OUT ON A LIMB (22 page)
Peter held up his hand to avoid hearing the details. “That hardly seems a crisis, Inez. Caron must be thinking of something else.”
Caron’s eyes grew so round that I could easily imagine her pleading her innocence in a court of law. “What happened was that somebody took a gallon container of that slimy processed cheese sauce from the cafeteria and rigged it in Rhonda Maguire’s locker so that when she opened it, it spilled all over her. She started screeching so loudly that Mrs. McLair told her class to evacuate. The cheese sauce was all over the floor and as slippery as ice. A dozen kids, including Rhonda, had to be hosed down.” She paused for maximum effect. “It was just awful, Mother.”
“Oh, dear,” I murmured. “Has the culprit been identified?”
“Not yet. Maybe Peter should go take fingerprints. Rhonda’s locker is just outside the library.”
“And you can take fingerprints in the restroom, too,” added Inez.
Peter muttered something under his breath, then said, “Claire, you have to promise to notify me if the person we were discussing attempts to contact you. Can I trust you?”
“Have I ever lied to you?” I replied sweetly.
Peter gave me a skeptical look, then left. As soon as the door closed, Caron and Inez advanced on me like salivating wolves, or at least drooling puppies.
“Did you hear about Daphne Armstrong?” said Caron. She vanished behind the fiction rack, then reemerged with the stage presence of a diva prepared to sing a heart-wrenching aria, clutch her throat, and crumple to the floor for a piteous and lengthy demise. “She staged a getaway this morning in the courthouse. Two guards were shot, and one’s in critical condition. She started a fire, then set off the alarm and came racing out—”
“No, she didn’t,” I said flatly.
“But that’s what Kerry told us,” Inez said. “And Aly heard that three clerks from the tax collector’s office were taken hostage, and nobody’s seen them since eleven o’clock. They could be dead by now, their bodies in the woods somewhere.”
I reminded myself that only a few hours earlier I’d been begging to hear gossip at the fitness center. I told them the gospel according to Saint Jessica, then added, “No shots were fired and no one was hurt. The three clerks are likely to be in the restaurant up the street from the courthouse, drinking tequila shots. Any trace of smoke probably came from custodians too lazy to go outside for a mid-morning cigarette break. Daphne did leave the courthouse, but there’s no suggestion she was armed.”
Caron stared at me in much the same way Peter had minutes earlier. “So where is she?”
I should have been flattered that everyone seemed to believe I was masterminding the melodrama, but I was neither. “I don’t know. If I did, I’d track her down and persuade her to turn herself in. She’s making the situation worse.”
Inez’s lips began to tremble. “Where’s Skyler? She didn’t—”
“No, she didn’t. Luanne took him to the mall to window-shop for summer booties. She’ll call me when they get back.”
“What if Daphne comes here, or to the apartment later?” asked Caron. “I won’t let you hand him over. He’s not a library book, for pity’s sake! She can’t just check him in and out when it suits her.”
I caught her hand. “I agree, dear. Luanne won’t object to keeping him until we know what’s going to happen to Daphne.”
“What will happen to her, Ms. Malloy?” Inez said solemnly.
“It’s hard to say. There are some inconsistencies in her story, but I’m not sure what to make of them. Other potential witnesses are less than candid. One would think the long arm of the law could get to the truth.”
Caron smirked. “Is that why Peter was huffing at you? He knows that you know stuff you’re not telling him?”
“You have cheese sauce in your hair.” “Eew!” she howled as she darted toward the bathroom in the office.
Inez began to snicker, but prudently. “My grandmother had all these ducks and geese on her farm. When the pond froze, they’d go blithely marching onto the ice, then start flipping on their”—she glanced at me—”tail feathers. It was funny, but not as funny as today. I don’t think Rhonda’s going to be ordering nachos at Taco Bell anytime soon.”
“Should I expect a call from the vice principal?”
“Well, Rhonda’s pretty sure, but no one saw Caron messing around near her locker. Waylan made some wisecracks later, acting like he was responsible. He wasn’t any happier than Caron about the rumors, since he has a girlfriend who looks like Xena. Luckily, we’ve got the weekend before Rhonda can launch her next ambush.”
Caron came out of the office. “Why don’t you tell us what you’re not telling Peter? We could help, you know. I’m kind of starting to like having Skyler around, even if it’s not for long. He’s, like, the only baby brother I’ll ever have.”
“Me, too,” said Inez, her lenses fogging up. “When I was born, my father calculated the cost of college tuition and had a vasectomy.”
I looked at them, wishing I could see them as children, or even the egomaniacal postpubescents they’d been only two years ago. “Let me lock the store, then we’ll go home, make a pot of tea, and I will tell you everything I know. You may be able to make more sense of it than Luanne and I have thus far.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard,” Caron said.
Miss Marple had never been burdened with sixteen-yearold girls, unless they’d been adenoidal maids who brought in tea trays, but only after straightening their aprons and caps. Caron and Inez poured themselves sodas, then flopped down on the sofa and eyed me like raptors, one more disconcerting than the other. The One Who Spoke In Capital Letters, naturally.
During the next hour, hushing them when they tried to interrupt every third sentence, I related it all—from my previous and inevitably exasperating encounters with Arnie; the specifics of Skyler’s birth; and my conversations with Daphne, Sheila, Adrienne, Chantilly, Joey, and Finnigan Baybergen. I told them about Randy and Jill Scarpo. I even went so far as to repeat the exchange with Arnie only a short while earlier. Both of them moved from the sofa to chairs on the far side of the room.
“You delivered a baby?” said Caron. “Weren’t you grossed out?”
“I didn’t have time to think about it. Even the most ordinary people, like the three of us, can and will rise to the occasion when the situation demands it. Afterwards, if it’s all gone wrong, we may lie awake at night, wondering if we should have done something differently. In this case, I had no regrets.”
Inez stared, either appalled or awed; in that she often tended to look like one or the other, it was hard to know. “And you didn’t tell anybody?”
“I wasn’t ready to share it. I told Luanne a couple of days ago, and now I’ve told the two of you. I was waiting for the right time.”
Caron went into the kitchen, slammed a few cabinet doors, then came back into the living room. “So the stork didn’t deliver Skyler, but now we’ve got him—so it must be the right time, Mother. This whole thing is such a mess. It’s like one of those comedies by Shakespeare where half the cast are twins, the girls pretend to be boys, and everyone is infatuated. They’re impossible to make sense of without a study guide.”
Inez shook her head. “It’s more like one of the tragedies where everybody goes blind or dies in the end.”
“We haven’t quite come to that,” I said. “It’s possible that Daphne did shoot her father. She couldn’t have felt much love for him after he kicked her out of the house.”
“She wouldn’t have given up hope, even with Adrienne muddying things up. Maybe she just went back to talk to him when she thought he was alone,” Caron said, sipping pensively on her soda.
“She said she didn’t think anyone was home,” Inez corrected her, and at her own peril, added, “She went there to get something.”
“Like a suitcase of counterfeit money? Did her mother just happen to remember the printing press in the basement? Are there clotheslines bedecked with damp hundred-dollar bills?”
Inez did her best to stick out her chin, but the effect was marginal. “She could have tried to blackmail him because he had a collection of porn movies hidden in his office. Some of them, the ones with minors, aren’t protected by the First Amendment. We studied that in my government class last week.”
“The cops didn’t notice a stack of videos? Give me a break!”
“The cops are going to stop to watch movies? You give
me
a break!”
I cut them off before they went off on a tangent, which they often did without any discernible provocation. “What’s really important is to figure out where Daphne is right now. She’s only two years older than you, and although she’s had some experiences I hope you’ll never have, she’s naive. Where could she be?”
“In a shed in the alley behind Thurber Street,” said Caron without hesitation. “She stayed there before.”
Inez fluttered her hand as though she were seated in the front row of her government class, where I was sure she always sat. “In the garage behind her mother’s house. You didn’t search there, Ms. Malloy. She knows her mother never drives the car. She could have been hiding in the backseat when you climbed over the fence. Now she’s in the house.”
“Those are both feasible theories,” I said. “Why don’t you two take the car and check both of them out?”
“Then you’re sure she doesn’t have a gun?” said Caron.
I sank into the upholstery. “I’m not sure of anything except where our next meal is coming from, and that’s from a box of macaroni and cheese. I’d go with you, but I think I’d better be here in case Daphne shows up looking for Skyler. She’s never seen either of you. Knock on Sheila’s door and pretend you’re taking orders for Girl Scout cookies, recruiting for a sect, or rallying support for a demonstration tomorrow on Thurber Street to save the noble oaks of Oakland Heights.”
Inez looked less than confident. “My parents are going to be so mad if I get shot. They have tickets for a performance at the college tomorrow afternoon, something about three oboes, a piccolo, and a mime. I’m supposed to go.”
Caron stood up. “Wouldn’t you rather be killed in the line of duty?”
“I guess so,” she said.
I described Daphne as best I could, then said, “If you find her, persuade her to come back here. I can’t promise her that I won’t call the police, but I will listen to her story and do everything I can to help her.”
“What if she demands to know where Skyler is?” asked Caron. “Do we lie about that and tell her he’s here?”
“No, don’t lie,” I said. “You can, however, fudge. Tell her that if she cooperates, she’ll have the opportunity to see Skyler.”
“Will she?”
I looked up at Caron. “Yes, she will. You seem to have a low opinion of me these days.”
Inez mumbled something and fled to the bathroom, leaving Caron in the middle of the room. She sat down on the sofa and stared at the floor. “I’m sorry, Mother. I have a low opinion of myself these days.”
“Even after you took out Rhonda Maguire with such an admirable coup de grace? You must have been chortling all afternoon.”
“I would have been if I hadn’t heard about Daphne. All I could think about was Skyler and what was going to happen to him.” She glanced up with a rueful look. “A first for me, worrying about somebody else. I worry about you and Peter, but mostly because I don’t know what it’ll mean for me. Same thing with how the Book Depot is doing, profit-wise, so I can shop at the mall and go out for pizza with everybody. If I’ll know what to major in when I go to college. If Louis Wilderberry will ever notice me, which isn’t going to happen before the advent of the next millennium.”
“If your father loved you?” I said carefully.
“Well, that, too. Did he ever wish he could have put me in a basket and left me on the steps of a church? Did he even want me to be born?”
“Of course, he did,” I said as I hugged her. “He was just ill-equipped to deal with fatherhood. Academia can be a narcotic as powerful as heroin. Your father wasn’t at the top of the hierarchy by any means, but there were plenty of warm bodies below him. When he walked into a lecture room, conversation stopped. All of his opinions were jotted down in notebooks in case they might require regurgitation on a test. Coeds in short skirts showed up during office hours to beg for a few minutes of his precious time.” I paused for a moment. “He lost his perspective. That doesn’t mean he didn’t love you, just that his priorities got screwed up.”
“Did you know about his affairs?”
“I was suspicious,” I said. “I didn’t know what to do about it, though, and I wasn’t making enough money from my assistantship to pay the rent. Getting a full-time job would have meant getting a full-time baby-sitter. I just looked the other way when he claimed he had to stay late for a meeting or attend a poetry reading at a cafe.”
“Weren’t you terribly angry?” she whispered.
“Yes, at times. Picking you up at the day-care center, bathing you, shoveling strained peas down your throat, reading and singing to you—all that was more meaningful to me.”
“You can’t sing.”
“I can, too,” I protested. “Want to hear the Motown version of‘Rockabye Blues’?”
“In E-flat? I don’t think so.” She stood up again. “Inez and I will go poke around for Daphne. She may just be panhandling on Thurber Street.”
“Watch for rubber sandals.”
“You’d better watch out for Peter, Mother.”
“Let’s hope that will be limited to the six o’clock news,” I said. After she and Inez left, I went into the kitchen to pour myself some scotch, then realized the empty bottle was in the garbage. Just as well, I thought, as I settled for orange juice and a plate of crackers and cheese.
An hour later, Luanne called to say that she and Skyler had enjoyed their outing at the merchandising mecca of Farberville. I gave her an update, then asked if she would keep Skyler until Daphne was taken back into custody by the police or swooped up by Caron and Inez. Arnie might have offered odds, but it seemed like a tossup to me. In either case, it wouldn’t be circumspect for me to have Skyler in the apartment.
“Sure,” she said. “We’ll slap together baloney sandwiches and watch old movies.”
“Don’t let him watch anything too violent.”