A Stiff Critique (32 page)

Joyce clenched her hands into fists. Suddenly, I remembered her hands clenched like that before. Why hadn’t I seen the violence in her? Of course Buddhists could kill. I thought of Jean’s brother, the explosive Christian. The religious weren’t exempt from rage.

“I cooked for a couple of the better restaurants in San Francisco. I was at Antoinette’s up here in San Ricardo when I started taking the leftovers to the homeless. Pretty soon, I was making soups for the homeless, too. And after a while Operation Soup Pot was born. I kept out of the limelight. Then came the idea for the book.”

“I didn’t mean to…” Travis broke in, then faltered. I looked his way for an instant. His brown eyes were glistening with tears, his handsome face stricken.

“Don’t worry,” Joyce told him. She even managed to smile. “I always knew it was a matter of time. I’ve been blessed with good work for these twenty years.”

“And…” Russell prompted.

The smile left Joyce’s face.

“And Slade wrote a manuscript and handed it out at a meeting. When I read about a woman who’d been in a commune running drugs to support an underground railroad for draft evaders, who’d killed a sheriff and later become a Catholic nun—I guess I could call myself a Buddhist nun—I thought for sure it was about me. I never even noticed the similarities to Nan, and to you, Russell. My ego was so great, I thought only of myself.”

Joyce shifted her bag from one arm to the other. What was in that bag? Not a gun. I still couldn’t believe Joyce would carry a gun. But what?

“I asked to speak to Slade after the group meeting at his house. And I asked him to keep our appointment a secret. After I left his house, I walked around Hutton for a while, then walked back at five o’clock for our meeting. I could tell he thought I’d finally decided to sleep with him.” Joyce’s pale skin flushed. “He was sitting at his desk, a dumbbell next to his word processor so he could exercise while he was thinking. I asked how he knew about me, how he’d found out about the sheriff and the commune.

“He looked up at me with this look of complete surprise on his face. I knew then that he hadn’t known. It had just been my ego. Then he smiled. And he said, ‘The media will love this.’ I told him the media couldn’t find out, that it would destroy Operation Soup Pot, but he wouldn’t stop talking. He said, ‘We’ll do all the talk shows,’ and started typing something. He kept talking and talking.” Joyce clenched her fists again.

Yes, I could imagine her killing someone now. Nausea rose into my throat.

“I began to see red. I’ve always seen colors when I meditate. But this time the color was red, a red mist in front of my eyes. I picked up the dumbbell he had on his desk and hit him. Again and again. And then the red was everywhere.” She took a breath. “I had to wear one of Slade’s shirts over my clothes on the way home. I was covered. Covered in red blood.”

As Joyce stuck her hand into her bag again, I heard the faint sound of a siren somewhere in the distance. The sound raised the hair on my arms. And woke me up. This woman had just confessed to murder. And we were all just sitting here, listening to her, watching her hold her tote bag. I pushed myself up from my chair, but Carrie’s hand touched my arm before I was even standing.

“Let her finish,” she whispered.

“But—” I whispered back, watching as Joyce pulled another Kleenex from her bag. Nothing else, just a Kleenex.

“We’re safe, Kate,” Carrie insisted. “I know this woman.”

I sat back down. Carrie did know this woman. Better than I knew her. But how well was that?

Joyce blew her nose and then went on.

“I tried to meditate after I killed him, to embrace the stillness inside myself. But all my mind could embrace was rage. The stillness was gone.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head slowly back and forth.

“I need to atone,” she whispered.

My pulse went into overdrive. She wasn’t going to attack us. But what if she was going to kill herself? I jumped from my seat, ignoring Carrie’s restraining hand. I wanted to be able to grab the tote bag if Joyce stuck her hand in again. If she took a gun or knife from that bag, I would be ready.

“There’s still something to live for,” I told her once I was on my feet.

She smiled at me, this time a full smile that seemed to light up her entire face.

“I’m not going to kill myself,” she assured me, her voice low and calm. “It’s too soon for me to die. I want to die a peaceful death, so I must once again learn to live a peaceful life. Unagitated by anger and attachment and fear. No, I’ll atone in prison.” She straightened her back. “I’ve tried to lose the violence, the attachment to ego. I thought I had. No money, no sex life, working with the poor. But I didn’t know that all of that was a different kind of ego, wanting so hard to be a saint. Not real surrender.”

“What about Nan?” Russell prodded.

Her face tightened and all the light left it. I shivered. This was the face of a murderer.

“Nan saw me walking around Hutton and going back to Slade’s house. She called me last Tuesday, said she’d pick me up for a little ‘tête-à-tête’ at her house. She wouldn’t tell me why. She teased me all the way in the car, little hints, but no real accusations.

“When we got to her house, she left me in the living room for a minute. Then she came back, holding one arm behind her. She told me she knew I’d killed Slade. She said she didn’t want to know why, she just wanted money. She figured I could siphon off the cash from Operation Soup Pot. Just a few thousand a month, she told me. I tried to reason with her. I stepped toward her…and she pulled the gun from behind her back.

“I panicked. Guns are dangerous. I tried to take the gun from her. But she resisted—and then we were struggling—and then it went off. And when I pushed her away, I saw she was dead.” Joyce stopped speaking for a moment, her eyes wide and unfocused. “I even wiped the gun clean. I know no one will believe me, but I didn’t mean to kill her—”

“I believe you,” said Travis.

“So do I,” I threw in, surprising myself.

“Listen, honey. We’ll work it out,” Mave said. “It’ll be—”

The sound of a siren, closer to us, stopped her mid-sentence.

Joyce collapsed onto the couch and put her face in her hands. When she reached for her bag again, tears were streaming from her eyes. I tensed. I still didn’t trust that tote bag.

But all she brought out this time was a stack of stapled sheets of paper.

“My confession,” she explained, her voice hoarse. She cleared her throat. “A copy for each of you. I decided last night that I had to tell. All the awful suspicion, it wasn’t fair to the rest of you. I’m going with the police soon. Thank you all—”

“No, don’t!” Travis shouted, on his feet, his arms waving. “We understand. We won’t tell—”

“Yes,” Mave cut in. “You don’t have to—”

“I’ve already called the Hutton police,” Joyce told us quietly.

In the silence, we heard the sound of pounding feet and then a knock on the door.

Donna opened the door and a man and woman in uniform came in.

“Is there a Joyce Larson here?” the woman asked.

“Yes, Officer, that’s me,” Joyce answered. Then she stood. “I want to confess—”

“Stop,” the woman ordered, raising a hand. “You have the right to remain silent…”

Even after they had read Joyce her Miranda rights, they still wouldn’t let her confess. Not completely. She kept trying, but they kept cutting her off. Even after she told them that she understood her rights completely. Even then. But she did manage to get out the word “murder.” And the names Slade Skinner and Nan Millard.

The two officers finally agreed to take her to the Hutton Police Department, where she could make her full confession. And then they led her away, pausing at the door to put her in handcuffs.

A few minutes passed in silence once that door had slammed shut behind them.

“Did you know?” Carrie asked Russell finally.

“No,” he said. “Not till she began to speak. And then I noticed everything I should have noticed before. She was the nun in
Cool Fallout.
She was the one who wouldn’t talk about the story. She wouldn’t talk about the sixties either. And she was the right age. She had no past. She had no legal identity.

“If only Nan—” began Donna.

“There are no ‘if only’s’,” Carrie declared.

We stood and left not long after that.

- Twenty-Five -

The three of us were positioned at the entrance of San Francisco Airport’s Gate 54, waiting for Wayne’s plane to come in. Carrie, Travis and I. I’m not even sure why I agreed when they offered to come to the airport with me. Maybe it was because I was still feeling the sting of my failure to spot Joyce as the murderer. Even though Carrie had insisted that having known Joyce much longer than I,
she
was the one who should have figured it out. As far as I was concerned, neither of us had really known Joyce Larson. Joyce Larson, whose real name turned out to be Louise Kimberly.

But the real reason I agreed to Travis and Carrie’s company was that the two of them so obviously needed a chaperon.

Carrie and Travis were in the silly phase of their budding relationship. They sat in the bolted row of chairs across from me, casting burning glances at each other every two or three seconds and then looking away, all the time jabbering on about anything and everything. Except for Joyce’s confession. Or their own relationship.

“So who’s behind the plot in
Cool Fallout
?” I asked during a lull.

“Ms. Jasper, I’m afraid you’ll just have to read the manuscript yourself to answer that particular question,” Carrie replied with an exaggerated wink. Then she reached up with the fingers of both hands to twiddle the two white sharks that hung from her dainty ear lobes.

I figured I deserved something for the new earrings, hot off the Jest Gifts presses. I opened my mouth to tell her so. But Travis was quicker than I was.

“Oh baby, how long do I have to wait?” he droned in a Bob Dylan whine, scrunching up his big brown eyes and strumming an imaginary guitar. “Tell me, oh tell me, how the book comes out—”

I stuck my fingers in my ears. He may have been handsome, but he sure as hell couldn’t sing.

At least Travis looked happy. Make that ecstatic. And certainly happier than he had been a few hours ago when the revised critique group had first met to talk about Joyce. Travis was still having guilt attacks about getting Joyce into the group. As much as I wished he’d give up the guilt, somehow I liked him for feeling it. Maybe Carrie and he wouldn’t be such a bad couple despite their differences. Or their similarities.

I crossed my fingers for the two of them as I watched their continuing antics, all exuberant hand gestures and lavish wordplay. Was it true everlasting love? Or just hysterical relief at the way things had turned out?

Carrie had visited Joyce at the county jail where she was being held and reported back to the group. Joyce seemed to be doing fine, Carrie told us. In fact, Joyce seemed oddly content now that she had made her decision. I hoped Joyce would be all right. I especially hoped she’d find the place of peace inside herself once more. It looked like she was going to have plenty of time to atone in prison, despite the high-priced criminal attorney that Carrie had scared up for her. The attorney whose fees the Operation Soup Pot board of directors had unanimously voted to pay.

“Warren Lee,” Carrie bent forward and stage-whispered my way, yanking me back to the present.

“What?”

“Warren Lee was behind the plot in
Cool Fallout
,” she expanded.

Travis put an arm around her shoulders diffidently. She turned her head his way with a look of hope on her round, freckled face. Or maybe it was desire. Whatever it was, I hadn’t seen a look like that on her face since the days of her marriage. The days before her husband had been diagnosed with cancer.

“But what did Warren Lee want?” I prompted.

Carrie pulled her gaze away from Travis with an obvious effort. A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth. Who cared if theirs was true everlasting love? Carrie was happy. That was enough for now.

“Lee wanted Dahlgren under his power, so he involved the entire membership of the defunct commune,” she told me. “His real purpose was to gain computer access to all those plump accounts that Dahlgren controlled as a banker. The rest was a ruse to make it all seem more threatening.”

“But why’d he want the access?”

“For the money, Kate.” Carrie rolled her eyes. “Remember money?”

“That’s all?” I said, disappointed.

She tilted her head and shook a playful finger at me. “I did warn you that it would be far more enjoyable to finish reading the manuscript than to listen to a secondhand account.”

“But—”

I broke off as I saw a human tide flooding down the corridor from a plane. Wayne’s plane. It had to be. My heart jumped up when I did, beating in my ears. Where was he?

And then I saw him, his head sticking out above the crowd, his low brows rising as he spotted me, his homely face breaking out in a smile.

“Wayne!” I shouted and began my run for him just as he ran for me.