Blessed Is the Busybody (3 page)

“May I come in?”

Deena waved a royal hand and I closed the door behind me.

“We’ve had a pretty bad shock,” I said. “Somebody died.”

“People die all the time,” spoke the born PK. Deena, unlike her little sister, had already worked through the excess of memorial services and funerals in her father’s line of work. To Deena, death was not an extraordinary occurrence, even in a congregation as small as this one.

“This was more unusual.” I flopped down on the floor beside them. “Her body was—” I pictured them going blithely out the front door from this day forward. That was never going to happen if I told them exactly where the body had been found. “In front of our house,” I finished. It wasn’t exactly a lie.

“She died at our house?” Teddy looked curious, but not horrified.

“We don’t know where she died. Probably not here. But she was discovered out front.”

“By the ladies,” Deena said. “One of them sure can scream.”

“I told you it was a pretty bad shock. Not what you expect when you visit the minister.”

“Who was it?” Teddy’s forehead was wrinkled.

“Nobody I know.”

“What’s she look like?”

“Honey, I don’t see why—”

“I might know her.”

I considered that. I don’t know my Teddy very well yet. She solemnly weighs the things that happen around her, much as her father does, and usually keeps her own counsel about them. I’m not always sure what’s happening under those straight strawberry blond bangs.

I left out the tattoo and settled for the obvious. “She’s about my age. Very short blond, almost white, hair. I’ve never seen her.”

“I have,” Teddy said.

“I really doubt it, honey. She’s not a regular member. She—”

“I saw her yesterday. In the parking lot talking to Daddy.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“She and Daddy were fighting,” Teddy continued.

“How could you know they were fighting if they were all the way back in the church parking lot?”

“I was outside, climbing our tree. She was waving her hands all around. Like this.” Teddy gave a good imitation of a woman gesturing angrily and nearly socked her sister in the eye. “Besides, I heard her shouting.”

I sat silently, wondering if I should ask what the woman had said. I didn’t have to. Teddy finished on her own.

“She said: ‘You can’t tell me what I can do. I’ll talk to anybody I want to, tell them anything I feel like telling them. I don’t care who gets hurt!’ ”

I didn’t doubt Teddy. The inflection was not my daughter’s. She was imitating what she had heard and doing a chillingly fine job of it. I felt as if I’d just heard the dead woman’s voice.

“Well, Daddy will tell the police everything he knows,” I said, trying to sound reassuring and maternal. “Whatever was wrong with her, he’ll be sure to tell them.”

I wondered, though, if it were true.

3

Detective Kirkor Roussos was not exactly what I had expected. After the ethnic melting pot of Washington, Emerald Springs is Wonder Bread bland. Our most diverse citizens are third-generation Italians and Poles, with blocks and blocks of Anglo Saxons to water down that heady mixture. We have a small but vital African American community and just recently we’ve attracted a few Latinos. But Greeks, especially one who looked pure enough to be posing in a provocatively draped chiton, laurel wreath, and sandals, seem to be rare here.

Actually, the detective was wearing faded jeans, a black T-shirt, and a worn silk sportscoat. The last, I guessed by the wrinkles, had been pulled on in a hurry as he left to take this call.

He shook my hand as he introduced himself, but he assessed me, much as Gelsey always did. Thankfully, he seemed to find me less distasteful. He granted me one brief white smile, made more so against tanned olive skin, and asked me to take a seat in my living room.

“Call me Kirk,” he said, dispensing with the formalities as he took a seat just across from me.

I guessed he was in his early forties, with black hair cut short and eyes nearly as dark. Surely there were entire fishing villages in the Aegean populated with men who stopped female hearts the way this one did.

I tried to make myself comfortable. “I’m Aggie.”

He glanced down at a paper in his hand. “Short for Agate?”

“My mother polished rocks for a living the year I was born.” Junie’s rock-polishing stage had lasted long enough to include my baby sister, Obsidian, forever after known as Sid.

“How long have you lived here, Aggie?”

“Going on a year.”

“In this house?”

“The whole time.”

“Do you work outside the home?”

I assumed he was trying to put me at ease, but that question was destined not to. Lately I’d been feeling very Donna Reed and wishing I had some place to go in the mornings other than the supermarket.

“I’m a homemaker,” I told him. “And mother.”

He rested his notes on one knee and sat forward. “Tell me about your morning. What you did. Where you did it.”

I left out waking next to Ed and the lovely things we had done immediately after. “I got up about seven thirty—”

“I’m sorry, does your bedroom face the street?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t hear any unusual noises while you were in bed?”

Just the ones Ed and I had made, but I couldn’t say those were unusual. “Nothing out of the ordinary. I heard the newspaper hit the sidewalk at the usual time—”

“Which is?”

“A little before seven. It always wakes me up, but most of the time I go back to sleep for a while.”

“What happened after you got up?”

“I took a shower, dressed, and went downstairs.”

“Did you get the newspaper?”

“I made coffee first and got out milk and cereal for breakfast.” I scoured my memory. How often was someone interested in the mundane details of my day? “I let the cat out the backdoor. Then I went out front for the paper.”

“Did you see anything out of the ordinary?”

I wished I had. I wished I had the perfect detail to insert here, the winning lottery ticket in the murder investigation that would make this man’s teeth flash again. But the morning had seemed like every other. The girls were still in bed. Ed was upstairs showering and getting ready for the day. Moonpie was stalking butterflies.

“Concentrate on what you saw,” Detective Roussos said.

“The door was locked. I opened it and stepped on the porch.” I shrugged. “No body. That I would remember.”

“Go on.”

“I reminded myself to water the planters. The petunias were drooping.”

“They still are,” he said.

I smiled a little. “You’re a gardener?”

“Vegetables, some herbs. Go on.”

“I walked down the front steps, not the ones on the side that go down to the driveway. The paper was lying halfway up the sidewalk. I got it, took it out of the plastic bag to scan the headlines, didn’t like what I saw, and tucked it under my arm. Then I looked to see if anyone else was around.”

He slid farther forward. “Were they?”

“Our street’s not very busy that time of morning. I didn’t see my next-door neighbors—”

He looked down. “Mr. and Mrs. Simon?”

“Right. An older couple. Usually I throw their paper up to the porch so they won’t have to go up and down the stairs. But it was already gone.”

I tried to picture the street that morning. We didn’t have real neighbors on the other side of the parsonage, just a narrow alleyway leading to the church parking lot. The church proper sat beside the parish house and both backed up to the alley. “Sometimes the sexton is outside the church cleaning trash off the sidewalk or watering, but not this morning.”

He looked blank, as if he wondered what bizarre rituals we performed inside the church walls and who performed them.

“A
sexton
is a janitor. Church janitor,” I prompted.

He looked vaguely relieved. “Anyone else?”

I tried hard to remember. In every possible way the morning had been ordinary.

Every way but one.

“Well, there was a car parked in the driveway across the street, and now that I think about it, that’s unusual. The house is for sale, and it’s in bad shape so they aren’t getting any movement on it. Lucy—my best friend—is a realtor, so she keeps me informed.”

“Did you see anybody in it? Can you describe it?”

I tried to remember, even though I knew this was probably not much of a lead. “It was an SUV of some kind. I remember it sat up high, the way they do. You know, on big tires.” I spread my arms to make my point. “One of the smaller ones. Dark green, maybe, I’m not sure.”

“License plate?”

My arms fell to my sides. “I wasn’t paying that much attention.”

“Would you notice out of state tags?”

I considered. “I’m not sure.”

He grimaced. “And occupants?”

“I didn’t see anybody. The car was just parked there. Maybe somebody had gone inside to do repairs or cleaning. It was probably too early for potential buyers, and besides, the SUV wasn’t the kind of car a realtor drives. Too casual. A little beat-up.”

“Anything else?”

“Nope. The cat came around front, and we went back inside, and I made breakfast. My youngest daughter came down and ate cereal, then she took the cat outside again to bury him.”

His face said it all. I explained until he relaxed. Gardener
and
animal lover. A back to the land kind of guy. Roussos would like my father.

I told him about Ed joining us, about his going outside to help Teddy fill in the other holes she’d dug that week, about the cookies and the Women’s Society board and Deena’s arrival. I was out of breath by the time I finished, and his eyes had glazed over.

“During any of that time did you hear any unusual noises? Did you look outside at any point after you came inside from getting the paper?”

I tried to remember. “I stayed in the back of the house. We’re protected from the street and don’t get much noise, even with the windows open. I did hear tires squealing out front.”

“Do you remember when?”

I did the math. “Between eight thirty and nine.” I realized the squeals might well have come from the car that had dropped the body on our doorstep. The timing was certainly right.

“We were inside. All of us.” I shivered. I was glad Teddy hadn’t gotten up earlier. What kind of murderer waited until broad daylight to dispose of a corpse? It didn’t make sense. A murderer could have been shielded from our neighbors by the tall evergreen hedge planted halfway down to the road on the other side of our driveway, and shielded from Church Street by a silver maple anchoring the corner of our porch. He might have backed in, taken the side steps, left the body, and screeched away.

But what if one of us had been close to a front window and gone out to see who had come to visit?

“If we showed you photos of SUVs, would you be able to pick out the make and model?”

I knew this was the place where I said “sure,” and found the car on my first try. Impressing this man would be heady.

“No,” I said sadly.

“Luggage rack? Bike rack? Clean? Dirty?”

I scrunched my eyes closed and willed myself to remember. I had barely glanced at it. “Just an impression that it wasn’t brand new or all that well taken care of.”

“Did you recognize the victim?” he asked.

I opened my eyes and shook my head. “I’ve never seen her before.” I didn’t tell him Teddy had. Ed would have to report the conversation in the church parking lot from his own perspective.

He stood, and I did, too. We were finished, but I had a question. “You know, I watch enough
Law and Order
to remember that head wounds bleed a lot. Hers didn’t.”

“Not by the time you saw it.”

“She’d been dead awhile?”

He shrugged.

Dead and cleaned up and undressed. Although who knows when that last item had happened in the sequence of events. “Do you have any idea why somebody would do this? Maybe a serial killer who hasn’t made it into the
Flow?
” The
Flow
was our local daily.
Emerald Springs Flow,
somebody’s idea of clever.

“I don’t have a thing I can tell you. But thanks for your help.” He shoved his hand in my direction. I took it for a brief, hard shake, but I didn’t let go when he started to withdraw.

“I have two young daughters,” I said. “I’d like to know if we’re in danger. Please don’t be evasive.” Then I dropped his hand.

“This is the first murder we’ve had in Emerald Springs this year. As far as I know we’ve never had one that looks anything like this.”

“And statewide no one’s dumping bodies on the porches of random ministers?”

“Not to my knowledge. But we’ll know more as we go along.”

“Will you tell us if we have anything to worry about?”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

Judging from his carefully schooled expression I wasn’t reassured.

Lucy Jacobs was waiting in my kitchen when I returned from talking to Detective Roussos. The yard was swarming with cops, half the Emerald Springs force seemed to be somewhere on the property, but Lucy had found her way inside without a word from anyone.

“So . . .” she breathed. “So, Aggie. This is too amazing for words. . . .”

“How did you get in?” Ed was gone. Between his interview and mine he had told me he was taking the girls to stay with the Frankels, church members who had daughters near the ages of ours. He wanted them out of the house until the police departed.

“I darted from lilac to lilac, then made one final sprint for the kitchen door.”

“I guess the lilacs really do need to be trimmed.”

“What—is—going—on?”

I’m still not sure how Lucy and I became friends. We aren’t neighbors. She lives on the other side of Emerald Springs, an ambitious career woman with no children. She’s not a member of our church. She’s a Reform Jew who would sooner attend a hanging than any house of worship. But we met six months ago in a long line at Krogers. By the time the clerk got to Lucy the ice cream had melted and we were bosom buddies. Sometimes life works out the way it’s supposed to.

I love a million things about Luce. She’s funny. She has a smile that nudges her ears and wild red Orphan Annie hair. Best of all, she worries about all the things I forget to. Between us, the universe is basically covered.

“Do you know if the owner of the house across the street has authorized any repairs?” I asked.

“Aggie! Tell me what’s going on!”

I did, succinctly. Lucy’s a great audience. Her green eyes get as big as tennis balls when she’s excited, which is most of the time. Her mother named her for Lucille Ball, and it’s hard to say if her mother was on to something or the name influenced Lucy. But sometimes when we’re together I feel like Desi should be practicing conga drums in the next room.

“You don’t mean it.” She sobered a moment. “That poor woman. What a terrible thing.”

I told her about seeing the SUV. “So, do you know anything about the house? Can you find out?”

“Are the police using your phone?” She went to the wall phone and picked up the receiver. Disappointment scrunched her features. “No, darn it.” Clearly she had hoped to pick up some tidbit from their conversation. “Hand me my Palm Pilot.”

I searched through a purse as large as a briefcase, found and flipped open the organizer for her. She punched in a name and squinted as she committed the resulting phone number to memory.

I sat back and watched the master of information gathering.

Lucy leaned against the counter. “Sarah? How-are-you-this-is-Lucy. I’d love to show the house on Church Street tomorrow, but I hear they’re doing repairs. Can you tell me what? Will it interfere?”

She listened, all eyes and coiling shoulder-length curls. She gestured excitedly at me as the other realtor spoke. “Really? You mean I heard wrong? Maybe it was the owners then. Someone saw a car parked in the driveway early this morning.” She gestured again. “They’re on vacation in Colorado? How odd. And I’m sure no one was showing it that early. . . .” She covered the receiver. “Do you want her to come over and take us through the house? Or shall we go alone?”