The Last Annual Slugfest (8 page)

“And after Leila turned eighteen,” Chris said, “she never set foot in St. Agnes’s again.”

“Hardly surprising,” I said.

“But you know, Vejay,” Rosa said, “I don’t think Leila ever really forgave Edwina, not so much for pushing the Church, but for how she thought of Leila’s father.”

“Anti-Semitic?”

Rosa took another sip of coffee. “I don’t think that’s exactly it,” she said slowly. “With Edwina, it probably wouldn’t have been much better if Raymond Katz had been a Baptist. You see, Edwina just felt that there were certain things the Henderson family should do. Marrying within the Church was one of them.”

But clearly it would have made some difference, and to the daughter who missed him, that “some difference” would have been gigantic.

“That wasn’t the only thing,” Chris said. “Edwina was always stalking down to the school. She cornered Mr. Granger, the band director, and didn’t let him go until he agreed that Leila could play the trombone. And she badgered Miss Hitchcock until Leila got a special place in swim class. I don’t even know if Leila wanted to do those things before Edwina got in gear, but she sure didn’t afterwards. The other kids were pissed about her getting special treatment, and they made jokes about Edwina. And Leila, well, she was just caught in the middle.”

“She never really had friends then, did she, Chris?” Rosa said.

“No. I did take her to a dance one summer—Mama sort of pushed me into it, but I didn’t mind. Or at least I didn’t till I got to Edwina’s house to pick her up. Edwina must have kept me in the living room for half an hour, pumping me. She just kept on and on, and there’s not much about our family that’s a secret. Leila was so embarrassed she didn’t do anything but apologize until the dance was half over.”

“You know, Vejay,” Rosa said, “I’ll bet it’s things like that that made Leila turn to women. She kept to herself all the time. Her only real friend was Angelina, and she was her babysitter.”

“But it wasn’t like Leila was strange or anything,” Chris said quickly. “It was more like she didn’t want to expose anyone else to Edwina.”

I took a drink of my own coffee. We were all friends of Leila’s, all sympathetic to her adolescent sufferings, all trying to put the best face on our observations, and everything we said strengthened the case for her killing Edwina. But there had to be others with motives. I asked, “Who made the two middle Slugfest dishes, Chris, the ones that were served while I was in the bathroom with Mr. Bobbs?”

Chris laughed. Even Rosa smiled. “The first one,” he said, “was the Camp Fire Girls. The second was from Esther Grimes.”

“Who’s she?”

“You know her, Vejay,” Rosa said. “She’s the woman who does for Father Calloway. You’ve seen her.”

I had. She was devoted to the priest. Her only complaint was that he refused to have a full-time housekeeper, as she felt someone of his station should. Under her care, his house sparkled and his larder stayed full. I couldn’t imagine her having so secular an interest as the Slugfest. “Did Father Calloway ask her to cook?”

Chris nodded. “Edwina told him she was low on dishes. So Father Calloway asked her to make one.”

“I guess we can leave her and the Camp Fire Girls out of our considerations.” I forked a bite of pie. Despite her concern for Edwina, and for Chris, Rosa had managed to make the best pie I’d had in months. “The only people who had access to the food were the cooks, the judges, Hooper, and of course, Bert Lucci.”

“Oh, not Bert,” Rosa said.

I’d forgotten Bert was a distant relation. “He did grumble about Edwina.”

“Oh, that,” Rosa said. “Bert’s grumbled about Edwina for as long as he’s known her. And she’s complained about him. It just seemed sudden because they had to work together on the Slugfest. Most of the time they didn’t run into each other, so they didn’t have the opportunity to moan. But I know they liked that, complaining.”

“Well, Bert did give her mouth-to-mouth. Maybe he wouldn’t have been so anxious if he knew there was poison in her mouth,” Chris said.

“What about Curry Cunningham?” I asked.

Rosa finished her pie. “The man who runs the logging company? I don’t know much about him.”

That was another sign of how things had changed for the Fortimiglios in the last year. Before that, any new winter person would have been invited to one of their dinners. They wouldn’t have rested till they had made him feel part of the community, and till they knew everything about him. But Curry Cunningham had moved here just over a year ago, when the dinners stopped.

“He was transferred from one of Crestwood’s other companies,” Chris said. “You know about Crestwood, Vejay. It’s run by that guy James Drayton, the one who’s so right-wing. He’s against almost everything—drinking, sex, even dancing. That was in the papers last year, when he came here for the opening of Crestwood Logging.”

“I thought at the time it was lucky he wasn’t going to be in the river area long,” I said. Guerneville, Henderson, and the other towns around, with their sizable gay populations, would hardly have been comfortable for one with Drayton’s narrow beliefs.

“But Curry’s not like that,” Chris said. “I did a little work up at the logging site before Christmas. He was hiring anyone who could lift fifty pounds then. You know Curry’s so careful about his safeguards that the government has brought guests there. And that’s saying a lot. There was a time a few years back that some guy—Opperman, wasn’t it, Mama?”

Rosa nodded.

“Opperman clearcut an entire hillside in one day. He brought in maybe a hundred guys and just went crazy.”

“What happened to him?”

“Not much. Once the trees are down there’s nothing you can do. The timber industry has a lot of power in this state, much too much. They’ve got so much clout that environmentalists aren’t even allowed to photograph the cuts from the air! They have to make an appointment to inspect! That’s how it is when you clearcut the hillside. But if you’re a fisherman, Vejay, the government can board your boat any time, with no warning, and go through everything you’ve got.”

I nodded. I’d lived here long enough to have heard plenty about the unequal treatment of the two industries. “But what became of Opperman’s land?”

“The land?” Chris said. “Oh, it’s a tree farm. Opperman made a big thing about replanting. But all the trees are the same height. It looks like a giant cornfield.”

“But you were saying Curry Cunningham isn’t like that?” I prompted.

“Oh, right. Curry’s been real good. What I was saying was that he was transferred from back East. His wife and son had to fly back there a couple times. Now they’re in Japan. I think she’s studying there.”

“They sound like a very ambitious couple,” I said.

Rosa nodded.

“Angelina Rudd?” I asked. Before Rosa could protest, I said, “Tell me about her. She was a local girl, wasn’t she?”

“She was in school with my oldest daughter. Her family, the Longhitanos, have been fishing here since longer than I can remember. Mario, her father, was swept overboard in a bad storm when she was just a girl.” Rosa swallowed, as if the memory were still fresh.

“That happens,” Chris said quickly. “It’s the risk of fishing. You’re careful, and even if you never take chances, a storm blows up suddenly, and you can’t get back to port.” He shrugged. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“What kind of girl was Angelina?”

“She worked hard,” Rosa said. “She always had a job after school. The family needed the money. She’d take care of Leila Katz and her mother every day after school until Edwina got home. Then she’d walk home—it wasn’t close by, either—and study. Later, when Leila was older and her mother had died, Angelina worked at Fischer’s Ice Cream.” Rosa lifted her coffee cup, then, realizing it was empty, put it back in the saucer. “I can remember my Katie saying how hard Angelina worked in school. She was one of those kids who have to struggle for everything. Good grades didn’t come easy for her. Or good times, or boys. Katie was always a very social girl. She always had more boys over here than she knew what to do with. Once or twice she invited Angelina over, I think because she felt sorry for her—Katie was that type of girl. But Angelina never came.”

“I guess she got what she wanted,” Chris said. “There she is running the fish ranch. And Katie’s just a teacher’s helper at the school, with four kids at home.”

“Chris!” Rosa exclaimed. “Katie’s a fine mother.”

“I know, Mama. But Angelina wouldn’t have wanted that. Besides, she has a son and a husband now. And she has the fish ranch. She’ll make a go of that if it kills her. She doesn’t have any choice. She told everyone that fish ranching was the way of the future. She said she’d make fishing with the fleet obsolete. She said we’d better think about going back to school and getting ready for some other kind of work. Maybe she’s right.” Slowly, Chris grinned. “But, Vejay, if she’s not, everyone who’s ever had a salmon on the line is going to be laughing. She’ll never hear the end of it.”

I nodded. Rosa didn’t look up. I knew her well enough to realize that she couldn’t imagine the women she’d known as children, or Bert Lucci, or the man who was an usher at St. Agnes’s, killing Edwina Henderson. She could no more see them poisoning her than she could picture Chris doing it. As for Chris, I suspected he was thinking the same thing I was—that none of them looked as suspicious as he did.

I stood up.

“Won’t you have another piece of pie?” Rosa asked.

“No, thanks. I need to get home. I don’t want to lose time in the morning.”

Surprisingly, neither Chris nor Rosa asked what I was planning.

W
HEN
I
GOT HOME
, my house was damp and cold. I ran the tub, turned on the electric blanket, and poured myself a glass of wine. I felt both exhausted and wired—not a good combination.

The rain had picked up, the wind was gusting, and the bathroom window rattled ominously. When I had bought this house two years ago, I knew it would need some repairs. I made a list, hired one of Chris’s cousins to deal with the foundation problems that couldn’t wait, hauled the firewood, and lowered myself precariously to the edges of the steep roof to clear the gutters, not daring to look at the fifty-foot drop to the ground down the hillside. I assumed that when everything I had planned was finished, the work would be done, and I would relax and enjoy my snug home. I didn’t realize that when that list was taken care of, there would be a new list. And another list after that.

With a forty-year-old house on a steep hillside, only constant hauling, hammering, and shoveling kept it standing. That window was one of the items that had been on this year’s list since last summer. It rattled more vigorously with each storm. But I noticed it only when I was in the tub, right before I went to bed. And when I got up in the morning, and had time to deal with repairs, I would invariably forget it.

The rattling was worse than I could remember. I did the only sensible thing. I pulled the bathtub plug, dried off, and went to bed.

When I woke, it was cold and barely light. I snuggled down under the electric blanket. It was five minutes, ten minutes, perhaps even half an hour before I realized that I was still cold. I reached for the control, wondering why it hadn’t occurred to me to turn the blanket up sooner. The control was dark.

“Damn!” I muttered. The electricity was off. Outside, it wasn’t raining, but the sky was dark and the wind was still blowing the branches of the redwood near the house. They scraped against the window. I wondered if one of the higher redwood branches or a branch from one of the laurels in front of the house had blown down on the electric wires, or if the outage was not limited to my house. A tree could as easily have fallen on a power main. I pulled on my bathrobe and headed downstairs to the bathroom. A shower would warm me up. But I was only halfway down the stairs when I remembered that there would be no hot water. The thought of a warm cup of coffee flickered through my mind, but, of course, the electric stove wouldn’t be working either. The problem with electricity outages here in the Russian River area was that, unlike most of California, we were not hooked up to the natural gas lines. When the electricity failed, not only was there no light, but no power for cooking, and no hot water. When the outages lasted three or four days, as they did at least once per winter, I spent my evenings huddled next to the fire, with greasy hair hanging down my neck, eating tuna fish on crackers, facing another day of reading meters for customers who stormed out of their dark, cold homes to demand answers I didn’t have.

But now the problem could be handled easily. I dressed, and drove down to the café for breakfast.

Weekends are big sales times in Henderson, as in all resort areas. But March is not yet tourist time. And at nine o’clock on a cold, windy morning, there were few people on North Bank Road, and fewer in the café.

Marty, the weekend waiter, waved at me as I walked in. I had been there so often that I was a regular, and my eggs, kraut, and chorizo sausage went onto the grill before I sat down. The vinegary smell of sauerkraut floated across the room and I noticed the woman at the next table—obviously not a sauerkraut lover—wrinkling her nose. While I waited, I picked up a copy of the local paper. I expected to find an account of Edwina’s murder on the front page, but there was no mention of it. The paper must have gone to press before she’d swallowed the poison. But there was the weekly burglary report, and an account of the chamber of commerce’s fight to have the summer dams put in the river before Memorial Day, and the fishermen’s opposition to anything that threatened to block the movement of the steelhead and salmon.

“Here it is, another peculiar meal,” Marty said as he put my plate in front of me.

“I thought waiters were supposed to be enthusiastic about all their fare.”

“I deal in truth.” He grinned.

In spite of the pie I had had at midnight, I attacked my eggs and kraut with vigor. The café was beginning to fill with grumpy tourists, still wrapped in jackets against the cold wind outside.

It was just nine-thirty when I finished, the hour the Women’s Space Bookstore opened. I walked across the street.