Touchy and Feely (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (8 page)

Seven years ago, when Ellen had agreed to marry Randall, he hadn’t been able to believe his luck. He had told her then and he had never stopped telling her, daily. She
was
pretty, in a snub-nosed way, with bouncy blonde hair and wide blue eyes, like a 1950s model for Ivory Soap; while Randall was swarthy and thickset, prematurely balding, and when he put on weight he had a jowly, hungover look. He didn’t understand that it was his very ugliness that had attracted her, and made her feel reassured, and protected. But after the Leonard thing, she felt hemmed in, more than protected, and she found it increasingly difficult to act naturally with him. Even going to the market felt like adultery.

Ellen went to the window and knocked. ‘Juniper! I want you in now, for breakfast!’

Juniper was still outside, in her little red boots, sticking pine-cone buttons onto her snowman. She turned and waved, and shouted something, but Ellen couldn’t hear what it was.

Ellen opened the pantry in her new Shaker-style kitchen and took out the box of Lucky Charms. She poured some into a blue-and-white bowl and set it on the scrubbed-pine table. She didn’t believe that Lucky Charms were particularly healthy (too much added sugar and colorings) but Juniper insisted that she would have bad luck if she ate anything else.

‘We
all
try to shield our children from harm,’ said a serious-looking woman on
The Daybreak Show
, ‘but life is full of all kinds of unexpected dangers, isn’t it, and we’re doing them no favors by pretending that they’re never going to get hurt.’

How true
, thought Ellen. She went to the window again and gave Juniper another sharp knock.

Juniper came bursting in through the back door, her cheeks red and her nose running. ‘I’ve nearly finished him!’ she announced. ‘I’m going to ask Daddy if I can borrow one of his hats!’

‘Daddy’s asleep,’ said Ellen, helping her out of her coat. ‘But I’m sure he won’t mind if you use one of his old fishing hats. Why don’t you borrow one of his scarves as well? We don’t want your snowman to get cold, do we?’

‘His name’s Mr White,’ said Juniper.

Ellen tugged off her wet boots and stood them beside the boiler to dry. Juniper climbed onto her chair and started to pick out all of the marshmallows in her Lucky Charms.

‘When are we going to see Santa Claus?’ she asked.

‘Well, not today, sweetheart. Daddy has the flu and we have to take care of him.’

‘But Janie and Holly and Emily are going to see Santa Claus!’

‘I know, but we’ll go next week, when Daddy’s better.’

‘Can’t I go with Janie and Holly and Emily?’

‘I’m sorry, they don’t have enough room in their car.’

‘It’s not fair!’

‘We’ll go next week, and I’ll take you to Punch’s for pizza.’

‘It’s still not fair!’

Ellen spooned coffee into the cafetière. ‘You can finish your snowman, and then we’ll make gingerbread, how about that?’

‘Mr White likes gingerbread. Mr White likes pizza, too. He likes every kind of food, and that’s why he’s so fat.’

Ellen looked out of the window. ‘He
is
fat, isn’t he? Maybe you should put him on the Atkins Diet.’

She was still looking at the snowman when its head exploded. She couldn’t believe her eyes. One second it was standing there with its carrot nose and its grin made of broken twigs. The next second it was headless. No sound, nothing. Just
pffff!
and it was gone.

‘That’s weird,’ she said.

Juniper looked up from her cereal. ‘What’s weird?’

‘Your snowman . . . his head’s disappeared.’

‘Mr White!’ said Juniper, in distress. She clambered down from her chair and tried to look out of the kitchen window. It was too high up for her, so she ran through to the living room and looked out of the patio doors. ‘Mr White! What’s happened to his head?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t see it fall off. It just . . .
vanished
.’

Juniper came back into the kitchen and started to pull one of her boots back on. ‘I have to make him a new head! If he doesn’t have a head he won’t be able to think!’

‘Juniper, finish your breakfast first!’

‘No, I have to make him a new head!’

Ellen pulled Juniper’s boot back off again. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. While you finish your breakfast,
I’ll
make him a new head. Is that a deal? I’m very good at heads.’

‘No,
I’m
his mommy, and
I
have to make his head!’

‘Maybe so. But I’m
your
mommy and I’m telling you to finish your breakfast.’

Juniper reluctantly climbed back onto her chair and picked up her spoon. When she pouted she looked so much like Randall. But at least she had blonde hair and blue eyes, and Ellen’s little tipped-up nose.

‘I’ll go take a look at him,’ said Ellen, slipping on her fur-lined boots, and reaching for her pink quilted coat.

‘You won’t make a new head for him, will you?’

‘No, I promise. You’re his mommy. You can make him a new head.’

She opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the yard. The sky was flawless, and the snow was so dazzling that she had to narrow her eyes. There was a clean, bracing smell in the air, as if the whole morning had been freshly washed, and hung up to dry. She crossed the yard, following Juniper’s criss-cross footprints, until she reached Mr White.

‘You poor unfortunate snowman,’ she said. ‘What on earth happened to you?’

She looked around. The only trace of Mr White’s head were bits and pieces of his carrot nose, which were scattered across the snow almost twenty-five feet away. This was even weirder. If Mr White’s head had melted, or simply fallen off, the carrot would have dropped straight downward, intact.

The higher end of the yard was lined with fifty-foot pine trees, which sheltered their house from the north-west winds. Some prankster could have been hiding in the trees, but they would have been too far away to have hit Mr White with a snowball. They could have used a catapult, she supposed—but in that case the pieces of carrot would have been lying halfway
downhill
, in the opposite direction.

With her hands in her pockets, she looked down toward the road, at the lower end of the yard. On the opposite side of the highway stood an old gray-brick building which had once been a furniture store, and a rough stretch of open ground, where there were plans to build a memorial park. There were two cars parked side by side on the open ground, as well as the trailer part of a tractor-trailer, NEW ENGLAND DAIRIES with two smiling cows on it, but there was no sign of anybody, anywhere.

She pushed back her hair. Must have been a freak accident, she thought. A sudden gust of wind. She turned to go back to the house.

At that moment, when her hand was still lifted, she was hit between the eyes by a .308 bullet. The impact flung her off her feet and threw her backward into the snow, her arms and legs spreadeagled in an X. Her blood and her brains were sprayed halfway up the yard, where the bits of carrot were.

Juniper was watching her from the kitchen. She had dragged her chair across to the sink so that she could see out of the window. She hadn’t trusted her mother not to start making a replacement head. Mothers
always
interfered, if you let them. When Ellen suddenly jumped backward and fell flat into the snow, Juniper thought that she must have caught sight of her, and was pretending that she was surprised. She ducked down below the level of the draining-board and waited, but nothing happened. After a while she raised her head again. Her mother was still lying in the same place, utterly motionless.

Juniper waited and waited, and then she climbed up onto the sink and knocked on the window. Still her mother didn’t move.

‘Mommy! What are you
doing
?’

Juniper pulled on her boots and opened the back door. There was no sound, only the high-pitched singing of the wind through the pine trees. She ran across the snow until she reached her mother, and it was then that she saw the hole in her forehead and the pinkish lumps of brains.

Juniper stood where she was, gripping the cuffs of her cardigan, panting. She could see what had happened but she couldn’t believe it. ‘Mommy,’ she said, but she was afraid to touch her.

‘Mommy,’ she repeated, but she knew it was no use. She waited a moment longer and then she turned and ran back into the house, up the stairs and into her parents’ bedroom. Her father was asleep, buried in his patchwork quilt, his face sweaty and red.

‘Daddy!’ screamed Juniper, tugging at the bedclothes. ‘Mommy’s been shot! Mommy’s been shot!’

Randall opened his eyes and stared at her. ‘What? What the hell are you talking about?’

Juniper opened and closed her mouth. ‘I think Mommy’s
dead
,’ she whispered.

Randall stumbled downstairs with the quilt wrapped around him, knocking a picture off the wall. Juniper ran out into the yard and he followed her, barefoot. When he first saw Ellen lying in the snow he said, ‘Oh, come
on
,’ as if Ellen and Juniper were playing a trick on him, to prove that he wasn’t really sick.

But as he came closer, he saw that Ellen’s face was luminous white like candle-wax, and that even though her eyes were wide open, and she was looking at him, the hole in her forehead couldn’t possibly be fake, and that the blood and the brains weren’t just cake-mix and cochineal. She had left him. She had actually left him. Not for an ex-boyfriend. Not to go back home to her parents. She had departed, abruptly, for somewhere else, where neither he nor Juniper could follow her.

He sank to his knees in the snow. ‘Call 911,’ he told Juniper. His nose was running and his pajamas were stuck to his body with cold perspiration.

Juniper didn’t seem to be able to move. Randall took hold of her skinny little elbow and steered her around so that she was facing him. ‘Sweetheart . . . call 911.’

 

J
im Bangs from the forensic laboratory laid out fifteen glossy photographs on Steve’s desk, and then stood back, his arms folded. He was thirty-one years old, short, with bright chestnut hair that stuck up like a yard-brush, and rimless glasses. His white sleeveless shirt was missing a button, so that his pale bulging stomach was exposed.

‘OK,’ said Steve. ‘What am I looking at?’

‘You’re looking at the most likely location of the shooter,’ said Jim. He had a voice that came right from the back of his throat, as if somebody were half-strangling him. ‘Here—in this area in front of the old abandoned diner, right opposite the filling station.’

‘OK.’

‘The reason for that is, the damage caused to the victim’s skull indicates that the shot was probably fired from no more than one hundred fifty to two hundred feet away. There are all kinds of imponderables, like the charge used, and the weapon involved, but Howard Stanton was not killed from any great distance, like for instance he wasn’t shot by a sniper concealed way back in this wooded area here.’

Doreen pushed open the office door, carrying an untidy armful of files and a styrofoam cup of cappuccino. ‘Did I miss anything?’

‘Probable location of the shooter,’ Jim repeated, without any hint of irritation. ‘The direction in which the victim fell to the ground tells us that the shot came from somewhere between the Branchville turnoff and this roadsign here. There’s no natural cover within three hundred fifty feet of the gas station—only the derelict diner, and this old International pickup parked outside of it. This might lead us to conclude that if our perpetrator shot Howard Stanton from anyplace else, apart from the diner, or the pickup, he would have had to be standing right out in the open.’

Steve said, ‘It was getting pretty dark, wasn’t it, and it was starting to snow, so he could conceivably have stood on the side of the highway without anybody spotting him.’

‘True, but it would have taken some kind of nerve, don’t you think? The cashier could have looked across the road and seen him at any time, as could Mrs Stanton, if she had turned in his direction, or even Mr Stanton himself. And Route Seven was fairly busy, considering the weather, and the time of day.’

‘Did you check the diner?’

Jim nodded. ‘We went over every inch of it. It was still shuttered and padlocked, and nobody had forced any of the windows or any of the doors. Nobody had gone up the front steps or stood on the verandah.’

‘How about the pickup?’

‘It wasn’t locked, but there were no indications that anybody had opened its doors in a long time . . . in fact the passenger door was rusted solid. We checked if anybody had climbed into the back of the vehicle and used the roof of the cab to steady a rifle, but there was no forensic evidence for that, either. No footprints in the back of the truck, no elbow-scuffs on the roof of the cab, no fibers, nothing. Besides, the angle of trajectory was way too low.

‘However—’ said Jim, and with a flourish, he opened an envelope and produced three photographs of the snowy ground in front of the diner. ‘We’re increasingly convinced that there must have been a second vehicle.’

‘A
second
vehicle?’ asked Steve.

‘That’s right. And all the evidence suggests that it was parked right next to the pickup at the time of the shooting.’

‘Go on.’

‘We found a rectangular area next to the pickup truck where the snow covering was considerably thinner. This indicates that a vehicle was parked there prior to the start of any substantial snowfall, although it had left before the snowfall became really heavy. Unfortunately, the later snowfall obscured any tire-tracks, as did the footprints of half-a-dozen troopers and media folk and rubbernecking passers-by.’

‘Any idea what kind of vehicle we’re looking for?’