Paula K. Perrin - Small Town Deadly (17 page)

After dropping the photographs at
the post office, I felt strange:  relieved, but literally dizzy with the
thoughts that chased each other through my head.  I’d actually pedaled a block
down Main Street toward Fran’s when I realized she wasn’t there to help me
straighten this out.  My bike wobbled, and a horn blared behind me as brakes
squealed and rubber burned.

I lugged the bike up onto the
sidewalk and stood there shaking.

“God damn it,” I said, the phrase
coarse and ugly and exactly right for a world where Fran no longer existed. 
“God damn it,” I repeated, slowly and distinctly.

“What is happening, Liz?” a voice
said.  “That car didn’t touch you, did it?”

I looked up through blurred eyes
to see Alisz.

I blinked.

Her hazel eyes were narrowed in
concern.  She examined me closely.  “You look close to collapse.”  She placed
one cool hand on my arm just above the elbow.  “Come, we’ll give you a ride
home.”

Numbly I let her propel me around
the corner to where Jared had moved the Cadillac.  He’d gotten out of the car
and was leaning against it.  I suddenly realized he was even handsomer than
Hugh had been.  And the look in his eye—did Meg realize the shy little boy
who’d followed her around like a puppy had grown into a full-fledged wolf?

Alisz said, “Come put Liz’s bike
in the trunk for her.”

“No,” I said, “I need to exercise,
I’m too restless.”

“You and Mom both,” he said. 
“Jumpy as fleas.  You better be careful, you were all over the road,
practically inviting that Toyota to hit you.”

“You could have practiced your
doctoring skills.”

He grinned.  “You’re making me
sorry they didn’t get you.”

Alisz said, “You should be home
resting after the terrible shocks you have had.”

“I’m going to find out who killed
Fran,” I said slowly.  “I don’t know enough about Andre’s life to figure out
who killed him, but nobody knew Fran as well as I did.”  Behind us the post
office flag snapped in the breeze.  “I’ll know what doesn’t fit.  I’ll see the
mistakes the killer made.”

“Then Gene has discovered Fran was
murdered?” Alisz asked.

“Leave it alone,” Jared said.  “It
could be dangerous.  If Fran was killed, that means someone has already killed
twice.  Another body probably won’t matter to him.”

“I don’t care.  Whoever did it is
going to fry.”

“Not in this state.”  He put his
hands around his throat and made ugly gagging noises.

“Stop it!” Alisz slapped Jared’s
shoulder.

I rolled the bike away from her. 
“Thanks for stopping.  I’d better let you get on your way.  Where are you
going, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Jared said, “Mom
couldn’t sit still, and she dragged me out with her.”

“You like movies?  Come, we’ll go
to a movie.”

“No thanks,” I said.

“Let’s go to the climbing gym,”
Jared said.  “That’s good exercise.  Okay, Mom?” Jared prodded.

Alisz nodded absently, then said,
“We’ll take Meg with us.  Is she home?”

“Yes.  She and Kirk and Mother
are—working together, but she might like to break away and climb.”

I’d straddled the bike and Alisz
had nearly reached the driver’s side door when I said, “By the way, whose idea
was it to cast Sibyl and Gene in the play?”

“Are these your suspects?”

“I’m just trying to get a picture
of how people got involved in the play.”

“And if Gene is the killer?  You
will feel bad at exposing him?”

“If he killed Andre and Fran, he’s
crazy, he’s dangerous.  He’d be a mad dog to chase down and shoot for the
protection of innocent people.”

“But he is your cousin—

“A very distant cousin.”

“—and friend for all of your
life.”

Her words brought a vision of Gene
in prison, his long, eager stride turned into a shuffle, his friendly grin
turned wary and placating.  My hand pressed against my chest, but I said, “If
he killed Fran, he deserves the worst that can happen to him.”

Her mouth tightened.  “Always you
have had this rigid streak in you.”  She shook her head.  “No mercy.”

“Mercy?  Mercy!”  My fingers
clenched the handlebars.  “What if you found out Annamaria had been murdered? 
Wouldn’t you want the person responsible to pay?”

A white line appeared around her
mouth as her lips compressed even further.  “I would want the person truly
responsible to suffer, yes.”

“Then you know how I feel.”

“Yes, perhaps I do,” she said, her
mouth relaxing.  “All right, I will help with your detective business.  After
Fran asked Andre to be in the play, Laurel realized it gave Andre more exposure
to the public in a good cause than her boss Sibyl and so she hurried to include
Sibyl.”

“Who asked Gene?”

“That was Victor’s idea, I
believe.”

“And who invited Victor?”

Jared piped up, “He invited
himself after Andre agreed to be in the play.  The idiot thought Andre might
help him out in Hollywood.”

“I was relieved to have someone
step in as director,” Alisz said.  “The production made me too busy.”

I pushed with my left foot to get
the bike rolling and waved without looking behind me.  I headed north past
cheaply-constructed townhouses.  I pedaled past the new Catholic church, then
fields, farm houses and an occasional Christmas tree farm.

As my legs worked, my brain ceased
its frenzy, and I was able to think.  If Fran had been killed because she had
those photographs, then they were the key to discovering who’d killed her.  The
most likely suspects were Gene and Sibyl.  If they’d kill her over the
pictures, they’d kill me.  As long as no one knew I had seen them, I’d be
safe.  So the trick was to find out how threatened each of them might feel
without giving away what I was after.

I puffed up a long hill to the top
where the cemetery lay amongst its silent pines.  Usually I stopped to visit
the McDowell clan.  Today I kept on past the cemetery, past the convent on a
narrow, twisty road that passed properties holding 40-year-old, rusted-out
trailers as well as acreage hosting brand-new mansions.

I scanned mail boxes as I passed,
unsure which house I wanted.  I still hadn’t found the name I was looking for
when I saw a Chinese-red gate set in a 10-foot-tall hedge of laurel.  “Bingo!”
I said.

No houses in view except the
vaguely oriental one behind the gate.  The other side of the road was a mass of
trees, the houses set back from the road where they could not see anyone
standing here.

I was reaching for the latch when
a noisy, faded green van with a handicapped parking notice hanging from the
rear-view mirror came around the curve, up the same route I’d just ridden.  Its
music system was cranked up so high that the bass notes throbbed through the
air between us.  I stepped into the road facing it.

It slowed and came to a halt five
feet from me.  Sibyl and I stared at each other through the windshield as the
Righteous Brothers wailed.  I stepped up to the driver’s side window.  The
music died abruptly, leaving only the noisy engine.

She straightened and smiled at
me.  “Lovely day for a ride, isn’t it?” she said through the closed window and
began to roll forward.

“Wait!” I said.  “I came to talk
to you.”

“If you’ve come about rescheduling
the play—” the rest was lost to her engine’s growl.

“What?  I couldn’t hear you,” I
yelled.  “Can you roll down your window?”

She hesitated.  Raising her voice,
she said, “Meet me at my house.”  She pointed.  “Next one down.”

She gunned her engine.  She
scraped the side of the van against the hedge as she turned into her driveway.

She stopped in front of a huge,
two-storey log cabin with a marvelous, wrap-around porch.  She jumped down and
began briskly brushing at her red suit.

“Dogs?” I asked, assuming she was
brushing pet hairs away.

She stared at me blankly.  “We
only have cats,” she said, pulling the pins out of her tidy chignon.  As she
shook her head, allowing the long, straight hair to cascade down her back, I
caught the scent of marijuana.

My heart began to thud as I
remembered finding the marijuana cigarette in Andre’s car.  Don’t get excited,
I chided myself.  Lots of people smoke it.  I noticed the uncertainty in her large,
dark eyes.

“Why did you think I lived there?”
she asked, pointing to the hedged property.

I shrugged.  “I saw you go in
there once.”

“It belongs to a good friend of
ours, a pilot.  I take in his mail and water his plants while he’s gone.  In
return, he looks in on Charlie when I have to travel.”

Does he know he hosts your trysts?
I wanted to ask.  But now I wanted to know just how mobile Charlie was in his
wheelchair.  Could he have been the photographer?

“I’m not the person to speak to if
you’ve come here to lobby for the play.”  Sibyl folded her arms across her chest.

It wasn’t what I wanted to talk
about, but as a stalking horse, it had promise.  “Why?  You’re the director of
the library system.”

She looked past her house to the
valley beyond, and the towering white clouds on the horizon.  She fingered an
earring, a gold hoop that pierced and held three small gold coins.

“I leave the running of the branch
libraries to the librarians as much as possible.”

That’s not what I’d heard.

She turned away.

“But building a new library
involves the whole system.”

She sighed and turned back.  “The
trouble is—well, frankly, Liz, I think that after what happened the play
should never be performed.”  Her hand went to her earring again.  “The people
of Warfield can’t help but connect the murder of one of their citizens to the
play.”

I stood silently as if my heart
were broken.

She continued, “However, Laurel insists that we would garner more ill-will if we didn’t hold the play.”

“Will you be in it?”

“I’m willing to let Laurel go ahead if that’s what she wishes, but frankly, Liz, I feel that it would be
unwise for me to participate.”

Unexpectedly, I was offended.  My
stomach tightened, my nails dug into my palms.  I decided to go with the flow. 
I sniffed.  “Well, frankly, Sibyl, I think the friends of the Warfield library
deserve your support.  We’ve done a lot of work in a cause that makes you look
good.”

“It’s just scheduling,” she said. 
“I’d blocked out these two evenings for your play, and, frankly, that’s all I
had to give.”

She took a couple of steps toward
the porch.  “I’m booked solid through the election.  In fact, that’s how I’ve
spent my day, at a district meeting.  It’s not as though I wouldn’t like to be
out riding a bike and enjoying the afternoon the way you are.”

I felt guilty.  Boy, she was good.

“The election must be important to
you,” I said.

“Not just to me.  A lot of people
have invested time and money to help me.”  She tapped her foot.

I was losing her, and I couldn’t
think how to approach the photographs.  Why had it seemed so easy on the ride up
here?

A man’s deep voice called from the
porch, “Is everything all right, Sib?”

“Yes, Charlie,” she called back. 
“Go inside, I’ll be there in a minute.”  She spoke as she might to a worrisome
child, with patience a transparent veil over irritation.

He lingered, a thin, bearded,
dark-haired man hunched in a wheelchair that inched forward, then backwards,
then forward.

Briskly I walked past Sibyl to the
wooden ramp up to the porch.  As I neared him, I held out my hand.  “Hi, I’m
Liz Macrae.”

His grey eyes were anxious, his
long fingers cool, his grip almost painful, as we shook hands.  “Charlie
Aynesworth,” he said in a magnificent baritone.

“Wow!  Our church choir needs
you,” I said.  “You do sing, don’t you?”

“Not any more.”

“That’s a shame.  Our choir is
heavy on sopranos and tenors and has little else to say for itself.”

He grinned, sitting straighter in
the chair, “You’d be taking quite a risk.  It’s been a long time since I’ve
darkened a church door.”

“The prodigal son got the fatted
calf,” I said.  “You might do even better.”

He laughed, the sound rich, an
overwhelming reward for such a feeble jest.  “What do you think, Sib?”

Sibyl had come up on the porch,
but she kept her distance.  “If you want,” she said, no trace of interest in
her voice.

He began to slump.  His voice less
resonant, he said, “Sib keeps me pretty close to home … ”

The change from slumped-over
hopelessness to animation and back was astonishing.  I looked toward Sibyl. 
She gazed across the lawn at the view.

This woman was not getting my
vote!

“Well, I interrupted you two,” he
said, beginning to back away.  “You’re campaigning with Sib?”

“No,” I said, “I was just passing
on my bike.”  Immediately I was horrified at drawing attention to something I
could do that he couldn’t, and added the first thing that popped into my head,
“My best friend died today, and I was upset.”

Oh, great,
I thought,
talk
about dying to a man who’s lost two sons
, but he said “I’m sorry.  That’s
very—”

Sibyl’s voice overrode his as she
said, “Fran Egan?”

“I heard about it on the radio,”
Charlie said.  “They suggested it might be murder.  I hope that’s not true.”

“I wonder if it has anything to do
with her disappearing after Andre’s body was discovered,” mused Sibyl. “I
overheard her on the phone that night, just a snatch of conversation as we all
rushed past.”

“What did she say?”

Sybil’s eyes narrowed.  “She said,
‘Don’t worry, I’ll get them.’ She sounded irritated.”

I sagged against the thick, rough
log that formed the railing of the porch.