Rosemary Remembered (8 page)

My cheerfulness faded when I walked into the kitchen.

"I didn't think you'd be so late," McQuaid said crossly. He was in jeans, barefooted and barechested, his dark hair wet from the shower. McQuaid is remarkably sexy in bare feet and no shirt, but the appeal was spoiled by his scowl.

"It's only ten-twenty," I said. "I had a lot of people to talk to. I hung around after dinner to catch up on the gossip." The real business at herb conferences, like anywhere else, goes on in the hallways and elevators and over coffee — or herb tea, if you're a purist.

"You drove home alone?"

I tried for a little humor. "I should have brought a bevy of dancing boys?"

McQuaid's mouth turned up at the corner. "Sorry. I was worried. I guess I've been pacing."

"You guess?" I looked at the floor. "You've worn a path."

"You ain't seen nothin' yet." McQuaid thrust something at me. "Here. Take a look."

He had given me two eight-by-ten glossies, mug shots. An unshaven face with bulging eyes scowled defiantly out at me. The neck was sinewy and thick, and above the tee shirt and onto the throat curled a rattlesnake tattoo. I shuddered. "Not my type."

"That's Jacoby." McQuaid was terse. "You see this character around here, run, don't walk, to the nearest phone and call Blackie."

Blackie Blackwell is the Adams County sheriff. He and McQuaid went to grad school together at Sam Houston State, and they're still friends. In McQuaid's opinion, Blackie's a more effective lawman than Bubba Harris. He's educated, up-to-date on new techniques, likely to rely on the brain as well as the gut. McQuaid's kind of lawman.

I looked at the photos again. Jacoby's mouth was angry, the brows threatening, the eyes murderous. An ugly, ugly man. "You've shown these to Brian?"

"Yeah."

I handed them back. "Scared the shit out of him, no doubt."

McQuaid pinned the photos to the corkboard beside the phone. "That's what I intended. He needs to know that he can't go bopping around, having a good time — "

"Being a carefree kid on summer vacation."

McQuaid's answer was a growl. "This is an extraordinary situation."

"You're right, there," I said. It
was
an extraordinary situation, one with which I was scarcely prepared to cope. What would I do if Brian were my child? Would I show him the pictures? Would I confine him to the house? Maybe I would. Maybe I'd opt for the safe thing, even if I wasn't sure it was the right thing or the best thing. Glancing at McQuaid, I saw that he was caught in the same quandary, and my heart softened.

"Here's something else," McQuaid said. He tossed me a small can about the size of a pocket flash. I grabbed it out of the air. "Bug spray?"

One eyebrow went up. "You might call it that," he said. "For a bug with a nasty bite."

I looked at the label.
"Pepper
spray?" Capsaicin spray, more precisely. Capsaicin is the quintessence of the chili pepper, an alkaloid found in no other plant.

"Yeah.
Muy
fuerte.
Disabling, in fact."

The can fit into the palm of my hand. "Is this the same stuff the Dallas PD adopted last year?"

McQuaid nodded. "You won't use your Beretta, but you can't object to cayenne. The ultimate in protection. If Jacoby won't stop, this'll stop him. Not kill him, mind you, just put him out of commission for the time it takes you to get away. Put it in your purse."

I put the can on the table. "Anything new on Rosemary's murder?"

McQuaid shook his head.
"Nada."
He padded to the refrigerator and took out two Coors. A dead mouse lay on the refrigerator shelf.

"What about Robbins?" I asked, not looking at the mouse. "Is his alibi still good?"

"So far." McQuaid popped the top on a can and handed it to me. "According to the sister, they were together from six-thirty to after midnight. She lives in San Marcos, so you can add twenty minutes drive time both ways."

"So the time of death will be critical," I said. I sat down in the rocking chair by the open window and sipped my beer. "If it's on the late side, Robbins could still be a suspect. He might have killed her after he left his sister's. Any sign of the weapon?"

"None." He was half-sitting on the window sill with the cold beer can against his cheek, one bare foot propped on the chair seat beside me. "Jacoby killed her, China. By now, he knows he wasted the wrong woman. He knows we know. He's pissed at himself. He's pissed at us. Next time he'll get it right."

I shook my head at the way he was stretching his theory into fact. "So what am I supposed to do?"

"Let somebody else handle your part of the conference. Stay home this weekend. All the area police are on the lookout for the guy. They'll pick him up in the next day or so, and you can go on about your business."

I thumped the Coors on the arm of the rocker. "No way, Jos£! I've been working my butt off for nearly a year to make this conference happen. It's important to me. It's important to my business."

His eyes softened and he reached for my hand. "But you're important to me, China."

I pulled my hand back. "Then stop interfering and let me do what I have to do." I spoke more crossly than I intended, but I wasn't about to apologize.

He straightened up and stood looking down at me for a long moment, his blue eyes dark and unreadable. When he finally spoke, his voice was flat and toneless.

"Keep that pepper spray where you can get it when you need it," he said. He drained his beer, tossed the empty into the recycling can, and left the kitchen. A moment later I heard the upstairs hallway floor squeak, then the sound of the bed sagging under his weight.

I turned off the light and sat in the rocker beside the window. The moon silvered the gray pillows of lamb's ears and santolina along the old stone fence, the mounds of silvery artemisia and fragrant nicotiana and the lacy dusty miller. The woods beyond were dark, still. Shadows flickered, then vanished, solid shapes dissolving into the black void.

And I continued to rock, remembering Rosemary, wondering about Jacoby, brooding about McQuaid. Was the threat real and serious, or was McQuaid exaggerating? If this was a one-time situation, I could live with it. If it was a taste of life with an ex-cop's paranoia, I couldn't. It was as simple, and as difficult, as that.

Somewhere in the woods a poorwill cried, his shrill loneliness shattering the dark. Khat came in, sat on the floor in front of me, and eyed the rocking chair with a firm and unmistakable intent. When I lived alone, he slept with me, curled against my back, purring deep in his throat, warm with fellow-feeling. Now that I slept with McQuaid, Khat slept in the rocking chair. I missed him. Maybe in the winter he'd join us in our bed. If we were still together.

As I got up and relinquished the chair to Khat, I saw the pepper spray. One more reminder of McQuaid's worry. I dropped it into my purse and went upstairs. I brushed my teeth, pulled on an oversized tee shirt with a sunflower on it, and climbed into bed. McQuaid, already asleep or pretending to be, was well over on his half. I was careful to stay on mine. There was a wide space between us, bridged only by shadows.

Saturday morning seemed cooler. At nine, the planning committee convened on the hotel patio, fortified with iced herb tea and breakfast croissants, to make sure we were still on track. It was a good time for a photograph, so I herded them over to stand beside the new fountain, in front of the rosemary that had been planted since yesterday—and planted rather hastily, and inexpertly I noticed, with the burlap wrapping still intact. The poor rosemary

wouldn't be able to stretch out its roots and was crooked, to boot, leaning at an angle. I made a note to mention it to Lily. The shrub deserved better treatment. It ought to be replanted.

But the new herb garden — crooked rosemary and all — made a lovely background for the photograph. The herbalists were smiling when I clicked the shutter, and they kept on smiling, right through the weekend. Saturday's conference sessions were even more successful than Friday's, and Sunday's were better still. The trade show included most major vendors, and the herb bazaar drew customers from as far north as Waco and as far south as San Antonio. Most of the booths sold out of merchandise by two o'clock—a sure sign of a successful bazaar.

In fact, as far as I could tell, the only things that went wrong the whole weekend were relatively minor. A grower from Denton slipped on the stair and twisted her ankle. A Lubbock retailer backed into the double doors of the loading dock. And the walk-in cooler—the one Matt had locked to keep down the traffic—went on the fritz Friday night. Matt wasn't anywhere to be found, and Lily had to arrange for dry ice to be trucked in from Austin until it could be repaired. I ran into her on Saturday morning when I was looking for Matt to tell him about the loading platform doors, which looked to me like they could be repaired without much trouble. Lily was harrassed and irritated, muttering something about both big bosses picking a fine weekend to take a vacation.

"Where did Matt go?" I asked.

"He's just gone, is all I know," Lily said. "Makes me mad, because I was planning on spending the day with my grandkids." And she huffed off.

Still, considering the size of the operation, the casualties were amazingly light, and when the last session ended on Sunday afternoon, I was exhausted but satisfied. While people packed up and checked out, I caught up on last-minute things and said a flurry of good-byes. By five-thirty, all the conference participants had gone. I finished up, dropped off my film at Fox Foto, and headed for the shop. Laurel had opened at one and closed at five, as usual on Sunday, but I wanted to check the register and find out what kind of weekend we'd had.

When I got to the shop, Laurel had already left, but next door, Ruby was just turning out the lights. "How did the conference go?" she asked, checking the front door. She retrieved her purse from under the counter and followed me through the connecting door and into my shop.

"It was great," I said. "But don't ask me to manage another one anytime soon. I've done my bit." I looked at the yellow Post-Its stuck all over the counter, notes from Laurel about things that needed my attention. I noticed one: the air conditioner had gone critical. Harold would be there on Monday morning to render an opinion on the cost of resuscitation or replacement. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the AC was in-op. In spite of the high ceilings and thick stone walls, the shop was sweltering. The other thing I noticed was the cash register tape, neatly rolled and fastened with a paper clip, the total circled in green ink with a happy face drawn beside it.

I whistled. "Hey, not bad." Next to January, when I close for a couple of weeks, July and August sales are the lowest in the year.

"There were a lot of herbies in town," Ruby said, "in a mood to spend money — regardless of the heat." She wiped her forehead. "I sure hope Harold can fix the AC. I had three fans going in the Cave all afternoon." The Cave and Thyme and Seasons share the same air-

conditioning. She looked at me. "What are you doing this evening?"

It was on the tip of my tongue to say, "I'm going home," because that's what McQuaid was expecting. But the liberated woman in me spoke up. "I don't have any plans. Want to have dinner together?"

It had been a while since Ruby and I had done anything unconnected with the shops. When I moved in with McQuaid, the center of my life seemed to shift to what we shared together, while Ruby—along with my other female friends—gravitated to the periphery. I hadn't intended this to happen, and now that I thought about it, I didn't intend for it to continue.

Ruby was looking pleased at my invitation. "Actually, I was about to ask
you,"
she said. "Ondine Wolfsong dropped in unexpectedly this afternoon, on her way from New Orleans back to Berkeley. She'll be here for a day or two. Several of us are having an early dinner across the street at Maggie's. We hoped you could join us."

I glanced at the telephone. It would probably be politic to call McQuaid and tell him where I was going. But I could just as easily call him from the restaurant.

"I'd love to," I said. "Being with Ondine Wolfsong is always a unique experience."

Ruby pushed out her mouth. "As I remember it, you weren't very polite the last time she was here."

"I promise to behave," I said, putting the register tape into the cash bag and stashing it with the cleaning supplies. "I'm hungry. What with one thing and another, I didn't get much lunch."

Ruby was right about Ondine. She meets some very weird women at the New Age conferences she goes to, and they drop in from time to time on their travels. Each one has an unusual name — Starfire, Moon Bear, Spider — and what Ruby calls a "gift." Some cast horoscopes, some do tarot and rune stones, some read auras. Ondine Wolf-song is the spokeswoman for a disembodied entity named La Que Sabe, She Who Knows.

I am very fond of Ruby, but when you get right down to it, the two of us aren't much alike. I'm short, Ruby is statuesque. I have nondescript brownish hair, an unremarkable face, and my hands always look like I've been digging out rocks with my bare fingers. Ruby's hair is red (exactly which red depends on which particular tint she's using just now), her skin has all the suppleness of a model's, and her hands and nails are perfection. More to the point, Ruby accepts without question the idea that a spirit can speak through the mouth of a living person, while I question whether La Que Sabe is anything more than an entertaining scam. The last time Ondine stayed at Ruby's, La Que Sabe told us that she created women by sewing them out of the skin of the soles of her feet. "This is why women have such a deep knowledge of all things," she said in deep oracular tones, "because we are made of sole skin. We walk intimately on the earth."

I snickered. Later, doing dishes in the kitchen, Ruby bawled me out.

"The trouble with you, China Bayles," she said sternly, "is that you've cultivated your left brain at the expense of your right. The light of your inner life has been darkened by your cynicism and pragmatism. Your feminine soul has shriveled." Ruby talks this way every now and then, especially when she's under the influence of one of her California friends. "You need to make a special effort to rekindle your spirit, or it will forever be snuffed out."

"I thought La Que Sabe was making a pun," I said, trying to defend myself. "You know, sole and soul. I thought we were
duppoded
to laugh."