Orchids and Stone (14 page)

“Message,” the policeman said.

“I have to take Jed home,” Vic said. “I’ll be back soon. Come on, buddy.” He walked away without kissing her good-bye.

Daphne wished the world weren’t a place where a father drove his son away to his ex-wife’s house and called that his son’s home. She wished so very many things were different.

“Dad?” Jed called, hurrying after him. “Dad, what happened? Tell me what’s going on.”

“Let’s go take a peek at the address on the other side of the park, shall we?” The officer stood on the threshold and beckoned her to come with him.

Daphne sucked in a great lungful and stepped one foot across the doorway, looked back at Grazie still on the floor. She addressed the cop while eyeing the dog. “Do you believe me?”

He reached for her arm. “I believe something may be a bit off. I’d like to take a look at the woman’s residence on Eastpark. You can come and point out to me the route you ran. Maybe a neighbor or someone saw something.”

Daphne shivered at the words and followed him outside, not wanting to lose this official person to talk to, this person who let her begin at the beginning. If she had more time, she decided, she’d even tell him about ten years ago and her dad, even about twenty years ago and her sister. Someone would know everything and could tell her what made sense and what didn’t. “I don’t have a car here,” she explained. “My boyfriend had to take mine since I got his impounded.”

“I’ll take you with me. Let’s zip around the park and check out the Minerva Watts place.” They were within feet of his marked police car now.

Daphne took a breath, eyeing the back seat of the squad car as he jingled his keys. “Seriously, I . . . mm, don’t have to go with you. I just . . .”

He opened his front passenger door and held it, looking back at her with a bland expression.

She smiled. “My parents told me never to get in a car with a man I didn’t know.”

“Your parents were right. Hop in.”

Hop in, Daphne thought. The same words the other officer said after he’d arrested her.

Crackling police radio accompanied their drive. Her body trembled. “I got arrested because this guy stole my ID.” Her tiny try for sympathy wasn’t enough to make sense. She told him more details about the chase, the two chases.

“Sounds like you got arrested for driving reckless, blowing a light, and causing an accident, but hey, I wasn’t there.”

She looked at him sideways. “Okay, here’s the one thing from ten years ago that stands out in my world.” And she told him about her father.

“Who would call you and say that can come back and bite you in the butt?”

“No one!” Daphne’s frustration bubbled out. “I mean, who? Why? It doesn’t even make sense. But why would that message be directed at Vic? The only person in the world who doesn’t like Vic is his ex-wife . . .”
And my best friend, Thea,
she amended in her head.

The officer nodded. “The caller didn’t address either of you. The message may not have been intended for either of you. It may have been a misdial.”

And then they were at Minerva Watts’s vacant house at 11243 Eastpark Avenue, and Daphne imagined she could look right into and through the Peace Park and see herself in the middle of the greenbelt just yesterday, see Vic’s dad’s old house on Westpark Avenue bordering the far side of the park.

The officer told her to wait in his car. Her mind ran on and on while the officer knocked, waited, then walked around Minerva’s house. When he knocked on neighbors’ doors, she wished he’d left the patrol car’s windows down farther, so she might overhear something. The woman who lived across the street was talking to the officer now, gesturing with the cop at the Watts house, the alley, down the road.

“She saw a dark blue car,” the cop told Daphne when he returned to his patrol car. “Said the old lady’s car’s silver, that this wasn’t the car that’s normally there—”

“It wasn’t?” Daphne chewed on this nugget, then shook her head in defeat. Every scrap was fallow, meaningless without illumination.

The cop shrugged. “Maybe family, a visitor.”

“That couple. The dark blue Town Car must be theirs.” Daphne stopped as the officer made a cryptic request into his shoulder microphone, asking for some kind of reverse check. The car’s dashboard radio squelched the same voice from the officer’s portable radio. Daphne looked from the cop to his dashboard and back again, not understanding the dispatcher’s response. Something about a transfer pending. She trained her perplexed look on the officer.

He squinted at the house. “A check of all vehicles registered to a Minerva Watts at this address shows none. She had a 2012 Ford Crown Vic, silver in color, but just sold it to Fremont Ford.”

“Just sold it?” Daphne looked at the house, too, wondering what, if anything, was in Minerva Watts’s garage.

“Yeah,” he said. “Records show a transfer pending as of yesterday.”

“Yesterday? She sold her car, her Crown Vic, to a Ford dealership yesterday?” Daphne shook her head and looked back across the street. “How long has the Town Car been hanging around Minerva Watts’s house?”

He shook his head. “The neighbor didn’t say.”

“Ask her. Oh, please? Will you ask the neighbor how long the car’s
been around here?” Daphne’s urgency came from her soul. “Can I go ask?”

The officer made a tight-lipped smile, then walked back to the neighbor’s house. It was brown with a red door. No one answered his knock for some minutes; then he spoke to the neighbor lady again. Then he tried her neighbors, rapping on doors with his nightstick.

“Well, we don’t know how long it had been there,” he reported, “but the neighbor lady just noticed it a day or so ago.”

At the house on the next block, Daphne pointed out the rhododendrons where she’d hidden, and the officer rapped on the door with a small flashlight, the metal making a ringing ping against a brass doorplate, but no one answered.

Moving across one yard to another, the cop lingered before he went next door to the house where she had seen someone in the upstairs window when she’d been hiding. The cop holstered the flashlight and drew his baton.

Daphne waited it out in the car, thinking and watching and reliving while the front door opened and the officer exchanged low words with occupants she could not see. And she wanted out, out of this car, this life. She wanted, craved, peace.

When he came back, she decided it was worth it, seeing things through. It would all be worth it if she got to understand. She didn’t want to miss a thing, not anything, so she asked, “Why do you beat on people’s doors like that?”

“Ever tried knocking on a lot of doors?”

“No.” She made herself not ask if he’d ever tried roofing a six-plex, or a dozen of them.

He grinned and started the patrol car. “Hard on the knuckles.” All the way around the park, he said no more.

“What happens now?” she asked as he pulled up at Vic’s house. Her truck sat in the driveway.

“I write a little report and go to my next call.” He tapped the radio on his dashboard then scribbled on a business card and handed it to her. “There’s a bunch of calls holding in my area. I need to move on. Here’s my card and the case number. Call if anything happens. And if nothing happens, you move on, too.”

CHAPTER 13

Abandoned at the curb in front of her house—it wasn’t hers, it was Vic’s, no, Vic’s
father’s
house—Daphne blinked in disappointment as the police officer drove off. Then she saw Vic standing in the front doorway with a huge bouquet of roses and wasn’t at all sure how she felt about him.

He waited for her to admire the red petals, looked undecided about something, then launched into, “So Thea was in the house, here by herself, looking for your ID.”

“Vic, what was I supposed to do? I needed identification. I needed someone to get it for me from the house. What in the world was I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know. Sorry. I’m just tired. I got up early this afternoon so I could get Jed’s bike before I took him to soccer and . . .”

She sniffed when he didn’t finish his thought. “Well, you’ll sleep well tonight.”

He reached for her. “With you. I can sleep with my arms around you all night. I love those nights.”

She did, too, when life wasn’t crazy and when his kids weren’t around.

In the bedroom, both ready to call it a night though it was mid-evening, he stroked her left shoulder when she pulled her shirt off. “You’re bruised. Is that from the guy grabbing you?”

Twisting to look at her shoulder in the mirror, Daphne prodded the purple blotch. “No, he grabbed my other arm—”

“God, I wish I’d been there!”

Pleased with Vic’s sudden explosion, Daphne straightened as she rubbed her arm. “This bruise must be from the crash. The side-impact and steering wheel airbags went off. The car spun a full circle.”

He shook his head. “The airbags went off? I think I was picturing closer to a fender bender, but something that still meant the car had to be towed. Quite a day. I’m just glad no one was . . . I mean, no one was hurt, were they? Anyone else?”

She told him then about the other two cars, the guy with the bloody knuckles and the woman taken away by ambulance.

“Yikes. I guess I had the impression you hit a power pole or something. I don’t know why.”

“I never said I hit a power pole. I got hit by a car from each side and it spun the Honda around in the middle of the intersection.”

“The guy wasn’t badly hurt though?” He waited for her head shake before continuing, “And you’re comfortably sure the other woman is going to be all right?”

“Yeah. She said she was glad her kids—”

“She had kids with her?”

“Not with her. But she said she’d just dropped them off or something like that. She was glad they weren’t with her.”

Vic’s shoulders sagged. “Picture what you did, Daph. You blew a light. You hit a woman.”

She felt the stresses of the day and the last two decades break her open. When she opened her mouth to respond, she laughed, a great guffawing cackle. “Hey, I hit a guy, too.” Daphne tugged at his sleeve.

“This isn’t funny. Suppose her kids had been with her. Picture it. Picture them scared and crying.” He shook his head. “I suppose it’s because you’re not a parent that you can make fun of potentially putting a kid in danger.”

She clenched her teeth. “It’s not because I’m not a parent, a mother. It’s because it’s over. There’s nothing I can do about it. I wish it hadn’t happened, but it did. In hindsight, yes, I should have slowed down, made sure it was clear before—”

“Before you ran a red light?”

“Remind me not to have you on my jury or defense team or whatever.”

His eyebrows pitched up. “Does that mean you’re going to contest your ticket?” He dropped his question when he saw her expression and raised his hands to stop the cycle of contention. “Can we just go to bed? Can I give you a rose massage?”

It had been his best move, she’d told him, the first time they’d slept together. A rose massage. He’d brought her a bouquet and startled her by tearing it up. Then he’d sprinkled the petals of twenty-three roses over her nude body, stroked and kneaded her skin, every muscle and curve. And he’d repeated every languid motion, stroking her with the last whole rose. It had taken hours. It had taken her to new heights of enjoyment, of seeing tenderness and affection in a man who professed pride in being with her.

Sinking onto the bed, Daphne asked him, “Do people seriously just go to bed like it’s a normal night when something like this has happened?”

“Something like getting arrested?”

“No,” she snapped, “something like seeing an old lady get kidnapped. Again.”

“Daph, you really don’t know what’s going on with that lady, in her life, in those other people’s lives. And I think you should face facts. Face the reality.”

“Which is?”

“That you never will know, okay? You will never know. Some things, we just don’t get to know. But those people, the lady, they’re probably okay.”

“You weren’t there. I know what I saw. Something was going on.” Daphne spread her fingers against his chest. “What gives with you? You wave off my concerns, but then when the cop shows up, you’re Mr. Supportive, like you’re playing a part.”

He blew out a hard breath and took her hand in his. “You are tenacious and it’s admirable, but once in a while, it would be good to let things go.”

“How often has something like this happened?”

“Maybe once in a lifetime,” Vic said, his voice beleaguered.

Once in a lifetime. The words echoed in her mind, lost from long ago. Once in a lifetime . . . what? Not helping someone?

Not helping because of not knowing was so much more excusable than not helping due to an apathetic lack of effort. A murder was once in a lifetime and most people didn’t have murder in their families. A hanging? Once in a lifetime.

A girl like Suzanne, someone had said, she was once-in-a-lifetime special.

Who had said that? A boyfriend? That boyfriend, the last one? Ross? Yes, Ross Bouchard said Suzanne was a once-in-a-lifetime girl.

Oh, and her mother said the same when frustrated with Suzanne, having caught her about to take the car without permission.

Their mother had perhaps never known how Suzanne snuck out so many times. Her mother talked about Suzanne’s sassing, funky clothes and hair, and that phrase on so many of the elder daughter’s report cards: not living up to potential. Daphne swallowed at the literal reality of those teachers’ comments. And her mother’s counterpoint, when shaking her head and half-complaining about once-in-a-lifetime Suzanne, came in the same breath as she proclaimed how different Daphne was.

You’re my good girl, Daphne.

“I have to call my mother again. I want her out of the house for now. Until I know if that guy having my wallet is going to be a major problem.” She tried to think, to plan the conversation. Her mother might argue that she couldn’t leave her cat for long. Daphne considered a counterargument, deciding she and Vic could keep the cat for a while. Maybe her mom would sleep at their house, too, but where?

“You have to cancel your credit cards,” Vic said. “Should have already done it.”

Daphne lurched from the bed, grabbed the phone off the nightstand, and pushed a useless button. “It’s dead. Why’s it dead?”

He took the phone from her and racked it back on the charger. “I’d guess you left it off the charger earlier. I’ll go get the kitchen phone so we have one up here tonight.”

Vic wanted a working phone beside the bed in case there was an emergency, in case his kids needed him, Daphne knew. She held out her hand. “Just give me your cell.”

Vic slipped his phone off his belt clip, put it in her palm, then headed down the stairs for the house phone.

Her mother’s voice held surprise with a one-word question. “Victor?” Although her mother still didn’t have a cordless phone in the kitchen, Daphne had bought her a set of cordless units for the bedroom and living room.

“No, Mom, it’s me. Just using Vic’s phone. Um, how was bridge? Good?”

“I didn’t have very good hands and I missed some things. Are you
coming out tomorrow? I’ve been doing so much. Why don’t you spend the
weekend with me? Victor can come, too. And his kids. We can all go—”

“Oh, Mo-om.” Daphne felt herself weighed down with these requests she didn’t want to grant and realized her mother would not give up either.

Daphne wondered about the validity of her concern that the man who’d taken her jacket would go to her mother’s house. She tried to weigh the best-case scenario against the worst, as Vic would measure it. People pursued victims in movies. With the salve of time, the whole afternoon at Minerva Watts’s house turned surreal. Unexplainable and incomprehensible and somehow not real.

“Oh, Da-aphne,” her mother said. “I have such a surprise for you. Just come out. It won’t be a too-sad thing . . . like every year. We were saying at bridge, the other girls, they were saying you have to do things with kids. Kids don’t want to just sit around in an old lady’s house. You don’t. And especially this weekend—”

“Mom, it’s just—”

“No, listen to me, child. Blanche said there’s this place we could go. We could all go. She takes her son and his wife and their kids up to a little resort in the apple country and they poke around at all those German-looking buildings and they pick apples and peaches in the orchards, although I don’t think you can pick fruit right now. And they have Christmas stores, open all year. The hotel they stay at has a swimming pool and the grandkids love it. We could join them. We’re invited. Victor’s kids would like that, wouldn’t they?”

“Um, Vic, Mom. Call him Vic.”

“All right then. Vic. Vic’s kids would like the hotel with a swimming pool. Blanche is going up with her son and his family this weekend and they’ve invited us, and there’s no reason in the world you can’t go, no reason to say no. You don’t work weekends and neither does Victor. Vic. So we could all get away for the weekend and stay together. They’re leaving tonight. You and I and Vic and his kids could catch up to them in the morning. Wouldn’t that be good? It would. You know it would. Say yes.”

“So, you could go away with them tonight? You’d be gone all weekend?”

“They’ve invited all of us. It’s not peak season yet, so we’ll get a good rate and there are vacancies on short notice.”

“You should do it, Mom. You should go with Blanche this weekend. Tonight.”

The pause killed. Her mother’s voice returned, stiffer. “But you’re not going to say yes and come along and spend the weekend,
this
weekend, with me?”

Daphne sighed. “No, Mom. I’m not. We’ll have the kids and we’ll visit Vic’s dad Saturday morning and—”

“I told you the kids could come. They’d have fun. You just don’t want to spend the weekend up in Leavenworth with me and Blanche and her lovely family. She’s so lucky to have a son and daughter-in-law and grandkids who like to spend time with her. You just don’t like—”

“Come on, Mom. That’s not it.” Well, it was, but it was a truth that left Daphne cringing. Spend a whole weekend trapped with her sad mother? Beautiful Bavarian Leavenworth, Washington, loomed like a prison—like Leavenworth, Kansas—when she thought of spending an entire weekend with her mother there. Aurgh.

“Mom? Make sure the doors and windows are locked if you don’t go away tonight, okay?”

“Why?”

“Just do. I was thinking of you is all.”

Her mother said nothing and the pause went on and on until Daphne sighed and said, “The truth is, my wallet and jacket and cell phone were stolen and my ID still has your address on it and I wondered if the guy who stole it might come to your house. You know? I just wondered.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place? Did you leave your jacket in your car at work?”

“It’s a truck. I don’t have a car—”

“Will you stop correcting me for every little thing? I’m your mother. You don’t correct me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mom. I am. I had a lousy day and—”

“Well, I’d imagine so, what with your jacket being stolen. Poor girl. Are you sure you didn’t just lose it? Where did you see it last?”

Batting the conversation back to her mother, Daphne stepped over Grazie and thundered down the stairs, rolling her eyes at Vic while fending off her mother. She tried to pour a glass of wine with one hand, watched Vic chuckle, then relinquished the corked bottle to him. He was unable to stifle a grin while he poured two glasses, and he clinked them together before gesturing that he’d carry the wine up to their bedroom.

She heard the house phone ring as she ran up the stairs, screwing her eyes shut as she worked her mother’s conversation to an end.

“I’ll tell her,” Vic said. Daphne peered over the landing and watched him finish writing a note, pick up the two wineglasses again, and climb the stairs with the note protruding from two fingers. She waited until she could stand his passivity no more, aggravated that he didn’t tell her right away what he knew.

“Who were you talking to?”

He met her stare, set the wineglasses on their nightstand, and reached to kiss her while holding the note behind his back. “Thea.”

“Hmm. You two still hate each other?”

“We don’t hate each other,” he protested. “We both love you.”

“How long are you two going to not get along?”

“I don’t know. How long were you eavesdropping on us this evening?” Vic brought his hand from the small of his back, glanced at a note in his palm, then folded the paper in quarters.

“What’s that?”

“It’s an address and phone number. And I have a quote to read to you from her, but I don’t know what it means. Will you tell me what it means?”

Daphne looked at the tiny note between his thumb and forefinger, wondering hard about what Thea might have told Vic. “If I can.”

“Okay, it says: Retired Detective Arnold Seton. Do not tell him where you got this address.”

Daphne perked up. “And there’s an address?” She snatched at the slip of paper.

Vic kept the note between two fingertips, extending his arm toward the ceiling. “You said you’d tell me what it means. What is going on, please?”

“I can go see him. I can talk to him. After all this time . . . what?” She raised her eyebrows as Vic scowled. She scowled back and hated being short.

He tossed the note on the bed and folded his arms. “And what am I supposed to do? You’ve wrecked my car. Am I supposed to take a cab?”