sneak it in.”

  “A wishbone?”

  “For good luck.”

  Alex was sure it was going to take more than a wishbone to get her out of this situation. Maybe a genie in a bottle or a magic wand or maybe some fairy dust, and there was plenty of dust in her cell.

  “Here, you take the long end, honey.”

  Alex held the whitened bone between her fingers and pulled until it snapped. Her mother ended up with the longer piece.

  Alex rolled her eyes and asked, “Have you seen my girls?”

  “Of course I’ve seen them. We just had a nice long visit at Vicky’s. I’m sorry I can’t care for the girls. You know how overwhelmed I get with too much responsibility. Vicky’s better suited than I am. Nobody needs me anymore. I’m obsolete.”

  “Mom, you’re not obsolete. And I need you.”

  “That’s sweet, but I’m not much good to anyone anymore. You know, my knee’s been hurting, and remember last week when you took me to the orthopaedic surgeon and he said I have to get it replaced? Well, you know those artificial knees don’t last more than twenty years, so I asked my primary-care doctor why I should have surgery now when I’m just going to have to get it replaced again in another twenty years. And do you know what that man had the nerve to say to me?”

  “What, Mom?”

  “He said, ‘I wouldn’t worry about that. You’re not going to be around in twenty years.’ Can you imagine that? I think I should change doctors.”

  “Mom, don’t worry about it. He can’t predict the future.” She couldn’t imagine the world without her mother.

  Watching her mother place her purse on the table, Alex panicked when she didn’t see another package.

  “Did you bring them?” Alex asked, agitated, as she flexed her fingers.

  “I brought some of what you asked for. They wouldn’t let me bring the easel or the paints. But I have a nice sketch pad, some color pencils, some crayons, just the basics. No craft knives. No sharpener. The guard is going through everything right now. I guess he thinks I’ll try to sneak in a weapon.”

  “Mom!”

  “Just joking. They’re going to bring everything in here just as soon as all the material has been cleared. Your lawyer’s already arranged it. I honestly think everyone here’s afraid of that man.”

  “Thank you,” Alex said. “I don’t think I could survive another day in here without something productive to occupy my time.”

  She was caged in a small space, but she was used to that. The cell was probably about the size of her laundry-room studio. The light wasn’t great, it was mostly artificial, but the tiny barred window did let some nice slanted light into the cell’s interior at the beginning of the day. She could work with that. And she could see a tree—or at least some leaves at the top of a tree—when she looked through the window.

  “What about the house?” Alex asked. “What kind of shape is it in?”

  “Honey, it’s a mess, I’m sorry to say. It looks like a hurricane hit it.”

  “Mom, a hurricane did hit it. Any trees down? The police dragged me out of there before I could assess the damage.”

  “You don’t have to worry about a thing. Vicky’s husband, that nice colonel, took care of everything. He’s got the workers over there now, repairing your front window, cleaning out the sand and the water, removing the damaged shrubs and cutting down the tree that fell.”

  “Not my cypress!”

  “No, that’s still standing. You lost a pine tree.”

  Alex felt sick. She didn’t want the girls to come home to that devastation. They had already been through enough. Now she had another reason to thank Vicky and the colonel.

  “What about Joplin?”

  “Between your girls and Vicky’s kids, Joplin is being smothered with love and very well fed.”

  “Have you told Daddy yet?” Alex asked.

  “Of course I have, and he wishes he could be here to see you, but don’t expect him to drop everything and fly up from Miami. His new wife runs the roost now, and she’s got him so henpecked he probably doesn’t know which end is up. I’ll never understand why he dumped me for her. She’s nothing special. She’s probably never even heard of Woodstock, and that was such a big part of your dad’s and my relationship. Oh, those were the days. We didn’t have a care in the world at Woodstock.”

  Her mom was still stuck in the sixties and hadn’t gotten over the fact that her husband had divorced her, remarried a young widow, and moved into the widow’s beachfront condo in South Florida. It must have been difficult for her mother to call her ex-husband, with the current level of tension between them.

  “Speaking of Woodstock, I have just the thing for you. I brought my karaoke machine with me and some backup music. You know how singing helps me cope. You just don’t have guitarists like Jimmy Hendrix anymore. Or singers like Janis Joplin. And they contributed to society, unlike that Mark Newborn. What did he ever do for anyone but bring misery to you and the girls?”

  “Mom,” Alex protested, but her mother was in a talkative mood.

  “I always said that man you married was too handsome for his own good.”

  “Which is why you have two beautiful grandchildren.”

  “Who take after our side of the family.”

  Alex smiled.

  “There, that’s what I like to see, your beautiful smile. I have just the song to lift your spirits. It’s by Janis Joplin.”

  Alex had endured her mother’s singing in public all her life, whether it was in the local drug store, on the mall escalators, or in the waiting room at the pediatrician’s office. Once, on a tour bus on the seventeen-mile drive in California, Alex’s mother had grabbed the microphone from the tour guide and started a sing-along with the passengers. Surprisingly, they all sang along. At some point it became less exhausting to just let her mother be herself.

  Alex’s mother turned on her boom box and started parroting Janis Joplin’s words about loneliness.

  “Hey Mom, do you have something a little more upbeat?”

  “Okay, how about this one?” her mother said, as she changed the background music and recalled Joplin’s lyrics about being smothered by bad luck

  “Enough, Mom, all these morbid songs aren’t making me feel any better.” Alex sighed. “I don’t need to be reminded that I’m burying my husband tomorrow!”

  Some of the other inmates called out. “Let her keep singing!”

  “Well, I sang that one as an intro to the conversation about Mark’s funeral. We need to talk about it. Are you going to go?”

  “If I’m allowed to go to the funeral, I’ll have to have a police escort, and I’ll be in shackles. I don’t want my girls to see me that way.”

  “You have to go for their sakes. It will give you a sense of closure. What about funeral arrangements?”

  “Vicky and the colonel have already taken care of it for me. You know, Mom, I’m kind of tired. I appreciate the cookies and the wishbone and the impromptu concert, but I think I want to be alone now.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to be alone, but as you wish. Call me the minute they let you out, and I’ll meet you at the funeral. I’m here for you, whatever you need, dear.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” Alex turned and signaled for the guard to escort her back to her cell.

  When she returned to the cell, her art supplies were waiting. She sat down on the cot. She’d given Nick a sketch pad. And now she was in the same situation, cut off from everyone she loved, homeless in a way. She was missing her children, so she drew some sketches of her girls. Then one of Mark. Then one of Nick, shirtless, wearing his sunglasses, standing next to the bald cypress, looking back at her. Her fingers hurt, and her bones were sore. She placed the sketchpad under her thin striped
pillow, climbed into her cot, and cried herself to sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Just Look for the Signs

  Alex stepped out of the squad car in an electronic ankle monitor, which was covered by the long black pants Vicky had delivered to the jail that morning. But the pants didn’t shield her humiliation. It was beginning to get warm. She should have worn a dress, but she refused to let her girls, or anyone, see her in chains.

  She walked toward the group of mourners with a strained gait, coming ever closer to the casket, the tent, the freshly dug hole, and the modest crowd that had gathered to pay their respects to Mark.

  Emory and Ella broke away from Vicky in unison, like horses bolting out of the starting gate, and ran to her, tears streaming from their eyes, their anxious faces crumpled. The girls missed her desperately, and Alex resented the separation. All she could think of was holding them in her arms. She was so happy to be with them again that, for a moment, she forgot where she was and why she was there.

  The girls clung to her, each grabbing an arm. She hoped they hadn’t noticed the ankle monitor.

  “I know Aunt Vicky and the colonel are taking good care of you.”

  They both tried to speak at once.

  “They’re great,” cried Ella, “but we want you. Mom, are you all right? I’ve been so worried about you.”

  “No one would let us visit you in jail,” Emory sobbed.

  “I didn’t want you girls to see me like that,” Alex explained. “Don’t worry, they’re just doing some detective work, and they’ll let me go home soon, I promise. I’ve missed you both so much.”

  “I want everything to be like it was before.” Ella was crying and inconsolable. “I miss Dad. I want him back. Why did he have to leave us?”

  She knew the tears the girls cried for their father were just as much about her absence. First their father had been taken away from them, and now their mother. She was all they had left. It was plain to see they were scared of being left alone.