Dial Om for Murder (23 page)

“Yes.”

A.J. scrutinized his drawn face. “Did you tell him what was really going on?”

“Since when do you care about Nick’s feelings?”

“I don’t,” A.J. said. “I care about you. And you can tell me till you’re blue in the face that you’re okay with this and you’ve made your decision and blah, blah, blah. Anyone can see you’re totally miserable.”

“I’ll get over it.”

“Will you? Will Nick?”

He turned a stony profile to her.

“Did you tell him the truth or did you tell him some stupid lie like you don’t love him anymore?”

Andy was silent. He said at last, “Can we not talk about this now?”

A.J. sighed and, leaning across, kissed his cheek.

Although for different reasons, neither of them felt much like eating the dinner Andy had prepared. When they had finished picking at their meal, they got in A.J.’s Volvo and headed across the valley to Elysia’s farm.

The evening was mild; a pair of bats flew over the golden meadow as the red ball of the sun sank beneath the trees. A.J. put The Killers’
Day & Age
in the CD player and neither of them spoke.

Are we human or are we dancer?
Well that was the question, wasn’t it?

They rounded a curve in the road and Starlight Farm lay before them. The front yard was crowded with police vehicles, red and blue lights glittering in the dusk.

“Uh-oh,” Andy said.

Nineteen

A.J.
braked hard. “Oh
no
.”

Andy said faintly, “You don’t think Jane . . . ?”

Ran amuck and murdered her mother? A.J. swallowed hard. “No, of course not.” But if Jane had not murdered her mother, A.J. was going to. She took her foot off the brake, advancing slowly into the yard. A state trooper ran toward their car and flagged them to a stop.

A.J. pressed the button and the window rolled down.

“Sorry, you’ll have to go back.” Despite the late hour, the trooper was still wearing mirror sunglasses. A.J. could see her tense face reflected in twins.

“My mother lives here. Is she all right?”

“Your mother?” He looked back over his shoulder, and then said, “Maybe you should pull over to the side there beside the hedge. Remain in your vehicle, please.”

“Is she all right?”

“No one’s been injured.” He gestured impatiently, and A.J. pulled carefully over to the side and parked behind the emergency vehicles.

She turned the engine off and peered through the gloom at the house.

“The police must have discovered Jane was staying here.”

Andy said nothing.

“She must be all right, don’t you think? Mother, I mean.”

He started automatically, “I’m sure she’s—” He broke off. “Oh hell.”

Two uniformed officers escorted Jane—arms handcuffed behind her—out of the house. They marched her over to a marked police car.

A moment later Jake appeared on the front doorstep.

A.J., hands frozen on the wheel, said faintly, “Do you think he’s arrested Mother?”

Andy said grimly, “Him? Probably.”

A.J. swallowed hard. She felt a little lightheaded. They waited. Jane was put into the police car, the officers got in, and the car drove slowly away. The trooper who had directed them over to the side went to speak to Jake. As they talked, Jake stared at A.J.’s car.

After a brief discussion Jake turned and went back in the house.

The trooper crossed the lawn to A.J.’s car.

“You can go,” he said.

“Is my mother being arrested?”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“But—”

The trooper made another of those brusque move-it-along motions.

“Move it,” Andy said out of the side of his mouth. “Robocop is liable to arrest you, too.”

Hands shaking, A.J. put the car in reverse, inching painstakingly past the wedge of official vehicles, before finally reaching the safety of the open road.

“Should I call Mr. Meagher?” she asked as they drove swiftly back to Deer Hollow. “He won’t really arrest her, will he?”

Andy just shook his head.

Back at Deer Hollow, A.J. paced up and down the living room while Monster, head on his paws, watched her. Andy sat on the sofa absently stroking Lula Mae.

“Why doesn’t she call?” A.J. demanded as the clock slowly ticked down the hours.

Andy shook his head again—it was starting to get on her nerves.

“What can they be
doing
? They can’t be interrogating her, can they?”

“They’re probably getting out the rubber hoses and bright lights as we speak.”

She glared at him. “Very funny.”

“Sorry. She’ll be okay, A.J. You know, Ellie. She’d probably get a kick out of being arrested. And if she needed Mr. Meagher, she’d have no hesitation yelling for him.”

The phone rang, shattering the silence that followed Andy’s words.

A.J. jumped to answer it.

“Mother?”

There was a pause and then a voice—muffled and indistinct—said, “Keep your nose out of Nicole Manning’s murder if you don’t want to end up like her.”

The phone clicked down.

A.J. looked to hit redial, but the phone in the hall was an old model, refurbished from the fifties, and did not have such fancy doodads.

Returning to the front parlor, she said, “Somebody just threatened me. Us. Me.”

“That narrows it down.”

“I’m serious. Someone just called and said to butt out of investigating Nicole’s murder if I didn’t want to end up like her.”

Andy stared at her with dawning consternation. “You
are
serious. Did you recognize the voice?”

She shook her head. “It was pretty low tech. Someone disguising his voice and talking through a handkerchief.”

“He?”

“I don’t know.” A.J. lowered her voice and spoke in menacing tones, trying to emulate the caller. “It. Could. Have. Been. A. Woman.”

“Don’t do that, okay? It’s scary.” Andy tilted his head. “Maybe it’s a prank?”

“Nothing gets me laughing like a death threat. It’s that stupid article about me being the local Miss Marple—I bet it caught the attention of some nut.”

Andy looked worried. “If it’s not a prank, we must be getting close.”

“Close to what? Close to who? How could we be getting close without knowing it?”

“Well, then maybe it
is
a prank.”

Wide-eyed, they gazed at each other.

Andy was sleeping on the sofa when the phone rang the next time. He groggily lifted his head, and A.J. said, “I’ve got it,” and went into the hall.

She lifted the receiver and Elysia hissed, “Trust no one!”

“Mother?”

“The police have taken Jane.”

“I know. We were there this evening, but it wasn’t me. I didn’t tell Jake. I was going to call from your house so that it would make it clear we were all cooperating.”

Elysia who had been making a soft shushing sound as A.J. spoke, turned up the volume like a hissing tea kettle on the verge of explosion, cutting off with a sharp, “SHUSH!”

A.J. shushed.

Elysia said, “I know it wasn’t you, pet. The Grand Inquisitor wouldn’t be so angry with you if you were the fink.”

“
Fink?
”

“The coppers received an anonymous tip about Jane.
We are being watched.
”

“What? By whom?”

Elysia spluttered, “How should I know by whom? But they may be listening to us
at this very moment
.”

This jolted A.J. into silence. Then sense reasserted itself. “How could they be listening to us? And what makes you think it’s a
they
? I doubt if it’s a conspiracy—”

Elysia was hissing again. A.J. shut up, and Elysia whispered, “We can’t take that chance.”

“Mother . . .”

“Meet me tomorrow at eight—no, I need a decent night’s rest. Make that ten o’clock—at the place your father took you for your ninth birthday.”

“But—”

Elysia hung up.

A.J. stared at the phone in disbelief before replacing the receiver and returning to the room where Andy was sleepily scrubbing his face.

“Who was that?”

“Mother. I think she’s finally snapped. She thinks we’re being observed by an unknown nemesis. She says the police were tipped off about Jane by an anonymous caller.”

Andy lifted his head. “I thought that was you.”

“You thought
I
told the police that my mother was hiding a fugitive?”

“I did. Sorry.” He said slowly, “Someone
is
watching us.”

A.J. nodded. “We’re starting to make someone nervous.”

After Andy turned in, A.J. sat in the parlor listening to the crickets outside the open window and the chimes moving softly in the night breeze.

It was nearly midnight when she heard the sound of an engine approaching. Monster thumped his tail heavily on the floor. Lula Mae stretched luxuriously and showed her claws.

A.J. rose from the sofa and went to the window.

Jake’s SUV gleamed in the moonlight. The car door opened and he got out, a long-limbed shadow crossing the grass and coming slowly up the porch.

A.J. opened the door before he rang the bell.

He stared at her for a long moment.

“Will you come in?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I can’t stay.”

“Jake, I know what you’re going to say . . .”

“No,” he said levelly. “I don’t think you do.” And something in his tone held her silent.

“I like you, A.J. A lot. Hell, I even like your mother. Sort of. But . . . I don’t like this. I don’t like the games you play.”

“It’s not a game,” she tried to interject. “I know how it looks, but I was going to—I was trying to—I had already told Mother—” She stopped, horribly aware that she was making it worse with every word out of her mouth.

Jake spoke over her, and although he didn’t raise his voice, every word hit her as hard as a pelted stone.

“I asked you to stay out of it. You’re not dumb, so you must know that you put me in an impossible position when you cross the line between my personal and professional life. Worse than that, you lied to me.”

“I didn’t lie.”

“Come off it. You lied by omission. We sat right there at lunch talking about Nicole and your mother and Jane Peters, and you never said a word. Not a hint that you knew where Peters was. Didn’t it occur to you that you had a responsibility to come forward? I’m not just talking about your responsibility as a law-abiding citizen, I’m talking about your responsibility—call it your
loyalty
—to me. You’re the girlfriend of a cop. It didn’t occur to you that some of these stupid, reckless decisions would reflect on me?”

And even though she knew Jake was right to be angry, A.J. was starting to get mad, too. “I wasn’t thinking about your image, no. And I
was
going to tell you, Jake. Tonight—”

“My
image
? I’m not talking about my goddamned image. I’m talking about the fact that you’ve potentially compromised a police investigation. I’m talking about the fact that I could lose my job over this. And because of you, because of my feelings for you, I’m continuing to make bad decisions. I should have arrested your mother tonight along with Jane Peters. I should have arrested you and your damned ex-husband. But I didn’t. Once again, I didn’t do my job because of my feelings for you.”

She could feel the blood draining out of her face as the full ramifications of what she had done finally sank in—along with the realization of the extent of Jake’s feelings for her.

And although she tried to be rational, she couldn’t help pleading. “She’s my mother, Jake. It’s not so easy to choose between loyalties like that.”

“I know.” He just sounded weary now. “So let’s call it a draw. You should have confided in me, but I should have arrested you. So we’re quits.”

“Quits.”

He nodded, drew in a long breath, and expelled a longer one. “Yeah. We could go back and forth on this, but the upshot is . . . I don’t think it’s going to work between us.”

She opened her mouth and then closed it.

“Good night,” Jake said.

She watched until his figure merged with the darkness.

Twenty