Gracie's Game: Sudden Anger, Accidentally on Purpose (35 page)

Madison grinned, and walked to Gracie's group. "I was just having a little fun," she remarked.

"If you do it again, I'll catch you this time," one of the guys offered.

"Maybe we'll get to watch Mrs. Lane throw you out of the house," a girl suggested.

"Madison, if you get hurt then Mrs. Lane could get in big trouble," Gracie said quietly. Having gotten Madison's attention she nodded meaningfully at the noisy group around the teacher, Jake prominent among them.

"Oh. Yeah, I wouldn't want to get Ja, uh,
Maggie
in any trouble," Madison said. "You'll be there tomorrow to do the recycling, Gracie?"

"You bet!" Gracie replied. "I checked before we left, and there's a lot of bags, so we got a good response. Wish it would be a little warmer, but we'll deal with it."

"Wish we could mark them as 'plastic', 'paper', and 'cans' so it won't be so much of a mess to sort them out," Madison complained.

"Always is," Gracie said. "But it's dark at the game, people can't see the labels. If we make it too hard they won't do it."

"Yeah. It's a lot of work passing those cloth bags down the rows during the game, and most of 'em don't care why we collect the stuff, it's just easier than walking to the trash can."

"Good thing the local grocery stores donated a lot of those bags!" Gracie said.

The discussion was interrupted as Jake, leading an entourage, moved toward the front door. "Hey, Jake!" someone called out. "It's only midnight, afraid you'll turn into a pumpkin?"

"Jake, you're not leaving
now
are you?" Amy asked loudly. "Uh, I mean, the party's not over yet."

Jake favored the room with a broad grin. "I worked
hard
today, I need to get to bed. "See you later." He waved at the crowd and walked out, followed by teammates Shaun and Tyler.

As the front door shut behind them Gracie heard someone say, "Yeah, but
whose
bed!" People laughed.

A few minutes later Allison joined the group. She didn't look particularly happy.

"You need a ride home?" Kelly asked.

Allison's eyes flashed for a moment, until she realized Kelly wasn't so much pointing out that her date had left her there alone, but offering to help. She made an attempt to smile. "Thanks, but Jennifer said she'd take me. She's gotta leave early, but I don't care." She wandered off again, as if she couldn't quite figure out what she wanted to do.

Meaghan walked up with her coat on and purse over her shoulder. "Goodnight, everyone," she said cheerily.

"Leaving so soon?" someone inquired.

Meaghan smiled. "Yeah, it's been kinda a long day. But a good one! See you guys Monday, take care." She too went out the door.

The party was winding down, though Maggie was still holding court on the sofa in one corner. It wasn't long before Jennifer Myers left too, with Allison and Amy.

Kelly pulled his cell phone from his jeans pocket to check the time. "We ought to go too, Gracie," he said.

"I'm having fun," Gracie said. "But you're right, it'd be embarrassing if Mom sent Clay over here to drag me home."

"Your step-dad's a nice guy, would he do that to you?" Kelly asked.

"Let's not find out," she suggested.

Chapter 29

It's cold out here at 7:00 AM
, Sandra Michaels thought as she held the back door open for the cat to go out. She looked up at the sky, trying to judge what the day's weather would be. It didn't look like rain, so when it warmed up in the afternoon she could probably bundle up her two young children and let them play outside for awhile.

She glanced at Maggie's house next door, surprised to see only a few paper plates littering the yard after last night's party. Something caught her eye and she looked closer – the sliding glass door was standing wide open. She knew her neighbor wasn't an early riser on weekends, but surely she'd locked the house up after the kids had left. Unless she'd passed out before they left.

"I'd better go check," she said to herself. "I won't bother her, I'll just pull the door shut. Her house must be freezing by now."

Sandra continued to mutter to herself as she wrapped her bathrobe tighter around her chubby body and went out her back gate. She trudged around the front of Maggie's house, careful to notice that her front door was closed and everything looked normal. Maggie's car wasn't on the drive, she'd probably put it in the garage. "Heaven knows there were enough cars parked up and down the street last night," she said out loud, though she knew Maggie probably couldn't hear her complaint and wouldn't have cared if she had.

She opened the gate and stepped into the backyard, feeling just a little uncomfortable at the trespass. As she walked across the patio she glanced at the windows. "I'm not snooping, I just want to make sure no one broke in and then left through the patio door," she justified her actions under her breath. But everything looked normal and she began to relax.

She walked up to the glass door and grabbed the handle, preparing to give it a hard shove so it would close well. But she couldn't resist just a little peek inside the house. She hadn't been inside since the previous owners moved and wondered what Maggie had done with the place. The mess was far worse inside, paper plates and cups left everywhere, and a folding table along the wall still held platters and bowls of snacks that hadn't been put away.

Sandra shook her head with a superior attitude at the idea of leaving the mess until the morning, but then she wouldn't have had a big noisy party in the first place so she had no idea how daunting the idea of cleaning up before bed might be. She looked beyond the dining room, curious now that she was there. "Oh, dear," she said.

Maggie Lane was lying on the cold tile floor in the living room. Sandra rushed in, suddenly unconcerned with her impropriety. "Maggie?" she called out. "Maggie, are you okay?"

She rushed down the steps into the sunken living room and stopped, unsure what to do next. "Maggie?" she called again, but the woman on the floor didn't move. She was trying to remember what she'd learned about CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation when she'd taken that Red Cross class, what, three years ago? That was something you were supposed to know, but you never thought you'd actually have to use it.

Cautiously Sandra squatted down and put her finger on Maggie's neck. The skin was cool and she couldn't feel a pulse though she was sure her finger was on the carotid artery. She jerked her hand back and sat there on her haunches, her heart beating hard.
Was that movement? Did I just see her chest rise a little?
she wondered. She pulled a tissue from the pocket of her robe, the clean one she always kept there just in case. Smoothing it out she held it in front of Maggie's nose, but it just hung there; there was no telltale flutter of breath.

Sandra jumped up and let out a little squeak. She spied the phone on a small table nearby and called 911. Thankfully she heard sirens just a couple of minutes later, and opened the front door to see the ambulance pull up. The EMTs rushed inside and went straight to Maggie. But it only took them a few seconds to determine what Sandra expected, the woman was dead.

An hour later Sandra heard the expected knock on her own front door. She'd had time to dress and feed the kids, though she'd only had a cup of coffee as she felt too unsettled to eat.

"Good morning, Mrs. Michaels. I'm Lieutenant Ken Freeman of Homicide." She glanced at the proffered badge out of formality. The man standing on her porch
looked
like a homicide detective, Sandra thought; brown suit and short brown hair with a touch of gray, a few extra pounds around his middle.

"Come in, Lieutenant," she said, beckoning him inside. "The officer told me someone would want to talk to me, though really I don't know anything, I just found her lying there. Can I get you a cup of coffee?" Sandra felt like she was running on but she was still flustered from her morning's unaccustomed experience.

"That would be great," Ken said. He followed her into the kitchen and sat down at the small table. Although he heard young children in another room he noticed there was no sign of them here, the kitchen was neat and clean.

Sandra's hand shook a little as she set the mug in front of Ken, then took a seat herself. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant. This has me rattled – I've never seen a dead person before!"

"I understand completely," he said. "You were the one who discovered the body?"

"Yes. I was letting the cat out and noticed her back door was open and went over to check. And then I saw her lying there, and I thought she was hurt or had slipped on the steps or something, but…there was no pulse." Sandra shuddered.

"Did you know Ms. Lane well?" Ken asked.

"Only to speak to; she was friendly enough, but kept to herself most of the time. She was single and, well, frankly we just didn't have that much in common I guess."

"Do you know if she had a boyfriend?" he wanted to know.

"Boyfriends, is more like it," Sandra replied a bit huffily. "And parties," she added significantly.

"Did you happen to notice if anyone was visiting last night?"

"Only about half the high school!" she said.

"What?" Ken asked, surprised.

"She's a teacher, English Lit I believe," Sandra explained. "Last night was Homecoming and apparently she had a party to celebrate."

"I see," he said. He thought it a bit odd for a teacher to have a party for students, but wasn't about to jump to the conclusion that anything untoward was going on. Even if there was some hanky-panky it didn't have to be related to the woman's death. "Wasn't that rather irritating?"

"It's not so bad in cool weather, not many kids go out in the backyard and I don't hear the stereo with the doors closed. Though there were cars parked all up and down the street until all hours."

"So the back door was closed last night?"

"I didn't look," she said. "We watched TV after the kids were in bed, so we wouldn't have heard the noise if people opened it to go in or out. We went to bed ourselves at 11:00. We're not nosy neighbors, Lieutenant."

Ken chuckled to put her at ease. "Of course not, Mrs. Michaels; I didn't mean to imply that you were. I just thought you might have seen or heard something that could help us determine what happened to your neighbor."

Sandra took a sip of her coffee while she thought. "I did notice a car still parked on the street early, around 2:00 AM. I'd gotten up to, uh…"

"Yes. Was it in front of Ms. Lane's house?"

"I think so," she said, clearly trying to remember. "I wasn't very awake. I wondered if the party was over and when I saw the car I thought maybe it wouldn't start and they'd get it later today. But it wasn't there this morning. It was a light colored car, but that's all I could say."

Privately Ken thought some young girl had probably had a chance to go joy-riding or necking with one of the boys, and retrieved her car later. "So you don't know what time the party was over, right?"

"No, I couldn't say. I'm sorry, I don't feel like I'm much help," she said.

"That's all right," Ken assured her. "You said you checked for a pulse, did you touch or move anything?"

Sandra frowned slightly as she went over events in her mind. "I put my finger on her neck…oh, and I held a tissue in front of her nose to see if she was breathing. And, um, then I grabbed the phone to call 911. Oh! Should I have called from my house? The police shows on TV all say you're not supposed to touch anything at a crime scene."

"No, that's fine. I just wanted to make sure," he assured her.

"Do you think she was murdered?" Sandra asked as the thought suddenly struck her.

"It's too early to say," Ken replied. "I'll lock the house up when I leave, but you might keep an eye on it. Thanks for your time, Mrs. Michaels. Oh, and if you remember anything else, even if it seems insignificant, please let me know." He handed her his card though he didn't expect to hear from her again.

"Brrr, it's cold in here," Emily said. She pulled her hood up over her head, then carefully fluffed her bangs around the edges.

"It's not so bad," Madison said. "They let us use one of the rooms under the stadium so at least we don't have to do this outside." She dumped the contents of a cloth bag onto the tarp spread on the floor. "Ewww, this one's got half a hot dog in it."

"That's why we wear latex gloves," Gracie commented. "Though just for the record this is
not
my favorite part, either. Bobby, can you drag that trash bin a little closer please?"

Bobby Summers was out of his element and obviously bored. He looked like a classic beach bum with sun-bleached blond hair and blue eyes, but his true love was working on cars. He tried to get into school activities but was uncomfortable talking about movies or music because he knew little about those subjects and always felt like the girls ignored him. Since this recycling project was mostly girls he'd thought he might be useful, if only for brawn. He moved the bin as requested and decided to begin moving the small bags closer so the girls didn't have to get up and get them.

"Great idea, Bobby," Madison said. "We'll get done a lot faster this way."

"I thought more people would be here," he said.

"Me, too," Gracie said. "But it's just a little after 9:00 AM, maybe they're just late. Oh look! There's Amy, now."

Amy ran into the room, looked around for a second, and then said, "I've been in a wreck!"