A Lie for a Lie (29 page)

“You can be proud of what you accomplished, Tammy.”

I left her staring off into space, but I was sure that after a minute passed, she’d be hitting the chemistry text again. Tammy Sargent was one determined woman. She would succeed at anything she set her mind to.

The Frankels have a lovely Tudor cottage on a quiet street not far from the coffee shop, with a small pool and patio in the back for parties. May likes to garden and prefers flower borders and shrubs to grass. Today, like the rest of Emerald Springs, her front yard showed the effects of too much heat and not enough water.

May and her husband, Simon, are psychologists with private practices in a small office building downtown. They also teach conflict resolution at the high school and classes at Emerald College. Somehow, in between, they’ve managed to raise two bright, interesting children. I wasn’t sure I’d find May at home on a Friday afternoon, but when I drove up she was outside weeding in the shade of a trio of redbud trees.

“Hey there.” She got to her feet when she saw me. “Can you tell me why weeds do so well in this weather when nothing else does?”

“It’s one of those universal mysteries. Try Ed.”

She wiped her hands on her khaki shorts. “I’m ready for a break. Want some iced tea?”

“No, I just indulged in a million-calorie mocha, but if you have five minutes, I’d like a conversation.”

“Let’s go inside.”

May’s kitchen is dark and cool, with framed still lifes and curtains made from William Morris floral prints. She poured herself tea and gave me iced water while I told her about my conversation with Tammy.

“I’m glad she told you. So are you here because you’re checking up on her?” May asked.

“Just nominally, because I believed her and she knew I’d be checking. But our conversation did make me think about how tough it is to be a mother, and how hard to figure out what to do. How much do you interfere and how much do you let kids make their own mistakes?”

“Maddie keeps me informed about what’s going on with Deena. I gather she’s the only Meanie who’s not at the community pool today?”

“Is this too professional? Should I make an appointment? I don’t want to abuse our relationship.”

She smiled. “Ask as a friend and I’ll answer as one.”

“I keep wondering if I’m doing the right thing about Deena. Ed won’t say so, but I know he’s really hurt at the way she’s treating him. He’s apologized sincerely and promised never to make the same mistake again. But Deena’s still treating him like a pariah, and it’s rubbed off on the rest of us, too.”

“And you want to fix it.”

“Well, sure.”

“As one friend to another, you can’t. It’s up to Deena and Ed.”

Of course I knew she was right, but I’d been hoping for a magic solution. “That’s it? I can’t wave a wand and make this go away?”

“You’re a fixer, Aggie. That’s your biggest role on this earth. Find solutions, fix things. Houses. People. Murders. You were the fix-it lady for the Emerald Springs Idyll. All a piece of the same cloth. Only this time you’re not in charge of fixing your family, no matter how much you want to. You have to stay out of it.”

She was right, and at least I knew that Teddy came by this tendency honestly. She had been born with a double genetic whammy, since Ed was a fixer, too.

“Easier said than done.” I shook my head.

“Like most things.”

“I’m pretty busy anyway, trying to fix things for Nora Nelson. I don’t think she killed Grady Barber. I think the murderer is still out there.”

“Why is fixing that up to you?”

“Nobody else is doing it.”

“If you ignored it, I guess you’d be fighting your own inclinations for no good reason. So checking on things makes sense to me. But you can’t fix everything. You have to figure out where to draw the line and not feel guilty.”

“I wonder if the person who murdered Grady felt the way I do? That something was wrong, and he or she had to take care of it? Maybe he or she’s a fixer, too. Maybe as far as they were concerned, the only way to set things right was to kill Grady.”

“That could be a piece of the puzzle. Of course that logic could lead straight back to Nora Nelson. If she believes she talks to God, she may well think God told her to murder him herself.”

“I really think if she did, she wouldn’t lie about it.”

“Your instincts are good. I believe you.”

“I didn’t think I’d get right into the middle of a murder investigation again. I was sure I wouldn’t.”

“You don’t know yourself as well as you think, then.”

“I’m pretty good about figuring out who murderers are, but last time I came awfully close to not living to tell the story.”

“And you’re afraid the same thing will happen again?”

“Every other time, somebody else had to jump in and save me.”

“We all need help. No man is an island, and no woman.”

That sounded like what I’d just told Tammy. I told May so. “But I’m not going to put myself in the same situation again,” I added. “I’m not going to be helpless. I’m going to make sure I’m safe, that I have backup, that I’m not vulnerable. Heck, if I can avoid getting trampled by elephants—”

“What?”

Those darned elephants. Despite the best of intentions, despite every plan to stay safe, to be careful, I’d nearly been flattened.

Still, I hadn’t been, had I? I’d found a safe place. I’d survived. On my own. Nobody’d had to rescue me.

“It’s kind of a long story,” I said. “But maybe my luck is changing.”

May opened a cabinet and pulled down a box of Girl Scout cookies and held them up like a bribe. “Then I’m glad I have a large glass of tea and an unopened box of Thin Mints. Let’s go sit on my sunporch.”

Our weekend went something like this: Deena finished her chores. Ed and I had three long conversations about Deena finishing her chores. Ed considered the pros and cons of telling her she was no longer our prisoner. Teddy had another unsuccessful heart-to-heart talk with Deena to make her see the error of her ways. Deena told us that if she couldn’t go anywhere else, she didn’t see why she had to go to church, either. Deena went to church under protest. That took us to dinner on Sunday. We were living our own little reality show.

I made eggplant Parmesan for dinner, one of those time-intensive meals guaranteed to draw people into the kitchen to laugh and talk during the ten years or so it takes to dip multiple slimy slices of eggplant into an egg solution, then flop them back and forth in bread crumbs before broiling. This time nobody came to converse or laugh and share in the misery. When we sat down to eat, I thought the dish tasted flat, like I’d left out the most important ingredient.

We said grace, and passed the food around in silence. Ed was the one to break it. “Deena, you can use the phone and computer now, and you can make plans with your friends for the week. You did everything we asked you to, except maybe learn from your experience. And without any proof of that, I guess we’ll just have to assume you did.”

Deena brightened visibly, but that disappeared almost immediately. “I worked hard on that list,” she said.

“You did.”

“So what’s wrong?” The challenge was clear in her tone.

“I trust you to know that, too.”

“I don’t understand why when a parent makes a mistake, nobody does anything, but when a kid makes one, all hell breaks loose.”

Silence reigned. As it extended I remembered my conversation with May and repeated her advice to myself like a mantra. Ed’s not easy to read. He keeps his emotions under wraps, which comes in handy when members of the church are trying their hardest to provoke him. It came in handy now, although I knew that despite his outward calm, he was feeling a number of things.

“Nobody had to do anything to me,” he said at last. “I felt sad that I hurt you, and I apologized. That was my punishment. But let’s face it, you’ve extended your anger as far as you can, by continuing to punish me. So never underestimate your power. The difference is that I’ve been trying to teach you something. You don’t have anything to teach me. You know I’m sorry and I learned my lesson. You’ve just been trying to hurt me, and by extension, Teddy and your mom.”

“Nobody else I know gets lectures like this.”

Ed asked for the bread, and Moonpie jumped up on the table to steal a piece for himself. By the time we’d banished him to the other room, Deena was no longer the center of attention, and Teddy was telling Ed about the new plotline for the video. The boys and girls had come to a compromise. Bicycle theft and guilt were still in, but the theft was now—as I’d predicted—the result of a brain-eating parasite that caused good children to turn bad. Were it only that simple.

After we cleaned up, Ed took Teddy out for ice cream and politely invited Deena to come, but she refused. Politely enough, too, I’m happy to say, but I noticed she couldn’t quite look her father in the eye. I was just gathering the bills to extend the joy of the evening, when the phone rang and Deena called down to tell me the caller wanted me. The fact that someone older than thirteen had gotten through, now that Deena was no longer barred from using the telephone, was proof of the goodness of the universe.

Roussos was on the other end.

“Taylor’s coming in to talk to us tomorrow.”

“You’re kidding. Here in town?”

“His choice. I just happened to mention we could have his local police interview him instead. He wasn’t keen on the idea.”

“Thanks for finding him so quickly.”

“Do you want to sit in on the conversation if he allows it?”

For a moment I thought Roussos had asked me if I wanted to be there. I pictured myself hitting the side of my head to knock loose whatever was distorting the sound waves.

“You heard me right,” he said.

I was delighted. “I’d like that a lot.”

“I’m just asking so you can be sure it’s the same guy you saw the night Barber was murdered.”

“I got you.”

“You won’t speak unless spoken to?”

“I’ll be the model of a parochial school third-grader.”

“You never went to parochial school. You wouldn’t have lasted a day.”

“But I wanted to. I yearned to wear those cute little pleated skirts.”

“Tomorrow morning at ten.”

I hung up and shouted upstairs to tell Deena the phone was free again.

Ed was bedraggled by the time he made it to bed. Too many questions without answers for Teddy, too many days of Deena’s freezing wrath. I was no longer quite so sore from my log encounter, and I made sure our night ended on a more pleasant note.

By nine thirty the next morning Deena was on her way to Maddie’s house, and Teddy and her crew were getting ready to film a major scene in our backyard involving parasites made from grocery bags stuffed with grass clippings. The parasites hung by the lowest branches of the same tree from which Moonpie had been rescued, and in a perfect Norman Rockwell moment the boys, two freckled, crew-cut specimens, were hanging upside down among them making faces. Ed had a good book and a glass of lemonade so he could watch their progress from the deepest shade in the yard and make sure there were no fights over who held the camera. I was off to make Rob Taylor confess to murder.

Okay, I was off to keep my mouth shut and hope for the best.

When I got to the station, Roussos was waiting in the lobby, and he led me back to what I supposed was an interrogation room, although not the lone lightbulb hanging over a dented table variety. This one was pleasant enough, with fresh paint and fluorescent fixtures. The table was something you’d expect to see in the conference room of an ambulance-chasing law firm; the chairs were comfortable.

“When he comes in and sits down, just nod if it’s the same guy you saw the night Barber died, and shake your head if it’s not. I’ll wait for a signal before I begin.”

“I’ll shrug if I can’t say one way or the other.”

“You do that.”

Roussos and me, planning our secret code. This was too cool for words. I yearned to teach him some of the cloak-and-dagger hand signs my sisters and I had indulged in throughout childhood, but I know how to quit when I’m ahead.

I recognized Rob Taylor the moment he came in carrying a manilla folder, but I waited until he was seated and Roussos glanced at me before I nodded. And some people think I have no patience.

Roussos made no sign he’d noticed the nod, but he angled his chair so he was looking more directly at Taylor. He started by thanking Taylor for coming, and he explained he was just tying up a few loose ends in the investigation of Grady Barber’s murder.

“I’d like to hear about your connection to the victim in your own words, if you will. Mrs. Wilcox worked as Barber’s assistant right before he died, so we’ve asked her to sit in and explain anything that might come up. You’re okay with that?”

“Yeah, I don’t care if the whole wide world knows the things I know. He was a sleazebag, plain and simple.”

Today Rob Taylor wore a curry-colored polo shirt with fashionably faded jeans and hiking boots. His dark hair was shiny and longish, swept back from a high forehead, and he had a gold stud in his left earlobe. The bottom edge of a tattoo was just visible under his left sleeve. I guessed he was in his early forties, about Roussos’s age.

Roussos sat back, like one friend listening to another. “Tell us how you met Mr. Barber.”

“My wife, Kathy, was a contestant in a Pittsburgh fund-raiser, a talent show kind of like your Emerald Springs Idyll. Grady Barber was the so-called celebrity judge. Kathy did well in the competition, but then she found out that if she wanted to win, she had to put some of her other talents to good use.”

“You want to be more specific?”

“Yeah, he wanted sex. Any way and anyplace she was willing to give it to him.”

“He told her that outright?”