Read Aurora 07 - Last Scene Alive Online

Authors: Charlaine Harris

Aurora 07 - Last Scene Alive (2 page)

Lizanne said, “Roe, I imagine Bubba’s boosterism got in the way of his common sense.”

Beautiful Lizanne has always been a tranquil woman, resolutely uninvolved in any town intrigues, and for the past two years her attention had been narrowly focused on her children, two boys she’d named Brandon and Davis. Brandon was eighteen months old, and Davis had just turned three months, so Lizanne had her hands full. In the course of our choppy telephone conversation, we were constantly interrupted. Bubba, Lizanne told me, was at a bar association meeting. I fumed at not being able to speak my mind to Bubba, but I would have settled for a nice chat with Lizanne. But in five minutes, Brandon’s shrieking and the wails of the baby reached such a peak that Lizanne excused herself.

While I washed my few dishes that cool October evening, I found myself wondering which of the unfamiliar faces in the library in recent weeks had belonged to the magazine writer.

You’d think a writer for an L.A.-based entertainment weekly would have stood out like a sore thumb in our library. But the dress of our culture has become so universal, it isn’t as easy to spot outsiders as it used to be.

It struck me as particularly nasty that this woman had been able to come and stare at me and dissect me, while I’d been totally unaware. She’d said I’d turned down a request for an interview. That was so automatic that I actually might not have remembered it. But how could I have been oblivious to the fact that I was under observation? I must have been even more preoccupied than I’d thought.

Being a widow was a full-time occupation, at least emotionally.

Everyone (that is, my mother and her husband John, and most of my friends) had expected me to move back into town after my husband’s death. Our house, a gift to me from Martin when we’d married, was a little isolated, and too large for one person. But from my point of view, I’d loved the man and I loved my home. I couldn’t lose both at once.

So I stayed in the house that had been known for years as the Julius house. When Martin had given it to me, I’d renovated it from the bottom up, and I kept it up well, though now I had to have more help in that keeping. Shelby Youngblood, Angel’s husband and a close friend of my husband’s, had offered to come out and do the mowing, but I’d turned him down gently. I knew Shelby, with his own yard and house and baby, had plenty to do when he had a couple of days off work. I’d hired a yard service to do most of the heavier work, but every now and then I got out and put in bedding plants, or trimmed the roses.

With less justification than the yard service, I’d also hired a maid. Martin had always wanted me to have help in the house, but I’d felt perfectly capable of taking care of the house and cooking, though I was working at least part-time most of our marriage. Now, oddly, I was seized with the determination that the house should always look immaculate. It was as if I was going to show it to a prospective buyer any moment. I had even cleaned out all the closets.

Where my new passion for absolute order and cleanliness had come from, why it possessed me, I could not tell you. The maid (whose identity kept changing—at the moment it was a heavy older woman named Catherine Quick) came in once a week and did all the heavy cleaning—

the bathrooms, the kitchen, the dusting, and the vacuuming—while I did everything else. I didn’t suffer a smudge on the kitchen floor or an unwashed sock. Even though only one upstairs bedroom, the downstairs study, one bathroom, and the kitchen were in any kind of regular use, I kept this regimen up month after month.

I guess I was a little crazy: or, since I could afford a slightly kinder word, eccentric.

As I trudged up the stairs to go to bed that night, I wondered, for the first time, if keeping the house hadn’t been a mistake.

Opening the bedroom door still gave me a little shock. One thing I
had
changed, a couple of months after Martin died, was our bedroom. Once fairly masculine and centered around the king-sized bed, now the big room was peach and ivory and fawn, the bed was a queen, and the furniture was more ornate. Atop the chest of drawers, there was a picture of Martin and me at our wedding. That picture was all that was bearable.

I looked at it for a long moment as I pulled off my rings and put them in a pile in front of the frame. I added my watch to the little heap before I climbed into the high bed and switched on the lamp, stretching a little further to reach the switch to flick off the overhead light. I picked up the book I was reading (though for months I hadn’t remembered a word of any book I read) and had completed just a page when the telephone rang. I glanced at the clock and frowned.

“Yes?” I said curtly into the receiver.

“Roe?” The voice was familiar, tentative and masculine.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Ahhhh . . . it’s Robin?”

“Oh, great. Just the guy I wanted to talk to,” I said, my voice saturated with sarcasm. But way down deep, I found I was really glad to hear his voice.

“You’ve seen the article. Listen, I didn’t write that article, and I didn’t know it was going to be in the magazine, and I had nothing to do with it.”

“Right.”

“I mean, it’s good pre-publicity for the movie, but I didn’t arrange it.”

“Right.”

“So, at least, you already know I’m coming back to Lawrenceton?”

“Yes.” If I could stick to one syllable at a time, I might be able to restrain myself. The anger had definitely dominated that little spurt of pleasure.

“The thing is, no matter what the article said about me and Celia, I want to see you again.”

To see how I’d aged, how I’d changed? Not for the better, I was sadly aware.

“I heard,” Robin said into my silence, “you have a house out in the country now. I hope you’ll let me visit you.”

“No,” I said, and hung up. It didn’t really make a difference to which statement I was responding. “No,” covered just about everything. Maybe, two years ago, I would have been appalled at my own rudeness. Somehow, marriage and widowhood had given me the indifference to be rude—at least from time to time.

I lay awake in the darkness for a while, thinking over the implications of Robin’s call. Was he truly hoping to renew our friendship? I didn’t know why; maybe he just wanted me to be fodder for the camera. Or maybe he was just calling because Celia Shaw had told him to call. I didn’t like to think of the very young actress leading Robin around by his . . . nose.

Surely Robin was counting on finding the old Aurora: the one who, in her late twenties, had just discarded her high school wardrobe for something more adult; the one who was just learning to say what she thought; the one who was just on the verge of coming out of her shell.

Robin had left town before that process had gotten up a head of steam.

Across the fields, my neighbor Clement Farmer’s dog Robert began to bark—at the moon, at a coon, at a wandering cat or derelict dog . . . who knew? Robert (short for Robert E. Lee) had a barking episode just about every night. I didn’t mind, this once; the noise was company for my thoughts.

I found myself wondering how Robin himself had changed. I remembered meeting Robin when he’d moved into the row of townhouses I managed for Mother. I figured that when I’d met Robin, I’d been twenty-nine. Now I’d turned thirty-six. Why, Robin must be forty!

When he first moved to the coast, he’d called me a lot, telling me this and that. His book had gone through three title changes, he’d had trouble getting some of the relatives of the victims and the murderers to talk to him, and one deal had been discarded in favor of another.

He’d gone out to California with his agent, and I was pretty sure they’d been more to each other than agent and client but, somewhere along the way, that relationship had changed. His book, finally titled
Whimsical Murder
, had been finished while he was in California.

I’d been angry with him, even then. I’d always hated the idea of a book about the crimes in Lawrenceton. I’d tried to understand his need to write the book, the conviction he’d had that this was the book that would “make” his career. Well, it had. Robin’s fiction had all been reprinted in matching paperbacks,
Whimsical Murder
had been on the best-seller list for months, and the paperback was poised to be on the stands the week the movie opened.

My eyes fluttered shut, for just a second of sweet oblivion. My anger against Robin slid off my mind, replaced with a more familiar melancholy.

He’d been living in Hollywood, swimming with the sharks, off and on for the past few years. I would seem even more naive and provincial to Robin now. I’d had a certain amount of awe for him when we met, because he’d been a fairly well-known mystery writer, teaching a writer-in-residence course at a college in Atlanta. I thought of the day I’d gone into the city to meet him for lunch . . . I’d worn that ivory blouse with the green ivy pattern . . .

I could sense sleep approaching now, could feel it stealing over me. I held onto the thought of Robin so I could slide under; if I looked directly at the sleep I needed, it would slip away.

Tomorrow I’d check his picture in the magazine again, examine his hair for any signs of gray. I didn’t have any yet, but when I spotted some, I’d have Bonita take care of it right away. . . .

Perry and Lillian were in the library’s employee lounge when I got to work, and their conversation ground to a guilty halt when I appeared. Lillian Schmidt beamed at me with her most insincere smile. Believe me, she’s got quite a repertoire. Perry Allison just looked nervous, which was about par for the course for Perry. Perry is about half Lillian’s age, bone thin and perpetually jumpy, while Lillian is as round and plain as a ball of coarse yarn. Perry, who’s been in and out of mental facilities and drug treatment programs, is now on an even keel as long as he takes his medication. Lillian, with whom I have even less in common, is a self-centered member of a fundamentalist Christian church. These are my best work friends. Am I lucky? I stuffed my purse in one of the bright orange lockers while they covered the silence with a spate of chatter that wouldn’t have deceived a reasonably intelligent child.

“Good weather for this time of year,” Lillian told Perry, who nodded his head in an alarming series of jerks.

“Uh, Roe. We just want you to know we didn’t know anything about that writer, or the article, or anything.” Perry was trying an ingratiating smile, but it was sliding off the other side of his face. Perry had a difficult life, and he didn’t want me mad at him.

“No, hon, we would’ve told you if we’d known a magazine writer was in the library.”

Lillian’s eyes were bright with excitement.

For all her gusto in the situation, which was the way she was born, I really believed Lillian.

For that matter, I believed Perry, who could be quite devious. Other librarians came and went, but we three had been yoked, somewhat off and on for . . . oh, seven or eight years.

“Okay,” I said mildly, but in such a way as to close the subject. They were probably telling the truth, but
someone
had talked to the writer, Marjory Bolton. I thought I could pin the betrayal on the shoulders of the aide who’d been fired last week for stealing from other employees. I was willing to bet she was already out of town and beyond reach. I suggested this to Perry and Lillian, and they jumped on the idea with enthusiasm.

After a second or two of relaxing small talk, both put on their work faces and went through the door to the patron part of the library.

The employee lounge was a large open room with a couple of tables and matching chairs, a small kitchen, and a large worktable in one corner where we repaired books and prepared new ones to be placed on the shelves. Then there was a half-wall with glass in the top, through which you could see Sam derrick’s secretary’s office. Sam’s was firmly walled. His secretary wasn’t at her desk, but I could see the lights in Sam’s office were on. If he wanted to ask me about the article, he’d call me in. Otherwise, I knew he’d appreciate not being disturbed. Sam was a whiz with the budget, could apply for grants with one hand tied behind his back, and he was an absolutely sound administrator.

But Sam was a dismal failure with people. Painfully aware of the fact, he tended to leave all the personnel interactions he possibly could to his secretary, a position he’d manufactured with some creative money managing. Though the job was only part-time, Patricia Bledsoe had made the most of it.

She was coming in the back door now, dressed, as always, in painstakingly matched and ironed clothes. They weren’t expensive clothes, but she had good conservative taste and was an ardent shoe polisher. Patricia—not Pat, or Patsy, or Trish—was somewhere around fifty, with skin the color of a Brach’s caramel. Her hair was tamed into a short pageboy—not for Patricia the weaves and beads of more trendy African-Americans. Patricia didn’t like nail polish, or dark lipstick, or high heels. Her teenager, Jerome, was not allowed to wear clothing sporting a visible brand name: no Nike, no Fubu, and no Reebok. There was a reason behind everything Patricia Bledsoe did, and if she’d ever acted spontaneously, it had been a long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away.

Not too surprisingly, everyone depended on Patricia, but no one liked her very much. The great exception was Sam Clerrick, whom she guarded as though he was a wealthy industrial magnate.

Patricia said, “Good morning, Ms. Teagarden. How are you today?” Her voice was as crisp as if it’d been in the vegetable drawer overnight.

As always, I fought the terrible impulse to imitate her brisk enunciation. “I’m fine, thank you, Patricia. Did you see the magazine with the article about the movie?”

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