An Unthymely Death (29 page)

 

 

“The Closed sign is still on the door,” she said, looking at her watch. “But it’s almost eleven. Molly always opens promptly at nine.” She picked up the phone behind my counter. “Guess I’ll call her.”

I handed her my cordless phone. “Here—use this. My answering machine’s out of commission again.”

One after the other, Ruby punched in both of Molly’s numbers—the bookstore and the one that rings on the third floor, where she lives. But after letting the phone ring and ring, she gave it up. “If she’s there,” she said worriedly, “she’s not answering.”

At that moment, Constance Letterman stamped in. “What’s going on at the bookstore?” she demanded. “I’ve been pounding on the door and nobody answers. I even went around to the back and checked the garage. Molly’s car isn’t there. Is she on vacation?”

“If so, she didn’t tell me about it,” I replied, thinking that it was just like Constance to go poking in Molly’s garage. Next thing, she’d be telling us what Molly stashed there.

Sure enough. “You’ll never guess what she’s keeping in there,” Constance said, leaning forward.

“I don’t care what she’s keeping in there, Constance,” I said. “It’s none of our business.”

“But something is wrong, China,” Ruby chimed in. “She doesn’t answer her phones.”

“Yes,” Constance agreed. “Something is
definitely
the matter. I feel it in my bones.”

I gave her a look. “Remember the time you felt in your bones that the Loves were running some kind of funeral home scam? Or when your bones insisted that Mrs. Tuttle, at the library, was pocketing the library fines?” Both of these non-events caused a great deal of embarrassment when Constance raised the alarm, but she hasn’t yet learned her lesson. She still insists on imagining crises and disasters all around her—most of which never come true.

Constance glared at me. “I don’t know why you’re bringing up all that ancient history,” she snapped. “You should be concerned about Molly McGregor. We all need to keep an eye on what happens in the neighborhood. It’s our responsibility as citizens. Anyway, Molly is a friend as well as a neighbor. Don’t you care what happens to her?”

Just then, somebody came in to buy some rosemary plants, and I didn’t have to find an answer to the question. Constance stalked out, and that was the end of the conversation. It wasn’t, however, the end of people’s concern about Molly’s welfare.

At noon, I left Laurel in charge of the shop and headed out to make the deposit and pick up some credit card slips. On the way, I stopped in at the
Enterprise
to leave my weekend ad with Ethel Fritz. She squinted at it, allowed as how it would probably do, and took my money. As she was writing me a receipt, she said, “What happened at the Hobbit House this weekend?”

I frowned. “Nothing, so far as I know. Why?”

She tore out the receipt and pushed it across the counter. “Because Diggety Dolittle came in just a few minutes ago. He said there’d been a break-in or something.” Diggety is Pecan Springs’s mail carrier. “He had a package to deliver and the shop was closed, so he went around the side and peeked through a window. The place was all torn up inside, like there’d been a fight, or maybe a break-in.” Ethel’s look was accusing, as if I should have been paying closer attention to what was going on at my elbow. “You mean, you didn’t know?”

I wanted to say, “Am I my sister’s keeper?” but settled for “Nope.” However, I was beginning to feel definitively uneasy.

“Well, maybe you’d better check it out,” Ethel said tartly. “Around here, folks keep an eye on other folks. We believe in Neighborhood Watch.”

Feeling chastened, I went to the bank, where I headed for Bonnie Roth’s window. Bonnie—a member of the Herb Guild and a regular customer at the shop—is my favorite teller. Fingers flying on the adding machine, she began to work on my deposit. Without looking up from the checks, she said, in a low, worried voice, “China, what’s going on with Molly McGregor?”

“I’m not sure,” I said cautiously, thinking about what Diggety Dolittle had seen when he peeked through the window. “What makes you think there’s something going on?”

Bonnie leaned closer, her brown eyes anxious. “I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I was on the drive-up window Saturday afternoon about four, when Molly drove up and wanted to cash a check. A
big
check.”

“Oh?” I cleared my throat. “How big?”

Bonnie looked to the right and the left, then wrote $10,000 on a slip of paper and slid it through the window. “Of course,” she said, watching my eyebrows go up, “for a check that size, I had to phone Mr. Carson. He was watching the UT-OKLAHOMA game on TV.” She made a face. “It was overtime, the score was six to six, and UT was inside Oklahoma’s ten-yard line. When I interrupted him, he was mad enough to spit nails.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. Carl Carson, the bank president, used to be a cheerleader for the UT football team. He’s one of the Long-horns’ biggest fans. “Did he approve the check?”

“Finally, after UT kicked a field goal. He had me tell him Molly’s balance.” She frowned. “It worried me, though. Because of that guy.”

“What guy?”

“The guy in Molly’s minivan, with her. He looked like a
gangster.
” Bonnie shuddered. “Big and square, with muscular shoulders and a day’s growth of beard. Huge hands, with black hair on the back. Very sensual lips.”

Bonnie certainly had seen a lot through that drive-up window. “Not everybody can look like Tom Hanks,” I protested mildly. “Had you ever seen this man before?”

Bonnie shook her head. “A total stranger,” she said, her voice ominous. “Molly took the ten thousand out of the caddy and that thug grabbed her arm and said, ‘I’ll take that.’ In a really nasty voice.”

I frowned. “And then what happened?”

“And then he said, ‘Let’s get the hell outta here,’ and they drove off.”

“I suppose,” I said, “that there are all kinds of explanations for this.”

“I can think of one.” Bonnie’s mouth was set and grim. “That gorilla kidnapped her at gunpoint, made her drive to the bank and withdraw that money, and then—” She stopped.

“And then what?”

She shuddered. “I don’t want to think about it,” she said, and looked over my shoulder. “Next!”

Back at the shop, I grabbed a sandwich from the tearoom and went in search of Ruby. I found her on her knees in her front window, setting up a display of Tarot decks. I filled her in on what Diggety Dolittle had seen through the side window at the Hobbit House this morning, and what Bonnie Roth had seen through the bank’s drive-up window on Saturday.

“Ten thousand dollars!” Ruby’s eyes popped wide open. “Why in the world would Molly give that kind of money to some strange thug, unless she was coerced?”

“Bonnie only thought he looked like a thug,” I pointed out. “He might be a perfectly respectable person, for all we know.” But even to my ears, I didn’t sound convincing. I sighed. “Let’s go next door and see what Diggety was talking about.”

We went through the garden gate, and I took the key to Molly’s back door out of its hiding place behind the loose shingle. Ruby and I let ourselves in. The back room, where Molly keeps the science and nature books, looked perfectly neat. But when we went into the main room, we could see right away that something was wrong.

Ruby gasped. “What a
mess
!”

That was almost an understatement. Books had been knocked from the shelves and lay open on the floor. Potted plants had been pushed from the windowsills, the soil spilled all over the floor, even tracked across the pages of books. The blinds hung askew, posters were crooked, and the toys were scattered in the play area. It looked as if a tornado had ripped through the place. And on the carpet in the middle of the room, we found a big smear of dark, dried blood.

“We’d better call the police,” Ruby said through clenched teeth. “There’s obviously been a fight of some kind. Maybe that gangster beat Molly up.”

“Let’s check upstairs before we call,” I said, heading for the stairs. But the second-floor rooms were untouched, and Molly’s living quarters on the third floor—a cute little three-room apartment—looked just the way they usually did. Except that the table had been set for two and not cleared after the meal was eaten, Peter Rabbit’s cage door was open and Peter was gone, and there was no sign of Mrs. T, Molly’s large calico cat.

“Molly’s been kidnapped,” Ruby said grimly.

“Maybe she’s just . . . gone away somewhere,” I said, trying to think of alternative explanations.

“And left Peter’s cage open and the place in a mess?” Ruby snapped. “No way.” She reached for the phone. “I’m calling the cops.”

 

 

In Pecan Springs, phoning the cops usually gets you Tommy Ryan, who handles the calls in our part of town. Because it was Ruby calling, however, we also got Sheila Dawson, the Pecan Springs chief of police and a close friend of ours. Sheila and Ryan showed up in a matter of minutes. After a look around, she dispatched Ryan to check the windows and doors for signs of forced entry, then opened her notebook and asked us what we knew about the situation.

“Actually, we don’t
know
anything,” I said. By this time, I was feeling very defensive. “All we can do is guess. And we don’t have much to go on.”

“That’s nonsense, China,” Ruby replied tersely, and told Sheila what Ethel Fritz and Bonnie Roth had told me. “Obviously,” she concluded, “Molly’s been kidnapped by some big gorilla of a guy, who forced her to withdraw ten thousand dollars from her bank and—”

“Ruby,” I said, “I don’t want to throw cold water on your theory, but we don’t know that anybody forced Molly to do anything. All we know for sure is that she made a withdrawal and—”

“And now she’s gone,” Ruby interrupted. “Her rabbit and her cat are also missing, the downstairs has been totally wrecked, and there’s blood all over the carpet. Those are
facts
, China, not guesses.”

“We’ll check everything out,” Sheila said, standing up. “And I’ll ask the DPS to keep an eye out for her vehicle.”

We gave her a description of Molly’s van and found a photo of Molly on the bedroom dresser. We couldn’t find an address book, unfortunately, and none of us knew exactly where her daughter, Karen, lived. Ryan came back to report that none of the windows or doors had been jimmied, and Sheila called for somebody to come and check out the blood on the floor. “Let me know if you hear anything,” she said. “I’ll keep you posted on our progress.”

For the rest of the week, the neighborhood could talk about nothing but the mysterious absence of Molly McGregor. The news of her disappearance traveled up and down the streets faster than a computer virus, and each of the Neighborhood Watchers had a different view of the situation.

“She ran off with the UPS delivery man,” Mr. Cowan told me with obvious relish when I met him in the alley the next morning, where he was walking Miss Lula. “I saw ’em together, out there strollin’ through that garden o’ hers.” Miss Lula yapped vociferously, and he added, “Oh, yeah. Miss Lula wants me t’ tell you that she chased that white rabbit outta the yard last night.”

“Last night?” I asked.

“That’s what I said, ain’t it?” Mr. Cowan snapped. “Whatsa matter? You hard o’ hearin’ or something?”

“Before Mrs. McGregor ran off to Mexico, she turned her calico cat loose,” Vivian Baxter lamented, coming into the shop to buy some more catnip. “The wretched beast destroyed my catnip last night!”

Last night. So both the cat and the rabbit were still in the neighborhood. Which didn’t solve anything, unfortunately. It only added to the mystery.

“I never believed that story about Molly McGregor inheriting money from her mother,” Leona Love told me, when I saw her on the street. “If you ask me, there’s something
ve-ry
crooked going on here. Maybe she and that gangster stole some money together, and he tracked her down and forced her to hand over his share.”

And so it went, each neighbor embroidering an already disturbing picture with one more bit of speculation. It would certainly have been helpful if the police had been able to track down Molly’s car or get a fix on her whereabouts, but they seemed to have drawn a complete blank. A few questions did get answered, however.

The smear of blood on the carpet turned out to be animal, not human blood, and a likely explanation emerged when I discovered Mrs. Tiggywinkle nonchalantly washing her paws on my back patio and saw that her shoulder had been badly nipped. When Ruby found Peter Rabbit hiding under the holly bushes, there was enough dried blood on his white fur bib to convince us that he had been the nippee. And as we straightened up the Hobbit House, we decided that the mess was probably made by Peter and Mrs. T. Peter’s cage must have come unlatched, and he and Mrs. T, normally best buddies, had gotten into a spat that had escalated into full-blown war, Mrs. T employing claws and fangs, Peter using his strong back feet and his sharp front teeth, perfectly honed for carrot-crunching. If the two of them had had access to nukes, there’s no telling what would have happened before they made their exit through the kitty door and down the alley.

It was the next Monday morning, however, before we learned what had happened to our friend Molly—and by that time, the neighbors were thoroughly sick of their own gossipy tales and wild for some real information. I was in the shop, unpacking a box of crescent moon-shaped, satin-covered dream pillows that my friend Carol had made for me, when the door opened and Molly herself stepped in.

“Hey, China,” she said. “I’m back.”