Chill Factor (12 page)

Banging the horseshoe again, she wondered if Marty had fallen asleep. Then she peeked in a window, and her brain sorted through memories of the home’s interior for places that might yield useful information. She recalled that Edna had kept a memento box in a hall closet. Vacation snapshots, postcards, invitations—everything went into the box until she found time to stick them in albums or frames. Her bookshelf, too, collected memorabilia.

After several minutes, Marty answered the knock.

“Sorry, I was on the phone with my partner. We have a show for a new artist opening this week.” He looked distracted. “Hell of a time for me to be gone.”

Right. Damn your mother for being so inconsiderate.
Dixie swallowed the sarcasm and braced herself for the nostalgia that hit as she entered the living room. Edna’s fondness for flowers showed everywhere, from wisteria-printed draperies to hand-stitched bluebonnets on the sofa pillows. But the place had a just-scrubbed look Dixie didn’t associate with Edna. Marty’s mother, friendly, generous, and comfortable as an old shoe, had never wasted energy keeping a spotless house. And it was the new Edna she needed to learn about.

“Did the cops take anything?”

Marty shook his head. “Unless I’m overlooking it.”

“They’d have left a receipt.”

“They asked a lot of questions about the hunting rifles—wanted to know if Mom owned any handguns, which I’d already told them she didn’t.”

Marty had tossed his jacket and tie on a chair and rolled up his shirtsleeves. A lock of hair tumbled across his ear. Dixie liked him better this way. Less pressed. He raked the hair back.

“Did your mother ever fire those rifles?”

“Dad taught both of us to shoot when I was about ten. After years of hunting, and bagging only one small whitetail buck, he lost interest and the rifles stood unused in the case. Come on back. There’s a desk in the dining room where Mom paid bills. The bank and tax records should be there, too.”

Fine. She’d get to those. Did he expect to discover a Caribbean bank account containing money from previous robberies?

“What I want to see first are the rooms where your mother spent her time.” To get to know the personal side of the new Edna.

Marty shrugged and led the way to the kitchen. A new juice maker gleamed on the counter. A wire basket held carrots, onions, and peppers—probably from Edna’s small garden—all still looked fresh, except for the drooping carrot tops. The vinyl floor appeared recently polished—another sign of the neatness and order Dixie didn’t associate with her neighbor.

“Did your mother hire a maid?”

Marty peered around at the tidy kitchen. “She might’ve.”

He opened the refrigerator and absently stared inside as he’d done thousands of times when he lived here. His features slackened into a sadness that alleviated Dixie’s annoyance with him. She turned toward the bedrooms, Marty’s first. It looked exactly as she remembered. His bed, updated during his college years, was flanked by a matching cherry-wood desk and chest with brass hardware. His college pennant sagged over the mirror. Two paintings he’d done in high school decorated one wall. In the master bedroom, a fluffy cream-white comforter replaced Edna’s antique crocheted bedspread. Plump pillows in shades of white were layered three deep against a wooden headboard, carved with angels. A sisal carpet took the place of a colorful braided rug Dixie remembered.

“What happened to all the stuff on her dresser?” Marty demanded. “All the paintings I gave her? The pottery vases I made while I was growing up? Look at this.”

Seven white candles in an array of sizes, each on a simple wooden holder, scented the air with a light citrus fragrance. Otherwise, the dresser top was clear. The walls were bare. She opened a drawer. Bottles of creams and oils and jars of makeup lined one side. A fancy art deco tray of brushes and combs lined the other.

Dixie lifted out a jar to read its lavender-and-silver label. Ornate letters spelled the name “Artistry Spa” and boasted “custom-blended,” which, to Dixie, meant pricey. All the cosmetics bore the same label. A business card with the spa logo and the name
LONNIE GRAY, PROPRIETOR
lay beneath one of the jars. Dixie slipped the card into her pocket. Before closing the drawer, she carefully ran her fingers along the wooden surface above it. Nothing taped there.

“No pills,” Marty reported from the bathroom. “Not even a bottle of aspirin or liniment. Just vitamins. What happened to her blood pressure medicine?”

“Maybe she kept it in her purse,” Dixie suggested. “If she took it frequently.” She opened another dresser drawer. Not much there. A simple nightshirt, champagne white. Several
bras. A third drawer held cotton underwear, the next, cotton socks and three unopened pairs of panty hose.

She eased the mirror away from the wall to check behind it, then moved to the nightstand. The drawer held reading glasses, pens, and, toward the back, a single-dose package of Tylenol. Behind a door in the lower compartment, she found a stack of volumes, each about six by nine inches, all covered in identical fabric. She lifted one out. The cotton cover, with its tropical flower design, felt almost like satin.

“I remember those!” Marty snatched the book away. “I gave her these blank journals on her fiftieth birthday. One a year, enough to last until she reached a hundred.” He opened the volume and flipped rapidly through the pages.

“I only count fifteen,” she told him.

“She kept them in the attic, brought a new one down each January.”

“Edna was what, sixty-five?”

“Sixty-six. This one’s dated last year.”

Dixie recounted. Fifteen. “There’s one missing.” She checked the dates on the others. “This year’s would be less than half filled. It’s not here. Maybe it was in her car, along with her purse.”

“Which the cops have,” Marty grumbled. “Maybe they stole the journal from this cabinet.”

“Marty, they wouldn’t take it without leaving a receipt.”

In the closet—remarkably free of clutter—warm-up suits, leotards for working out, and a pair of denim jeans lay folded on shelves. Cotton shirts, two plain cotton dresses, both white, and a coral silk dress similar to the blue one Edna had worn during the bank robbery hung from the rod.

“Where’s all the
stuff?”
Marty said irritably, coming up behind Dixie. “Mom never threw anything away. Always planning to patch it or hem it up or dye it and wear it a couple more years. She had sizes from twelve to sixteen, for all the diets she tried and the weight she lost and regained. This stuff looks new.”

Indeed. Dixie checked the tags inside a few of the items—all size ten. Several came from one manufacturer, “Unique
Boutique,” a private-label women’s shop Dixie’d seen in the Galleria area. Tracing all the flat surfaces with her fingers, as she had the dresser and nightstand drawers, Dixie found no hidden caches.

“Marty, where does she keep her address book?”

“The desk in the dining room.”

He led the way. Opening a drawer, he removed a well-thumbed, spiral-bound book. A bouquet of sunflowers decorated the cover. Years of use had abraded the edges and softened the colors.

Dixie opened it to A. No Ames listed. Then to B, for Bacon, in case Edna’s attack on the bank had been directed at Len in particular. No dice. No “Texas Citizens” listed under T, no gun shop under G. She hadn’t really expected to find anything that easily. Scanning the pages one by one, she did notice a difference in the writing over the years. Bill had no doubt made some of the entries. Erasures, with new information penciled over, indicated new addresses or phone numbers. Some erasures hadn’t been reentered. Numbers no longer needed? Deaths? You couldn’t live to be nearly seventy without people around you passing away.

“How about going through this and jotting down any names you don’t recognize?” she asked Marty. “I want to look through her canceled checks.”

“Yeah, okay. But shouldn’t I help you?”

“We can cover more ground quickly working on separate tasks.”

He gave her a grudging nod, then turned over a paper-clip holder, removed a key, and opened a locked drawer. Dixie wondered if people really expected burglars to be fooled by such tactics. Boxes of checks filled the drawer.

“Here are the more recent ones.” Marty indicated a date scrawled on a box lid.

“Okay. I can take it from here.”

He shrugged, grabbed a pencil from a cup on the desk and a tablet from one of the drawers. Dropping onto a chair at the dining table, he bent diligently over his task.

Edna’s checks, carbonless duplicates, the same kind Dixie used …
with a blocked-out signature on each copy … a
diligent forger with a single checkbook would have dozens of examples to practice …

With a mental nudge, Dixie turned her thoughts from her own account problems to Aunt Edna’s records. The current checkbook was probably in her purse, now in the hands of the police. The most recent checks in the drawer, dated eleven days earlier, were written to the grocery store, health food store, drugstore, a gasoline credit card payment. Apparently, Edna had gone into Houston on May tenth to shop. On that date, she wrote several checks to department stores and one to a Terrence Jackson, for consultation. Dixie jotted the name down, along with Artistry Spa and the Unique Boutique. Any new people and places in Edna’s life could be revealing.

On May third Edna paid for six months’ car insurance. Dixie wondered if the comprehensive covered bullet holes. In December and January, Edna issued four checks to “Fit After Fifty,” a popular health club chain. The notation on a November payment to Southwest Airlines read “Dallas, Marty’s art show.”

Closing the last box, Dixie dropped it back in the drawer. The desk blotter had shifted, and now a folded newspaper clipping peeked from beneath it. The article, dated the previous November, featured a band called “Meanstreak” playing at a club in the Heights. Folded inside the clipping, a ticket bore the club’s name and address.

Meanstreak?
Curiouser and curiouser. She added the health club and nightclub to her list.

Edna’s calendar started with January of the current year. The letters “FAF” marked every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday through February. May fifth was circled without an explanation. She’d circled Marty’s upcoming show in red. The only other marked date, May tenth, bore a penciled notation: Vernice Urich, four
P.M
. The same day as Edna’s shopping trip to Houston. No address or phone number. Dixie wrote down the name. She glanced through the other desk drawers, meticulously running her hands over the backs and bottoms, and then moved to the bookshelf.

The Zen of Eating. Fit for Life.
A booklet titled
An Ounce of Wheat Grass.
Recalling the chef’s salad Edna had served
Parker, Dixie thumbed the
Zen
book to a recipe section about halfway back.
Spinach, shredded apples, bok choy?

These cookbooks were all new, compared to
Fanny Farmer
and
Good Housekeeping.
Another new book,
Work It On Out
, stood behind three framed five-by-seven photographs.

The first snapshot, of Edna, Bill, and Marty in front of a Christmas tree, had been taken the Christmas before Bill died. The second picture, one of those glamour photos Dixie’d seen advertised at malls, with professional makeup and soft focus, showed Edna as she’d looked at the bank, hours before her death.

“Seeing the changes in your mother before and after her new fitness regimen, I’d say she was on to something,” Dixie said.

Marty rose from his chair and snatched the glamour shot from Dixie’s hand.

“That’s
Mom?”
He plopped back down like a deflated balloon.

“That’s not the way she looked last time you saw her?”

“No. But I guess I didn’t realize … I mean, she dressed nice for the art show, and she looked great, but she didn’t stay over, flew right back that night … I mean, how often had I seen her in party clothes? She and Dad never went places as upscale as my gallery … except that one time, when we first opened.”

The third photo, at least twenty years old, had been taken on a golf course. Bill, curled over a putter, had apparently sunk a winning ball. Marty held the flag, while Edna and two men applauded.

“Your mother looks as trim in this recent photograph,” Dixie said, “as she did way back then.” She studied the men with Edna on the golf course. “This is your father’s old army buddy—what was his name? And his son.”

“Hager,” Marty said quietly. “J. Claude and Derry Hager.”

“That’s right—Bill always called him J. Claude, never just Claude. And Derry caddied for them—although you and I usually chased the balls.”

“Yeah, that was Derry.” Marty abruptly stacked all three photographs on the desk. “And his father.”

His eyes had turned evasive. Dixie recalled hearing whispers in the Flannigan household that Bill’s old friend had a crush on Edna. Dixie looked back at the photograph. Edna and J. Claude were standing together.

“We didn’t exactly come here to dig up old memories,” Marty said. “Did you find anything
useful?”

“Won’t know until we follow a few trails.” She checked her notes. “Do you know a Terrence Jackson? Or Vernice Urich?”

“No, but I saw Jackson’s name in her book, a financial consultant.”

“What about this date?” Dixie pointed to May fifth circled on the calendar.

Marty’s face tightened.

“Aw, nuts.” Stiff-lipped, he turned away. “Her birthday. I forgot it.”

They continued to search, including the box of photographs and mementos in the closet, but found nothing else “useful.” Dixie pocketed her notes and strolled back through the house, one last sweep for anything they might’ve missed. This time, she particularly noticed the dichotomy between the colorful, flowered decor in the living room and the white, un-embellished decor in the kitchen, bedroom, and master bath. This difference, more than anything she’d seen, epitomized Edna’s personality change, from a warm and caring country mother to a cool sophisticate who could dispassionately commit armed robbery.

Dixie departed for the walk home. With a distracted wave, Marty flipped open his cell phone.