Go, Ivy, Go! (5 page)

A police car started to turn in behind Mac, but the driveway was already full of motorhomes, plus the little Toyota pickup Mac pulls behind the motorhome when he’s traveling. The officer at the wheel parked the police car at an angle on the dry grass. One middle-aged male officer and one sturdy woman officer, both in dark sunglasses, got out. He was bald; she had red hair sculpted into a bun tight enough to do a face lift. Except she was much too young to need one.

“A report came in that there’s a dead body in the house at this address,” the man said.

“The body is in the bathtub upstairs.” I waved in that general direction. “There are a couple of people up there, but they don’t have anything to do with the body. They were just looking.” I realized right after I said it that that sounded peculiar, as if I’d been selling tickets for self-guided tours. “One of them may be unconscious.”

That was enough to send the officers storming into the house without asking more questions, although the woman paused long enough to yell back, “Nobody leaves! We have questions to ask you.”

“But I just got here,” Mac protested. “I don’t know anything. But that’s okay,” he added hastily in response to her stern look. “I wasn’t going anywhere anyway.”

“Good.” The woman officer transferred the stern look to me. “Don’t let anyone else come inside.”

Right. No more tour tickets.

That left Mac and me looking at each other, Mac with silver-gray eyebrows raised in a questioning arc. He looked good. Khaki shorts, light green polo shirt, and that disreputable old straw hat that somehow manages to look rakish instead of bag-lady-boyfriend on him. Even that blue tattoo and his knobby knees looked good.

Mac crossed his arms over his chest. “A dead body in your bathtub?” he inquired.

“Okay, go ahead and say it,” I muttered. Just because he looked good, and I was glad to see him, didn’t mean he wasn’t going to go snarky on me. “You warned me. You told me so.”

“I admit an I-told-you-so is tempting,” Mac agreed. “Although I hadn’t figured even you would come up with a dead body this soon. My apologies for underestimating you.” He gave me a complimentary bow of head.

“Maybe you’d prefer the dead body was
me
. Although then you wouldn’t have anyone to say ‘I told you so’ to.”

“Has anyone ever mentioned that sometimes you sound as if you should be riding on a broomstick instead of driving a motorhome?” he grumbled.

We glared at each other for a long minute.

Okay, I’d started this by being a tad snappish. “I’m glad you’re here,” I finally said.

He was still scowling, but he grabbed me in a big Mac-hug. I was still a little unhappy with his grumpy attitude about my coming home to Madison Street, but I was too glad to see him not to hug back.

“I came because I missed you,” he said. “I tried to call but I couldn’t get through.”

“My phone was dead.” Still was.

“I was worried about you. Apparently with good reason.”
He held me off at arm’s length and inspected me. “Are you okay?”

“A little shook up,” I admitted. Yes, as I’d told Eric and Tasha, I’d found dead bodies before. But it isn’t as if this is something you want to incorporate into your daily routine.

“You want to tell me what this is all about?” Mac said with a wave at the police car.

Someone had put a couple of rickety old benches under the maple tree, so we moved over there into the shade and sat down. He kept hold of my hands while I told him. Arrival yesterday. Smelly house. Staying in the motorhome last night. Finding a sleeping bag and a woman’s clothes in my bedroom this morning, followed by wrinkled, blackened toes under blankets in the bathtub. Running to the neighbor’s. Calling 911.

“I didn’t deliberately
try
to get involved with a dead body. I wasn’t sticking my nose in where it didn’t belong.” I needed to emphasize that point. Because, what my friend Special Agent Dix called my “mutant curiosity gene,” has gotten me in trouble before. “It just … happened.”

“You’re thinking this is a natural death? This woman just crawled in your tub and died?” He sounded skeptical.

“Tasha said there’s a big hole in the body,” I answered uneasily. “And the blankets were pulled up over her face. But that doesn’t necessarily mean she was
murdered
.”

“No?” He lifted his eyebrows and crossed his arms over his chest again.

“The police haven’t said anything about murder.”

“What would you expect? An officer rushing out and screaming ‘Murder! Murder!’ like some guy on a TV infomercial yelling to get your attention?”

Okay, probably not. But I still didn’t want to think of the woman as
murdered.
In my tub.

“You don’t know who the body is?” Mac asked.

“No. Except I figure it must be the woman who was wearing the clothes and using the sleeping bag.” And drinking the wine out of those bottles in the garbage can. Could she have been drinking, stumbled in the bathroom, and taken the blanket with her when she fell in the tub?

“The police will probably find something to identify her. Maybe it’s a renter, someone the rental agency can identify?” Mac suggested.

“I quit renting the house after that last eviction. But there was food in the kitchen and a few things in the medicine cabinet. I’ve heard about people just moving into a vacant house and living there.” This, I realized, could explain those utility bills I’d received. Somehow the woman had managed to get the utilities turned on, but when she wound up in the bathtub, the bills had gone unpaid. Eventually the utility people had looked up the property owner, me, and sent the bills to me through my complicated forwarding system.

“How about the unconscious man? Who’s he?”

I explained about Eric and Tasha coming back to the house with me after I called 911 from their place. “He’s a big, muscular guy. But very sensitive,” I added, repeating Tasha’s words. “They were trying to be helpful.”

Eric and Tasha came out the back door. Although Eric was conscious now, and the flip-flops were
back on his feet, he still looked disoriented. He wobbled as Tasha led him over to the maple tree and nudged him onto the other bench. With his 245 pounds, the bench creaked and groaned and the legs sank deeper into the ground.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

“I don’t understand why that happens. Makes me feel like a big wimp,” he muttered. He jiggled his shoulders and slapped his thigh as if to check it for feeling. “Once back in high school I passed out when a guy I tackled in a football game broke his nose and bled all over me.”

I patted his shoulder. “It’s okay to be sensitive.”

“Does anyone know what time it is?” Tasha asked. “I have to get to work.”

Although it seemed much later, when Mac looked at his watch he said, “Nine-fifteen.”

“Actress work?” I asked Tasha

“I’m working at the Heartland Grocery today. I do food demonstrations and hand out
samples.” She beamed and pretended to hand me a sample. “Would you like to try our wonderful new tofu sausage? It’s terrific for breakfast or snacks. Anytime!
Delicious and healthy too!”

Tofu sausage? Making that sound irresistible indeed took some acting talent. But Tasha was succeeding, because Mac said, “Hey, I wouldn’t mind trying a sample.”

“I’d better run back to the house and call to tell them I’ll be late. I didn’t bring my cell phone. You’ll be okay?” she said to her husband.

He nodded. She kissed him on the forehead and started a long-legged lope toward the sidewalk.

The woman officer came out of the house. She was on a phone, no doubt calling for backup. This was more than a two-officer job. The Medical Examiner’s office would have to be called in. There would undoubtedly be an autopsy. But when the officer saw Tasha heading down the sidewalk, she waved an arm and yelled at her. “Hey, you can’t leave until you answer some questions!”

Tasha reluctantly returned. “I don’t know anything.”

“But you may have talked to the dead woman,” I pointed out. “The woman with the parsnip.”

“But that was
you
.”

“No, it wasn’t. I haven’t been here for almost three years.”

“No discussing the case,” the woman officer said. Up close she still looked sturdy, but even younger, about junior-high age. Like most doctors these days.

She separated us so we couldn’t talk to each other. Good police procedure, although her flustered attitude suggested doing it was like trying to herd grasshoppers.
Somehow I doubted she’d been a police officer for long. She sent me to stand by my motorhome, Mac to wait by his. Eric clung to the bench he was sitting on. Tasha rebelled and clamped
an I’m-not-moving hand on his shoulder.

“We won’t talk to each other about the dead woman,” she said.

Policewoman frowned, but she accepted that compromise.

More police people arrived. Radios crackled. A fire truck and an ambulance showed up. It wasn’t chaos, but it wasn’t exactly the finest example of authority in action when the fire truck and a police car backed into each other.

We were questioned separately. Mac’s session with a sharp looking Hispanic officer was brief, Eric and Tasha’s with a different officer a little longer. Lucky me, I got Ms. Junior High, She looked at her hand a couple of times, introduced herself as Officer DeLora and asked my name.

“Ivy Malone.”

“But the dead woman is Ivy Malone,” she objected.

“She can’t be Ivy Malone,” I objected. “
I
’m Ivy Malone. What makes you think she is?”

“Identification.”

“What kind of identification?”

“A library card. It was in a purse in the bedroom. Along with mail addressed to Ivy Malone.” She frowned as if realizing that was information she probably shouldn’t be sharing with me.

“Anyone can fake a name to get a library card,” I pointed out. Although it seemed a lot of bother for such a minor thing.

“Why would she fake it?” Officer DeLora scoffed. “Maybe
you’re
faking your identity.”

“Why would
I
fake it? Look, just let me go in the motorhome and I can prove who I am. I have a driver’s license.”

She wasn’t about to let me go in the motorhome alone, although I didn’t know what she thought I could do in there. Escape by doing a high-tech morph of motorhome into flying machine? Or maybe she thought I had an AK-47 stashed in my closet. She followed me inside. Koop met us at the door. He didn’t hiss at her, but he backed away when she started to pet him.

“Cats usually like me.” She sounded unexpectedly dismayed by Koop’s rejection.

“Are you a smoker? Koop has a real hangup about smokers.”

“No! I quit.”

I lifted my eyebrows at her hasty claim. Koop is better than police profiling when targeting a smoker.

“My mother thinks I’ve quit.” She shot a guilty glance back over her shoulder as if afraid Mother might be standing there listening. “And I’m really trying.”

Koop, stickler that he is, doesn’t give points for trying. He flicked his stubby tail and headed for the bedroom. I handed her my driver’s license and the registration on the motorhome. Both were from Colorado, where I’d spent some time and where my good friend Abilene now
lives with her veterinarian husband. It was her address I’d used for the license and registration.
Another of my tactics for hiding from the Braxtons, who seemed to have tentacles everywhere.

“That’s an older address,” I explained. “I’ll be living here in my own home now.”

“You’re saying you own this place?”

“For more years than you are old.”

The officer took down all the information from both license and registration, though she didn’t seem convinced of my identity even yet. The other woman was
in
the house, also with identification, and there’s that old saying about possession being nine-tenths of the law. Did that nine-tenths apply even if you were dead?

Someone from the Medical Examiner’s office arrived while Officer DeLora was grilling me. Crime scene people showed up along with a couple of guys in plain clothes that I thought were probably police force detectives. People collected on the sidewalk to watch. Tasha had left after being questioned but she was back now, one hand protectively resting on her husband’s shoulder again.

Officer DeLora finally finished with me, although she warned there might be more questions later. I couldn’t think what else they might ask, unless they wanted to know what brand of undies I wore. She’d already asked about everything else, including whether I had false teeth. Fortunately she didn’t try to check for herself, because by then I might have given her a demonstration of LOL tooth power.

Finally we both went outside again, which is when I realized the small but curious crowd was on the far side of a newly-erected barrier of yellow crime scene tape. Mac was already on the other side of the barrier, and Officer DeLora took me over there too. I tried to ask her about the
crime scene
aspect of this, but she headed back to the house without telling me anything. A little later she returned and asked permission of both Mac and me to search our motorhomes. It was a politely phrased request, but I knew the clout behind it. If we didn’t agree, they’d just get an official search warrant. Mac shrugged and said okay, and I did too.

A little later, two men came out of the house carrying a stretcher with a dark body bag on it. I’d never known the dead woman, and I didn’t know how she’d died, but this was such a bleak ending to anyone’s life that I had to blink back tears. Who was she? Did she have family to mourn her? Would anyone come to claim her body? The stretcher disappeared into the back of a van.

Now what? Both Mac’s and my motorhomes were included within that barrier of yellow tape, officers now going through them. I couldn’t think there was anything to find, but who knew what innocent item they might target as incriminating evidence? This was obviously going to complicate my plans to move into the house. I suddenly doubted that even after I could move in that I’d ever be able to use that upstairs bathroom again, no matter how much bubble bath I dumped in the tub.