A Stiff Critique (21 page)

But Barbara had changed her tune anyway by the time we’d finished our meal—not to mention umpteen more murder theories—and returned to my house.

“Don’t go looking for trouble,” she warned me, her eyes glued to mine after we had hugged goodbye in the driveway. “This isn’t a game. It might be dangerous.”

I clenched my teeth.
I
knew it was dangerous.
She
was the one with all the goofy theories.

“I know that, Kate,” she said, answering my thought seriously. “Just…just take care.”

And exactly how was I supposed to do that? I wondered as she got into the Volkswagen. But before I had the chance to answer my own question, Barbara rolled down her window and stuck her head out.

“Don’t be so shy about your poetry,” she ordered with a grin. “I’ll bet it’s great.”

All right, so maybe she really is psychic.

I stomped into my house and got back to work.

It was a good four hours later by the time I remembered that I’d never picked up my mail that day. I made my way out to the mailbox in the darkness, scuffing my shoes in the gravel as I went, enjoying the cool night air. And then I heard a car start up.

I took a step past the front fence as the car whooshed by, nearly unrecognizable in the dark.

Nearly, but not quite. I could still make out its shape, a shape very much like a Honda Civic. And even in the moonlight, I could guess at its color.

I guessed beige.

- Sixteen -

Of course, I knew that Russell Wu drove a beige Honda Civic. I wondered for a couple of pounding heartbeats if that was why I’d guessed beige. Had I just conjured up the color in my mind? Or had I really seen it?

I walked back to the house, keeping my steps regular and centered on the gravel, refusing to panic. Even if it had been Russell in the car, I told myself, there could be a lot of good reasons for his presence. Like what? Murder, mayhem, abduction?

By the time I stepped through my front door, I was beginning to burn with anger. I could feel the heat as it climbed from my neck into my face. I had to confront Russell. I didn’t care anymore if I looked foolish. I—

The phone rang, exploding my unfinished resolution.

“Saturday night and you’re all alone,” a smooth male voice purred when I picked up the receiver. “What a shame.”

I stopped breathing. Then the voice registered. It was my ex-husband’s voice.

“What the hell do you want?” I demanded angrily.

“Kate!” he objected, the hurt in his voice bringing an unwanted vision of his puppy-dog eyes to my mind.

“Listen, Craig, I’m tired,” I explained, then wondered why I thought I had to explain. I hardened my heart and my voice. “State your business,” I told him.

After a shocked silence, Craig stated his business. He’d thought up a new gag-gift design for me.

“A tie with sneakers on it—’cause computer nerds wear sneakers, but every once in a while they have to wear a tie to make a presentation—so their tie should match their shoes.” He paused. “Get it?”

I told him I got it.

“How about a combination pocket protector and tie tack? See, computer nerds—”

“Craig, thank you, but I don’t need any more computer-nerd gift ideas,” I interrupted him. “Good night.”

“Kate, I love you,” he whispered before I could hang up.

Damn. He had finally said it. And I knew he wasn’t kidding. My chest tightened. I took a long, painful breath before speaking.

“Craig, sometimes I like you. But I don’t love you anymore,” I told him as gently and clearly as I could. “I love Wayne. Wayne and I are going to be married.”

There was a much longer silence than before.

“Oh boy, do I get to be a flower girl?” Craig asked finally, his voice a shrill falsetto.

I knew this was my cue to laugh, to pretend that our whole conversation was just kidding around. So I forced a laugh. It was hard because of the way my chest hurt, but I pushed it on out anyway.

And finally, we hung up. I thought about Wayne, then, counting the days until he’d be home again. And trying my best not to imagine how Craig felt. I tried all night long.

*

I climbed out of bed on Sunday morning tired and cranky but still determined to get some work done on the Jest Gifts backlog. I’d put in a couple of hours when the doorbell rang.

I snuck over to the window to peer out. Who would my visitor be this time? Russell Wu, the Mafia brothers, or my ex-husband? I wasn’t sure who would be worse. But it wasn’t any of them. It was Carrie.

I didn’t even wait for her to tell me why she was there. I just got my purse from the pinball machine and walked to the front door.

“Who do you want to visit today?” I asked once I’d opened up.

“Donna,” she answered instantly. Then she grinned.

Donna had a large house in the hills of San Ricardo with a big green yard that looked like a toy shop had blown up and landed there in pieces. There were swings and slides and brightly colored barrels to crawl through glittering in the sunlight, along with all modes of rolling things including a bunch of phosphorescent tricycles and an assortment of roller blades.

Inside, the house was filled with macrame, soft sculpture and more toys. Children’s art work hung on the walls next to art posters. And then there were the animals. I counted at least four cats, two mice and probably twenty brightly colored fish in a large aquarium, plus a few more goldfish in a smaller aquarium. And two children: Dacia, age eight, who wore earrings and a silk headband to match her dress, and six-year-old Dustin, who wore a polo shirt with a lizard on it.

“I’m into cobras and anacondas,” Dustin told us, “but Mom only lets us have fish and mice and stupid cats—”

“The cats are not stupid!” Dacia shouted. “They’re a lot smarter than you are!” One of the cats took a moment to glance approvingly over its shoulder before returning its gaze to the contents of the smaller aquarium.

“Well, you’re stupid too!” Dustin shot back. “Really, really stupid. And gorpy too.”

“Mom!” Dacia yelled.

She didn’t really have to yell. Donna was only a couple of feet away. So were Carrie and I, unfortunately.

“Remember what I told you two yesterday?” Donna asked, smiling as she knelt down in front of her children.

Neither child responded.

“Be like Mahatma Gandhi,” she said, refreshing their little memories.

Dacia crossed her arms emphatically. Dustin stuck his fingers in his ears.

“Have you both been meditating on cooperation?” Donna persisted, still smiling.

The two children sighed identical sighs and marched out of the room. At least they were unified in their disgust, if not actively cooperating. Maybe Donna’s method of dispute resolution wasn’t so silly after all.

“So Donna,” I said a little too loudly. My ears were still ringing from Dacia’s shout. “Who introduced you to the critique group?”

“Um, Nan did,” she replied, peering into my eyes, her own honey-colored eyes round with question. But she didn’t ask why I was interested. Instead, she asked if Carrie and I would like to sit down.

“Certainly,” Carrie answered and Donna began pulling plush toys and chunks of brightly colored plastic off the nearest couch. Finally we all sat down, Carrie and I on the couch, Donna across from us in an easy chair. All without mishap. Donna didn’t seem so awkward in her own habitat. Maybe it was her clothes. She was wearing jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt today. No floor-length skirts or vests conspired to impede her progress.

“Perhaps you could tell us more about meeting Nan,” Carrie suggested once we were all seated.

“Nan and I took this creative writing class together, um, five or six years ago,” she told us. “It was incredibly liberating, all that energy just flowing and flowing, trauma being transformed into beauty. And after that, Nan and I really bonded. We went to lunch, oh, maybe once or twice a year. And then I told her I was beginning my book and she invited me to come to the group. I was like, really, really honored that she would ask, you know?” Donna tilted her head.

I nodded encouragingly.

“Nan even dated my brother Freddy for a while—”

“Mom!” someone screamed nearby.

Donna jumped out of her seat and sprinted into the next room, grazing her shoulder on the edge of the doorway on the way. So much for grace in her own habitat. She was back within minutes, smiling and rubbing her shoulder with one hand, a long shiny plastic saber in her other hand.

“Aren’t little kids just wonderful?” she breathed as she sat back down. She dropped the saber onto a pile of toys by her chair. “They’re such extraordinarily complex little beings. So full of life, and well, intelligence. But a different kind of intelligence. And integrity.”

“Yeah, intelligence and integrity,” I agreed as enthusiastically as I could. I wasn’t about to ask her about the saber. I just hoped it wasn’t sharp enough to do any real harm. “So what happened between your brother and Nan?”

“Um, you mean Freddy?”

I nodded, assuming Donna only had one brother who had dated Nan.

“Oh, they stopped dating. The energies just weren’t right for them, I guess. Freddy is really incredibly traumatized by his childhood.” She lowered her voice a little before going on. “Wounded, you know? He’s in business with my father. All that dirty money.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I think Freddy’s integrity is really, well, impaired.”

“Donna,” Carrie said. Her hands were folded but I could still see her thumb wiggling. “I want to ask you one more time if you believe your father had anything to do with Slade Skinner’s death—”

“No,” Donna interrupted calmly. “My dad said he didn’t have anything to do with it and I believe him. See, there’s a way my dad denies stuff for the record but you really know he did it. He looks you in the eye, but there’s like nothing there. And then there’s the way he says ‘no’ when he means it. Where he waves his arms around and yells. And he told me ‘no’ that way. In fact, he’s agreed to let me do my book.” She clapped her hands together. “I’m so happy.”

“He doesn’t mind?” I asked in disbelief.

“Not anymore, he doesn’t,” she assured me. “We had an incredibly good talk last night and we came to an agreement. I’m going to use, well, a pen name.”

“So how come Nan and Donna ‘bonded’?” I asked Carrie in her car fifteen minutes later. That relationship just didn’t make any sense to me.

“Donna and her family are wealthy,” Carrie answered as she snapped on her seat belt.

“Money or status,” I murmured, remembering now that Carrie had told me these were Nan’s prerequisites for friendship.

Not that Donna’s relationship to Nan really mattered. Her relationship to Slade was what mattered. And she didn’t seem to have a more definite relationship to him than she had to anyone else. I had even asked her if she and Slade had ever been lovers. She just giggled at that one, and then started in on a rambling explanation about the “incredible kind of integrity” that would qualify a man to be her lover. In short, Slade hadn’t qualified.

“What the hell are we doing anyway?” I asked Carrie aloud. “Are we really investigating Slade’s murder by seeing all these people? They’re not telling us anything—”

“Not yet,” Carrie interrupted. “Or perhaps they have told us significant facts and we haven’t noticed yet.”

“But Carrie, we’ve talked to everyone—”

“Not everyone,” Carrie corrected me. “We haven’t visited Travis or Vicky individually yet. We may learn something by speaking to each of them privately that we would be unable to elicit in the group setting.”

Ugh. My stomach spasmed. I didn’t really want to talk to Vicky privately. Or Travis, for that matter.

“Kate, we are accomplishing more than you think,” Carrie went on. She turned her serious face in my direction. “We are learning more about the connections between the members of the critique group with every single person we interview. We are learning how they perceive each other, how they perceived Slade.” She turned back to stare out the windshield as she turned the key in the ignition. “And perhaps more importantly, we are stirring the pot. Quite possibly, someone will react soon.”

“Maybe someone is already reacting,” I muttered, thinking of Russell Wu.

“I hope so,” said Carrie as she turned the steering wheel. “I sincerely hope so.”

Carrie was quiet on the drive to Travis’s apartment. This visit had to be hard for her, with its implication that Travis was yet another murder suspect to be interviewed by both of us. Not just a man in love with her.

“Hey, Carrie!” Travis greeted her enthusiastically at his door, a smile lighting up his gypsy’s face. Then he saw me and the smile disappeared. “Hey, Kate,” he said with an inverse proportion of enthusiasm.

Travis’s apartment was just as jumbled as Donna’s house, though there were no toys or animals evident. Unless you counted the video games that were in pieces all over the living room waiting to be fixed. Or the animals that were on the posters, innocent bunnies being tortured to test cosmetics and innocent calves being tortured for the sake of veal. The rest of the jumble was made up of books, tools, magazines and clothing.