Moving Is Murder (6 page)

“There’s nothing wrong with eating every few hours. It’s called having a meal, you know. Just because you can go for days without eating, there’s no need to rub it in,” I retorted, but I was smiling, too.

“I’ll get Livvy and distract her for a few minutes while you eat,” Mitch said.

After I found the Wendy’s sack and two large drinks, I pulled out the blanket we kept in the back of the Cherokee and spread it on the grass under the pines in our backyard. The breeze wasn’t cool, but it was enormously better than in the house. I left Mitch’s grilled chicken sandwich in the bag. He eats such healthy food it makes me feel guilty sometimes, but not today. I unwrapped my crispy chicken sandwich, thought briefly about whether it would upset Livvy later when I breastfed her, but then I decided I was starved and it was the only food in sight. Livvy had done fine so far with whatever I ate. I took a big bite and hoped the trend would continue. I felt a little better after a few bites.

It was great Mitch would be off, but his idea of unpacking was to pull everything out of a box and toss it in a closet or a drawer. If I let him unpack I might never
find the Christmas decorations, much less the juice glasses. I grabbed a handful of fries. How would I take care of Livvy, feed her every two or three hours, and unpack several thousand pounds of household goods?

A brown grocery bag thudded onto the blanket.

A
bby plopped down across from me. “Hi, there. You doing okay? Jeff called me and said you’d found Cass. That she’d died?” Her voice made it a question. I nodded. Abby’s face was a mixture of puzzlement and concern. “Wow.” She pointed to the bag. “I was finishing up dinner, so I brought you some. Grilled chicken pasta salad, bread, and some cookies for dessert. And”—she reached in the bag and pulled out a Mason jar filled with a thick gold liquid—“honey. Straight from Jeff’s mom in Oklahoma. She FedEx-ed it.” A portion of the honeycomb tilted inside the jar. “I figured you wouldn’t feel like cooking, but it looks like you’ve already got dinner right here,” Abby said as she replaced the jar and scooted around to grab a few fries.

“Thanks, Abby.” I felt the tears gathering in my eyes again. She waved away my thanks. “Since I’m breastfeeding,
I’m always hungry. I’ll be ready to eat again in a few hours.”

“It’s too hot to cook all the time, so I made a big batch. Jeff and I will be eating it for a week. So what happened? The squad’s buzzing, but no one seems to know anything.”

“That was fast.”

“Well, you know how it is. The grapevine in the squad is as good as the one back home in Erick, Oklahoma. And just about as accurate, too.”

I recounted the story while she nibbled on my fries. A touch of genuineness set in every time I told what happened. Like a mist clearing, the edges of reality were bleeding into the unreal experience of finding Cass’s body. “She was the center of attention just a few minutes before and now she’s gone.” I shrugged.

“God. This is terrible. And now I feel kind of bad. I mean Jeff was furious with her, but it seems so insignificant with her dead. Dead. I can’t really believe it. You know?”

“Yeah. I know. What was going on between him and Cass? What were they arguing about?”

Abby dusted the salt from her fingers and plucked a blade of grass. She concentrated on the blade. “I don’t know. He said it was a misunderstanding. No big deal.” Abby tossed the blade away and looked at me. “We hung our last picture yesterday.”

“You’re done?” She didn’t want to talk about the scene between Cass and Jeff, so I went along. A determinedly blank expression had replaced her usual transparency. It wasn’t like Abby to keep anything back.

“Pretty much, except for a few boxes of odds and ends in the basement.” Abby and Jeff had moved one month before us when the military began closing Hunter
AFB. Remembering Abby’s walls at their last apartment, I knew the picture hanging must have been a job. Photos, paintings, quilts, display shelves, and decorative plates covered her walls, but somehow her house didn’t look cluttered, just artistic.

“It was quite a night. Jeff out with his tape measure and you know me, I just want to slap some nails in the wall and hang the stuff.” She looked me over critically with her blue eyes. “So, what have you been doing this afternoon?”

“Making a tiny dent in the mountain of boxes.”

“You’re doing great. I felt that way a few weeks ago, too. And I don’t have a new baby. We’ll have you unpacked in a few more days. How about I watch Livvy while you unpack? You’ve got a knack for seeing where everything should go. I do draw the line at poopy diapers, though.”

“… though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me….” The words from the church service were still in my thoughts as we drove home. Livvy kicked the rattles suspended from the car seat handle, glad to be released from what she obviously considered a prison, the nursery. Mitch drove with one hand on the wheel, the other holding my hand as we took the sweeping curves up Rim Rock Road.

The Sunday worship service had been formal with hymns, readings, responses, and a rambling series of tear-jerking stories for a sermon, but no real inspiration or wisdom. One elderly couple greeted us, the wife with her nose crinkled like she smelled a bad odor and the husband speaking to us but searching the faces behind
us. It certainly wasn’t an improvement over the previous Sunday when we had visited a small church where the worshippers had converged on us with eager smiles, clinging handshakes, and reassurances that they were “so glad to see some new faces” and we
“had to come back again
.” I’d felt like bait dropped into shark-infested waters. Looking for a church was only slightly less exhausting and frustrating than looking for a home, I decided. The road emerged from the neighborhoods and clung to the edge of Black Rock Hill. I studied the tops of the pines marching down the escarpment that fell steeply away from the road.

“I haven’t seen that sign before,” I said. Perched on the edge of the drop-off, the large sign with a pinecone logo shouted,
WILDE CREEK ESTATES. EXCLUSIVE GOLF COURSE COMMUNITY WITH LUXURY HOMES STARTING IN THE LOW $300,000S. CONTACT: DIANA MCCARTER.
A phone number filled the space under the name.

A switchback road cut down into the trees. In the flat valley at the bottom of the escarpment, yellow construction equipment parked in a freshly cleared patch of dirt looked like toys in a sandbox.

“Wow. Can you call anything in the three-hundred-thousand-dollar range low?” I asked.

Mitch grinned. “Way out of our league.”

“I know Vernon needs more housing, but I don’t think many people from the base will be able to afford anything down there. Diana McCarter. Isn’t she one of the spouses? Petite, blond?”

“I think that’s Brent’s wife. He said she was a realtor.”

As I studied the river winding through the valley I remembered a phrase from the reading at the Sunday service, “valley of the shadow of death.” Cass’s husband, Joe, was certainly there. I knew I had been introduced to
him, but I couldn’t remember him. Was there anything I could do besides pray for him? There was always the old standby of taking food.

That afternoon I pushed the stroller up our steep driveway. I balanced a dish on the cover of the canopy over Livvy, who was dozing despite the roar of the lawn mower. I wondered how Livvy could sleep through the racket when other times a sneeze could wake her. I caught Mitch’s eye, held up the dish, and pointed to Joe’s house. He waved and pushed the mower he’d borrowed from some neighbor in front of a line of bushes I’d trimmed. Or tried to trim. They looked fine until I stepped back for a wider view. Definitely sloping like a playground slide.

Despite the shade from the maple and pine trees, I already felt sticky. It was a different heat from Southern California’s dry, scorching heat. There was a touch of humidity in the air here. I looked up at the pines, almost surprised that I missed the fan palms and yucca. I heaved the stroller up the steps to the bungalow’s wide front porch, then paused between the sturdy porch piers, reluctant to ring the doorbell. I couldn’t decide why. Was it just the proximity of death I was avoiding? Maybe I knew it would make me reexamine what happened. I’d tucked that event away in my mind and I didn’t want those images and feelings pulled out again.

I didn’t really know Joe, I’d argued with myself, but in the end my upbringing won out. My mother, so relaxed and easygoing in so many ways, was adamant about certain things. If there was a death, you took food and later you went to the funeral, regardless of how much that person’s life had intersected with yours. If
you knew them well enough to know they had died, you knew them well enough.

I pushed the doorbell and looked over Cass’s yard. Already yellow patches pooled in the grass and her roses needed deadheading. Joe opened the door. His thin black hair receded at the temples gave him a large forehead. He was tall, probably six-three with a rectangular face and rough skin, the kind with easy-to-see pores. As soon as he opened the door, I remembered him. He had carried a black trash bag around after the barbeque cleaning up. Today his brown eyes were pink rimmed and his skin, instead of being the olive tone I remembered, looked pale and washed out. He gazed blankly at me. A brown and black rottweiler stood, solid and alert, beside him. Joe automatically rubbed the dog’s ears.

“Hi. I’m Ellie Avery.” I angled the stroller away from the dog. “We live over on the corner.” I gestured to our house across the street. “My husband is in your squadron.”

The only advice I had heard about talking with grieving people had come from my mother after my grandfather died when I was twelve years old. She had said go ahead and say you’re sorry and say the person’s name. “For God’s sake,” she had said, “can’t they remember his name? I’m not going to burst into tears if they say it.” So I plunged in even though I felt awkward. “We’re sorry about Cass.” He still stared at me. Was he taking any of this in? “I brought you some minestrone soup and bread.” I held out the container topped with the foil-wrapped bread, which the dog sniffed appreciatively but Joe made no move to take.

“Um, if you’ve had supper already you could freeze this,” I said. He didn’t say anything. I asked, “Have you
had supper?” I felt like I was talking to a three-year-old, prying out a few words.

His gaze transferred from me to my house, “Ah, some cereal this morning,” he said vaguely.

“You haven’t eaten all day?” If I could get him to take this food, odds were he’d leave it on the kitchen counter and forget about it. “How about I warm it up for you? You can eat some right now. You need to eat.”

His eyes focused on me and he seemed to see me for the first time. “Ellie Avery? That’s your name?” he asked as he opened the door wider and called for the dog to follow him. “I’ll just put him out. Kitchen’s over there.”

Dark and silent, it felt like a different house than the one that had been filled with women’s voices and energy just a few days ago at the spouse coffee. I pushed the stroller past two suitcases standing near the door and went to the kitchen. In the living room, the remote rested on the couch beside a blanket. A twenty-four-hour news channel silently flickered blue light on the furniture.

I deciphered the microwave and looked for silverware. Joe called out, “I think the Security Police mentioned your name.” I paused with a spoon in my hand. Did he want to ask me about finding Cass? I closed my eyes and frantically tried to think of what I could tell him. Not the truth. She had obviously died in pain and terror, frantically clawing dirt to get up the hill. My mind froze on that image, the microwave beeped, and Joe returned to the kitchen. He paused over Livvy’s stroller and she yawned, stretching her hands and feet. He gave a small, automatic smile and turned to me.

I hastily set the steaming bowl on the table in the breakfast nook and searched in the refrigerator for a
drink for him. “Be careful. It’s hot.” Cass’s refrigerator was crammed with haphazardly stacked containers: a block of cheese, an apple, and a stick of butter sat on top of wrinkled whole wheat tortillas wedged in beside soy milk. I found a pitcher of tea and poured him a glass. I’d tell him as little as possible and let him talk.

“I found her on my way home.” I sat down at the other end of the table and pulled Livvy’s stroller over. I fiddled with her Pooh bear.

“I just can’t believe it happened. That she’s gone.” He ate his soup and bread unconsciously, but his eyes searched my face. “Did she say anything?”

“No. She was … gone when I found her. It must have happened fast because she left just a few minutes before me.” I offered this information, hoping the speed of her death would gloss over the terror of it.

“I told her and told her …” his voice trailed off and he pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. After a moment he sighed, rubbed his high forehead, and took a drink of the tea. “I always hounded her to keep the EpiPen with her. Her last reaction to a wasp sting was so severe she almost died. That happened last year at the squad’s pool party. But she wasn’t like that, cautious. She used to tease me that she wanted to live life without worrying about every little thing, like I did. She was impulsive and fun and full of energy.”

To keep him from asking me anything else, I asked, “Is that what happened, she had a reaction to a sting?”

“Anaphylactic shock.” The syllables rolled off his tongue with ease. It was a familiar term. He drained his glass. “A wasp got in the van. It stung her several times. Her whole body reacted to the venom. That’s what the medical examiner’s office found. She must have stopped the van to get out, away from the wasp, then
she went around the passenger side to get her EpiPen. But she got queasy and dizzy. They think she slipped and fell down the slope. She must have lost consciousness before she could get back up. At least, that’s what the medical examiner and the Security Police think. They’re releasing her body today. I’m flying home to Houston tomorrow.”

“Her family lives there?” Livvy started to fuss, so I pulled her favorite red and blue clown rattle out of the bin in the bottom of the stroller.