“Come on,” coaxed Jack. “I promise, if we have to throw to you we’ll toss it real gentle.”
I wavered. My mind was on Boot Creek, not baseball. Then I spotted Aaron at the visitors’ bench with the rest of the California contingent, and when he saw me looking he turned his back. That tore it.
“Never mind the tossing.” I stood up. “I can’t hit for beans, but I’m not afraid of the ball. You can throw to me.”
“Good woman!”
Jack draped an arm on my shoulders, and I checked for Aaron again. He was watching, so I threw back my head and gave a loud, merry laugh.
“Happy to help. Where’s my mitt?”
Jack was right, these friends of Tracy’s were serious players. Jack’s vaunted pitching was rusty, and all I did for the first half of the inning was scoot out of the way as they sprinted past my base. California five, Idaho zero.
Leading off the second half, Jack redeemed himself with a home run, but it was downhill from there for the smoke jumpers. A strike is a strike whether you can do one-armed push-ups or not.
I struck out myself—no surprise—and then it was time for our side to take the field again. The Tyke still hadn’t shown, so I checked in with Bob, gulped some beer, and went back to first base. This was fun. And if I made certain that Aaron saw me having fun without him, well, it served him right.
The second inning took an interesting turn. Peter Props was first to bat, hitting a high fly that was caught for the first out. Then one of their two token women, a giggling script girl named Ramona, flailed the bat around for number two. Things were looking up for the home team.
“Don’t worry about it,” Aaron called to the visitors as he strutted up to the plate with his Red Sox cap turned backward. “These guys are going down, and they won’t need parachutes.”
That raised a laugh, and Aaron smiled as he took his stance at the plate. Then he brought the bat to his shoulder, tightened his jaw, and stared hard at Jack the Knack. Jack stared back for what felt like a long time. I realized I was holding my breath.
An eternal moment passed, and then everything happened at once. Jack fired off a high-speed pitch and Aaron smashed it right back at him, dropped his bat, and came pounding down the baseline toward me like a locomotive. The crack of the bat was still sounding as Jack snatched at the ground, pivoted, and drilled the ball straight at my sternum and hard enough to restart my heart, which seemed to have quit beating.
With Aaron bearing down on me, instinct took over. My glove at my chest, I planted my left foot on the base and lunged to the right. I didn’t so much catch the ball as let it strike me, like an arrow striking a target. But I closed the glove tight, and though I staggered with the force of Jack’s throw, I didn’t take my foot off the base.
Yes.
When I opened my eyes the smoke jumpers were cheering uproariously and Aaron was walking away without a backward glance. His shoulders were slumped, and my petty triumph began to feel sour. All this bickering was getting out of hand.
“Aaron? Wait a minute.” He kept going.
“What a play, what a woman!”
Jack rushed over to embrace me, but I held him off, and then I heard a familiar tomboy voice.
“Not bad, Kincaid, not bad at all.”
The Tyke was advancing across the grass. Time to quit while I was ahead. I tossed the Tyke her mitt, waved to my teammates, and rejoined the boisterous crowd at the picnic tables.
A few of the guys commented on my catch, but most of them were busy with their burgers. Someone handed me a beer, and I poured half of it down my throat as the adrenaline drained from my system. I headed for the grill as I drank, feeling suddenly ravenous.
Food Bob greeted me with a flourish of his long-handled spatula. “I bet you’re a medium-rare lady.”
“Medium-well,” I told him. “And I’ll take two.”
I polished off both burgers and was seriously contemplating the cherry pie before I remembered B.J.’s necklace. I glanced around. With everybody playing ball or chowing down, and with Aaron busy in the outfield, this was just the right moment to search through Brian’s belongings. I felt in my pocket for the padlock combination, took a fortifying swallow of beer, and wandered casually inside.
Chapter Twenty-One
BESIDES HAVING DAYLIGHT TO SEE BY, ON THIS SECOND FORAY into the ready shack I knew my way around. I slipped through the dispatch room and past the sewing machines, then instead of continuing on to the parachute loft I followed B.J.’s instructions and took the stairwell down to the lower level.
As I descended, my footsteps on the concrete stairs grew louder than the party noise filtering in from outside. The base office was staffed today, but this main building seemed to be empty.
B.J. had told me that the jumpers’ personal lockers were down on the lower level, but in a corridor on the way to the gym, not inside the shower room itself. Good thing, too. Empty building or not, I had no intention of invading the smoke-jumpers’ showers. I’d had enough naked bodies for one day.
Except maybe Aaron’s, and something told me that putting him out at first base had probably killed my chance to get lucky tonight. Men take sports so seriously.
I emerged from the stairwell into a wide hallway. The air down here was tinged with that sweat-and-disinfectant aroma that signals a weight room nearby. Beyond a pair of rest rooms stretched a long row of lockers, their slatted metal doors illuminated by the windows high on the opposite wall. I walked along the row with the padlock combination in my hand.
Each locker was marked with the owner’s surname, and most of them were decorated with funny magnets and goofy stickers and snapshots of little kids and pretty girls. I saw a lot of smoke-jumper emblems, along with “Everybody Out of the Gene Pool!” and “Keep Honking, I’m Reloading” and a death’s-head logo that said “Vomit Shop,” which I hoped was a band and not a retail establishment.
Some of the jumpers’ names were familiar: Packard, of course, and Taichert, Kane, Soriano, Gibson. But there were plenty of others: Schorzmann, Uehling, Fox... Thiel.
My stomach knotted around Bob’s burgers. The door that said “Thiel” was hanging open, and the locker was empty. Cleared out. Absolutely bare, save for a few curling scraps of Scotch tape left clinging to its metal insides.
Damn.
B.J. would have to lie to Matt after all. And after that, she’d have to live with the possibility of the necklace resurfacing and giving rise to awkward questions. Poor B.J. I spared a moment to be grateful for the anonymity of a big city like Seattle. But only a moment, because at that point I heard footsteps in the stairwell, and then men’s voices.
Adrenaline surged again, spreading like a hot, prickly fluid under my skin. I told myself the men were probably just guests looking for the rest rooms—which wasn’t a bad excuse for me to be down here myself. I hurried back up the corridor into the women’s room and waited for the men to pass. But instead they halted at the foot of the stairs and continued what seemed to be an argument.
“So let’s hear it,” demanded a low, menacing voice that I recognized as Danny Kane’s. “You and the Tyke have been sitting on something about Thiel and I want to know what it is.”
“Dunno what you’re talking about.”
The other voice was a sullen mumble, hard to make out, but I thought it belonged to Todd Gibson. Danny’s next words confirmed my guess.
“Sure you do, Ned,” he prodded. “I saw the official findings. You radioed in when you spotted his chute, but you didn’t report the accident until seventeen minutes later. What the fuck were you and Taichert doing for seventeen minutes?”
“I told you, she wasn’t there!” Todd sounded frightened. “She didn’t get there till after I called in. It just took me some time to get to...to find the...”
I leaned my ear closer to the crack in the door.
“The body,” said Danny. “The dead man. The corpse. Say it!”
I cringed, as Todd must be cringing, from the cruel words.
“OK!” he said. “I found the corpse, and I radioed in right away. The Tyke showed up a couple of minutes later, and then you came, and that’s all.”
“That
better
be all.”
I heard a thump and a clanging noise, as if Danny had shoved the younger man against the lockers. He said something more, but I lost it in a burst of laughter from above. Someone else had entered the building.
The two men fell silent, then one of them went rapidly up the stairwell. After a moment the other followed, his footsteps slow and uneven. I waited long enough for them to get clear and then went upstairs myself, past a trio of carefree guests looking for the rest rooms, and stepped out into the bright, innocent world of sunshine and baseball.
The game was still in progress, of course, and the tables were still crowded, though I felt like I’d been in the basement for hours. Todd had taken a seat by himself, but Danny was already in the parking lot getting into his car. I went around the corner of the building and leaned against the wall, thinking hard.
So Danny Kane suspects foul play, too.
No wonder I’d observed him drinking so much and acting so temperamental. He was a smoke jumper, and right now he believed that one of his comrades, or maybe two of them, had murdered another.
No wonder.
Was Danny’s only clue the time discrepancy in the radio calls, I mused, or had he noticed something out of order at the accident scene itself? Dr. Nothstine said the photographs showed Brian’s PG bag unclipped from his harness, and a suspicious wound on the back of his head. Danny could have seen all that in person, and followed up by examining the official report.
It would be simple enough to ask him, but I wasn’t sure that would be wise. Danny had been drinking a lot since Brian’s death, and down in the basement just now he’d sounded almost violent, like a man in a nightmare. “Something weak in his character,” who had told me that?
In any case, I didn’t want to fuel Danny’s suspicions with my own, for fear that he’d do something rash. Especially now with this new information—if it was fact and not illusion— about a campsite near the Boot Creek fire. If Al Soriano really did see a tent down there, then the field of suspects for murder went far beyond Todd Gibson and Pari Taichert, and Danny could awake from his nightmare of murder within the brotherhood.
But he’s convinced that those two were hiding something, and
I thought that, too. In fact, I still do.
I shook my head in frustration. My thoughts were spinning in circles, and I needed someone to help me straighten them out. But my first choice of someone was busy playing center field. Maybe he could take a time-out... I stepped away from the wall and scanned the baseball diamond. Aaron wasn’t anywhere in sight. Had he left early?
Maybe that was just as well. I still hadn’t decided whether I owed him an apology, or vice versa. So I dug out my cell phone—it showed a couple of missed calls—and reached B.J. at work.
“Finally!” she said. “I’ve been chewing my nails to the elbows. Did you find it?”
“Sorry. The locker’s been cleared out.” I gave her a moment for this to sink in. “I’ll help you explain things to Matt, OK? But listen, I heard something new about Boot Creek that I need to talk over with you. Can I come by the nursery after I’m done working here?”
“Fine,” she said dully. “Whatever.”
“I’ll get there as soon as I can. Hang in there.”
The bachelor party was going well, but the number of guests had swelled far beyond expectations. I offered my services to Bob, who allowed as how he could use an extra pair of hands slicing pie. So I pitched in for a while, and even made a beer run back into town.
Finally, in late afternoon, I checked in with him one last time, and he waved me away with a smile. “Everything’s under control now, m’dear. You get on with your other business. Oh, by the by, any idea where Beau’s at this afternoon? His office just called me looking for him, and then Cissy did the same thing.”
I couldn’t very well say that Beautiful Beau was probably in a shower somewhere with Overripe Olivia. So I promised to keep an eye out for him and headed for my car, listening to my messages on the way.
One was Paliere Productions in New York, asking for Beau, and the other was Dr. Nothstine, asking me to call. She didn’t answer, so I left her my own message. I think that’s why cell phones were invented, to increase the amount of telephone tag in our lives.
I didn’t call New York, though. The office was probably closed by now, with the time difference, but that wasn’t the reason. I decided to let Beau make his own explanations, whenever he finally surfaced. I was the assistant planner here, not his personal secretary.
I found B.J. out back of the nursery, sitting on an upended wheelbarrow among the tubs of aspen saplings and baby crabapple trees. A roof of shade cloth dimmed the sunlight here, but I could see the tear tracks on her face.
“I’m so sorry, Muffy.” I laid a hand on the shoulder of her High Country Gardens T-shirt. “Matt will believe you about the necklace being lost, you’ll see. It’ll be all right.”
“I guess. I’m just so mad at myself for having to lie to him in the first place. And all for a roll in the hay with a bastard like Brian Thiel. You know what Steve told me?”
“Who’s Steve?”
“The bartender at the Pio. I was fishing around about people’s alibis for Tuesday night, like I said I would, and he went off on this rant about smoke jumpers. He told me that one night he saw Brian in a corner, making out with the Tyke!”
“
What?
She told me she hardly knew him.”
“That’s not what Steve said. He said they were going at it like crazy. He was all disgusted because he knows the Tyke’s got a boyfriend.” She lifted her tearstained face. “What if people knew about Brian and
me
? What would they say then? What’s Matt going to say?”
I was startled—no, shocked—to hear about Brian and the Tyke, but I didn’t have time to think about it. B.J. was beginning to cry again, and I sat beside her.
“Matt’s never going to know, Muffy. And you’re going to forget about Brian and concentrate on improving your marriage. Come on, chin up.”
B.J. sniffled into a tissue, and then sat up straight and squared her shoulders. “Well, like you said, what’s done is done.”
“There you go. Now tell me, what did you find out about Tuesday night?”
“Nothing definite. People were coming and going all night.”
“Well, that may not matter anymore. Listen to this...”
I was just finishing my story about the campsite that Al Soriano had spotted, when B.J.’s assistant, a bright-eyed college girl named Liz, called to her from the door of the garden store.
“Someone to see you, boss. I’ll be out front watering the hanging baskets.”
“Why not send them back here, then?” B.J. groused.
But she headed inside, with me following, and we soon saw why not. The visitor was Dr. Nothstine, ensconced in a white wicker peacock chair that B.J. had for sale among the pots and the patio furniture. She looked drawn and tired, and her twisted leg lay limply to one side. But she sat her throne with dignity, like an aristocrat about to issue orders to the servants.
“I apologize for interrupting you at work,” she began, with an intriguing little smile.
“No problem,” said B.J. “In fact, you should hear this. Carnegie says there might have been somebody camping at Boot Creek at the time of the fire.”
The doctor’s smile froze in place, and I could see the brisk intelligence working behind her faded blue eyes. “So the killer might not have been a smoke jumper at all. This changes everything. We shall have to—”
“Hey, hey, guess who came back early?” A grinning Liz pulled open the front door, sloshing water from her sprinkler can, and stepped aside to reveal a good-looking wide-shouldered fellow holding a suitcase.
“Matt? Oh,
Matt.
”
B.J. flew into her husband’s arms, and his embrace lifted her right off the floor. A charming moment, but all I could think was:
What is she going to tell him?
Then Dr. Nothstine beckoned me to her side with a stealthy little movement of one hand. As B.J. and Matt went on smooching, she dipped the hand in her purse, fished something out, and dropped it quickly into my palm. I caught a glitter of metal and closed my fingers over the cool silver coils of B.J.’s necklace.
No time for questions. I stashed the necklace in my pocket and mouthed a silent “thank you” just as Matt came up for air.
“Carnegie, hello!” he said heartily. “We haven’t seen you for way too long.”
I’d always liked Matt, and now I could give him my usual hug and kiss without reservation. “It’s good to be here. This is Dr. Julie Nothstine. I don’t know if you’ve met?”
Matt greeted her with a courteous handshake, and the canny old lady held onto his hand and his attention just long enough for me to slip the necklace to B.J. Her face sagged for a moment in astonishment and relief, then she whipped it out of sight and held up her beaming face for another kiss from her man.
“Young lady,” Dr. Nothstine said to me as she rose from her throne, “I believe our presence is no longer required. Perhaps you could walk me to my car.”
She filled me in along the way. “I returned to the base this morning, as I told you I would. The gentlemen there refused to meet with me, but as luck would have it, a box containing your cousin’s effects was brought into the office just as I was leaving. I asked the secretary to fetch me a glass of water, and while she was gone—”
“You swiped the necklace!”
“I wouldn’t put it quite like that. But I’m pleased to have returned it to the rightful owner. A good morning’s work, and now I’m in need of my afternoon’s rest. Perhaps we can discuss your new discovery later on.”
“Of course.” I opened the car door for her. “Dr. Nothstine, can I hug you?”
She lifted her chin. “Certainly not. But you may call me Julie.”
My cell phone sounded as she drove off. This time it was Cissy Kane, mother of the bride, calling to pay her respects to tradition. She was performing a special ritual, a wedding custom that’s been cherished and nurtured by mothers of the bride for centuries, perhaps millennia.