Killing Thyme (20 page)

“All good, Glenn,” I called out. “Thanks.”

When I turned back to Tag, his lips had curved down, and his sky blue eyes had lost their verve, but not their look of concern.

“Pepper, this isn't about being smart or strong or brave.
You're all those things, and nobody knows it better than I do. You watch out for people. You fight for people.” His breath had steadied. “I—”

Ohhhmygod
. I did not want to hear this. Arguing with Tag was no fun, but if the alternative was hearing him declare his love and devotion and guilt and regret one more time . . . “Tag, don't—”

He held up a hand. “But if you uncover something that incriminates someone you love, can you live with that? Can you—what's that beeping?”

“The oven!” I jumped up and wriggled past him, then hopped inside. How long had it been screaming at me while I'd been caught up in drama? I grabbed a pot holder and the oven door, and slid out the baking sheet. Miraculously, I detected no telltale odor of scorched sugar or burnt molasses.

The cookies looked exactly as they should.

Thank goodness something did.

I grabbed a spatula and slid them onto a cooling rack. Wondered what Tag had meant about evidence incriminating someone I loved.

My mother? Kristen?

Ridiculous.

Another buzz sounded. I glanced at the oven, frowning, sure I'd turned it off. A second buzz, short and irritated. “Who's here now?” I said as Tag stepped through the window, our empty plates in hand.

Though the intercom distorted the voice, I could tell Tag recognized it, too. I bit my lip and pushed the button to open the door.

Who needs bad luck, when you have a mother?

They say that timing's everything,

In stocks and crops and love.

They say that it's what matters most,

When push comes right down to shove.

—Don Beans, “Timing”

“You couldn't call?” I looked past my brother to my mother, who was now hugging Tag.

“She didn't give me time,” Carl said, matching my low, exasperated tone as he set my mother's big black suitcase inside the door. “Besides, would you have answered?”

“Point taken. Sorry. What's this about?” I watched my mother step out the window to sniff the herbs and flowers. In the kitchen, Tag poured her a glass of wine.

“Plumber called. He's starting our job on Monday, so I need to pull the tub and toilet, patch the subfloor, and who knows what else.”

“You know plumbers never start jobs on Monday. They start on Friday, so they can leave you all weekend with one toilet for the whole family. It's required. It's part of the building code.”

“We've been waiting for months. If I put him off until
Mom's gone, Andrea will have my head on a platter. Mom said no woman should ever have to share her bathroom with her mother-in-law, and she'd come stay with you.”

And she'd insist on sleeping on the futon, refusing to let me give up the bedroom. That, and the grandkids, were why she'd stayed with Carl in the first place.

“No. Why's she really here?” I recognize an ulterior motive when I smell one.

“Beats me, Sis. I never can figure her out.” He sniffed. “Are those cookies?”

“Gingersnaps,” I said, and he groaned. “I'll put on coffee.”

“Ooh, I'd love a cup,” Tag said.

I clenched my teeth and pointed to the door.

“Let him stay.” Mom set three red tomatoes on the counter. “Pick these as soon as they ripen, or they get mealy. Maybe he can help us solve our predicament.”

“He's a cop. And you're a witness.” To what, I wasn't sure. An invisible ice pick stabbed my jaw, and I winced. I reached for the coffeemaker.

“Five minutes of meditation every morning, Pepper, and that jaw pain will never bother you again.”

It's a basic principle of conflict resolution that telling someone to relax or calm down only jacks up the tension. My mother's words had the same effect. But before I could respond, Tag's hand warmed the small of my back, and he set a full glass of wine in front of me.

He knows me too well. “What you said outside,” I whispered. “About fighting for people. Thanks. And thanks for staying.”

I lowered the volume on my mood music, and we sat in the living room. My mother asked after Tag's parents and brothers. The rich aromas of the Costa Rican beans she'd brought almost tempted me away from the earthy, fruity wine, but not quite.

“Tag,” she said, “tell me why those detectives think my
friendship with Peggy Manning—or Bonnie Clay—has anything to do with her murder.”

Arf lay on the floor next to Tag. He'd always said no to a dog, pleading shift work, but whenever he came by the shop or loft, it was clear that they'd bonded. “Actually, Lena, Pepper knows way more about all this than I do.”

I shot him a dirty look, but he was picking a crumb off the upholstery and feeding it to my dog.

“The police found the stolen bracelet this morning.” I described spotting Bonnie's van while searching for a parking place. Tag's eyes darted between my mother and me, and I thought I saw him struggle between being a cop or a member of the family. Divorce doesn't always end relationships; sometimes it only complicates them.

Carl leaned forward, arms folded, elbows on his knees, coffee and cookies forgotten. “What took them so long to find her van?”

“Oh.” Realization struck, and I sat up. “I'd assumed she'd had to park that far away, like I did, but that late on a Friday night, all the businesses on her block would have been closed. The street should have been half empty. She hid the van on purpose, so whoever—whomever—she was afraid of wouldn't find it.”

“She was afraid someone would link her to the past, right?” Carl asked. “And kill her for it. But why?”

Underneath her year-round tan, my mother had gone pale as any Pacific Northwesterner in winter.

“Mom, the van was registered in New Mexico. In your name.”

My brother doesn't much resemble my mother, but at the moment, their faces were twin pictures of horror.

The only sound in the room was Arf padding across the floor, returning to his bed and bone.

“I—have never—been—to New Mexico. That is not my van.”

“I know that, Mom, and I think the police do, too. It was clearly hers. What we don't know yet is whether she'd been using your name for other purposes, or just for the vehicle registration.” After fortifying myself with a long sip of wine, I told them what I'd learned about the twice-stolen bracelet's link to the incident in 1985. About the deaths of Walter Strasburg and Roger Russell. About the ten-year-old who'd watched his father die, and the detectives' belief, because of the missing bracelet, that another person had been present.

“That's why you thought she was dead, isn't it? That day in the Market, when we took the salt pigs and cellars back to the potter, and you recognized her. The police never mentioned that missing bracelet, so you didn't know the police suspected she had survived.”

After a long silence, my mother stood and went to the kitchen, returning with the wine bottle. She refilled our glasses and sat back in the corner of my couch, her bare feet tucked beneath her on the golden brown chenille.

We'd waited thirty years. Another thirty seconds wouldn't hurt.

“After all this time,” she finally said. “She called herself Peggy Manning when she moved in, sophomore year. Three girls in a funky one-bedroom apartment on the Ave, an old yellow brick building. It's still there.”

University Way, always called “the Ave.”

“I can't honestly remember—and believe me, I've asked myself—whether she said she was a student or we made that assumption. You wouldn't guess, seeing her now, but all the men in our crowd were crazy about her. Not your father—we met later. She had a waifish appeal, thin and blond. Like Twiggy, the model. Not to mention those eyes.”

I could picture that Peggy in the photo from the pantry opening fifteen years later, still attractive, though no longer young and fresh. Harder to see her in the Bonnie I'd met last week.

“She kept them all at a distance,” my mother continued. “Except Roger and Terry.”

“Terry we know.” Carl plucked two cookies off the plate, his diet temporarily free from Andrea's scrutiny. “Seriously good cookies, Sis. But who was Roger? You mentioned him the other night, but I can't place him.”

“Roger Russell. Short, dark haired, bearded. Intense. Adjunct faculty at U Dub, in the poli-sci department,” I said, courtesy of the brief dossier Ben had sent this afternoon, and which I'd barely had time to skim.

“That's right.” My mother sounded surprised at what I knew. “He was a serious rabble-rouser, constantly challenging the administration. He led the campaign to divest the university from military spending and other investments. Of course, he wasn't alone, and some of the older faculty joined in, but he became the public face of dissent.”

Ben had dug up a history of the antiwar movement in Seattle, written by an ex–journalism student. Roger Russell was all over it. “He was older than the rest of you.”

“A few years.” My mother sipped her wine. “Peggy never got any phone calls or mail. She had no friends outside the movement. One night, she took a shower and left her bag in the living room. A hobo bag made from upholstery samples, all the rage, and I rummaged through it. I suppose I shouldn't have, but she was so darned secretive. She had three driver's licenses, in three different names.”

“So the name changes were a pattern,” I said.

“Was she an informer? Hoover and the FBI claimed they had spies in the SDL and Weather Underground all over the country,” Tag said.

“SDL?” Carl asked at the same time as I said, “What do you know about that?”

“I read,” Tag said, with a touch of indignance. “I'm not just a pretty face.”

Jen at the Mystery Bookshop says men read more
nonfiction than women, and Tag had shelves full of books on history. Last winter over dinner, he'd raved about a book on the famous U Dub rowing team that won Olympic gold in Germany in 1936. I'd never heard him talk about the Vietnam War, but he could have read an entire encyclopedia since our divorce. If encyclopedias still existed.

One more pair of opposites that we personify.

“Student Democratic League,” my mother said. “We all belonged at first, until it got too crazy. So we did wonder about a plant. But they both seemed to be the real deal. They stuck around after the major protests in Seattle ended. Roger got kicked off the faculty—”

“No shock there,” Carl said. He gestured with his cell phone and ducked into my bedroom to call his wife.

I took a moment to refill the cookie plate and hoped Arf's bladder held.

“So, back to Roger,” I prompted when we were all back in place. “Oh, and what about Terry?”

My mother reached for a cookie. “We called them the Unholy Trinity. At first, Roger and Peggy were an item, then they became a threesome. I don't mean anything kinky—”

“The '60s have their reputation for a reason,” Carl said, earning a motherly glare in return.

“People in the neighborhood called us a commune, said the adults all slept around and the kids ran wild, but that was before they got to know us. You two know”—she looked from me to Carl—“there was no hanky-panky, and plenty of parental discipline. We were two families who shared a house and a philosophy, and tried always to live consciously and consistently. But some of our friends . . .” She let the words trail off.

“Roger would blow up,” she continued, “and Peggy would seek refuge with Terry. But it never lasted. Some couples seem to thrive on that sort of intensity, mistaking it for love.”

That had not been Tag's and my pattern, but I knew what
she meant. Ben had confessed to an emotional roller-coaster ride in his last relationship. And Josh had described a textbook case with Hannah.

Arf snored softly in his bed, but my own patience was running thin. “Fast forward to 1985, Mom.”

She sighed and twirled her nearly empty wineglass. I threw Carl a meaningful look, and he went to the kitchen to open another bottle. She and I weren't driving anywhere tonight.

“Peggy helped out in the day care. When she started learning pottery, she had everyone in the house working clay. Do you remember making those little animals?”

I slid to the floor and rooted around in the wicker trunk for the shoe boxes I'd seen last Sunday. Blew the dust off the one bearing my initials and lifted the lid.

Inside lay a lumpy ladybug, recognizable mainly by the black spots on her red back, and an exquisite emerald green turtle. I didn't have to turn over the ladybug to know I'd find a childish PR carved on the belly. But the turtle . . .

On the bottom of one foot was a pair of neatly carved diamonds. Bonnie's mark. And Peggy's, too—one identifier that hadn't changed. I cradled the gem-like memento, finally knowing where the memories had come from.

“Roger was chief gleaner. He and your father convinced the grocery stores on Capitol Hill and in the U District to donate produce and baked goods to the Pantry. Your dad taught all day, so Roger made most of the pickups. He also got restaurants and caterers on board. I'll never forget the day we got twelve dozen deviled eggs from a canceled wedding. The clients thought they'd gone to heaven.”

The clients were the men, women, and children we'd fed. “I remember that. We had half days the last week of school, and I was helping out. Was that 1985?”

She bit her lower lip. “After the—
incident
, they traced the van to Grace House. That was the first inkling we had that Roger still believed in bringing the war home.”

“A Weather Underground slogan,” Tag said.

“We'd all protested the nuclear buildup. We supported Bishop Hunthausen's stance against the nuclear subs in Puget Sound. We stood on street corners with signs and petitions. We wrote letters and organized boycotts. And we kept on teaching children, and advocating for the homeless, and feeding the hungry.” She paused, sipping, reflecting.

“So what happened while we were in St. Louis?” Carl said.

“Ellen called—the police were at the house. The shooting and explosion were all over the news. Roger was dead—they found his body. The community van was found abandoned near the Strasburgs' home, in an exclusive neighborhood. It was registered to Ellen and Greg.” Kristen's parents. “No one kept tabs on it.”