Murder at Moot Point (11 page)

Brother Dennis talked, smiled, squinted, nodded, blinked, winked, cajoled—all wise and serene and convincing—all silent and in living color. Charlie yawned. Eddie barked savagely, but far away in his Hide-a-bye out back. Exercise mats lined the walls, stacked under the windows facing the sea. They looked like the naptime cushions Libby'd had in day care, but these were longer, fuller, not as sticky.

She felt the last of the adrenalin rush from her confrontation with Eddie drain peacefully away and must have dozed, because she was startled aware suddenly by voices in midconversation.

“… agent, if you can believe Jack Monroe. No, I haven't seen her since yesterday.” Brother Dennis's voice seemed pitched too high for the compelling man on the monitors above her but Charlie recognized the soothing tones and softened consonants of a man trained to speak distinctly yet without suggestion of threat. “But if I do I'll let her know you're looking for her, Linda.”

“Seems like everybody's seen her but me. Wes'll platter my head and stick an apple in my mouth.” This Linda spoke with a drawl that sounded more like low blood pressure than region. She had to be What's-her-name. Charlie sat very still and very quiet.

“Saw a sheriff's car down at Doc's. Wondered if it was you. He's been seeing a lot of Gladys, Doc has. But I expect you know that.”

“Yes, Dennis, dear. Now you phone the dispatch the minute you see that woman and ask them to notify me.” Linda said it slow and insulting. Her shoes scraped the step and soon a car door slammed. She threw more gravel on her takeoff than the UPS man.

Brother Dennis winked at Charlie on the eighteen TV screens and mouthed the answers to questions she'd never asked. She lip-read the word “universe” several times. Off-screen, he grunted and swore under heavy boxes hauled in from the drive, up the lower steps across the platform to more steps, and along the floor above to drop them with a thud and return to repeat the sounds, his breathing growing less meditational by the minute.

Charlie lost count of the number of trips he made but waited until he'd kicked the door closed, then rose like a Phoenix from her floor seat. He stood panting and sweating on the platform hallway with stacked boxes in his arms, staring down at her with wonder and suspicion.

Brother Dennis made no rush to call “the dispatch” and notify Deputy Linda of Charlie's presence. Instead he showed her around the Moot Point Consciousness Training Institute—his gentle and benign condescension gradually returning.

“Why aren't you having seminars now? Seems like summer would be a great time,” Charlie asked as they explored a bookstore and reading room filled with the local guru's publications and tapes.

“We've got a two-day, a three- and a five-day all overbooked and that's just for starters. Searchers begin arriving tomorrow. The whole village is gearing up.”

“Sounds like Georgie's murder was poorly timed.”

“You'd know more about that than I.”

“Oh, come on, you don't think a total stranger dropped in to town to murder an old woman. I don't see you yelling for Linda the deputy.”

A twist of his hair had loosened from the leather clasp of his ponytail. Holding the clasp in his teeth, he deftly gathered all the flat-black strays and imprisoned them once more. “Three wings are dorms. One male, one female, and one for couples. But it's not unusual for two of the dorms to be taken up by single females. Women are more transformative.”

Each “dorm” had plaid spreads and matching curtains for those lucky enough to have windows. Each pair of beds shared a dresser, a tiny closet, and a rocking chair and were partitioned off from their neighbors. Each two partitions shared a tiny bath. Colorful rag rugs sat next to every bed on polished wooden flooring. Brother Dennis explained the rugs were handwoven by ladies of the town and on sale for students at the craft center next to the Scandia. “Many searchers buy so many rugs and other crafts they send them home UPS rather than take them on the plane.”

“Do they fly into Chinook?”

“We arrange with a van service to bring them over from Portland International. Some people from Oregon or Washington or Northern California just drive it. There's a row of tourist cabins along the main street they can rent and two bed-and-breakfasts we sometimes fill with searchers as well.”

He didn't show her the upstairs, which he shrugged off as his living quarters, recording studio, and storage. The dining room was cavernous, with trencher tables on a flagstone floor. Couches, chairs, and floor pillows grouped around a fireplace. But the kitchen was no bigger than Charlie's.

“Rose caters our meals,” he explained.

“Sounds like Moot Point relies on your institute for its livelihood.”

“A good portion of it—your client, for example. Jack Monroe's a lucky man. His son has an agent to share with him, and his store has a built-in clientele coming to town eight months a year.”

“Even in winter?”

“The storm season has an aura all its own,” he said ominously. “It might appeal to murderers more than summer.”

They stood toe-to-toe before the great stone fireplace. There was no question of standing nose to nose. Charlie refused to bend over backward to challenge his stare and lose more of the advantage.

“The odds are,” she informed the third shirt button up from his belt buckle, “that Georgette was shot by a male of her acquaintance. Not a total stranger with no motive.”

“We don't know you are a total stranger or have no motive, but we have just established that it is hardly in the interest of an inhabitant of this village to have something so disquieting as murder done here. Therefore it must have been an outsider like yourself who shot that poor old woman.” And with that he stalked off.

Chapter 12

“Therefore it must have been an outsider like yourself who shot that poor old woman,” Charlie mimicked to a tree on her way off the institute compound. Something about Bro. Dennis was formidably convincing even when you knew better. Even when you were only staring at his shirt button. Charlie would hate to have him testifying against her on a witness stand. These were all things she wouldn't have known had she not disobeyed the sheriff and avoided Deputy Linda, she pointed out to her nagging rational self.

Why would anyone eager to entice “searchers” keep a man-eating dog in the backyard?

Charlie clutched Doc Withers's book proposal and searched the lower terraces for a Moot County sheriff's car. It was just backing down a driveway on the second level. She waited until it meandered over to Jack's store and then she headed for the last place Wes Bennett's little watchdog had visited, figuring that would be the safest bet at the moment.

Speaking of watchdogs—drawn drapes and a high crescendo of doggy ferociousness bounced against the windows on three stories of the redwood, glass, and deck creation when Charlie rang the chimes. That was all that happened. Keeping an eye on the black-and-white-and-blue sedan with the light bar, still parked in front of the Earth Spirit, she followed a deck around to the back door. The grating din of what sounded like ten or fifteen yipping, slavering ankle biters begging for a swift kick in the incisors erupted now on this side of the house. Some human to answer the door did not.

Behind the house and to the right was one of those ostentatious three-car garages. One for her car, one for his car, one for the boat? Pickup? Motorcycle? Servant's car?

Above was an apartment with its own deck along the front to face the Pacific. And beneath the deck rose a flight of redwood stairs. And down by the sea Linda the law backed her black-and-white-and-blue away from the Earth Spirit.

The space above the garages held an artist's studio and apartment, both on the lavish side—Charlie was used to starving writers. Michael Cermack was not a starving painter. He was, if you could believe him, a gold mine of information. He was also still an asshole.

Charlie had stumbled across Gladys Bergkvist's little place on the hill, and the proprietor of the Scandia Art Gallery rented out her “loft” to visiting artists.

“More like leases it for next to nothing,” Michael said in a bored-to-tears tone, lifting palms and eyes upwards in an appeal to the deities for a clue as to the mentality of Gladys and her ilk. One had to bear so much in life. “But then she'd have to, wouldn't she, to lure anyone with options to this backwater?”

Visiting artists lasted as long as they could bear it or as long as their work sold at the Scandia to tourists and students of consciousness-raising. “Gladys and Olie, of course, take an enormous commission. But since so much is provided and there's so much space and privacy to work, they're hard to refuse.”

Olie, pronounced with a long “O” in the Scandinavian manner, was Mr. Bergkvist. But his wife was the one with whom everyone had to deal because good old Olie was on the road most of the year looking for artists and products for the gallery. “At least that's the excuse. My hunch is he can't stand the gloom of the rainy season—which is most of the year. And he can't abide Gladys—which is most understandable.”

Michael had welcomed Charlie into this place with undisguised delight. He'd been visited by the sheriff's “lady dogsbody,” sworn truthfully he'd seen nothing of Jack Monroe's agent, and then had been astonished to notice Charlie prowling around the Bergkvists' house. He'd known who she was from the dogsbody's description. “If you hadn't come up, I'd have come after you,” he'd said and drawn Charlie into his lair.

She was seated now on a poofy couch, and he poured them both glasses of wine the size of iced teas. But these held no ice. “Nothing much happens in Moot Point, you understand.”

Charlie just sat and listened, nodded and sipped, unable to believe this could be the same man who'd found her existence such an insult the day before at the lighthouse.

“But you know,” her host said, “Olie's usually back by mid-June. He's late this year.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Three years this month. About two years too long. Don't tell Gladys, but this has to be my last summer. Ennui can stifle the art inside as well as the man outside.”

Charlie shrugged—as if she knew all about art and artists. People expected as much from agents.

Olie was a high liver who had discovered Michael at a New York showing. “I'd been discovered years before of course, but this sounded like a much-needed vacation from the routine and stress of the real world.”

Charlie thought three years sounded like an incredibly long vacation from any world. But she made her living working with life's dreamers so she smiled, nodded, sipped. What would Sheriff Wes give to be hearing this bird sing?

Not all the little pieces of “structure” had settled to the bottom of the glass. A few ended up on her tongue. Must be Oregon wine. But after a few sips the taste grew very pleasant, relaxing.

Michael had shown Charlie the studio half of the loft first—skylights and the smell of oil paint and the stickiness of plastic sheeting covering the floor. The compelling, disturbing seascapes were banished to one corner and shrugged off as “crowd pleasers,” “hack work” necessary to earn a living—art with a sneer for the subhumans who knew what they liked.

Michael's passions were the massive canvasses that hung on the walls and that she could only describe as slash and burns—fiery slashes of bold color that changed perspective when you moved to either side of them. Some reminded Charlie of animals and birds, but in a vague way—perhaps a beady bird eye suggested above a possible beak by the brush strokes—then when she looked again, they didn't. Charlie didn't know what she liked, but she found these paintings as disturbing as the seascapes.

And that surprised her because the man himself appeared so shallow. Libby was always chiding her for judging people too quickly, being too impatient to discover the mysteries behind the face and the style of dress. While Charlie insisted pink and green spiked hair and leather and chains were not necessarily meant to conceal profound minds or sincere hearts.

Maybe Charlie was too impatient with the people of Moot Point. Maybe if she didn't look deeply into one of them she'd be accused of a murder that person committed. Or maybe she'd just shrug off some important piece of information it would be to her advantage to have. Or maybe she wouldn't beat Wes Bennett to an important clue—or the solution to Georgie's murder even.

Now who's the dreamer?
her nagging other sneered. But Charlie took a slightly deeper sip of her drink and gave Michael the asshole all the flattering attention she could fake.

He rose to uncork the bottle again and stood peering out the glass front of his loft. “The law is now zooming off to the lighthouse in hot pursuit of you.”

Today he looked like a mad, if handsome, scientist or maybe a surgeon. The dark hair in that ragged, arty cut. The high cheekbones and satyrlike brows. The smooth swarthy skin so unusual in this sallow population more accustomed to rain than sun. The white lab coat worn for an artist's smock and liberally smeared with shades of Michael's favorite color—red.

The yappy dogs started off again next door, mercifully muted by the walls of two buildings and the distance between them. “People seem to have a lot of pets in this village,” Charlie said, hoping his delight at fooling the deputy would keep him feeling chatty. He was the type whose moods would change quickly. “How many dogs do the Bergkvists have?”

“Five.” He waved all the digits on one hand and flounced back into his poofy chair. “Five miniature poodles, every one of which I'd give the earth to throttle with loving care and exactitude. Gladys has given them fanciful, regal, ancestral, papered, registered, purebred, and blue-blooded names. I call them Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe, and Joe.”

“Do they bite?”