Dark Tort (24 page)

Meg settled herself in a chair near the hearth. Her two couches and four chairs were all constructed of rough-hewn logs. Each one sported horsehair cushions and was piled with Native American woven blankets in shades of rust, sand, and gray. The decorator of the H&J reception area might have thought she was evoking the Old West, but this was the real deal. I picked out a chair near Meg and sat down.

“Goldy and I have a party to do in a little while,” Julian said from the doorway. “Why don’t you let me get the tea so you all can have time to talk?” Before we could respond, Julian trod quickly across a Hopi rug of the same weave and earth tones as the room’s blankets and cushions. “Don’t worry,” he said as he disappeared around a corner. “I’ll find what I need.”

I felt suddenly awkward, sitting in this Old West living room with a woman whom I admired but did not know very well. Meg, usually so forthright, smoothed imaginary wrinkles out of her jeans and stared at the ashes in the fireplace. “I don’t know where to start, and I know you can’t stay long.” Her voice trembled. “I talked to Sally Routt this morning, and I feel so disconnected . . .” She pulled a tissue from where she’d tucked it into her waistband, and began to weep quietly.

“I understand,” I said softly. I felt my own throat close. Maybe coming over to this house had not been a good idea.

Meg dabbed her eyes and nose. “Sally said you were trying to help figure out what happened to her daughter. She said you’d promised to keep the police and press out of it.”

“That’s not exactly—” I began, but stopped. “Look, Meg. I am trying to help Sally. Why don’t you start by telling me why you wanted to see me.”

“Well.” Meg cleared her throat and gave me the benefit of her clear brown eyes. “You remember my neighbor Charlie Baker.”

I nodded. “We were friends. We used to cook together sometimes.”

“He was a wonderful, eccentric old coot.” She smiled, remembering, then frowned. “You know how much Charlie adored our congregation, and the feeling was mutual. He always insisted on making all the pancakes for the Shrove Tuesday supper. He relished running the luncheon café at the church during the Episcopal Church Women’s home tour.”

I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. “We did the baked goods for the bazaar together.”

“You remember how upset he was when Father Biesbrouck died.”

“I do.”

“But never mind,” she said brusquely. “That hurt us all. When Charlie found out he was sick, he had a lot to do, you know, legally. H&J was his firm, and they sent Dusty over to work with him, to get his affairs in order. She . . . she came every day. What a dear girl. She would help Charlie, then she would always come over here to say hello, bring me some warm whole wheat bread or something else that Charlie had made for me. Even though he was sick, he still baked.

Dusty said he claimed it made him feel as if he could live forever.” She stopped talking for a moment. “Poor Charlie. He wanted to have one last show, in March.”

“I know,” I interjected. “I did the food for it—”

She waved this away. “People came from all over, they bought Charlie’s paintings. He sat in a chair and soaked it all in. But when I drove him home, he was in a foul mood, poor thing. There’d been an accident outside the gallery, and that slowed us down . . . but he hardly seemed to notice it. When I left him off, he asked me if I knew of any private investigators.”

“A private investigator? To find out what?”

Julian appeared, carrying tea things. After he’d set down the tray, he said, “Do you all want me to leave?”

“No, no,” Meg said, her voice distressed. “It’s all right.” Julian poured the tea and gave me a wide-eyed look, as in What’s going on? I shook my head quickly, then took the proffered cup, which Julian announced was Darjeeling. Meg barely nodded when Julian put her cup down on a small table made of intricately twisted branches.

Meg fixed me with that gaze of hers. “I told him to try H&J. He said he had other business to do there.”

“What kind of business?” I asked.

“I don’t know, he didn’t say.” She frowned, lost in her reminiscence. “I guess he meant his will, but that’s just conjecture.”

“Uh,” Julian interjected, “I don’t want to be rude here, but Goldy and I need to think about getting over to the Ellises’ house.”

Meg stood up. “All right, then,” she announced. “I didn’t ask you to come here because of Charlie. I wanted to see you because of Dusty.” She glared at the tea things, as if they were somehow getting in the way of her story. “Could you bring your tea into my workout room? I’ll show you . . . what has me disconcerted.”

Julian and I glanced at each other, then picked up separate mugs. Julian doused his with sugar, and then we dutifully followed Meg down a narrow hallway and into a small log room that had bookshelves on three sides and a wall of wavy-glassed casement windows overlooking the ridge. Incongruously, a treadmill and two weight machines were placed in front of the shelves and windows.

“Used to be my father’s office,” Meg said by way of explanation. She moved over to the treadmill, which had been placed next to the bank of windows on the far side of the room. “I walk here, and run a bit, too. Do my exercises, push-ups and working with weights. Looking out the window keeps me from getting bored.”

I peeked out the window, which had a view through the pines . . . to Charlie Baker’s house. In profile, the house looked like the glass prow of a ship, set at anchor overlooking Flicker Ridge. From the window, one also had a good view of the iron fence around Charlie’s house, and the gate to his driveway.

“That lot was empty for many years,” Meg told us. “When Charlie became successful, he asked me if I would mind if he bought the land from the Flicker Ridge developers. I told him if I was going to have a neighbor, it was better to have him than a member of the nouveaux riches. That’s a category that you can put your friends the Ellises in, by the way.”

“They’re not my friends,” I corrected her. “They’re my clients.”

“Touché,” said Meg. “So Charlie built that monstrosity of a house. Talk about people living in glass houses. Well. When I walked on my treadmill, I would see cars, trucks, repair people, anyone coming and going from that house. I knew Dusty’s Civic by heart. Whenever I saw it, it would make me happy, because I knew she was helping Charlie, and that she’d be coming over soon with fresh, warm bread.” Meg smiled faintly at the memory.

“So,” I prompted her, “you saw something having to do with Dusty?”

Meg lifted her chin. “Dusty told me, after Charlie died, that the law firm had put her in charge of picking up his mail on her lunch hour. She said that was part of settling an estate.” She shook her head. “I suppose I was wrong to expect her to keep coming over. I mean, Charlie wasn’t there anymore, so there was no bread to bring. And a young girl’s lunch hour is only sixty minutes, after all. But . . . well, it just used to comfort me to see her car in Charlie’s driveway every day. All of a sudden, after Charlie died, she began to pull into his garage and put down the door. I don’t mean to sound like an old woman, because after all, I am an old woman. But I’d be over here on my treadmill, thinking, The days are getting longer, why doesn’t she park outside? And why does it take her entire lunch hour to pick up the mail? She was like clockwork, though, after Charlie died. Drive through Charlie’s gate at ten after noon, go straight into the garage— I suppose she had a remote control for that—close the garage door. Then the garage door would open at ten to one, and out would come the Civic. Don’t you think that’s odd? Does it take an hour to pick up someone’s mail?”

“Maybe she had other things to do for the law firm,” I offered. “Inventory Charlie’s stuff, that kind of thing.”

“Right,” said Meg, nodding. “That’s what I thought, because I asked a friend on one of my softball teams. Lots to do, check out bank account statements, find assets, and so on. But then . . .” She stopped talking.

“Then?” asked Julian, his voice betraying a hint of impatience.

“Then Tuesday night of this week, Dusty’s Civic was there. She came through the gate at about a quarter to five. Didn’t park in the garage. Ran up the steps of Charlie’s house and came out less than five minutes later. She was carrying a tube.”

“A tube like a tube of toothpaste?” Julian again.

“No, no, no,” corrected Meg. “A tube like the kind you send through the mail.”

Right, I thought, a tube like the kind you send through the mail. Or like the kind you use for a rolled-up painting.

Dusty was doing the inventory. I may not have learned much of what they did at H&J, but I certainly remembered the lawyers’ joke about the “race to the house.” That was why you had locks changed right after someone died. Dusty had told me she had received the new locks to Charlie’s house from Richard himself, who was Charlie’s executor. She’d also told me that no one was allowed to take anything out of Charlie’s house until the estate was settled, and that wasn’t going to happen until she had completed the inventory, which was extensive.

Would she have dared to take a painting? Why? If she had stolen a work of Charlie’s, how could she possibly have thought she would get away with it? I felt more confused than ever.

And what was this with the closed garage doors on her lunch hour?

“Wait,” I said, thinking of the “New O.” from Dusty’s journal. “Do you have any idea what was going on in Dusty’s life at the time? Like maybe she had a boyfriend or something?”

Meg’s face wrinkled in disgust. “She never discussed her social life with me, Goldy.”

“Okay.” Now I felt embarrassed, and covered it by taking another sip of tea. “Let’s go back to the tube. Did she say Charlie had given her something?” I pressed. “That he had left her something? A painting, maybe?”

“No,” Meg said. “And I have no idea what Dusty was doing over there on her lunch hour every day. Working on the inventory? Then why not stay longer? And working on what?” Meg paused. “I never found out any of those things because two days after Dusty came out with the tube, you found her in the law firm. Dead.”

So: Two days before Dusty was killed, she had carried a tube— maybe the kind used to store paintings—out of Charlie Baker’s house. She’d been in love with a boyfriend nobody, not even her mother, seemed to know anything about. What else? Let’s see: When the weather had been blizzardlike, Dusty had parked her Honda in front of Charlie Baker’s house, and walked inside to do his legal work. Once Charlie had passed away, Dusty had received new keys to Charlie’s house, been assigned to inventory Charlie’s estate, and do other odd jobs such as pick up his mail every day. But by the time she’d been assigned to do all that, the weather had turned pleasant. Nevertheless, she’d driven her Civic into Charlie’s garage when she arrived . . . and closed the door behind her.

Goodness me, I thought grimly as Julian piloted the Rover back down to the main road that ran through Flicker Ridge, all this info was not helping to clear up anything. I sighed. Dusty Routt had been dead for over twenty-four hours, and all I’d picked up was information that seemed, at best, disconnected. Worse, I’d made no progress trying to figure out what had been going on in her life that had prompted someone to kill her.

I didn’t even want to contemplate the inevitable meeting with Sally Routt.

Once Julian was on Flicker Ridge Road, he headed the Rover toward the western edge of the development. Donald and Nora Ellis lived by Flicker Ridge’s border, on a dead end that overlooked hundreds of acres of pine forest, all part of Furman County Open Space. It was prime real estate that kids could have run and played in, but the Ellises had no children. If anything, they were a typical example of the housing reversal that had become part of the demography of Aspen Meadow, and perhaps the rest of the country. To wit: the fewer kids and the more money you had, the bigger house and yard you demanded. On our lower-middle-class street, the lots were tiny and the houses small. Yet after school every day, kids spilled out of the driveways and onto the sidewalks to kick soccer balls, throw baseballs, and toss Frisbees to their dogs. When a blizzard moved through and school was canceled, the kiddos would grab their big toboggans and slide merrily down our road, yelling “Yahoo!” all the way, until they made a sharp right turn into the last driveway before Main Street.

Then again, Nora and Donald Ellis weren’t entirely without family, as Bishop Sutherland, Nora’s father, had been living with them for almost ten months. What I had picked up from Nora was not an isn’t-this-fun-Dad’s-come-to-stay-with-us attitude. When I’d booked the party, Nora had tossed her blond hair and announced, “Yes, my father will be at Donald’s party, because he will still be living with us. That’s why I had to invite Marla, so we’d be an even number at the table. God! The sooner my father’s out of here—” She’d stopped. Then she’d laughed, as if it were all a joke. “Maybe he’ll hook up with Marla, get married, and have all kinds of money to spend on medical treatment for that damn arrhythmia! Not to mention unlimited funds for clothing, cars, trips, and anything his big old diseased heart desires.”

Well, I definitely didn’t want somebody with medical problems to hook up with my best friend, who’d already had a heart attack, thank you very much. On impulse, I put in a cell call to Wink Calhoun. Luckily, she was at home.

“Wink,” I asked casually after I’d identified myself, “do you know anything about Bishop Uriah Sutherland? I’m just wondering, because he’s my closest friend’s sort-of date for the party today, and I don’t know anything about him, apart from the fact that he’s been helping out at our parish for a while.”