Death Climbs a Tree (6 page)

Birdie was leading them to the office when a good-looking man in a gray suit and tie came down the hall toward them. His face was so unlined that the hints of silver over his ears might have been painted there for good effect. He smiled down at Birdie. “Visitors on company time?”

She glared up at him. “No, Jim. Police.”

“What's the trouble, officers?” A full, rich baritone now. Sounded like a man gunning for an Indianapolis TV news anchor's job.

Fred stopped himself before his imagination got him into trouble. “One of your employees was injured, sir.”

The smile broadened. “Not my employees. I'm just one of the peons.” He stuck out his hand. “Jim Chandler, sales and service.”

Fred thought Chandler's strong, warm grasp ought to serve him well in sales. “Lieutenant Lundquist. This is Sergeant Ketcham.”

Ketcham and Chandler exchanged nods.

“So who's hurt?”

Birdie answered. “Sylvia. She fell.”

The smile disappeared. “That's terrible. She was taking an awful risk, we knew. How bad is it?”

“Bad enough that the hospital wants to reach her family,” Birdie told him. “So if you'll let us past, I'm going to check our records.”

“Of course.” He raised his hands and stepped back. “And if there's anything I can do, anything at all, please let me know.”

“Thanks,” Fred said, and followed Birdie Eads into Personnel to a desk by a window. A simple brass nameplate identified it as hers. Whatever her job, she wasn't in the secretarial pool.

Sitting at her computer, she quickly pulled up Sylvia's record. By now a little circle of women had gathered behind them and were conversing in shocked whispers.

“There. Her emergency contact is Linda Smith, Waterloo, Iowa. That's the sister I remember. She's closer to Sylvia's age, and I think they really understand each other the best, too. I'll copy her street address and phone number for you.” She whipped out an index card and wrote in a clear, round hand.

“You have her medical insurance, too?” Fred asked.

“Of course. It's through the company. I'll call the hospital and give them all that. I'm only sorry I don't have Linda's e-mail address. Sylvia probably does, though. Trouble is, we're careful about passwords around here. I couldn't get to her address book, and the person who could is out sick today.”

“We could check her home computer, if she has one,” Ketcham said. “But we don't even know where she lives.”

“Of course,” Birdie said. She took back the card and added a local address and phone number.

“Does she live alone?” Fred asked.

“Yes. But I have her spare key. We swapped, in case we got locked out. We've rescued each other more than once.” She bent to pull a leather shoulder bag from a bottom drawer. After rummaging only briefly, she held up a key triumphantly. “Here it is!”

They thanked her and made their way back to the parking lot.

“Let's check her apartment, see what we can find there,” Fred said. “Be good to put the hospital in touch with her doctor, anyhow.”

Ketcham drove while Fred tried the Iowa number on his cell phone, but after four rings, a cheerful child's voice told him no one could come to the phone right now and invited him to leave a message after the beep. He disconnected and punched the numbers in again, in case the first message machine had been a wrong number. But the same recorded child answered. “This is Lieutenant Fred Lundquist, calling from Oliver, Indiana,” he said then. “We urgently need to reach Linda Smith. It's about her sister Sylvia Purcell.” He left his cell phone number but didn't mention the police. “I don't want to panic some kid,” he told Ketcham. “I'll keep calling.”

6

Joan couldn't concentrate. Fortunately, none of today's activities at the center required her active participation. The bridge and craft groups could take care of themselves. The exercise group had its own leader, a lissome young thing in spandex whom the men enjoyed from the moment they saw her. The women were won over by her friendliness and her ability to adjust her routines to their stiffening limbs.

After laying out the monthly newsletter on the computer, Joan spent some time phoning her emergency orchestra personnel list in search of a replacement for Sylvia, but students with exams looming the week after the concert were harder to enlist than in the fall. By now she was offering them cash, and still she had no takers.

“I don't doubt that you could play it with only one rehearsal,” she told one, though she was stretching the truth, “but it's not just the performance. We need you to support the others during rehearsal as well.” That part was absolutely true. The other violinists were already demoralized by Sylvia's absence, even before she fell. They didn't need a last-minute sub showing them up at the concert without bothering to turn up for the work sessions. Crossing off one more name, she broke the point of the pencil.

Finally she got a tentative yes from a woman who had played with the orchestra in the past and so didn't expect to be paid. “Trouble is, I can't be sure I'll make the concert,” the woman said. “My baby is due a week later. And I'll need a babysitter during rehearsals for my two-year-old. Can you get me one?”

How hard would it be to find a sitter compared to a first violin? Joan promised without blinking, even though the woman hadn't been entirely clear about who would pay the sitter. Hugely relieved even to have a possibility, she relaxed.

Now she couldn't keep the vivid memory of Sylvia's fall in the back of her mind or block out the unreasonable certainty that Andrew would be horribly injured in the same way.

She could no longer suppress the urge to check on him. She called his cell phone number, and he answered immediately.

“You all right? I didn't startle you up there?”

“I'm not going to fall, Mom. I'm not in the tree yet, anyway.” He sounded breathless.

Joan breathed more easily, at least for the moment. “Have you been running? You sound like it.”

“We're still working on the rope.”

“What do you mean?”

“We borrowed one, that's not the problem, but getting it up there is. We thought we could throw a cord over the lowest branch to haul it up, but it's way too high. So now we're shooting the cord up there with my Wrist-Rocket. Remember my Wrist-Rocket?”

“That slingshot you broke windows with?” She remembered all too well. At about twelve, he'd bought one with his own money and done serious damage to two neighbors' windows before she'd confiscated it. According to him, he'd been aiming at tin cans on a fence post.

“Yeah.” She could almost hear him blush.

“But I hid it!” She didn't remember where, much less packing it when they moved to Oliver.

“You couldn't hide stuff from me for long, Mom. I found it right away and hid it in my room, but I didn't dare practice with the thing. I think it's going to do the job if I ever get my aim back.”

What else had he found? Did any parent have true privacy with kids in the house? She wasn't going to think about it. Not now, anyway.

As if he could read her mind, he said, “I never poked in your stuff. Only my own.”

“Uh-huh.” A dim memory was returning of that Wrist-Rocket buried in her underwear drawer.

“Gotta go, Mom.”

She supposed she ought to wish him good luck, but of course he'd hear it as meaning that she wanted him to be able to climb onto Sylvia's platform. Actually she wanted him safe on the ground.

“Good-bye, Andrew.” Hot tears threatened. She would
not
cry.

“Bye, Mom.” And he disconnected.

The day dragged after that. She ate lunch at the center, and when someone asked her about Sylvia, she didn't know how much she could say. It's not like a murder, she decided, where the next of kin has to know first. And she didn't have access to protected medical information.

“Sylvia's had a bad accident,” she told them, and after that, they hung on to every word. “She fell out of the tree this morning.”

“Is she alive?”

“She was when the ambulance came.”

“You were there?” they chorused.

“Yes.”

“Poor thing,” Annie said. “I can't imagine surviving a fall like that.”

“It would smash every bone in your body,” said a retired nurse. “She's in for a long haul.”

“Fool kids,” said a man named Ed something. “They go out there with stars in their eyes, and then they see what happens. That'll be the end of that!”

“Cindy will be relieved if it is,” Mabel Dunn said. “Now maybe they'll build the place, and her daughter can move all those grandbabies out of her house.”

“And Diane Barnhart will get the work,” said Annie. “Only she wouldn't want to get it that way.”

“Bert might,” Vernon Pusey said. “He's a hot-tempered son of a gun.” Bert was Diane Barnhart's unemployed husband, Joan remembered. “But you're dead wrong, Ed, and so'd Bert be if he tried a stunt like that. This ain't gonna be the end of it. Some other fool kid is bound to take her place.”

Joan pushed back her chair. “Excuse me,” she managed before escaping to the restroom.

“Let her go,” she heard Annie say behind her. “I think her son cares about Sylvia. He's probably pretty torn up over this.”

Remembering Sylvia's broken body, Joan shuddered. She splashed cold water on her eyes and avoided looking at her face.

Pull yourself together, she told herself firmly. This could be a long haul. You don't worry like this when Andrew goes out in traffic on a bike or when he borrows the car, for that matter. They're probably both more dangerous than what he's doing now.

In a few minutes she returned to the table.

“We weren't sure you were coming back,” Mabel said.

“You all right, honey?” Annie asked.

“I'm fine, thanks.” But the remains of her meal had no appeal. “Anybody want my apple pie?”

“Don't mind if I do,” said the man who thought Bert Barnhart had a hot temper, and for a moment she couldn't remember his name. Vernon Pusey, that was it. Some days Joan wished for name tags. Did Vernon think Bert Barnhart would actually do something to make Sylvia fall? But she just fell. I was there. I know. Or do I?

*   *   *

Fred and Ketcham had no trouble finding Sylvia's place. She lived in an old house that had seen better days, on one of the tree-lined streets near the campus. In its glory, the peeling frame house had probably belonged to a professor or maybe a doctor. Its generous front porch still featured an old-fashioned porch swing. Now, though, its five or six bedrooms had been broken up into apartments, each with its own entrance and mailbox on the porch.

Running his finger down the row of doorbells, Ketcham said, “Purcell, number three. Must be over here.” He led the way around the wraparound porch to a side entrance.

Sylvia's apartment turned out to be three rooms on the first floor. Windows on the east, south, and west sides of the house drenched it in sunshine, though a huge maple tree about to leaf out soon would shade her kitchen and living room.

Her violin case stood in one corner of the living room near a music stand and a stack of music in a brick and board bookshelf. A shabby sofa and old carved oak rocking chair faced each other. Bright rag rugs warmed the floor. No desk, and no sign of anything likely to hold the information they needed to find.

In the kitchen, clean dishes stood in the drainer, and a dishrag had been draped over the faucet to dry. Limp macramé plant hangers hung empty in the windows. “She must have someone else looking after her plants,” Ketcham said. There was no phone or notes, not so much as a refrigerator magnet.

“Let's try the bedroom,” Fred said. Somehow he hadn't expected this woman to be so tidy. He could only hope it meant she was methodical about her record keeping.

“Here we go,” Ketcham said. Beside the water bed, which took up most of the floor space in the bedroom, stood a huge oak rolltop desk. He rolled it up to expose a laptop plugged in through a hole in the back of the desk. “Ought to be fully charged, if she left the electricity on. Maybe if we get lucky we can figure out her password.”

“Give it a try, but maybe we won't need it.”

While Ketcham sat down and waited for the laptop to boot up, Fred opened the file drawer of the desk. He pulled out a fat manila folder marked simply “Linda” and flipped it open. It was filled with letters, photos of Linda and her family, and drawings her children had made, with notes on the back in their mother's handwriting from the children to Aunt Sylvia. Linda's name and phone number, both of which they already had, were printed neatly inside the folder itself, along with her e-mail address, which Ketcham copied onto a piece of scrap paper from one of the rolltop's cubbyholes. Nothing else new, except that now they'd recognize Linda when they saw her. She resembled her sister slightly but wore her hair short and tended toward blue jeans rather than the flowing skirts Joan said Sylvia wore. They both studied Linda's laughing face but didn't remove any pictures.

Another folder was labeled “Medical Insurance.” Good. Linda would be able to take that to the hospital when she finally arrived, but Birdie Eads had promised to call with the information before then. But no doctor bills or record of a personal physician.

Nothing about the tree sit. He wasn't surprised. If it was in writing at all, Sylvia would be more likely to keep that information in her computer, protected by her password. Ketcham was typing in several sets of letters and numbers, with no luck so far.

“I don't know enough about her to make good guesses,” he said.

Fred almost missed a slender “Family” folder. Tucked out of alphabetical order at the back of the drawer, it hid behind “Rent” and “Utilities.”