Death Comes eCalling (22 page)

“It’s delicious, but I’m allergic to almonds.”

“I’ll brew something different for you.”

“Thanks, but I should be going.”

She walked me to the door, then said, “I’m glad we had this little chat. Drive carefully.”

Automatically, I thanked her for her hospitality, but staring into her blue eyes, all I could think was: This is a person I truly don’t wish to spend time with.

As I drove home, I chastised myself. I’d learned nothing about whether or not she could have murdered Steve Wilkins or Mrs. Kravett. She
claimed
not to be the one threatening me, but I remained unconvinced either way. I did know that if I were Lauren and had slept with Preston, I would be watching my backside. I couldn’t understand Stephanie, so I couldn’t predict her behavior.

At home, I went immediately to my office and checked my email and fax tray. Nothing. Why had Poison Pen stopped sending threats? Possibly the rationale was that the pen is mightier than the sword, but not mightier than carbon monoxide.

I sat at my desk and doodled, drawing two mice. Eventually the doodle led to an especially inane cartoon. Two mice are walking down a road on a windy day. In the air are the words:
Psst. Swiss cheese.
One mouse says to the other, “Is it my imagination, or does every little breeze seem to whisper Swiss cheese?”

How could I market this? The song I’d gotten the idea from predated my parents, so I was probably one of the few people under fifty who remembered it. Who would buy the card? A convention of old cheese salesmen? As opposed to salesmen selling old cheese, I suppose.

None the less, I decided to scan it into my computer.

I nearly panicked when my keyboard didn’t respond, till I realized it had been disconnected from the scanner. I plugged the keyboard cord in, unplugged it, then plugged it in again, trying to figure out how this had happened. Perhaps the same person who’d tampered with the furnace had disconnected the keyboard cable. But why?

I searched my disk, and looked for any time-stamps that indicated that someone other than me had used the computer last night. Everything checked out fine, but I ran the computer through an operation that flagged altered files. Still fine. Was someone’s fiddling with my computer related to Steve’s death while using his? But if so, why disconnect my keyboard? Maybe the motive had been to keep me in my basement office near the source of the carbon monoxide, while I checked out my computer.

If this were yesterday morning, prior to Tommy’s discovery of the furnace problem, that might have proven to be very effective. Feeling uneasy, I scanned the card into a file. It occurred to me how well matched Stephanie and Preston were. Perhaps they had an open marriage and were both fooling around. If so, hopefully from now on it would be with equally hedonistic people.

That reminded me. I hadn’t verified the rumor that Preston and Sam’s import company was no longer under investigation. I dialed the enforcement office of the US Customs Service and suffered through a brief conversation with a customs agent who interrupted my every other word to say, “What?” Then he said, “I dunno anything about that. Let me let you talk to somebody else.” To my relief, he put a woman on the line who both spoke and understood English. She referred me to an enforcement agent of the Fish and Wildlife division in the department of interior. Now there’s a catchy job title.

He was a nice, helpful man whose name, given at the start of our conversation, was lost by its conclusion. I told him what little I could about Saunders and Bakerton Imports and how I’d learned those few disputed facts. He told me that, frankly, Preston and Sam had escaped prosecution by the “skin of an elephant’s tusks.” The company had insisted that the shipment had been received prior to January 1, 1990, and the government had lacked sufficient evidence to prove otherwise. Lucky for Preston and Sam. The smuggling plus conspiracy charges carried a maximum penalty of $250,000 and up to five years in jail.

After hanging up, I sat thinking, back to my original question: Who had killed Steve Wilkins and Mrs. Kravett? In my various gyrations over the past couple of days, had I eliminated any of my dinner party suspects?

If anything, Lauren looked massively guilty. I was so mistrustful of Stephanie, I wouldn’t drink coffee with her. As for Preston and Sam, that report of Cherokee’s had already been examined and ultimately dismissed by the authorities. But could I say with any certainty that Cherokee’s report had nothing to do with why two people were murdered? It didn’t take a whole lot of thought to conclude I couldn’t.

To put it another way, I had reached a dead end. And all I had to do to remind myself that time was running out for me was look at my heat registers.

That afternoon, after both children had settled down for cartoons, I went downstairs. My fax machine had a message in the tray. I read:

You’re still alive. Don’t worry. Next time I won’t go so easy on you. But I do wonder about your children. If you think they’re safe from me, you’re wrong. Killing them would be all too easy. If you were any kind of a mother, you’d protect them. You’d leave town!

“Damn you to hell!” I smacked my desk with the heel of my hand and stared at the letter.
First you threaten me, then my marriage, now my children. Whoever’s doing this is a summa cum laude graduate of the Marquis de Salle Torture School.
“By God! I’m going to find you and make you pay for this!”

This fax had been sent from a self-service business center. Maybe the creep’s computer was down. I needed to show this threat to Tommy, and I would drive it to the police station myself. But I had another stop to make first, and there was no time to lose.

I got the kids in the car, and the three of us drove to the business center. Inside were dozens of copier machines and four fax machines along one wall. Half of the copiers were in use; none of the fax machines. At the back of the store, an overweight woman in her late twenties or so sat behind the glass counter, reading a paperback.

Now to find a safe diversion for the children. To one side of the counter was a display that held hundreds of pens in some twenty shades. I told Nathan and Karen I would buy them each a pen in whatever color the store had the most of. They complained a little, but then dutifully started counting.

“How long have you been here today?” I asked the woman.

She looked up from her book, studied me, then said, “Too long. Why?”

“Have you been here for more than two hours? I’m trying to get a description of someone who sent me a threatening fax from one of your machines. It was at twelve forty-eight this afternoon.”

The girl snorted. “During the lunch hour? Good luck. Place is a mob scene.” She set her book upside down beside her and came toward me. “Bet we’ve had twenty to sixty customers today. Most never even come to the counter, just put money into the machines, use them, and leave.”

Listening in one ear to Karen and Nathan count aloud, I handed her a list of names of everyone at my dinner party and asked her to compare the list to her checks and charge receipts. There were no matches.

“Did you see any blonde women about my age and size with really skinny legs, or a brunette less than five feet tall? Or a balding man with a ponytail? Or a man with an egg-shaped head? Or a handsome, classy, white-haired man?”

She shook her head and chortled. “Wow. At least you ask interesting questions. Most people just ask me how to operate the machines or clear a paper jam.”

“I’ve got a yearbook here. Whoever it was would be seventeen years older now, but I’ve marked the pages with their pictures.”

“This is a joke, right?”

“Please, just look at the places I’ve marked and tell me if any of them look familiar.” I opened the book to the first marked spot, where youthful Stephanie eternally beamed. I rotated the book toward her and pointed.

“Nah.” She flipped to the next marked page, where Denise Meekers was shown. She shrugged. She shrugged again at the photo of Tommy Newton. She started paging through toward Jack Vance’s and Lauren’s photos, and suddenly stopped. “Wait!” She grinned. “I can’t believe this actually worked, but the girl here looks real familiar.”

I looked at where she was pointing and sighed, realizing now what a futile exercise this was. “That’s me.”

She widened her eyes and looked from the picture to me and back. “Gee, lady. You were sure ugly in high school. No offense.”

Chapter 18

Where Were You?

The next morning was gray and drizzling, yet Nathan was in a wonderful mood, in contrast to his sister and mother. He sniffed the air at the bus stop and said with a big smile, “I love the smell of rain.”

“So do I,” I told him, and walked back home after the bus arrived thinking how much joy my children brought me. My life would be so diminished were they not here to remind me to stop and smell the rain.

It was all I could do to let Karen and Nathan out of my sight, but the police were aware of the threat I’d received yesterday, and Tommy promised he’d keep them and the school under protective surveillance for the next several days. I’d even asked Tommy about bodyguards, but he convinced me that would do more harm than good. Also, he agreed with me that the thrust of the threat was that the sender wanted me out of the picture, not to harm my children. It made me all the more determined not to leave, but to solve this mystery.

I had misplaced my drawing pad and finally found it upstairs next to my bed. Searching for my pad reminded me how annoying it is to be looking for something in the presence of someone else, who invariably asks, “Where were you when you last had it?”

I emphasized that question’s uselessness in a new card design. Two men are stranded on a tiny island. One is looking around at the sand by his feet. The compass is plainly visible next to the other man, yet he says, “Lost your compass again, huh? Where were you when you last had it?”

It occurred to me that I’d missed an opportunity to drum up some repeat business from the woman who’d ordered the faxable advertisement for her office equipment store. Though self-promotion is neither something I’m good at nor enjoy, I decided to take a trip into the city and show her my wares. I grabbed my stack of recent greetings and placed them in a manila folder, which brought my absent husband to mind. Why couldn’t he have been stationed in Europe? We’d all have been thrilled to spend several months there. All of us except Nathan, that is, but he would have adjusted eventually.

It was still drizzling. Knowing the sweatshirt I’d worn while walking the kids to the bus wouldn’t make a good impression, I grabbed a waterproof jacket from the closet, an olive-colored Gore-Tex. Stephanie would’ve said it sucked the color from my skin. No doubt by the time I reached the store in Albany, people would wonder who the vampire in the coat was.

As I started out the door, I caught sight of the ceramic bowl on my refrigerator. I could return that bowl to Denise on a single trip from the house. Such efficiency.

The drive was long, slowed by traffic overreacting to the rain. I gave myself a pep talk to boost my confidence, and by the time I finally arrived, I was fired up.

The parking lot was empty, business apparently being adversely affected by the weather. I strode into the store, found a salesman, and asked to speak to the manager. He directed me to a woman at the counter. I gave her the prerequisite self-introduction and launched into my rehearsed spiel about how she could use my faxable greetings for demos in her store, as a gimmick to help sell fax machines.

Unlike when I rehearsed my speeches in the car, halfway through I ran smack into a basic coordination problem of mine. I can’t talk and breathe at the same time when I’m nervous. I caught my breath before passing out and handed her my eCard designs.

My nervousness grew, because the otherwise-unoccupied salesmen chose to come over and check out my presentation to their manager. The manager grinned at my cards. She laughed and said, “I love the one with the mice and the whispering breeze.”

“That’s my favorite, too,” I lied.

A salesman tapped me on the shoulder. “You have Rice Krispies stuck to the back of your raincoat”

This roused the curiosity of all three of the other salesmen. They also peered behind me. One said, “Yep. Those’re Rice Krispies, all right. How’d that happen?”

The last time I’d worn this jacket must’ve been the time we were running late and I’d stupidly given Nathan cereal to eat in the car. A useful parenting tip those radio-talk-show counselors never give: When you’ve got to feed your children on the run, don’t arm them with anything that’ll stick to your backside.

I eyed the salesman who’d asked the question. He was in his early twenties, a definite nonparent. “I was at a wedding earlier this morning, and we threw rice cereal instead of rice at the bride and groom.”

He nodded, not sure if he should take me seriously or not. Then the store manager thanked me for coming in and said she’d consider my suggestion, and I left with as much dignity as I could muster with breakfast food stuck to my derriere.

Denise lived near Stephanie. Judging from the outside, Denise’s house appeared to be one or two steps down from Stephanie’s; nice, though not nearly as well appointed.

To my surprise Sam opened the door. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. For once, his brown hair wasn’t greased back and hung down on his forehead in boyish-looking bangs. It was quite an improvement.

“Hi, Molly. I’m so glad to see you. Come on in.”

His friendly attitude made me leery. Last time someone greeted me with such open arms, Stephanie had made me PTA secretary/treasurer. “Thank you. I’m just returning your bowl and wanted to thank Denise once again for the Jell-O salad.”

Denise rounded the corner, smiling broadly. Her hair was in wild curls. With her petite frame and current care-free demeanor, she looked like a teenager. “Molly! You’re here. How appropriate!”

“Appropriate?”

“Sam just quit his job.” She wrapped her arms around his waist, and he grinned, resting his arm on her shoulders.