Flowering Judas (3 page)

She got into the kitchen and put her purse down on the counter next to the microwave. She stood still for a moment and listened for any sounds she shouldn't hear in the house, but the house was as quiet as the community bulletin board was blank. She got her cell phone out of her purse and headed for the living room.

The living room had track lighting. Kyle had put it in for her the week after she moved in. That was the first week the telephone poles had been covered with flyers, and the first week she'd found the crazy old woman trying to get in through a window in the back.

Darvelle sat down on the couch. Her hair was a mass of red running down her back. Her nails were long curves of violet with sparkles in them. The nails matched her suit. She punched, and then held down the number 2 on her phone and waited until it started ringing.

Kyle picked up right away. “Holborn,” he said first—but Darvelle wasn't worried about that. He was just trying to appear professional in front of the people he worked with.

“Don't worry about it,” Darvelle said. “I just got home. Everything seems to be fine. She didn't come back and put more flyers up while I was gone.”

“Come back? Was she there before?”

“Well, she must have been,” Darvelle said. “When I left to go show the Petrovski house, the street was full of flyers again. What does she think she's doing? I didn't own this house when Chester disappeared. He never got near this neighborhood, as far as I can tell.”

“She thinks you killed him,” Kyle said.

“I know she thinks I killed him,” Darvelle said, ‘but it stands to reason that if I had killed him, I'd have left his body in the place I was living in then. I wouldn't have carted it halfway across the city to put it in the flower beds here. Not that I have any flower beds. I hate flower beds. In the winter they look like crap. And in the summer they bring bees and you're trying to show the house and the clients are running around freaking out.”

“Did you check the whole house?”

“No,” Darvelle said. “Nobody's here now, though, I can tell.”

“You should check the whole house.”

“You mean maybe she came back and threw stage blood all over my bedspread again? I don't think she's going to do that. We've got a restraining order. And besides, she's getting what she wants. They're doing that TV show about the case. Whatever that is. God, I hate true crime shows. They're so boring.”

“You're not worried about it? Those people coming here to look into it?”

“No,” Darvelle said. “I've told you and told you, Kyle. Chester disappeared. He just disappeared. He was supposed to pick me up and drive me to school and he never showed up. And that's all there was to it. No matter what his mother thinks.”

“You don't have to have evidence to—to suggest things, if you know what I mean. Those shows suggest things.”

“And what are they going to suggest?” Darvelle asked. “That I killed him, why, exactly? Has anybody ever been able to come up with a motive? He was my boyfriend, yes, okay, but he wasn't my husband. I didn't have a life insurance policy out on him. And I wasn't worried about losing him. In fact—”

“In fact, you were already going out with me.”

“Exactly. So I don't see the point here. I just wish that old bat would give it a rest. It's been twelve years.”

“I've got something here,” Kyle said. “We've got some kind of call.”

“Really?” Darvelle said. “Crime in Mattatuck? Is it a homicide?”

“I don't think so,” Kyle said. “I've got to go. I'll tell you about it later if there's anything to tell.”

“It'll probably be another one of those convenience store robberies,” Darvelle said. “I mean, how stupid can you possibly get, anyway? They go running into these places and they have to know there are security cameras. They have to know it.
The World's Dumbest Criminals.
That's a show I like. Except I don't like Tonya Harding, and they always have her on doing commentary.”

“It's something out at the college,” Kyle said. “I have to go, really. If you find something in the rest of the house, call here and get somebody to come out. I don't like the way that woman behaves. I don't think she's safe.”

“She just comes around and puts up hundreds of those damned flyers,” Darvelle said. “She puts them up and I take them down.”

“Even so. You said she put them up today.”

“She did.”

“So check the house and call if there's anything wrong,” Kyle said. “I'll be over after shift. Leave something in the refrigerator I can microwave in case I'm late.”

“Maybe she killed him,” Darvelle said. “Wouldn't that be an absolute gas?”

“I'll see you later,” Kyle said.

Darvelle put the phone on the end table near the lamp and got up to go down the hall to her bedroom. Her head hurt a little. She didn't think she was going to sell the Petrovski house to these people she'd brought out there today. She didn't think she was going to sell it to much of anybody until she convinced the Petrovskis to bring the price down by at least thirty thousand dollars. It was not the kind of market you could play games in, and the Petrovskis were playing games.

Darvelle stepped out of her shoes. She picked them up and walked down the hall to the master bedroom in her pantyhose. It wasn't much of a master bedroom. It didn't have a bathroom
en suite.
It was just the bigger bedroom of the two, and the one with the walk-in closet.

She stopped at the bathroom and looked in. Everything was what it should be. She went to the bedroom and opened the door and looked in there for a moment, too. There was nothing to see. There was no stage blood on the bedspread. There was no wadded mess of flyers on the carpet. There was no bright-red
CHESTER
written in lipstick on the vanity table mirror. Honest to God, Charlene Morton was some kind of lunatic.

Darvelle Haymes did not believe in being afraid of her own shadow. She didn't believe in being afraid of anything. She was certainly not afraid of the ghost of Chester Ray Morton, wherever he might be and whatever it was he was doing.

She sat down on the side of the bed and started stripping her pantyhose off.

It was a good question—just what it was Chester had been doing, and where it was he'd been doing it.

She'd been wondering that for twelve years.

5

The flyers were lying on the counter next to the sinks in the third floor women's bathroom in Frasier Hall, and that made Penny London very nervous.

She put her two big tote bags on the floor and picked up the flyers, one by one. There were six of them, splayed out in a fan, as if somebody had deliberately placed them for maximum recognition value. She put the flyers down again. It wasn't as if they were anything unusual.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?
they read. Then there was that same picture that was up on the billboard at the front entrance to the college. It had to be a dozen years since Chester Morton went missing. Penny still remembered him.

She pushed her mop of gray hair out of her face and bent down to the tote bags. She found the one with the shampoo in it and got it out. She didn't like those flyers. Those flyers meant that somebody had come up to this bathroom, and the reason Penny had chosen it in the first place was because she was sure nobody ever came up here, except perhaps the cleaning staff. It was hard to find bathrooms at Mattatuck–Harvey Community College that nobody ever spent time in. There were too many students looking for places to get stoned.

Penny glanced toward the door. It would be better if she could lock it, but there was no lock on it. If there was an emergency, a hostage situation, one of those school shootings, anybody who came into the bathrooms in this place would be doomed.

She turned on the hot water in the left-hand sink full blast, then turned on the cold a third of the way. Then she bent over and put her head under the faucet. The cold water felt good on her scalp. It felt so good, Penny thought she might give in in a day or two and spend some of her money taking a motel room for a night. It would be wonderful to have a full-on shower for once. It would be even more wonderful to have a full-on bath. She'd promised herself she'd take a hotel room whenever it got to the point where she just couldn't stand it.

She put shampoo in her hair. She rubbed the soap deep down into her scalp with the tips of her fingers. She put her head back under the faucet and let the soap rinse out. When she was done with her hair, she'd risk taking some of her clothes off and washing the rest of herself. Then she'd change into the clothes she'd brought from the car. It was only twenty-five minutes before class. She would have to hurry.

It would be terrible if somebody walked in on her.

Maybe Chester Ray Morton's mother was still in the building somewhere. Maybe she would come back to see if her flyers had been thrown away by a janitor. Penny had met Chester Ray Morton's mother when all that had happened, and she was of the opinion that the woman was a stark raving loon.

Penny took off her shirt, and then her bra. She dressed very carefully for the days she took sponge baths in the Frasier Hall bathroom. She took the fresh shirt and the fresh bra out of her tote bag. She put them down on the counter next to the sink. She got out the Irish Spring soap and the Dove deodorant. She thought it was odd how she'd gone on buying all the familiar brands even after she'd lost her apartment.

Her cell phone rang. It played the theme music from
Looney Tunes.
Penny took it out of her other tote bag, the ones with the books in it, and stared at it.

It was a good little cell phone, nothing fancy, but with “features” to it, as her sons said. She could read and answer e-mail on it, for instance. She could instant message. She could have a presence online just as if she still had a computer and a home to put it in.

She slid the phone open and put it to her ear. Her body felt oddly exposed, without the shirt. She bit her lip.

“Mom?” George said. His voice still sounded high, as if it had never changed with puberty. He was twenty-three now. “Mom, are you all right?”

“Of course I'm all right,” Penny said. “I'm trying to get my act together for class. I've got a night class this term.”

“I know. You told me. Are you sure you're all right?”

“I'm positive I'm all right. I've got at least three kids who are going to end the term without handing in a single paper, but that's par for the course. And I'm kind of in a hurry. I could call you back later.”

There was a long, dead pause on the line. It was the thing Penny hated most about cell phones. With a landline, when the other person wasn't talking, you could still tell the line was open, that the call hadn't gone south. On a cell phone, when nobody was talking, the line just sounded dead.

Penny moved her things around on the counter. She looked at the flyer again. Chester Ray Morton hadn't been the kind of student who did nothing all term and then panicked about it during exam week. He'd come to every class.

“Mom?” George said.

“I'm still here,” Penny said.

“I talked to Aunt Jenna this morning,” George said.

Penny bit her lip. “Did you call her because you wanted to keep in touch? What? I thought you didn't like the woman.”

“She called me.”

Penny wondered if it would be easier if she just dropped the phone into some water. But that wouldn't do. That would only ruin the phone, and the phone was the one thing that made what she was doing possible.

“Well,” she said. “That must have been interesting. What did she want?”

There was another long silence again. Penny looked at the soap and the shampoo. She wanted to get on with it. She hated going to class without washing up. Besides, in her position, it was important to stay washed up. If you started to stink, you'd find yourself without any options at all.

“She wanted,” George said, “to tell me you were living in your car.”

“Did she?” Penny said.

“She said she saw you in the parking lot of the Walmart in Mattatuck and you had everything you owned in your car. She said she saw you changing your shirt.”

“I've never changed my shirt in a parking lot in my life,” Penny said. “And you know what your Aunt Jenna is like. I haven't really talked to her since your Uncle Zach died, and that was four years ago. She wouldn't know if I had all my stuff in my car to save her life. She wouldn't know my stuff.”

“But she saw you at Walmart,” George said. “That's true, isn't it?”

“Yes, George, she saw me at Walmart. In the parking lot. I saw her, too. We said hello.”

“And that was all?”

“She stood around for awhile having one of those conversations. You know. What's George doing. What's Graham doing. Alison is going to be queen of the universe next week. That kind of thing.”

“And that's all?”

“That's all we ever say when we see each other. She didn't like me when Zach was alive and she likes me even less now.”

“And you're not living in your car?”

“I'm just fine. I've got two courses to teach here and one over at Pelham.”

“Pelham doesn't pay anything.”

“Pelham doesn't pay much, but it pays something. It doesn't hurt.”

“You didn't get a summer course.”

“No, I know I didn't,” Penny said. “But the summer is over and we've started on fall term and I'm as booked up as I'm allowed to be. I'm fine.”

“If Graham and I find out you're living in your car and you didn't tell us you needed money, we're both going to come out there and kill you. I mean it. There's no reason for you to be teaching at all anymore if you don't want to. We could support you. You could come out here and we could find a place big enough—”