Happiness Key (6 page)

Cleaning and clearing hadn’t wrought any miracles, but she thought once the tile was down, and the rooms and cabinets were painted, the house might be liveable. She’d
bought a jute-and-seagrass rug, and six brass vases of odd sizes, from an import store that was “going out of business”—at least until the next “going out of business” sale. Now after pillaging her savings account, she only had to pay somebody to install the tile, then take care of the painting herself. Maybe afterwards she could walk through the door and not be flooded by memories of a different life.

She’d been surprised to find the physical labor—cutting flooring into manageable sizes, then wrestling it into rolls to haul outside—had been fun. As she scrubbed away mildew, cobwebs and just plain dirt, she’d imagined she was scrubbing away the past two years, getting back to something cleaner and more basic. For the first time since CJ sat her down to tell her that life as she knew it was over, she had looked forward to getting up in the morning to see what she could accomplish.

Now she had a chore she was not looking forward to. One more household item had to be wrestled to the curb for trash pickup. She didn’t want to leave Herb’s mattress in his cottage. And if she waited, it would have to remain there another week, a reminder she didn’t want to face every time she went inside.

She foraged for dinner—not difficult, since she rarely ate much at one sitting. She ate a few strawberries, three whole wheat crackers spread with goat cheese and half a dozen smoked almonds. She was ready to roll.

As she was halfway out the door, the telephone rang. This was so unusual she felt compelled to answer. The voice at the other end was familiar.

“Sherrie.” Tracy looked for a place to sit, tossing a couple of home improvement magazines on the floor so she could park herself in the easy chair. “It’s nice of you to call.” She was surprised at the edge in her own voice.

“I’m sorry, Trace. We’ve been out in Colorado. Wade had a conference, and I tagged along. I came back to an epidemic of strep throat.”

Sherrie Falmouth had been Tracy’s roommate at Cal State Long Beach. Her husband was a successful plastic surgeon in Scottsdale, Arizona, and was often on the road presenting papers or donating his skills to selected charities. Although the two women had been almost inseparable at “the Beach,” their friendship had waned after graduation. Distance and different lifestyles had been major contributors. Sherrie had married right out of college and started a family almost immediately. She and Wade had two adorable little girls, and when she and Tracy talked on the phone, Sherrie was usually obsessed with preschools, toilet training, or the exhaustion of trying to cope and still have something left over for Wade at day’s end. Tracy’s suggestion to hire a full-time nanny, so Sherrie could start having fun again, had never taken root.

Still, despite growing apart, Sherrie was the friend who had hung in with her when CJ’s exploits became public. It was Sherrie who helped pack what was left after the Feds vanished with their spoils, Sherrie who made arrangements for a van to carry everything to storage. And now, not surprisingly, it was Sherrie at the other end of a line that hadn’t exactly twittered with activity since Tracy’s arrival in Florida.

“Are the girls all right now?” Tracy asked.

“Just fine. But I’m a wreck. How are you?”

This was a question Tracy had never had trouble answering in the past. Now it presented all kinds of challenges. She knew herself to be a lot of things, some of which might not be that appealing. But she’d never been a whiner.

She concentrated on facts. “I’ve been working hard getting this place in shape so I can stay here until it sells.”

“You’re doing it yourself?”

“Yep. Oh, and I’ve had a couple of setbacks. Actually,
I
just had one, repairs I have to make to one of the cottages or the renters won’t pay. But the old guy in the next cottage had a doozy. He died. Just like that, and I found him.”

“Wow, bummer!”

“You’d better believe it. That part was really bad for him. The fact he won’t be around to pay rent anymore’s bad for me, but at least I’m still walking and talking.”

Sherrie made a tsk-tsk noise. “Did you know him?”

“Not really.” She decided to be honest. “I kind of tried to avoid him. I was busy, and I’m new at this. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to get involved with the renters.”

“Ah, Trace, who
do
you get involved with?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, as long as I’ve known you, you’ve made a point of just dipping your toes into relationships. You never just jump in and risk getting in over your head.”

“Well, I was kind of over my head with CJ, wouldn’t you say? I mean, I married him, I divorced him, and in between I sort of had fun. Until the big surprise.”

“No, if you’d jumped into that relationship and really gotten to know CJ, you wouldn’t have been surprised. You were surprised because you didn’t bother finding out who he was.”

“What kind of psychobabble is that?”

“The voice of somebody who knows you. Like, this is Sherrie, remember? One of the few people you ever let in, and mostly because we were in college and partying too hard to hide anything.”

“I wish I was as deep and mysterious as you’re making
me out to be, but I’m a ‘what you see is what you get’ kind of gal.”

“Right. So you say.” Sherrie paused. “Is there anything you need? Anything I can do from here?”

“You could find me another rich husband.”

“Do you really want one?”

“Make that a sugar daddy. I’ll do an Anna Nicole Smith.”

“You don’t have the boobs for it.”

“Wade could take care of that.”

“Over my dead body.”

“With CJ’s connections to the mob, that part could probably be arranged, too.”

“The girls and Wade send their love.”

Tracy made smooching noises into the phone.

In the last rays of twilight, the walk over to Herb’s seemed twice as long as it should have. As she drew closer, she could hear the sound of waves from the gulf side of the key. Her cottage was closer to the bay, and the view was blighted by mangroves and underbrush. Herb’s cottage faced in the same direction, but Alice’s peeked out at the gulf. Once the cottages were gone, and the vegetation was plowed under or tamed into submission, the owners of the luxury condos planned for this spot would have million-dollar views, which was a good thing, since they would be paying that much or more.

Tracy wasn’t a whiner, and she wasn’t a wallower. After life as she’d known it ended, she had taken hold of herself and put one foot in front of the other to get herself to this point. But now, as she approached Herb’s door, she wondered exactly what was in store for her future. She couldn’t dismiss the possibility that she was going to be living on Happiness Key until, like Herb, she was found dead in her bed.

No, that was silly. That was never going happen, because unless something changed quickly, she wasn’t going to have enough cash to hold on to the property. The taxes were enormous. She had enough money for another year, but if the land didn’t sell, she was in deep trouble.

But hey, that wasn’t the only thing she had to worry about. There was everything else, besides. Tracy supposed she had better take Lee Symington up on that introduction to the yacht club event planner.

Although the temperature was still well into the eighties, once she was standing on Herb’s front porch a shiver passed through her. She wished she had let the telephone ring, or skipped dinner. She had hoped to do this as the sun set, so she had enough light to guide her but not enough that her activities would be easily noted by her tenants. She was not insensitive, at least not completely. There was something crass about dragging the old guy’s mattress out to the road. It would probably look as if she couldn’t wait to clear out his house and rent it again. Find the body, carry the man’s stuff to the curb, dust off your capitalist hands and call in a classified.

Now she didn’t have to worry. Nobody would see her struggling with the mattress, because not only had the sun gone down, the last light had faded. No moon shone over the key, and an uncharacteristic silence had descended. She wasn’t easily spooked, but unlocking the door of a dead man and blithely walking in seemed like the sort of thing the victim in a slasher movie might do. A bad idea. But not as bad as waiting for next week’s trash pickup.

Inside, the light Janya had left burning in Herb’s bedroom was only a soft glow under the closed door and little help. She felt for and flipped a switch by the door, but nothing happened. Terrific. Herb probably had a lamp connected to it, but he had turned it off at the source. She
waited for her eyes to adjust. There were a couple of streetlamps at the front of the property where the rental office for the beach cottages had once stood. But the oyster-shell roads themselves had no illumination except front porch lights. She could make out the shapes of furniture, but not well enough to cross the room.

As she waited, she listened. The silence was like the thick, oozing chill of a San Francisco fog. Now and then it was punctuated by swamp noises, which were no consolation. The moment she judged she could see well enough, she felt her way across the room and found the nearest lamp. She fumbled for the switch—and why didn’t manufacturers agree on where to put the darn things?—and had just started to flip it when she heard something clang in the kitchen. She straightened with a jerk, nearly knocking the lampshade to the floor.

Mentally she gauged the distance between the end table and the front door. She told herself that she had imagined the clang. She told herself that the deputy had been sure Herb Krause wasn’t murdered in his bed but had died a quick, natural death.

Of course, mistakes could be made….

Her struggle lasted only seconds. She owned this house, such as it was, and it was her job to take care of the property. If somebody was in the kitchen going through Herb’s things, then it was up to her to stop them. She doubted anybody was going to kill her for a spatula and a cutting board. She had noted a vintage kitchen timer shaped like a chicken on the windowsill, but even that, campy as it was, provided no motive for murder.

By now she could almost see. A pocket door separated the kitchen from the living room, and now it was closed. She was almost certain the door hadn’t been closed when she was here earlier.

She tiptoed toward the kitchen and heard what sounded like the squeak of hinges, the creak of a door opening. She wasn’t imagining this. Somebody was inside going through cabinets. For what? And why? Poor Herb wasn’t even cold in his grave. Okay, cold, but not yet in the ground.

She felt along the edge of the door until she found the indented handle; then, with one smooth motion, she slid it open and jumped into the kitchen.

A low-wattage bulb lit the stove top from the hood above. Someone was bending over at the other end of the room, going through the lower cabinets. At the noise of the door, the figure straightened and whirled.

“What are you doing here?” Tracy demanded before she could see the intruder’s face. “This is breaking and entering.”

“Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist.” The woman straightened her shoulders and glared at Tracy.

Wanda Gray. Dressed in black spandex leggings and an equally tight black T-shirt, like some sort of white trash ninja.

Tracy felt herself relax, then she tensed again with righteous anger. “You scared me to death! What do you think you’re doing here? And how did you get in?”

Wanda reached in her pocket. For a moment Tracy wasn’t sure what to do, then Wanda swung a key in her direction on a spiral chain.

“Herb gave me his extra key. On account of him being so old and all. I think he expected me to come over now and then if I didn’t see him outside, and check to be sure he wasn’t lying on the floor with a broken hip or worse.”

“And that’s what you’re doing?” Tracy tried to sound cooler and calmer than her elevated heart rate dictated.
“You’re searching the cabinets to see if he’s in there with a broken hip?”

“No need to get smart. I know he’s gone.” Wanda snapped her fingers. “Like that. The Symington fellow told me. Of course, Mr. Symington wasn’t the one that found poor Herb. The one that found him didn’t bother to tell his neighbors he was dead.”

There was too much truth in that, but Tracy didn’t blink. “Maybe if you’d used that key the way Herb wanted you to,
you
would have been the one to find him, and you would have gotten all the bad news firsthand.”

Wanda didn’t say anything.

“What
are
you doing here?” Tracy said.

“I brought him some pie last week, in my special pie dish. My daughter gave it to me, and she’s not all that good at gifts. One year she gave me a pair of brown suede earth shoes, like she actually thought I might wear them. That dish is a winner, though. I didn’t want somebody coming in and taking it home just because they like it.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me, so we could look for it together?”

Wanda snorted.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ve gone a lot of years without baking a pie, and I see a lot more in my future.” Tracy saw a switch and flipped it so the overhead light came on. “Come on, let’s see if we can find it.”

“You just want to see if I’m telling the truth.”

Tracy supposed that was a little bit true. But mostly she just wanted Wanda to go home. “What does it look like?”

She listened as Wanda described the dish, then she started opening cabinets. Glasses in one, just a few, which gave her a pang. Some plates in another, a few saucers
and bowls. More pangs. No need for enough dishes to entertain, she guessed.

“Did Mr. Krause have any friends?” she asked. “You knew him better than I did. I guess, more important, did he have family? Because the funeral home took his money, but not his information.”

“Memorial, right? Somebody at work told me Memorial will be after me soon enough, too. They probably got to Herb and didn’t take the time to do the thing right. Busy canvassing everybody over fifty who hasn’t laid down their money.”