Dead Over Heels (10 page)
Authors: Charlaine Harris
After an upsetting forty-five minutes, during which nothing had been settled and Sam’s hair had turned a little grayer right before my eyes, I’d gone to pick up Madeleine at the vet. They’d gotten the blood sample and sent it to a lab, Dr. Jamerson had told me with determined cheerfulness, and he expected to get a reply from the lab in a few days, maybe a week. I’d loaded Madeleine in my car with the strong feeling that the vet and his staff wouldn’t have minded a bit if the hypothetical drugger had used something stronger and more lethal, or perhaps tied that bow a little tighter.
Somehow I’d expected Dr. Jamerson to have the answer ready right then—had Madeleine been drugged or had she not?—and not knowing had thrown me even further off course. As Madeleine yowled on the way home, I had found myself thinking of getting a dog, a medium-sized stupid one who was everyone’s friend. A mutt with brown rough hair and a black muzzle . . . but Jane Engle, who’d left me Madeleine and a heck of a lot of money, had somehow astral-projected her strongly disapproving face right into my consciousness.
So I trudged into the library’s back door feeling dispirited. At least Angel had been out running this morning as I was driving in to town. She’d grinned and waved at me. A smiling Angel—and one with a bulging abdomen—was something I would have to get used to. I smoothed my own oversized orange T-shirt over my stomach; I was wearing orange leggings, too, and there was a big gold sun on the front of my tee. I was hoping the children would think it a cheerful outfit. I’d pulled my hair back with an orange-and-gold barrette, and I was wearing my gold-framed glasses. Just a blaze of color, that was me.
“Who was that woman who came in to see you yesterday?” Perry asked, as I stowed my purse in my locker. He was using the microwave to make hot chocolate, which he drank regardless of the outside temperature; he had quite a sweet tooth, though by his leanness you wouldn’t have guessed it.
Here I was, I thought wryly, glowing all over the place, and as usual, I was being asked about . . . my bodyguard.
“Angel Youngblood.”
“She’s not local.”
“No. She’s from Florida.”
“Married?”
Well, well, well. “Very,” I said firmly. “And a black belt in karate, as is her husband.”
Perry didn’t seem dismayed by this news. “She’s just stunning,” he said. “I could tell by the way she walks that she’s an athlete. And her coloring is so unusual.”
“Yep, she’s gold,” I answered, burrowing in my locker for a tube of breath mints. I’d had this conversation with many men (and some women) about Angel. “I thought you were pretty tight with Jenny Tankersley?”
“Oh, we’re dating,” Perry said casually, though his mother Sally had told me they were all but engaged.
Jenny wouldn’t have been pleased to hear Perry dismiss her so cavalierly, from what I’d heard of her. She’d been married for a few years to a man who ran his own crop-dusting service, and when Jack Tankersley had made a fatal mistake regarding plane altitude one summer, Jenny had ended up selling the business and doing very well for herself. She’d stayed on as general dogs-body for the three pilots who’d bought it, doing every task from answering the phone to ordering supplies to making out the checks, and occasionally she flew herself, as she had with her husband.
Perry seemed drawn to strong women.
“Your friend Angel must be the woman Paul was talking about last night,” Perry said, stirring his Swiss Miss with a plastic spoon. I was standing awkwardly, my weight on the foot closest to the door, waiting to terminate this conversation so I could get to my area, though I was dreading seeing Beverly. I had a kindergarten class coming in fifteen minutes, and I’d left a note requesting yesterday’s volunteer to cut out twenty-two spring flowers, one for each child to write his or her name on, to stick to the ends of the bookshelves. Hopefully, each child would bring a parent into the library to see the flower, and the child and the parent would both check out books. I had to get out the yellow stickum, and I had to count the flowers . . .
“You had supper with your mom’s ex?” I said with some surprise.
“Paul and I have always gotten along. He’s been more like a father than an uncle to me. Especially since I’ve only seen Dad a few times in my whole life,” Perry added with understandable bitterness.
The fact that Sally’s latest ex, Paul Allison, was the brother of Sally’s first ex, Perry’s father Steve, made the situation a little complicated emotionally. I was glad there wasn’t a third Allison brother, and I was willing to bet Sally was too.
“Jenny’s giving flying lessons now,” Perry said, determined to chat. “I’m taking, and so is Paul, and your friend Arthur Smith . . .”
“That’s great, Perry, and I want to hear more about it later,” I said insincerely. “I’ve got to get to work now, I’ve got a group coming in.”
But even as I banished visions of the Lawrenceton police force on air patrol, focusing instead on visions of little kids who were going to want some individual recognition in about ten minutes, Sam came out of his office and strode over to us looking very worried. Sam is not very good with people; he is a great manager of things, but not a great personnel guy. He’s become aware of that in the past few years, and whenever he has to say anything that is going to upset someone, he stews over it.
That’s why I didn’t expect anything awful; he was probably going to tell me the board had decided to hire a full-time children’s librarian and my job was terminated. I had a moment to think of this before he put his hand on my arm and said, “In view of our conference yesterday, I don’t know how you’re going to take this, but Beverly Rillington was so badly beaten last night they don’t know if she’ll live.”
“W
hat? Why?” I asked.
hat? Why?” I asked.
“Sit down, Roe, you’re white as a sheet,” Sam advised. He pulled out one of the chairs that had been tucked under the round table.
Perry sat down right by me, and I noticed he was on the pale side, too.
“Beverly’s mother Selena was hit by a drunk driver a month ago,” Sam said. “She’s still in a coma at the hospital. Beverly goes to see her every night. When Beverly got out of her car at her house after visiting her mother, someone jumped on her from behind and hit her with a piece of pipe. More than once.”
“Oh my God,” I said. I shook my head. What a dreadful thing. “Sam, did you know about her mother?” Beverly hadn’t breathed a word to me, and I suddenly realized the pressure Beverly had been under. Had pride kept her silent?
“She didn’t tell anyone here,” Sam said, shaking his head.
“It was in the paper,” Perry volunteered. “The wreck, that is. But I didn’t realize the injured woman was Beverly’s mom.”
“So . . . is Beverly . . . how bad is it?” I asked.
“Severe head wounds,” Sam answered succinctly. “Listen, I’ve got to tell the others, and send a flower arrangement to the hospital; don’t you have a group coming in this morning, Roe?”
I glanced at my watch and shot out of the chair.
Five minutes later, I met the kindergarten class at the door with a shaky smile, and hoped they wouldn’t notice my hands were trembling as I passed each of them a bright construction paper flower.
After they’d left, I had a little time to think between helping patrons. I wondered if someone had it in for Beverly’s family. Had her mother’s accident really been an accident? Or was the attack on Beverly totally unrelated, a kid on some kind of high taking the easiest money available?
A person would definitely have to be chemically altered to have the nerve to tackle Beverly, who was physically as well as mentally formidable. As I sat with my hands folded in my lap at my little desk, staring blankly at the shelves of books that walled me in, I wished Beverly and I hadn’t had our fracas the day before—and when I thought twice about it, I wished even more it hadn’t been witnessed by so many people.
Sure enough, when I was called to the phone, Arthur Smith was on the other end, at the police station. The Rillingtons’ house was in the city limits, so the city police were handling the investigation into the attack on Beverly.
“Roe, I wonder if I could talk to you after you get off work, about that incident in the library yesterday,” Arthur said. He had always been blunt. Once upon a time, I’d found that directness very exciting.
“Okay,” I said with a detectable lack of enthusiasm.
“Could you come by the station this afternoon, say around two o’clock?”
“I guess so. Why the station?”
“It’ll just be more convenient,” he said.
I liked this less and less. But it seemed paranoid to wonder if I needed a lawyer. Why was Arthur calling me, anyway? He was a robbery detective. Lynn Liggett Smith, his wife, was the only homicide detective on the Lawrenceton force, so other detectives were detailed to her sometimes, but why Arthur?
I began to wonder if I shouldn’t call Martin out of his seminar in Chicago and ask his advice. Nah. I’d talk to him tonight. Then I wondered if I should call my mother, and it didn’t seem like such a bad idea to tell her where I was going. Naturally, since Mother owns a prosperous realty business, the line was busy. So I figured I’d just stop by on my way to the police station.
Mother’s office, established in an old house and redecorated in calm, elegant colors, always made me feel inadequate. I’d hoped once to get interested in real estate, had even started studying for my license, but at last I’d had to admit that my only interest in real estate was in buying my own. When terms like “equity” and “Fannie Mae” and “assumable mortgage” began to be bandied about, my brain glazed over. But when I watched the controlled and purposeful bustle on good days at Select Realty, I felt a pang of regret.
Mother’s terrifyingly perfect receptionist, Patty Cloud, had graduated to office manager and then to Realtor. Her understudy, Debbie Lincoln, now controlled the desk in the reception area. Debbie had done some evolving of her own, from a rather slow, silent girl with cornrowed hair and baby fat to a slim, streamlined, fashionable babe who’d become the office computer expert. In the process, Debbie had gained a lot of artifice, and shed some of her natural charm. She’d also acquired confidence and lost her diffidence around older people.
As I entered, she gave me an “I see you but I’m in the middle of this” smile and waggle of magenta fingernails, the phone clamped between ear and shoulder, her fingers busy separating computer sheets, collating and stapling them.
“Uh-huh. Yes, Mrs. Kaplan, she’ll be there at three. No, ma’am, you don’t need to do anything special. She’ll just look over the house and tell you what she’d recommend you ask for it . . . no, ma’am, that doesn’t obligate . . . no, ma’am, you can call in as many as you like, but we hope you’ll list your house with us . . . right, three o’clock.” Debbie blew a breath out after she’d hung up.
“Difficult?” I asked.
“Girl, you know it,” Debbie said, shaking her head. “I half hope that woman doesn’t decide to list with us. Dealing with her is almost more trouble than it’s worth. Your mom is showing a house now, so if you wanted to see her, you may have quite a wait.”
“Heck,” I said. I wondered whether I should leave a note. “Debbie, do you know Beverly Rillington?” I asked out of the blue.
“Oh, isn’t that terrible, what happened to her?” Debbie stapled the last batch of papers together and tossed the result into Eileen Norris’s basket, which was half full of phone message slips already. Debbie followed my glance. “Eileen can’t get used to coming out here every time she comes back in the building,” Debbie said. “So her stuff kind of piles up. I don’t really know Beverly that well, she goes to a different church,” she added. “But Beverly has always been a real tough individual, a real loner. She had a baby, you know, when she was just fourteen . . . and then, when that baby was about a year old, it choked on a marble or something and died. Beverly hasn’t had it easy.”
I tried to imagine being pregnant at fourteen. I tried to imagine my baby dying.
I found I didn’t want to imagine that.
“I guess I’ll just leave Mother a note,” I told her, and started down the hall to Mother’s office. It was the biggest one, of course, and Mother had decorated it in cool, elegant gray, with a slash of deep red here and there for eye relief. Her desk was absolutely orderly, though covered with the paperwork on various projects, and I knew the notepads would be in the top right drawer—and they were—and that all Mother’s pencils would be sharp . . . and that I would snap off the point of the first one since it was so sharp and I pressed so hard. Having gone through that little ritual, all I had to do was compose a message to let her know I was going to be at the police station at a detective’s request, without propelling her out the office door with her flags flying.
Maybe such a composition wasn’t possible, I decided after sitting for several blank seconds with the (now blunt) pencil actually resting on the paper.
After a false start or two, I settled on: “Mom, I’m going to the police station to tell them about working with Beverly Rillington at the library. She got hurt last night. Call me at home at four o’clock. Love, Roe.”
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