20
“W
TBA-TV, good morning.”
“Hi, Shirley. This isâ”
“I know: Louise. I suppose you want to talk to Marty.”
“In fact, I do.”
“Sorry. He isn't available until one.”
“I see. Would you be kind enough to leave a message that I called?”
“Of course.”
“And how are you, Shirley?”
“Doin' all right, Louise. Except the switchboard's busy. Gotta go.”
Was the switchboard really that busy? Or was Shirley, the friendly receptionist at the station, giving her the cold treatment?
Looking at her watch, she realized it was close to lunchtime. She'd told Sarah she'd drive today and hurried out the front door to pick her up. This was a moment in her life when she had no other choice but to turn to friends. Nora and Mary were eager to help and had promised to see her again tomorrow to talk over things. Sandy Stern was on vacation. The only wise mind left to probe was Sarah Swanson's.
Louise preferred not to dwell on the fact that her older daughter might also be snooping into the crime in spite of her father forbidding her to do such a thing. If Martha was detecting, Louise tried to convince herself, it probably amounted to little more than list-making with Nora and Mary, or talking with Hilde over lunch.
As she made her way down the front walk, she was relieved to see the press was nowhere in evidence. The yellow police tape around the yard was gone, but not the police. The large person just shoving his body out of an unmarked police car at her front curb was Mike Geraghty. After the scare in the toolshed, she was glad to see him. The detective was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his limp jacket slung over his shoulder. He ambled to the front gate; every movement expressed weariness.
“Hi, Mike,” she said, and opened the gate for him.
“Louise, how ya doin'? You look like you're on your way somewhere.” He nodded at a nearby bench in the front woods, which Bill had constructed for her out of two old tree stumps and a long piece of flagstone. “Can we hunker down there for a minute? Darned hot this morning, and it looks cooler in the woods.”
They strolled to the bench. “It's about five degrees cooler in here,” said Louise, “which makes it only ninety-two. You look tired, Mike.”
“I am.” He grinned at her. “I've been real busy investigatin' a murder.”
“Do you know anything new? Am I out from under this yet?”
It was a four-foot-long bench, tight quarters for a large man and a tall woman. She could smell the detective's stale body odor. He turned his bright marble-blue eyes toward her. “We found the blood on the sweatshirt was Peter Hoffman's.”
“I'm not surprised. Bill and I already thought that would be the case.” Her mouth turned down in a grimace. “If you're going to frame someone, blood evidence sure helps.”
Geraghty was silent. She glanced over at his big, slouched figure and found he was the picture of remorse. “I'm truly sorry, Louise, but we're still investigatin' lots of other angles. Among them is a proposed time study of your trip back home on Sunday night, August twelfth. I need to know the name of the crab house where you stopped to eat on your way back from the beach.”
“Let's see, it was something catchy, something alliterative: âCharlie's Crab House” ... no, âCarl's Crab House.' It was east of the town of Helton.”
“All right,” said the detective. “That's progress.”
“You mean you're going to go over the route I took and try to figure out a time line?”
“Yep. Try to dovetail it with the time our source said they saw someone in the woods, movin' the cart and diggin'.”
“That'll help, provided your source is telling the truth.” She sighed in frustration. “As if the source is a secret. I know it was Greg Archer who thought he caught a glimpse of me in the woods that night. But who knows if he's telling the truth about it, even the time he saw me?”
“Louise, why do you mistrust him?”
“The man dislikes me, that's why. And that's why I doubt your time line is going to mean much.” She shrugged. “Okay, so I've said enough about that. You can't blame me for being grumpy. Now tell me what's new in the investigation. Or wouldn't George Morton approve of that?”
He gave her a troubled look, then gazed down at the safety of his notepad. “We got lots of lines out on Hoffman's business contacts, which includes Lee Downing, of course, and Michael Cunningham. We're questioning Mrs. Hoffman, of course.”
“Of course,” said Louise.
Moving slowly, he got up from the bench. “Louise, uh, I hope you do what Morton suggested and don't get involved, okay? Please just stay home and keep out of trouble. Things should improve pretty soon.”
“You think so?”
“I can't promise you anything, you know that.”
“One thing you could promise me is that your evidence technicians put things back in the proper place.”
“You mean they didn't?”
“No, and I was nearly hit with a pickax they stashed on a rack above the doorway. Furthermore, they left a tarp on the patio.”
Geraghty frowned. “That's odd. Let me get back to you on that, Louise.”
She hopped up from the bench. “You do that,” she said in a cool voice. “And now I have to go. I have a friend waiting for me.”
As she made her way to the garage, she could feel the red in her face, and it was not from heat or embarrassment, but from anger. Mike Geraghty and the Fairfax County police wouldn't have nearly as good a reputation had Louise not helped them time and again in their investigations. And now they had her dangling, proposing that she was a murder suspect. Not only that, their sloppy technicians had imperiled her life!
She got in her PT Cruiser and revved the engine.
Let him arrest me for that!
She sped out of the cul-de-sac, not able to feel the full satisfaction that a speeding car gave the human psyche. After all, Rebecca Road wasn't the autobahn and Sarah Swanson's house was only two blocks away. She got there in less than a minute, slammed out of the car and realized she was panting as if she'd run a mile. She took a few deep breaths and paused to look around her. Before Louise was one of the most beautiful natural gardens in the Washington, D.C., areaâSarah Swanson's front yard. It was featured last year in one of her TV gardening shows. She'd called it “The Wild Suburban Garden.” Its only trouble was that it was on a steep hill. She took another deep breath and started upward.
Admiring the prize dwarf hawthorn tree,
Crataegus crusgalli
, at the base of the yard, she ascended through clusters of native grasses and oakleaf hydrangeas interspersed with low-growing specimen evergreens and deciduous small trees. By the time she'd reached the top of the hill, the frights and frustrations of the morning were dissipated, her composure almost restored.
She tucked her blouse in her skirt and headed for Sarah's studio. Talking to Sarah was a more sensitive matter than chewing over the facts with her friends Nora and Mary. Mort Swanson had close ties with Peter Hoffman that apparently went back for years. Still, Louise had to do it, for the potter was one of her shrewdest friends, with an artist's eye for detail. She had learned more than once that it was the details that counted when one was trying to find a killer.
As she was about to knock on the studio door, it was opened by Hilde Brunner, and Louise stepped back with a little cry of surprise. The potter's beautiful intern was obviously in the middle of her work, her apron and her hands smeared with clay. A strand of rosy-tinted hair had escaped from her bun and fallen across her unusual catlike green eyes.
“Mrs. Eldridge, what's the matter?” She approached Louise and lightly touched her shoulder. “Did I frighten you? I am so sorry.”
“Don't be sorry, Hilde, it's me who's jumpy. I've had a sorely trying morning at home.”
“Oh,” said the girl, as if soothing a hurt child. “If you're looking for Sarah, she's in the house.”
“You look busy.”
“I am,” the young woman said, flashing a radiant smile. “I'm hurrying to get my work done so that I can go to your house.”
“I know. That's why I came here. Sarah and I are going out for a bite. That way, you young people can have the house to yourselves.” She laughed ruefully. “At least the two of you won't disturb things in the house.”
Hilde said, “Disturb things? Oh, no, of course not. I wanted to express how sorry I am about what happened. It must have been such a terrible shock to find a body.”
Louise flinched involuntarily. She'd been so busy fretting about the pickax incident that she'd forgotten for a while about that dratted body in the garden. Life was one shock after another, and nearly being bonked on the head by twenty pounds of steel was only the latest. Now she had the sense that nothing was quite right about her house or her yard.
She pulled in a deep breath, hoping the girl didn't notice how rattled she was. “It was a horrible thing, Hilde. I'm just trying to recover from it.”
“I hope you do, and soon. So, today, Martha and I will lunch, and I get the pleasure of meeting Janie. That means I can say that I am now friends with everyone in the ... ”âshe put her arms up to form a circleâ“what do you say? Immediate neighborhood.”
Louise smiled back. “And in such a short time. Quite an accomplishment. In fact, I hear you've met Charlie Hurd, too, though he's not a neighborhood person except when he's around covering a story.”
The expression in Hilde's eyes became noticeably noncommittal, and Louise could see that while Hilde might be the new love of Charlie's life, the reverse was not necessarily true. “Yes, Charlie. He is such a fun person. I introduced him to your Martha the other night. It seems she had never met him.”
“That's because Martha's seldom home. So nice of you to do that.”
Louise walked thoughtfully to the side door of the Swanson's house and suddenly felt that, unlike Hilde, she didn't really have a clue as to what was going on in this neighborhood, or even in her own house.
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Over a sandwich at the Coffee Pub in the Belleview Shopping Center, Louise could see how unhappy her friend was. Sarah Swanson's handsome countenance seemed to have aged by years, and even the usually curly strands of gray hair around her face were limp and cheerless.
“Sarah, tell me what's troubling you. Is it the medical problems?”
“No, it's not Mort's diagnosis, or rather lack of a diagnosis,” said Sarah, “although that is the shadow that fills our lives. But there's something else, too. Sylvan Valley, where we have lived so happily for thirty-five years, seems to be in mourning over the disgraceful fact of finding the body of that man in your garden.” Her tired, red-rimmed gray eyes turned to Louise. “But why am I sorrowing over this, when you must feel it more than any of us?”
“We can't avoid it, Sarah,” she answered. “What we have to do is try and dig ourselves out of it. Somebody did this, and it wasn't me.”
Tears formed in Sarah's large eyes. Quietly, she said, “I'll only share this with you, Louise. Please don't let it go further. I'm terribly frightened over the role that Mort might have played in thisâ”
“Oh, no, he couldn't haveâ”
“I don't mean the murder. Of course he wouldn't kill anyone. I'm referring to the events that could have precipitated it: the sale of Hoffman Arms. I'm so afraid he knows something of that and has unwittingly contributed to someone else's motive for murder. I know there was a meeting after Peter was released from the hospital... .”
Louise could hardly restrain a smile. At last, her chats with neighborhood friends had hit pay dirt. “A meeting,” she said, cautiously, without appearing overly interested, “with Peter and Mike Cunningham?”
“Yes. But I have no idea what it was about. My husband doesn't confide in me like he used to, and he already feels terrible because of his physical ailments. So what can I do, beg him for information that implicates him?”
“I'm so sorry you're in this quandary. I had the impression that Mike Cunningham handled the sale of Hoffman Arms all on his own. Maybe you shouldn't worry if Mort only played a peripheral role.”
Sarah shook her head hopelessly. “He's been with Wilson and Sterritt for almost thirty years. Mike Cunningham's their flashy newcomer hired in as a partner; he's only been there six years. I don't know what this will do to Mike's career, but I'm afraid it will tarnish Mort'sâand after all he's given to that firm, poor man. Furthermore, he shouldn't have to think about these things right now.”
“I'm sorry,” repeated Louise. Her potter friend stared unseeing out the restaurant window. She let the silence restore them for a few moments, then said, “I have to go downtown this afternoon. I, uh, cracked a tooth and have to see my dentist in DuPont Circle. Would it be all right with you if I just dropped in on Mort?”