Murder Among the OWLS (2 page)

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Authors: Bill Crider

BOOK: Murder Among the OWLS
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IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL SPRING DAY, A WEEK AFTER EASTER, WITHOUT a cloud to hide the pure blue of the sky, and Rhodes enjoyed the walk down the block. So did Speedo, who'd gone along for the fun of it. He ran into and out of every yard they passed, seemingly excited by all the new and exotic smells.
He ran ahead of Rhodes and then ran back to meet him, as if trying to hurry him along. But Rhodes wasn't going to be rushed. The air was dry and cool, and he didn't often get a chance to go for a leisurely walk. No one else was out and about, so he and Speedo had the neighborhood of the silent houses to themselves. Some of the houses were empty because the owners had gone to work, and in some of them people were eating breakfast, watching TV, maybe reading last evening's
Clearview Herald
.
Helen Harris's yard, when they reached it, was immaculate, not a twig to be seen, not that Rhodes had expected anything else. It had been mowed only a day or so earlier, and the edges of the
grass along the sidewalks were trimmed. In the flower beds, which were completely free of weeds, purple irises bloomed, along with white narcissuses and yellow jonquils. Or maybe it was the jonquils that were white and the narcissuses that were yellow. Rhodes was never sure about flowers.
The house itself was old, dating from the 1930s or earlier, white frame with freshly painted trim and a clean-swept concrete porch walled with brick.
Rhodes and Speedo went up on the porch. Speedo ran from one corner of the wall to the other, as if something might be hiding in plain sight, but there was nothing, not so much as a spider. The floor of the porch was as clean as the floor in most people's living rooms.
A black-painted iron doorknocker was nailed to the frame beside the screen. It was shaped like a boot. Rhodes lifted it and gave a couple of taps.
No answer came from inside the house, so Rhodes knocked again, making the taps a bit louder. Still no answer. Rhodes figured that Helen was in the kitchen, which would be at the back of the house. Maybe she was busy or couldn't hear well. He went down the steps and around to the backyard, which was enclosed with Hurricane fencing that was beginning to rust in a few places. Rhodes opened the gate and went through, followed by Speedo, who ran to the other end of the yard before charging back toward the gate, hoping that Rhodes would play with him.
Rhodes told Speedo to mind his manners and not to mess up Helen's backyard, which was just as neatly kept as the front. There were no flower beds, but gardenia bushes lined the fences. Rhodes knew about gardenias. In June the smell of the flowers on so many bushes would be almost overpoweringly sweet.
The back porch was screened in. Rhodes stood on top of the concrete steps and knocked on the frame of the screen door with one knuckle. The door bounced a little when he struck it, as if it were loose, maybe not latched. Rhodes waited for several seconds, but no one responded.
Looking through the screen, Rhodes saw a little porch. A covered litterbox sat near the inner door beside a well-ripped scratching post. The inner door, which led into the kitchen, was open, but no one was in sight.
Thinking of the way the door had bounced, Rhodes gave it a try. Sure enough, it wasn't latched. He opened it and looked at the hook and loop arrangement. Nothing wrong with it. Maybe Mrs. Harris wasn't afraid of burglars, not that a hook-latch would do any good at all if anyone wanted in.
Rhodes could remember a time when hardly anyone in Clearview locked the doors, but that was in the past. Now, most people did, especially people living alone.
“Mrs. Harris?” he said.
Speedo ran over to see if Rhodes might have been calling him. Seeing that wasn't the case, he sat at the foot of the steps and looked up at Rhodes, who called out Mrs. Harris's name again, louder.
No answer, and Rhodes looked down at Speedo.
“Behave yourself,” he said.
Speedo wagged his tail, brushing it across the short-cropped grass, and Rhodes went on inside.
A white washer and dryer sat on the wooden floor of the back porch. The painted hardwood floor was so clean that it gleamed. Rhodes passed the washer and dryer and went through the open door into the kitchen.
It was like stepping back into an earlier time. The linoleum on the floor had been new about forty years earlier, but it was still shiny. Rhodes wondered if they still made Johnson's Glo-Coat.
The kitchen cabinets were original to the house, and there was no dishwasher. The stove was a white Chambers range. Rhodes's parents had owned one exactly like it. It had once been the top of the line, but now it was a collector's item.
A divided sink had been installed in the counter at one time, but it was by now forty years old or more, and a chip of enamel was missing on one edge. The Formica-covered countertops were clean but worn, lined with canisters, a chrome toaster, and a coffee percolator. An old wooden table stood on the faded linoleum at the opposite end of the room, near a door leading into a dining room. Near the table a bowl of cat food and a bowl of water sat on a rubber mat.
The only jarring note in the room was the body lying on the floor in front of the sink.
 
It looked as if there had been an accident.
Helen Harris lay motionless with an overturned stool beside her. She lay on one side, almost as if she were asleep, but Rhodes had seen enough dead bodies to be pretty sure that Mrs. Harris wouldn't ever be waking up. He didn't want to take any chances that he was wrong, however, so he walked over and knelt down to check for a pulse. There was none.
The stool was made of wood and had four legs, which would supposedly make it fairly stable. Apparently it hadn't been.
The cover of the light over the sink had been removed and was sitting on the counter, and a lightbulb with a dark spot on it lay beside
it. Rhodes stood up and looked into the sink. A broken bulb lay in the bottom.
So Mrs. Harris had been standing on the stool, trying to replace the bulb. Something had happened to the stool, it had become overbalanced, and she had fallen. The new bulb had landed in the sink, and she had landed on the floor.
That wouldn't have been enough to kill her. Her head, covered with wispy white hair, was beside the stool, and a pair of glasses lay not far away. Rhodes supposed that she might have hit one of the rounded corners of the stool when she fell. He saw a couple of white hairs caught on the wood, but he didn't make any firm conclusions.
He felt a kind of sadness that was a little different from that which usually came over him at someone's death. Mrs. Harris had been a part of the community for far longer than Rhodes could remember. For longer than most people in town could remember. Rhodes hadn't known her well, but he had vivid memories of her husband's algebry classes.
After looking down at the body for a couple of seconds, Rhodes sighed and went to check the rest of the house to make sure that no one else was hiding there. First he checked the front door. It was locked.
The furnishings in all the rooms were as old as the house, except for the TV set, which might not have been much more than twenty years old. There was only one telephone, an old black handset with a rotary dial, sitting in a little niche in a hallway. Rhodes didn't think there were many of those left in use even in a small town like Clearview.
Every room was as clean as the kitchen. The hardwood floors were smooth and shiny, the throw rugs hardly seemed to have
been stepped on, and there was no cat hair that Rhodes could see. He wondered if there was a single dust bunny to be found under any of the beds. Probably not.
In one of the bedrooms on a low bookshelf there were all sorts of interesting items: pieces of old glass and metal objects, including a few coins. One was a half-dollar. Rhodes hadn't seen one of those in years. Some things Rhodes couldn't identify. Most of them appeared to be not much more than junk: an old ice pick, what looked like a rust-covered hood ornament from the days before they'd been eliminated, even some rusty bottle caps. Junk or not, everything was clean and dusted.
The bed in Helen's room had already been made up, and her purse sat on the dresser. Rhodes would check it later, but it didn't appear to have been disturbed.
A tall jewelry box sat in front of the dresser mirror. Rhodes opened the little doors and saw necklaces draped over small hangers. He opened the drawers to see if any rings were inside. Several rings were there, and it didn't appear that any had been taken. Whatever had happened in the kitchen, robbery didn't seem to have entered into it.
After peeking into the rest of the rooms and finding no one, Rhodes went back to the kitchen. Nothing in the house had been disturbed. Everything pointed to an accidental death, but Rhodes somehow didn't believe that was the case. He suspected that Helen Harris had been murdered. There was no proof of that as yet, and in fact nothing in the deserted house suggested it, but Rhodes couldn't shake the feeling.
The setup was obvious enough. When Mrs. Harris had gone into the kitchen that morning, she'd discovered that the bulb over her sink was burned out and decided to change it. Then the accident
had happened. It was even possible that events had gone exactly that way.
But a few things were wrong. For one, the back screen door hadn't been latched. Rhodes thought that a meticulously careful person like Helen Harris would latch the door, especially if the door leading from the screened porch into the kitchen was open and unlocked.
It wasn't the doors that bothered Rhodes the most, though. It was the cat. Ivy said that Mrs. Harris never let the cat leave the house, but it had left, and it had been outside long enough to wander a couple of blocks to Rhodes's house. Who had let it out? Rhodes was convinced that someone besides Helen Harris had been in the house, someone who had gone out the back door and then gone somewhere else.
Rhodes thought about going to the black telephone and making the necessary calls, but he didn't want to mess up any fingerprints that might be there. He wished he'd brought a cell phone with him, but he didn't like cell phones. He thought about the odds of someone other than Mrs. Harris having made any phone calls. He decided there was next to no chance that anyone had, so he went into the hall and called the jail, dialing awkwardly because he was out of practice.
Hack Jensen, the dispatcher, answered, and Rhodes told him to have Ruth Grady, one of the deputies, meet him at Helen Harris's house.
“What's the matter?” Hack said. “Something happen to Helen?”
“I'll tell you later,” Rhodes said, and hung up the phone, knowing that he'd just ruined Hack's day. The dispatcher wanted to know everything as soon as it happened, so he could lord it over Lawton, the jailer.
Rhodes then called the ambulance and the justice of the peace. He called Ivy last.
“That's terrible,” Ivy said when he'd told her about Mrs. Harris. “I can't imagine why a woman of her age would want to climb up on a stool. She's frail and not exactly steady.”
“I'm not sure she climbed on anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don't know exactly. A few things don't seem quite right to me. I need to find out more about Helen Harris.”
“Are you suggesting that it wasn't an accident?”
“I don't mean to suggest anything.”
There was a pause, then Ivy said, “It's Sam, isn't it.”
Rhodes wished she hadn't used the cat's name, but he said, “Yes. Didn't you say she never let him outside?”
“That's right. Someone had to open the door, or he'd still be in the house. I know Helen wouldn't have let him leave, and certainly not before she tried to change a lightbulb. Someone who didn't know about Sam's habits must have done it. Or someone who knew and didn't notice Sam slipping past.”
That was what Rhodes thought, too. He said, “I don't know a lot about cats, but if S—if the cat hadn't been outside before, why would it go out now?”
“Because it was scared? Or bothered by a stranger being in the house?”
It sounded right to Rhodes.
“How many women are in the OWLS?” he asked.
“About six regulars, but Helen was in several other groups. She joined some of them when her husband was still alive.”
That would complicate things, Rhodes thought. The more acquaintances a person had, the more potential suspects in a murder
case. If this was a murder case. And that didn't even begin to account for the possibility of a stranger who might have wandered by.
“Do you know anything about those other groups?” he said.
Ivy didn't, not really.
“One of them was a metal-detecting club,” she said, and Rhodes thought about the things he'd seen on the shelves. “But I don't know who else was in it,” Ivy continued. “I don't even know for sure if she was still a member, but she used to talk about it now and then. You'll have to ask some of the OWLS.”

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