More than any of that, though, was the fact that Todd lacked the instincts to elevate his standing among his peers. Despite all his tough talk with her, she’d seen him a few times around other kids, and he became as shy and quiet as a blushing debutante.
Stella figured that Chanelle Tanaka barely knew who Todd was. And as much as she figured the girl was halfway to tramp city riding a river of trouble, her heart still broke a little for the boy.
“Ain’t nobody having
sex
sex,” he said uncertainly.
“What the hell does that mean?”
Even in the paltry restaurant light, Stella could see the boy’s acne-dusted cheeks flush red with embarrassment. “Well, they’re having, uh, the kind that don’t count. Not the all-the-way shit.”
“Whatever does that mean?”
Todd rolled his eyes so dramatically, Stella wouldn’t have been surprised if they popped out of his skull and landed in the remains of his pizza. “Do I have to spell it out for you? You know, like, not … like one person, uh … you know, there’s no, um, direct—”
“Todd,” Stella said fiercely, “has your mother talked about this stuff with you? Prevention and safety and—”
“Jesus, Stella, it ain’t nineteen-fucking-fifty. We get that shit every year in health. They spend more time making us stick our hands up condoms than we do eatin’ lunch, and then we got to look at all those nasty pictures of people’s parts.…” He gestured down around his belt buckle for emphasis.
“So I don’t need to worry about you bringin’ home any little Todd Juniors any time soon,” Stella clarified.
“Damn it, Stella, I didn’t bring you here for a damn lecture. I ain’t talking about having sex with Chanelle, all I want to do is get her to
talk
to me!”
His voice had risen in frustration with each syllable, and Stella was suddenly aware of people at a few nearby tables looking over with interest.
“Hush now,” she said, “let’s not have the whole world in on your secrets, okay?”
Todd flushed even further and nodded.
Stella’s phone, which she’d left faceup on the table so she’d be sure to hear it over the restaurant’s din, started ringing. Todd reached for it, but Stella slapped his hand away and put it to her ear, jamming a finger in her other ear to try to drown out the noise.
“Hello?”
“Stella, this is Adriana Wolfort.”
“Adriana!” Stella was genuinely pleased to hear the old lady’s voice, though it seemed odd she’d be calling at this hour on a Monday night. A couple of years back, she’d met with the rich old lady to discuss measures to deal with her husband. It wasn’t the usual case; her husband Milton’s irascibility was a result of a stroke that had fried some key filter on his brain, so that he mostly sat on the couch and hollered strings of obscenities at nobody in particular all day long. Adriana, who’d never been all that fond of her husband and was very frank about having married him for his money five decades earlier, had suggested Stella could come up with some relatively painless but voice box–obliterating injury to keep the man quiet to give her a moment’s peace, and Stella had been trying to get her to consider off-site care instead when Milt had obliged them both by having a second, massive stroke and pitching forward onto the carpet, dead before he hit the floor.
Adriana had wanted to pay Stella what she called a “consulting fee,” but Stella had demurred. Now, given the state of her bank account, she wondered if she ought to have taken the old gal up on her offer.
“I’m desperately sorry to bother you,” Adriana said breathily. She was a great fan of old movies and had adopted an oddly formal and dramatic way of speaking. “But there’s a little matter here that needs your attention.”
“What sort of little matter?”
“Oh, I don’t want to say on the phone. Why don’t you just buzz on over.”
“I’m out to dinner,” Stella said. “Can it wait an hour or so?”
“Oh, I certainly think not.”
Stella raised her eyebrows. What kind of trouble could the widow have possibly gotten into? She had a gal that came around to help several days a week now, and her activities were generally limited to visiting with the very few spinsters in town she considered her social equals. Stella had often thought the old widow ought to join up with the Green Hat Ladies, but that would be a crossing of the social strata that, she was sure, would horrify the old biddy.
“Well, is it something, um … dire? Should you be calling 911?”
“No need for that,” Adriana said crisply. “I’ll put the coffee on.”
Then she hung up.
“You done eatin’?” Stella asked, resigning herself to another fool’s errand. Odds were that the old lady was just feeling lonely. “Call your mom and tell her you’ll be a little while longer. You can come with me and do your civic duty.”
Chapter Twenty-four
The once-proud iron gates at the Wolfort estate were propped permanently open, years of rust and corrosion having popped a hinge or two out of place. The road was not plowed, but lights burned from inside the big house. Stella pulled up the circular drive and gestured at Todd’s feet. “Guess you wish you would have worn boots now,” she said.
Todd jumped out of the Jeep and stomped around in a little circle, kicking up snow. Anything to prove an adult wrong. “I’m fine,” he said through chattering teeth.
“Mind your manners,” she cautioned as she rang the bell. “Mrs. Wolfort’s old school. She won’t put up with no sassin’.”
Adriana opened the door with a grand, sweeping gesture. She was dressed in her country gentlewoman finest, a look she’d adopted years ago that was lost on most of the locals. Her Wellington boots were topped by a tweedy skirt and a sweater set that looked like it might have been picked out by the queen mother herself.
“Hello, young man,” she said, holding out a gnarled, beringed hand.
Todd, to his credit, shook it with no hesitation and set to rubbing his shoes vigorously on the entry rug. “I’m Todd.”
“Well, now,” Adriana said briskly, leading them through the musty, once-grand foyer across threadbare carpets laid out all over the marble floor. Stella spotted cobwebs in the corners and a thick layer of dust on the furniture. She knew Adriana made a habit of firing housekeepers and had burned through every available cleaner in town.
In the sitting room, a tray was laid out with coffee cups and a china pot and a plate of what looked like stale Nilla Wafers. “Young man,” Adriana said imperiously, “why don’t you make yourself at home here for a few minutes while I confer with Mrs. Hardesty. Do help yourself to refreshments.”
Todd looked around the room, which was stuffed with upholstered furniture and lined with breakfronts and cabinets and bookshelves, every surface piled with fussy knickknacks.
“Uh…,” he said, and Stella knew he was trying to figure out something to keep himself occupied.
“Oh, looky here,” Stella said, seizing on a pile of magazines stashed on a bamboo tray. “
Saint Louis Town and Country.
Enrich yourself.”
She thrust the magazines at Todd, and he sat down on a tufted settee and glared at her.
“This won’t take long,” Adriana promised, striding with surprising speed for an old gal toward the back of the house. She picked up a pair of flashlights on a table by the back door and handed one to Stella, and they went out onto a stone terrace. Stella offered a hand to Adriana to help her down the steps, which were dusted with fresh snow over evidence of recent foot traffic.
“I’m fine,” Adriana snipped as a trio of sleek black Labradors came hurtling around the corner. They were handsome dogs, and well trained enough that they sniffed at her politely but didn’t jump. “It’s these three that alerted me to the problem. About an hour ago, they took to baying like the hounds of hell, and I came down here to take a look.”
Stella followed the old lady along an overgrown path. The garden had once been a showplace, an English-style affair featuring benches and footbridges along the curved paths. At the bottom of the gentle incline, a few dozen yards from the house, was Milton’s pride and joy, a large pond that he had once kept stocked with trout. Beyond it, a road led from the pond to what used to be the rest of the Wolfort estate, but had been sold off and planted with soybeans. Stella remembered that in her childhood there had been old-fashioned grass tennis courts and stables and an archery course.
The dogs grew increasingly agitated as they drew up to the edge of the pond, and one tried an experimental bark, but when Adriana scolded him, he immediately quieted down and skulked along at her heels.
“Well, there they are, then,” Adriana said. “I know I said you could use the pond any time, but I think you need to work on your technique some. I’m quite certain you didn’t expect them to come floating up to the surface so fast.”
Stella flashed her own light on a trio of lumps that lay at the edge of the pond, their sodden shapes hard to make out but distinct enough that she knew without a doubt they were bodies.
“Liman and Priss,” she guessed, a sinking feeling in her gut. “And the fella from the trunk.”
“Well, now, it might be better if you didn’t tell me the particulars,” Adriana said. “In case the police decide to interrogate me vigorously. If I don’t know any details, they won’t be able to drag them out of me, even if they resort to that waterboarding like the last administration was so fond of.”
Stella bent to the closest body, which was facedown with its limbs out at odd angles. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it, and looked around for a stick. It took some doing to get the thing rolled over, and even then its features were waterlogged and swollen, and only when she recognized the second corpse’s black cape did she feel confident she was looking at the drowned remains of Priss and her brother.
“How the heck did this happen?” she said, her gut twisting from both the ramifications to her personal situation as well as a general queasy feeling about the distasteful effects of their deaths.
“Well, now, my guess is that they were of insufficient weight or density to stay down. But then, I’m hardly qualified to put forth an opinion,” Adriana said. “I’m no forensic scientist.”
“You think
I
killed them?”
“Now, Stella, you don’t need to be coy with me. When I offered you the use of the pond, I understood it entailed a certain measure of discretion, and I would never dream of breaching that.”
Offered the use of the pond
… Stella racked her brain and dredged up a conversation she’d once had with the old lady the summer that Milton had his strokes. They’d gone for a stroll to get away from the old gent’s off-color screaming. By then he’d been at it so long that his voice had been permanently reduced to a scratchy, hoarse grating that still somehow managed to reach every corner of the house.
When they passed by the pond, Adriana had made a point of mentioning that it was built on the site of underground caverns and that it was a surprising thirty feet deep in some places. What was it she’d said?
Be a fine place to stash a body.
Which, at the time, Stella had taken as the eccentric ramblings of a bored old lady, or perhaps wishful thinking about the disposal of her harmless but irritating husband.
“Adriana,” she said carefully, “I didn’t murder these three.”
“Now, now, dear, I really don’t need to know,” Adriana said. “Your business is your business. I just thought you’d want to get them returned to their watery graves as quickly as possible.”
“But I didn’t drown them in the first place. I swear to you, this isn’t my doing.”
Adriana, her features drawn and eerie in the light of the flashlights, pursed her lips. “Well, now, how else would these unfortunate people come to be in my pond? Especially since Priscilla hasn’t been back to Prosper in years, and then one day she shows up unannounced to visit a brother for whom she’s never had a shred of affection? I’m not one to gossip or speculate, but it does seem clear as day that the poor woman must have been having troubles of the sort that require specialized solutions.” She leaned in for emphasis, her hooked nose inches away from Stella’s face, and winked. “The sort of solution that
you,
if I may be forgiven, are known to provide.”
Stella sputtered in exasperation. “Well, if that was the case, why would I kill
her
? Or Liman, for that matter?”
“Well, I’m sure I don’t know,” Adriana said. “
I’m
not the professional here. Perhaps things were not as they seemed … a double cross or a deal gone bad, really it could be anything. But honestly, Stella, I think I had better get inside with the boy while you do whatever it is that you need to do here. You’re welcome to use anything you need from the potting shed.”
“What I need to do,” Stella said with dawning urgency, “is get the heck out of here. Adriana, I can’t be seen anywhere near these bodies. Do you understand? You need to call the sheriff. Give me time to get back into town. You know what, take your car out and drive it around the lane a few times, if you don’t mind, make it look like you were the one driving, cover up my tracks. Can you do that?”
A light glinted in the old lady’s eyes. “Oh my, yes. How exciting.”
This isn’t a game,
Stella was about to say, but she bit her tongue. She doubted she would convince the old lady of her innocence. The best she could hope for was cooperation, and if that meant playing to the lonely old gal’s longing for a little adventure, then she’d have to go that route.
“It’s very, very important that you do exactly as I say,” she said carefully. “If, uh, justice is to be served. If the innocent are to be honored. Do you understand?”
As they reached the house, it seemed to Stella that there was a bit more of a spring in the old lady’s step.
“You can count on me,” Adriana said with conviction.
The door burst open and Todd, holding on to an antique-looking black umbrella with a wooden handle, came flying out. “Oh shit, thank God you aren’t killed!”
Adriana looked from the boy to Stella and lifted one aristocratic eyebrow. “Me? Or Mrs. Hardesty?”
“Either one of you. How’m I supposed to know which one they was after?”