Death with a Dark Red Rose

by Julia Buckley

  His eyes opened and focused on me. “Hmm?”

  “How do you feel? Would you like some water?”

  He took a deep breath and squinted around the room. “What time is it?”

  “It’s close to ten now, I think.”

  He sat up a bit and I helped him drink a few sips out of his cup. “I have a little bit of energy,” he said. “That’s good, right?”

  “Very good. Does anything hurt? Allison said there can be body aches with this virus.”

  “Not too bad, no. Just a crick in my back from sleeping in a weird position. Do I hear voices downstairs?”

  “Yes, we have a houseful. Camilla and Adam have returned, and Belinda and Carl showed up.”

  His brows rose as he took another sip of water. “Why is that?”

  I frowned. “A lot has happened. Do you really want to hear all this now?”

  He smiled, and I saw that my Sam was at least halfway back to his normal self. “Yes.”

  “Okay.” I sat on the edge of his bed. “First of all, Camilla and Adam got married.”

  “What?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, that’s great! Adam, you romantic old devil.”

  “He must be, because he’s really bringing out the romantic in Camilla. She’s—playful. Young at heart.”

  “That’s great,” he repeated. He smoothed his covers. “So get to the bad stuff.”

  “How do you know there’s bad stuff?”

  “Your face gives you away.”

  “Okay.” I sighed. “They found Luis’s car in a ditch in Blueville. There was blood. It doesn’t look good.”

  “Oh no. How’s Carl taking it?”

  “He’s angry, and he came here to basically beg Camilla to look into it because she’s a famous mystery novelist. But then Adam heard Carl is a good cook, and he said that he needs someone at Wheat Grass, so Carl kind of auditioned for the job by making quiche, which is the delightful aroma that has floated up the stairs.”

  Sam stretched. “Is there any left?”

  I studied him. “Do you think you can eat?”

  “I don’t know, but I do feel hungry.”

  “Well, that’s a good sign.”

  He nodded, picking up Geronimo and rubbing his fuzzy little head. “Okay, back to the story.”

  “The quiche was delicious, and—well, you saw how Carl works.”

  “Adam was impressed?”

  “So much so that he gave Carl the job.”

  “Wow!” Sam set Geronimo down and the kitten returned to his sister and started to bathe her ears with his tongue. “I did miss a lot.”

  “Then, while we were all feeling a little better and celebrating, a man’s face appeared in the kitchen window, and Belinda and I both saw him and screamed.”

  “I heard that! I thought it was in my dream. I was trying to help you . . .”

  “Adam and Carl ran outside and saw the guy get into a dark car. Which is weird because when Belinda and I came back from talking to some people at Blue Lake Games, Belinda saw a dark car behind us. It kept going, up to the overlook.”

  “That’s weird. No one drives up there.”

  “Exactly. Anyway, Adam called Doug, and he’s going to be coming over. We need to tell him all this and more.”

  “There’s more?”

  “Just some theories we’ve been batting around. They can wait.”

  He sat up. “I want to go to the washroom. Maybe splash some cold water on my face.” I helped him get out of bed, and he padded slowly over to the little bathroom in the corner of my room. He shut the door, and I tidied his bed, careful to leave the kittens where they were. They were both purring with their eyes closed.

  Sam returned and climbed back into bed. His skin was pale. “I just used up my energy walking across the room,” he said with a wan smile.

  “A night of sleep will do wonders.” I tucked him back in. “I hate seeing you like this. You’ve never been sick a day.”

  His blue eyes were solemn. “I was sick, about a year ago. Before you came to town. It was some crazy virus like this. I was living up here on the bluff all alone, hiding away from other human beings, and I felt terrible.” He scratched Geronimo’s head. “I was sick, and I felt—alone.”

  “Oh, Sam!” I said, lunging forward to hug him. “I’m so sorry.” I kissed his cheek, then leaned back to look at him. “You do know you’ll never be alone like that again, right?”

  We heard feet pounding loudly up the stairs, and Cliff poked his head into the room, verifying my last comment. “Someone told me my little brother was sick.”

  Sam shrugged; he couldn’t help grinning. “Just a virus.”

  Cliff marched into the room, and as usual he seemed to take up a good deal of space. He looked around and nodded. “I’ve never been in Lena’s chamber before. Very nice. A little writer’s retreat, huh?”

  “Yes. I’ve done zero writing in the last few days, though. Just some planning with Camilla. As soon as Sam is better I need to get on the ball.”

  Cliff edged forward and poked Sam’s foot. “Yeah, what’s your problem?”

  “I don’t know. Weak antibodies?”

  “Figures. I thought my manly strength was in my genes, but . . .” He shrugged, feigning disappointment.

  Sam laughed. “Shut up.”

  This cheered Cliff. “Well, you don’t sound that sick.”

  “He needs more rest and sleep,” I said. “But I think the kittens have done wonders for his morale. How are your kittens, Cliff?”

  He had adopted two of the cats he and Sam had found—two gray brothers that he’d named Jeeves and Wooster. “They’re good. Running my house, walking all over me, literally and figuratively. They’re pretty awesome, though. I never had cats before, and we get along really well.”

  “I suppose Isabelle comes over to check on them now and then?” I asked, unable to resist.

  Cliff’s eyes darted away from mine. “No, not yet.”

  “What? Cliff, you did call her after I told you she liked you, didn’t you? Back in July?”

  He shrugged. “I got busy. And then I didn’t see her anywhere and I guess I—chickened out.”

  Arabella woke up and jumped off Sam’s bed in search of her food bowl. Sam sat up slightly and scowled at his brother. “You didn’t call her? What’s your problem?”

  Cliff put his hands on his hips. “You.”

  “She’s gorgeous, she likes you, she lives in town. What’s to stop you from asking her out?”

  “I don’t know. It hasn’t come up. I can’t just go wandering into the vet’s office with some fake story about my cats. That would look obvious. And I don’t want to call her on the phone like I’m in seventh grade. It has to happen naturally.”

  “Oh, like reuniting with your brother? That only took you, what, seventeen years? Isabelle will be close to fifty by then, but I’m sure she’ll still be attractive,” I said.

  “You can both lay off,” Cliff said. “I came up here to check on Sam, not face the Spanish Inquisition.”

  “Fine.” I pursed my lips. If Cliff wasn’t going to arrange a meeting, I would.

  He turned to me. “Don’t get any ideas, either, London.”

  “Okay.”

  He nodded, then pointed backward, toward the stairs. “What’s the kid doing here?”

  “Carl? He wanted to talk to Camilla. As a professional. He figures she can work some miracle of detection and find out what happened to poor Luis. Carl was really upset when he got here, but luckily Adam distracted him with restaurant talk.”

  “Why would that distract him?” He blinked at me.

  “Oh, because he’s a really good cook. It seems innate with him. Adam is excited, and so is Carl. But he’s also determined to find out more about Luis. There was a look
on his face, when we told him what the guys at the game store said. It made me nervous. Did you hear all about that?”

  He nodded again. “Belinda told Doug, and Doug told me.”

  Sam had settled back against his pillow. “Why are you here, anyway?”

  Cliff didn’t take offense. “I was driving Doug home when he got Adam’s call. And I need to go downstairs and find out what I can about this intruder.”

  “Don’t let Lena go anywhere until you guys catch him, okay?” Sam pointed weakly at me. “She tends to wander into dangerous situations.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but I realized he was right.

  Cliff darted forward to feel Sam’s head, a quick concerned gesture that belied all of his posturing and name-calling. For a moment, their resemblance was very strong: Cliff’s dark head bent over Sam’s, both of them with one subtle gray stripe in their bangs, both with a noble jaw, square and slightly cleft at the chin. “Not that bad,” Cliff said. “I’ll check in on you tomorrow, maybe challenge you to some racquetball or something.”

  Sam grinned, but his eyes were closed.

  I kissed his cheek again and said, “Go to sleep. I’ll come back in a while.”

  “Mmm,” he said.

  “Cliff, I’ll walk you down. Don’t let the kittens out.”

  Cliff scooped up Arabella, who had marched with queenly grace to the door and was waiting to depart with us. “No, you don’t, pretty girl,” he said. “You can sit on this windowsill and scan for bats.”

  Arabella’s eyes widened as she stared out into the darkness. I smiled and followed Cliff out the door.

  On the stairs he said, “How long has he been sick?”

  “Just today. He woke up okay, but then it hit him like a hammer about half an hour later.”

  “Huh. He always struck me as too sturdy to get sick. I guess because when I was recovering from my bullet wound he always looked so young and strong and fit by comparison.”

  “He still does,” I joked, and Cliff gave me an approving nod.

  “Anyway, I’m on duty tomorrow, but text me with a health update, okay?”

  “Sure. I’ve been watching him pretty obsessively.”

  We had reached the bottom of the stairs and stood together in Camilla’s foyer. He pulled me against him in a half hug. “I’m glad he has you,” Cliff said. “You’re a good kid.”

  I looked up at him. “Seriously, though, why haven’t you called Isabelle? You knew in July that she liked you, and here it is October already.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He shrugged. “I don’t—I’m not good at—getting started. You know? I need some kind of plan, or I’ll lose my nerve.”

  “You don’t need nerve. You’re a great guy, you’re tall and handsome, and wear a uniform, and risked your life to save someone else’s. You love your cats and built them a special cat tree from scratch. No pun intended. Do you know how many of those things would be in the average woman’s ‘dream man’ scenario?”

  “Uh, no. I don’t know anything about women, Lena. That’s the point. I’ve gotten pretty good at being alone. Besides . . .”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Besides what?”

  “Back in August I saw her with some guy at the grocery store.”

  “Oh.” I had seen Isabelle fairly regularly since she had arrived in town, but she hadn’t mentioned anything about a boyfriend. “Well, I’ll look into that.”

  “Good. I’d appreciate it.”

  I grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the kitchen. “Let’s see what they’re up to in here. Did you know that Camilla and Adam got married?”

  “What? That’s awesome.”

  “Yeah. I called Doug to tell him first, since he and Camilla go way back, but it was right after he heard from Blueville. So he doesn’t know, I don’t think.”

  We reached the kitchen door and found Doug at the table, listening gravely to the testimony of Belinda, Carl, Adam, and Camilla, who all seemed to be talking at once.

  Cliff and I pulled up a couple more chairs and joined the group. Carl stood up and put a piece of quiche on a plate for Cliff; Doug, I saw, had already devoured one. Carl retrieved Doug’s plate and carried it to Camilla’s sink, where he washed it. Truly the boy was a wonder.

  Belinda was saying, “And Adam said the man was picked up by a dark car. I understand that at night every car looks dark, and that ‘dark’ is not much to go on, but just to be clear—Lena and I had an encounter with a dark car, too.”

  Doug’s blue eyes darted to mine for a moment. “When was this?”

  “Belinda and I were coming back from our visit to Blue Lake Games. I didn’t see anything on the way up, but Belinda said there was a black car behind us. And that it went up the bluff road. Later we both saw a dark car coming down.”

  Cliff frowned. “Even if that had anything to do with the disappearance of Luis, why would someone think to follow the two of you? You were just two women going shopping, right? Did anyone in the game shop even seem to be interested in the questions you were asking?”

  Belinda and I exchanged a glance and shook our heads. “No, I don’t think so,” she said.

  Doug sighed. “Did anyone happen to recognize this man in the window?”

  I held up my hand. “I did, I think. But I can’t remember where I remember him from. I mean, when I saw him I realized I’d seen him before, but then he was gone so quickly . . .”

  “Think hard on it, Lena. It’s the only clue we’ve got.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture the man’s face again. I tuned out the conversation around me and brought his features back into my mind’s eye: dark hair, thin mouth, eyes narrowed in suspicion or dislike . . . “I know who it was!” I cried, disrupting a conversation between Adam and Doug.

  “What? Who was he?”

  I looked at Belinda. “Wasn’t he one of the guys that we saw in front of Plasti-Source, when Sam pulled over on the shoulder, coming back into town? There were two men, and they didn’t talk to us—”

  Belinda sat up straighter. “Yes—yes! It was him. Because at the time I thought he looked like a cartoon villain. And that’s how he looked peering in the window. Almost impossible to be real—more like a bad guy on the cover of a Nancy Drew book.”

  Adam, concerned, pushed aside his coffee cup and leaned closer. “If that is the case, and if these men had even an instant to study the car you were driving, perhaps to look at the license plate number . . .”

  “Or to take a picture of it,” Doug said. “That would only take a second.”

  I shook my head. “But when the dark car followed us, we were in Belinda’s car. Not mine.”

  Cliff looked at his place mat, his brows furrowed in concentration. “Let’s say that from the time that you pulled over on the side of the road, these people were interested in knowing who you were. Assuming they didn’t recognize Doug from his press conferences, they would have only the license plate to go on.”

  “But that would mean they’d need some connection to run the plate,” Doug said. “Someone in our department.”

  “They might have other means,” Cliff said. “Some unscrupulous source on the Internet. We know they’re out there. Anyway, let’s say they got Lena’s location from her plate, and they started following her.” He turned to me. “Where did you go before you met with Belinda?”

  “Coffee Dreams. On Violet Street. Luis’s wife works there.”

  “And then you and Belinda went to the game store—a place Luis frequented. So if this person was worried about you looking into the whole Luis thing, these two visits would not necessarily make him feel good.”

  Doug nodded. “That’s interesting. And that might make him take a risk. Might make him leave the safety of the car, walk past a driveway full of cars to see what the people inside were doing—or to hear what they were saying.”
We all looked at the window, now closed, that had been bringing in fresh fall air. “And who knows how much he heard, if anything at all.”

  Camilla’s eyes glowed purple in the kitchen light. “You do see what this means.”

  We all looked at her. “It means that Luis’s disappearance was in fact linked to Plasti-Source. Carl is right. The boy was targeted because of his job. The man looking in this window was standing at a Plasti-Source construction site. Luis told someone at Blue Lake Games that he had been disillusioned at work. He hinted at corruption via the allusion to Uriah Heep. I don’t think Doug or Cliff need look farther than the Plasti-Source in Stafford.”

  Doug tipped his chair backward slightly, his lips pursed in thought. “We were there this morning,” he said. “Before we got the call about Luis’s car. Everyone on the factory floor was super polite, wore expressions of concern, said they hoped we found Luis. Said he was a good worker, a good person, a nice colleague. In the second-floor offices, the story was different. He was unreliable, and they couldn’t afford to have someone like that on the staff. They hoped all was well, but it wasn’t their job to hunt him down.”

  “And everyone upstairs said words kind of similar to everyone else’s,” Cliff said. “The president, the vice president, the plant manager. They were all there for a meeting, so we chatted with them. Apparently, the president, Edward Grange, has been out of town. His wife had been ill and she died, and he was off at her funeral. So his underlings have been running things for a while. Like I said, they all basically told the same story—Luis was a deadbeat, and he’d probably turn up, but they had a business to run.”

  “Toeing the party line?” Adam asked.

  Belinda looked shocked. “But only one of them is guilty! This isn’t some Agatha Christie novel where every person is a part of the denouement. So you have to assume that much of that testimony is true. That those people really did consider Luis good and loyal.”

  Something was bothering me, and Doug saw it. “What is it, Lena?”

  “Well . . . Carl said that initially some boss there said he didn’t expect Luis to return because he had been repeatedly late or absent or something. That’s why they weren’t concerned when he didn’t show up. But that doesn’t seem to jibe with what you just said.”