Authors: Sara Rosett
“I bet it does,” Gwen said in an undertone. He must have heard her because he said, “I’ve been taking pictures here, too. Bet you didn’t know that.” His voice was completely malicious, now. “You’ll probably be interested in these pictures. In fact, we should probably go somewhere and talk about them. Your office?”
Gwen hesitated and then marched stiffly to her office with the man casually striding along behind her.
Later, as Abby buckled her seat belt she said, “Did you see her face?”
“Not really. But I could sure see his. He was almost gloating,” I said.
“Gwen was white the whole time. She’s scared,” Abby said.
I put the Cherokee in reverse. What did she have to be afraid of? Pictures, he mentioned pictures. Something related to Cass? Proof Gwen murdered Cass? I checked the parking lot for cars and backed out of the slot. I hit the gas and an irregular clunk sounded from the front of the Cherokee. I must need a tune-up. I made a mental note to find a mechanic.
If the man had proof, wouldn’t he go to the police? Any law-abiding citizen would, right? I sped up and the noise faded.
Unless he wanted something—something Gwen didn’t want to give, like access to Zoë. It sounded like blackmail to me.
Leave a large, self-addressed stamped envelope with your new address for the people who move into your old home so any mail that slips through the post office’s automatic forwarding can be sent to you.
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is
organized life.
—Immanuel Kant
I
dropped Abby at her door and cruised down to the gas station to fill up before I went home. My tires bumped over the hose and set off a bell, but I got out of the Cherokee and removed the nozzle.
A skinny man with a thin face emerged from the underside of a car in one of the bays. “I’ll be glad to pump that for you. Want me to finish?” He wiped his hands on a rough red cloth, then stuck it in his back pocket.
“Oh. No, I’ve got it.” I pulled the nozzle out when the numbers reached ten dollars. He picked up a squeegee and swiped it across the windshield.
“Thanks.” I replaced the hose and screwed on the gas cap.
He shrugged. “Anything I can do to keep people coming back, I do. It’s the only way to compete with the big boys down the street.” He swept the window clean and wiped the squeegee with a paper towel.
“Thanks.” I climbed back into the Cherokee to find my cash.
“No problem.” While he finished the back window, I studied the sign near the street, Bob’s Repair Shop. He came around to the driver’s side. I rolled down the window and handed him a ten for the gas. His cursive-stitched name tag read,
BOB.
“I think my friend brought her car in here. It was a minivan, actually. Burgundy color. Her brakes were out. Do you remember?”
“No.” He rubbed his hand down his face, lengthening it even more and highlighting the bags under his eyes.
“Okay. Thanks.” I reached for the key, disappointed. I don’t know what I’d hoped to find out, but I felt let down anyway.
“No, I mean, her brakes didn’t go out. The lines were punctured.”
“What? Punctured?”
“Vandalism.” He pulled out the red rag and wiped his hands. “Sneaky way to go about it, too. If they’d been out or disconnected there would’a been a pool of brake fluid under the van and they’d a gone out right away when she first tried them. But with the punctures, well, there’s not much fluid on the ground. The brakes would work for a little while, but the fluid would leak out. Pretty soon, no brakes. Did the same thing to the power steering fluid, too.” A ghost of a smile cracked his long face. “She was hopping mad when I showed
her. Called the police. They showed up and took the lines away. For evidence.”
“Have you seen anything else like that?”
“Nope. Not around here. We get a few busted windshields every once in a while. Kids out making trouble or something, but nothing dangerous.”
I remembered Cass’s words: “Good thing I wasn’t going down Rim Rock Road like I usually do.”
I pulled away and heard the clunking sound again. I stopped. Bob jogged back over, leaned over the front tire on the driver’s side. “You’re missing a lug nut and this one just fell off. Had your tires rotated lately?”
“No.” I got out and examined the bare bolts. “Could those have come off accidentally? You know, work their way off?”
“I’ve never seen anything like that.”
I gripped the open door of the Cherokee. “Got any extra?”
“Sure thing.” Bob trotted off and I walked to the back tire on the driver’s side and tugged on the lug nuts. They were tight.
“I checked the rest on this side. The other tires are all fine.” Bob’s voice made me jump.
“Every one ‘a those were loose on that front tire. Strangest thing I’ve seen in a while.”
Not strange. Scary.
I drove the two blocks home very carefully. What could have happened? Maybe just damage to the car, but what if I’d been on the highway or Rim Rock Road with its sheer drop-off? I swallowed hard. Lug nuts didn’t accidentally loosen on one tire. Porch railings didn’t fall off. And Cass’s brakes and steering didn’t go out on a fluke. Someone was orchestrating these mishaps.
I’d just dropped Abby off at her house, so it couldn’t be Jeff. He wouldn’t risk hurting her. Would he? No. He wouldn’t. Of course not. This was awful. I turned my thoughts away from that troubling mental debate and tried to think who else would have done it. I’d just made Gwen furious, not to mention the details I’d uncovered about Brent’s phone call and Nick’s shots.
But how would Nick or Brent know what I’d found out? I’d told Thistlewait about the phone message a few hours ago. Was there time for him to question Brent and for Brent to track me down? No, not enough time and I doubted Thistlewait would give away the name of the person who gave him the phone. He never gave any information away to me. Gwen was right there in the store, but how could she have run out to the parking lot and loosened the lug nuts while she was closeted with the strange man who arrived at Tate’s?
I pulled into the driveway and breathed a sigh of relief. I’d made it. Somehow, something I’d done or said threatened someone. They were either trying to get me to be quiet or silence me permanently.
I glanced around the garage. So many dangerous things: weed killer, cleaning products, insecticides. I suppressed a shiver as I looked at Mitch’s circular saw.
I had two choices. Either run from this and maybe this person would leave me alone or press on and figure out who was behind the incidents, one of which led to death.
It wasn’t really a choice. I had to go on. Backing down didn’t guarantee anything.
“Where do you want these? In this cabinet?” Abby held a cookie sheet in one hand and had Livvy propped
up on her shoulder with the other hand. Livvy let out a tentative cry. Abby bounced and bobbed.
I paused, a stack of mixing bowls weighing in my arms, and considered the cabinets. “No, put it over here closer to the oven.” I dragged the box across the floor for her.
“I think we had more boxes for our kitchen than any other room in the house.” I sliced the tape on a new box, pulled out the top bundle, and unwrapped a stack of china salad plates. I stacked them carefully in a high cabinet, where they would be far away from Livvy when she started exploring in a few months.
“I know. But you’ve only got a few more to go,” Abby said in a peppy voice. It did look like we might get finished before it was time for me to get ready for my big Saturday night date with Mitch.
“Hey,” Abby said, “want to come over for dinner tomorrow night?”
“Sure.”
“Great. About six o’clock?”
Mitch staggered up the basement stairs. “Last one,” he gasped. We’d stored some boxes with things we didn’t need right away in the basement. Rex meandered around Mitch’s feet, sniffing the seams of the dish-packed box. Mitch did a little two-step and dropped the box with a thud, narrowly missing Rex’s tail. I cringed, hoping the dishes weren’t shattered.
“Those are ready to go to the shed.” I pointed to the flattened boxes we’d already unpacked. Mitch gathered them up, maneuvered out the door to the backyard, and banged against the door frame and stair handrail.
I unwrapped six delicate coffee cups before Mitch returned.
“There’s a police car at Keith and Friona’s house,” he announced.
“I hope there wasn’t another break-in,” Abby said.
“Probably just another garage.” He picked up his list for the hardware superstore and gave me a quick kiss. “See you in about an hour. Love you.”
Livvy’s huffy cries merged together and I picked up my pace. I crammed the last piece of china, a gravy boat, into the cabinet with a hurried clink and took her from Abby as her cries intensified and her face turned from pink to scarlet. In her room, I settled down to feed her. I looked around and smiled. The walls could use a new coat of paint, but her nursery looked beautiful with the white crib and dresser and the yellow crib set dotted with tiny blue and white flowers. It felt good to have it out of the box. Her mobile of flowers and birds rotated slightly and gave off a single note of “Hush, Little Baby.” The window needed something, a valance maybe.
A large television truck with the number eight emblazoned on its side and a satellite lumbered past the window. I stopped rocking and watched as two women hopped down from the truck parked behind the police car at Friona’s house. One woman had blond hair escaping from a scrunchie. She wore baggy shorts, a T-shirt, and that classic California fashion statement, thick sandals with white socks. I pegged her as the news photographer. The other woman had hard-looking dark hair and moved carefully in high heels over the uneven sidewalk, straightening her vivid blue suit as she walked.
A second news truck arrived by the time I finished changing Livvy. “What’s going on?” I asked Abby, who was watching out the dining room window.
“I don’t know. Here, I’ll take Livvy. I see Mabel; she’ll know. You go find out.”
I headed across the lawn slowly. I didn’t want to be a nosy neighbor. I’d looked down on Ed and Mabel for their snoopy ways, but I was curious, too. I merged into the little clump of neighbors gathered in Mabel’s yard. I found her off to one side. “What’s going on?”
“The woman who lived there was killed last night,” Mabel said.
“What?” Goose bumps traveled up my arms. Another death?
“It was on the radio. Mugged in a parking lot downtown.”
“She was a squadron spouse.” I noticed Mabel looked annoyed that she didn’t know I was acquainted with Friona. Mabel wanted to be the one giving the news, not receiving it.
“I knew nothing good was going on in that house,” Mabel said.
“She was a night owl. I saw her out my back window,” said another woman, a contemporary of Mabel’s. “I’m Helen,” she said to me. “What a welcome you’re getting. This street used to be the quietest, nicest street. Now we’ve had a
murder.”
Helen was shrunken and stooped with age. Once she’d been petite; now she was tiny. She had a thin face with lines running down to her pinched mouth and straight iron-gray hair flattened in a bowl cut.
“Never had a murder until everyone started dying or moving to Arizona, and all these young people moved in.” Helen patted my arm. “I don’t mean you, of course. But people like her.” She pointed at the news vans obscuring Friona’s house. “Snooty. Too good to come over and say hello, the few times I did see her. Kept her nose in the air and didn’t even wave. But she sure kept busy coming and going at night. I don’t sleep well. Never
would have guessed she was slinging burgers at McDonald’s.”
“Does anyone know what happened?”
“She was knifed,” Helen said with relish.
“Helen you need to turn that TV of yours off,” Mabel reproved her friend. “This was a person, not some character in a cop show. She was held up at knifepoint when she left after closing. They took her purse and then slit her throat.”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“Someone at a hotel next to the restaurant heard her scream and called the police, but it was too late,” Mabel added.
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“I overheard Karrie Hobart talking to her photographer. Karrie’s my favorite. She’s on Channel Two. Unlike some people, I want to know the facts, not the speculation.” Mabel shot a look at Helen.
Helen turned and marched away with as much dignity as her stooped form allowed.
“Helen gets carried away, but she’s right about one thing. This used to be a nice, quiet little street.”
I returned to the house, sat down at the kitchen table, and pressed my trembling hands between my knees. I relayed the news to Abby.
“That’s awful. Friona?” Abby’s eyebrows scrunched tighter. “From the mall?”
I nodded. I felt hot, then shivered.
Abby said, “You don’t look so good, kind of pale. You’re not going to faint, are you?”
The corners of the room seemed to slip and merge. “No.” I bent over and pressed my forehead to my clenched hands. Breathe.
It was too strange. Another spouse was dead. What kind of squadron was this? Too much stress. Breathe. Too many changes, the move, a baby, a new house, and a new squadron. On top of all that, squadron wives were dying. Dying!
Abby’s voice had faded to a low murmur, but I realized she wanted me to drink some water. Experimentally, I raised my head and blinked. The sunlight in the kitchen seemed extremely bright. I didn’t feel that strange hot/cold sensation anymore, so I took my large plastic water cup that Abby held out and sipped. The icy cold water felt good on my dry throat. “Sorry. It’s just so scary.”
Abby, who’d been hovering beside my chair, dropped into the one beside me and said, “I wonder what was she doing at McDonald’s?”
It wouldn’t hurt to tell Friona’s secret now that it was being broadcast over the news—even Helen knew. “She worked at McDonald’s. I saw her one morning and recognized her. She was embarrassed and didn’t want anyone to know. Her husband didn’t even know. Poor Friona. Now it’s going to be all over the news.”