Authors: Shannon Hill
I took the hose out of Maeve’s hands and hit Rachel Vogt in the face with a stream of cold water. She shrieked, sputtered, and staggered. She also shut up. Mission accomplished.
Shaking my head, I yelled at Tom, “Get outta the water!”
He tried. I finally had to hold out an arm and help him clamber out. “I tried,” he started, but I hushed him, and considered my options. Normally a quick hit with the tazer would end the fight, but they were in water, and I wasn’t sure how that would affect the flow of electrical current. But sooner or later one of those idiots would hit his head on the rocks outlining the pond and we’d have a real problem. If I hit them with pepper spray, they’d flail around and we’d be back to that whole potential head injury issue. I unhooked my air horn. Admittedly, pepper spray had more appeal right then, but the air horn would get their attention plenty.
A half-minute later, both men stood panting in water up to their thighs, hands coming down off their ears. “Jesus!” said Cam Shelhamer, and Richard Vogt snapped, “Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain!”
The fight might have re-started but I’d gotten a good grip on Cam’s ponytail by then, and Tom had hold of Richard’s arm. Once they’d half-fallen, half-climbed out, we handcuffed them and sat them down on the as-yet-unmowed grass of Cam’s backyard. Rachel opened her mouth but I silenced her with a glare and a nod toward my pepper spray, and Maeve, thank God, had the sense to just plop down on the fancy stone bench.
The worst of our uniforms is that they’re polyester blend. Great for not creasing, but hot as hell, and not much on absorbing sweat. I was dripping. “Let me guess,” I said coldly. “You were grabbing for your beer and you ran over his fence.”
Cam turned bright red.
I turned to Richard, well-known in town for his piety. “And the Christian response was to declare a crusade.”
Richard started to say, “Those bushes…” and changed his mind after a look at my face. Smart man.
“We’ve got two options here. Cam, you can pay for the fence repair and stop drinking while driving…”
“It’s a lawn mower,” he said hotly. Tom beat me to it.
“It’s got a motor and four wheels, we can still get you for intoxication while operating a moving vehicle.”
That shut him up.
“And Richard here can agree that the bushes will recover,” I said, getting back to my point. “Or I can haul both your sorry asses in, and charge you with disturbing the peace, property damage, assault and battery, and just generally pissing me off. Any takers for door number two?”
Richard quivered. He wanted to say I couldn’t do that. He ran the big mall down in Lynchburg, after all, and he was used to people doing as he said. Then he gave a tight, unhappy shrug. “Sure. Fine. Whatever.”
“I’m good with that,” Cam mumbled, after Maeve shot him one of those looks women shoot their men to head off further stupidity. “Sure. Good by me.”
“Wonderful,” I said sourly. I unfastened the handcuffs, and hooked my set back onto my belt. “Do I need to tell you I really don’t want to be called back here today? Or tomorrow? Or ever?”
They looked like shame-faced first-graders. “No, ma’am.”
“Good,” I announced, and went to coax Boris out from under the porch. To hell with healthy eating. I had Colliers, a heat wave making everyone nuts, and Crazy to boot. I needed donuts.
16.
T
hanks to Cam and Richard, I missed Marilee Collier’s telephone call, which went to the office line, but not Aunt Marge’s, which came to my cell phone. “Dear,” she said, “you really need to come to church more often.”
“I only get one real day off,” I reminded her, but half-heartedly. She was right. I did need to go to church more often. Church wasn’t just the religious thing to do. It was where everyone in town congregates at least once a week to gossip about their neighbors. It’s a great way to keep your finger on the town’s pulse. “What did I miss at the chit-chat meeting this week?”
“At the next town council meeting, Ruth Campbell plans to introduce a proposal to…” I heard Aunt Marge draw a calming breath, and exhale in a way that told me she was counting on her years of yoga to keep her blood pressure down. “To ban non-natives from holding jobs in Crazy.”
I had to pull over. I just had to. I needed to thump my head on the headrest of my seat. “You can’t be serious. She can’t be serious.”
“You know how she is,” said Aunt Marge diplomatically.
“Yes, I do. She’s a damn racist bitch,” I shot back. I smacked my palm on the steering wheel. “I guess it doesn’t matter to her that Raj was born in this country.”
I could hear a swish of Aunt Marge settling her floaty cotton skirt du jour. “No, not really.”
No, it wouldn’t. This was about Raj’s complexion, and the fact Bobbi had dumped her worthless crap-heap of a son. When it came to other people, Ruth had eyes like electron microscopes for picking out flaws. When it came to her son, she was blinder than a bat. “It won’t pass,” I said, “but there’ll be a few people who’ll wish it would. Freakin’ fantastic. I guess Raj must be expecting a visit from the boys in white bed sheets and hoods.”
“I suspect he is,” agreed Aunt Marge unhappily. “And I think that’s what Bobbi’s mother fears, too.”
We hung up, and I rolled back to the office. I tried calling Marilee again, and got her voicemail. I kicked my feet up on my desk and settled Boris nearby. I scratched his chin. I had paperwork to do, but I couldn’t get my head straight. I glanced over at Davis, who was reading a magazine Kim had got him. “Davis. Any siblings have diabetes? Any other kind of disease?”
“No,” he said, not looking up from his article. “Marilee used to be sick a lot, though, and she’d have to take injections from the school nurse. Vitamins, I guess.”
I drummed my fingers. Boris pounced. I let him mock-gnaw my hand. It occurred to me that a woman like Vera probably wouldn’t welcome the expense of a kid who’d need insulin. Maybe that was why Marilee had never looked back.
***^***
It took me until the following afternoon to finally catch up with Marilee and speak to her instead of her voice-mail. In the background, I heard kids shouting and splashing, the crush of surf. “You’re at the beach,” I said flatly. Here I was sweating out every minute of a murder investigation, to say nothing of Ruth Campbell’s racism, and she was playing in the ocean.
“Had to get the kids out of my hair,” she said without a trace of guilt. “So what’s this about, exactly?”
I told her what Punk had told me. It came as news to her. “It can run in families,” she admitted dubiously. “My doctor asked, but I said I was the only one.”
“How about your kids?”
“Frankie,” she said immediately. “Why are you asking this?”
“What actually killed your mother was insulin overdose.”
In the cell, Davis dropped his book and sat bolt upright.
Marilee gasped. Then I heard her swear under her breath. She’d married Navy all right. I nearly blushed. “Sheriff, are you sure?”
It was nice to be sure of something. “Yes. What’s wrong?”
Once she started, Marilee didn’t stop. “Frankie and I both have to do injections. Me more than her, it’s because Mama wouldn’t pay for me to have insulin and I had to get it at school, the doctor did something to make it happen, I think he paid for it himself and got the school nurse to do the shots, they were married.” She paused for breath for about a nanosecond. “I’m getting dialysis every other week now because of my kidneys. Mama made me eat whatever there was, and it was all cheap canned crap in sugar and salt, it was like a diabetic nightmare!” Her voice shook, and I told her to take some deep breaths. It slowed her down but she kept right on going. “Anyway, back in April, I noticed we were missing a couple vials. And we shouldn’t have been. I know how much insulin I take, I write it down, and there were six vials gone. A couple of syringes too. I keep them in the fridge. The cold makes it hurt less when I inject.”
I took her word for it. “Can I ask why that’s important?”
Marilee’s tone dropped into the kind of meanness I expected of a Collier. “I didn’t notice till the twentieth, when I was going to make a run to the pharmacy, I remember because I thought Frankie had taken them and was using it without telling me, and I thought she was lying, so I grounded her for two weeks, and that meant she missed being in the spring play the last weekend of the month.”
“Ma’am,” I said, trying to get her back on track. If there was a track.
Marilee drew a whooping breath. “Y’know who slept in my house the night of the sixteenth?”
I told the truth. “No idea.”
“My sister.”
“Honey or Eileen?” I asked, pen hovering over my notebook.
I heard Marilee’s sneer. “Laura.”
***^***
I spent an hour on the telephone confirming Marilee’s story. Which also took an hour, and I don’t think she took more than three breaths the whole time.
A friend of Laura’s, one Myrna Kirsch, had died down in Virginia Beach in a car accident. Myrna had moved there after meeting a man on a beach vacation after her graduation from the county high school. That man left her, and was succeeded by a series of men, who rambled in and then out of Myrna’s life. She went from cashier to manager to owner of a tourist trap store, and lived above it, and walked nearly everywhere. Thus the irony of her death: she’d been driving to take a vacation in her home mountains when she had the bad luck to get between a bridge abutment and a dump truck with failing brakes. It was, Marilee reported, and I confirmed from the obituary, a closed casket for good reason.
Laura had driven down in the morning for the funeral, but found herself exhausted by the ordeal of the afternoon, and had called Marilee “out of the blue”, asking if she could beg space on a couch or the floor for the night. Marilee had little use for Laura, but she wasn’t completely heartless. She gave her sister directions, had her sit down at supper with the family, and had her boys bunk together so Laura could have a bed. She’d heard Laura sobbing late into the night, but she herself had dialysis the next day, and needed her rest. She’d gone to sleep. Laura had seemed tired but fine at breakfast, cheerful in a subdued fashion, and Marilee went off to her dialysis with Laura’s profound thanks ringing in her ears. She thought nothing more of it, though she had appreciated the flowers Laura’d had delivered as a thank-you.
I scribbled all that down in my own jagged shorthand, then hit the computer. I found the obituaries on the newspaper’s website, and sure enough, there was Myrna Kirsch. I called the police department for the details of the accident, and that also confirmed Marilee’s story. I even demanded to talk to Frankie, and got a tearful denial that she’d ever take any insulin without telling her mother. “I’m not stupid,” she wailed loudly enough that Boris’s ears went back. “I know I can’t eat a bunch of junk and then just shoot up!”
Thanking God for my own health, I finally hung up the phone and logged off the internet. I’ll admit, I was half-hoping I’d have found something to prove Marilee was lying. I mean,
Laura
? I could see Eileen, or Honey, or any of the in-laws, but Laura?
I flipped back in my notebook to look at my first impressions of the various Colliers. I read “no smile in eyes” by Laura’s name, and my gut clenched up. Thanks to the fire’s heat and the amount of plastic in Vera’s house, there was little hope I’d get some huge break and find a chunk of melted plastic just right to have been a syringe or two, but that didn’t matter. Laura had taken her sister’s insulin. I knew it. The only question left was what she’d done with it.
I had to be fair. Or at least try to be balanced. Some people use insulin to lose weight. It’s a dumbass way to go about it, in my opinion, but people do stupid things all the time. That’s what keeps me, the shrinks, and the doctors in business. But Laura didn’t seem to care she was a little soft around the middle. Not that I’d seen, anyway.
Tom had come on shift, so I rolled over to Bobbi’s for a morale boost on my way to Gilfoyle to see about Del’s lawsuit. She wasn’t home, and I went with my hunch and drove to Raj’s place. Sure enough, there they were, on the porch in the heat, feet up and big glasses of lemonade to hand. Easy to see there wasn’t any room for a third. I waved as I passed instead of stopping, and reversed back toward Gilfoyle feeling silly and lonely, and silly for feeling lonely. Even Boris wasn’t a comfort. He was sacked out cold.
Judge Spencer Gilfoyle met me in his office. It was down the hall from Harry’s. Not a cat lover, he had his favorite foxhound with him, snoring away on a big cushion in the corner. Boris reacted to that by spending the whole visit on my lap, glaring at the dog, who was completely oblivious to his presence. When we’d sorted out what would happen with Del’s lawsuit—Judge Gilfoyle decided to toss it as frivolous—I felt a little better. I left Harry a note on his door about the outcome, and wandered out with Boris jauntily trotting at my heels like he’d been the one reprieved from having to pay ten thousand dollars to Maury’s ingrate of a brother.
To celebrate, I grabbed a bottle of juice and some half-and-half at the convenience store where Vera’d gotten her money orders. The heat hadn’t broken yet, so we did our rejoicing in my cruiser, in air conditioning. When we’d both finished our drinks, Boris settled in to take a long happy bath, and I decided it was time to go home. I could use an early night before I tackled Laura Collier in the morning.
Yeah. Early night. Me and my cat.
I looked over at Boris. He’s very cuddly, when you get past the claws and teeth. But somehow, driving back to Crazy, I couldn’t stop wishing that maybe there was a little more to my life than that.
17.
I
pulled into the weedy tire tracks that passed for a road into the Grenville property, and sat on the trunk watching the twilight turn to darkness.
Boris was cuddled against me, ears perked to catch the night sounds, and I let myself stroke his soft fur now and then. I didn’t cry. I didn’t anything. I just sat, numb but achy all at the same time. Colliers. They’d gotten to me. I had family. I knew it. But I’d always grown up wishing I’d had…
family
. Mom, dad, siblings kind of family. And this is what it looked like? I couldn’t decide if I was disappointed, disgusted or plain depressed.