Dead Over Heels (14 page)

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Authors: Charlaine Harris

BOOK: Dead Over Heels
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Martin often reminded me of the Roman officer in the New Testament, the one who told Jesus that when he said “Go,” people went, and when he said “Come,” people hopped to it. Now, he was apparently trying to decide what he could do about this situation, and he was angrily seeing that there was nothing he could do.
“Do you think the little hospital here is the best place for Shelby, can he get the best care available? I could have him moved to Atlanta by ambulance.” Martin looked almost happy at this prospect of action.
“I don’t believe there’s any need of that,” I said gently. “Besides, the doctors here are very aware that the city hospitals have things the Lawrenceton Hospital doesn’t have, and they would have sent him to the city without hesitation if they thought his situation warranted that. Plus, you know,” I said even more gently, “that’s Angel’s call, not yours.”
Diverted back to Angel’s pregnancy, Martin said what I’d been dreading he’d say.
“I like Angel just as much as you, but don’t you think it’s stretching belief to have her turn up pregnant when Shelby’s had a vasectomy? She worked out with Jack Burns and she’s going to his funeral, but she blasted him in public when he gave her a ticket. And she didn’t react at all when they turned him over the other day. I don’t want to believe anything bad about Angel, but doesn’t that all add up?”
“You know, Shelby asked me if I’d seen anyone else out here when he was gone,” I said evenly.
“What’d you tell him?” Martin turned to me, hands thrust in his pockets to keep them still.
“I slapped the tar out of him.” I looked at Martin steadily, blocking my faintly guilty memory of Shelby’s embrace from my mind, so he couldn’t read it in my face.
Martin looked back at me, eyebrows up in surprise.
“And—what did he do?” Martin asked faintly.
“He believed that he is the father of Angel’s child.”
Martin slowly took a deep breath, released it, smiled. “Okay. So is he going to get rechecked?”
“He’ll have to if they don’t want any more children,” I said.
“I can’t believe old Shelby is going to be a father,” Martin said absently, shaking his head.
I bit my lip and looked down so Martin wouldn’t see the tears well into my eyes. He pulled his reading glasses (a recent necessity) out of his shirt pocket suddenly, and went to the wall phone to flip through the tiny Lawrenceton directory.
He punched in numbers and stood waiting, his face in its executive mode: mouth in straight hard line, sharp eyes, impatient stance. I thought it was pretty sexy, providing he dropped the look when he turned to me.
“The room number?” he asked me crisply. I gave it to him, propped my chin on my hand, and watched my husband as he talked to Angel, and then said a few words to Shelby.
“He’s still groggy,” Martin informed me when he had hung up the phone. “But better. Angel said they want to keep him one more day for observation, then he can come home, providing he stays away from work for a few days.” Martin clearly felt better since he’d done something, even if it was only punch numbers on a phone.
I glanced down at my watch, and saw to my surprise that it was nearly eleven o’clock. I’d been up almost the whole night the night before, and gone through a great deal of excitement and anxiety since then. Martin’s homecoming had given me a jolt of energy, but suddenly I felt as if I’d run into a wall.
“I have to go up to bed,” I said, and heard the weariness in my voice.
“Of course, honey,” Martin said instantly. “You haven’t had any sleep.” He put his heavy arm around me and we started up the stairs. “I’ll give you your present in the morning,” he murmured.
“Okay.”
“You
are
tired.”
“Won’t be this tired in the morning,” I mumbled, I hoped in a promising way. “I am glad you’re home.”
I pulled off the clothes I’d pulled on so hastily so many hours ago and gratefully slipped into a nightgown, realizing that I had no memory of work that day at all, though I’d gone in and (I supposed) functioned more or less normally. I brushed my teeth and washed my face because I am constitutionally unable to go to bed without that little routine, and I was vaguely aware of Martin unpacking as I sank into sleep.
 
 
 
 
 
B
efore I open my eyes in the morning, I try to remember what day it is. There’s always that happy moment when it’s finally Saturday, and I don’t have to go anywhere I don’t want to. I think that’s one of the reasons I had wanted to go back to work; otherwise every day was Saturday, and that little happiness was gone.
I opened one eye and looked at my bedside clock. It read nine-twenty. Since that was clearly impossible, I closed the eye again and snuggled into my pillow. But the room certainly seemed light, and I could feel the emptiness of the other side of the bed. Reluctantly, I opened both eyes and wriggled closer to the clock. It was still nine-twenty.
I hadn’t slept that late in years.
For ten minutes or so, I basked in the novelty of being still in bed at such a late hour. I was too awake to drift back to sleep. From the lack of movement downstairs, I thought Martin was gone. He often went in to work for a few hours on weekends, especially when he’d been out of town; or maybe he’d gone to the Athletic Club to play some racquetball. Going downstairs in a nightgown this late seemed faintly sleazy, so I took my shower first and pulled on my favorite Saturday jeans and a green T-shirt. To atone for my laziness, I carried down a hamper of dirty clothes and started a load of wash before I even poured my coffee. Martin had made a full pot and left it on for me, with a clean cup waiting invitingly beside the pot. He’d also left, squarely in the middle of the table by the window, a package wrapped in white paper and topped with a blue bow.
I drank my first cup of coffee and read the Lawrenceton paper to postpone the pleasure of opening the package. And the paper dampened my happiness some; the attack on Shelby had made the front page, which was not too surprising. But what was surprising was that the incident of the bow on the cat and the body of Jack Burns landing in the yard were included in the story, tying all the different incidents together in a way that left me disturbed.
I’d been sure Jack Burns had been killed because he knew the identity of a local who was being hidden in Lawrenceton under the Witness Protection Program. I couldn’t see what that had to do with Angel’s unknown admirer. Combining all these incidents, the story implied my house was radiating evil, as though it was an eminently suitable candidate for exorcism. I wasn’t surprised to see a stranger’s name on the byline: Sally wouldn’t have written it that way.
I tried to regain my relaxed mood by reading the Garden Club meeting report, which was usually a hoot. It didn’t fail me today. My old friend Mrs. Lyndower (Neecy) Dawson had wreaked havoc by proposing that the war memorial outside the courthouse be surrounded by ivy instead of having its planting regularly switched by the club. Reading between the Garden Club correspondent’s careful lines, one could surmise that the ensuing debate had created bad blood that might last as much as a year, by which time Neecy could have forgotten she’d made the proposal. Or have gone to her great reward in the Garden in the Sky, as the Garden Club membership might have put it.
A flash of white and orange outside caught my attention, and I saw that Madeleine, to whom I’d given scant attention the past two days, had finally been driven to desperate measures. She was stalking a sparrow foraging in the grass. One thing I admired about cats was their focus; I’d never had a pet as I was growing up, so observing Madeleine had been an education for me (one I sometimes felt I could have done without).
However, when Madeleine bothered to hunt, the process was impressive—the intensity of her concentration, the stealth of her approach, the narrowness of her vision.
Can birds see color?
I wondered.
Whether it was Madeleine’s marmalade stripes or her bulk that attracted the bird’s attention, this sparrow took off. Madeleine sat up and directed a baleful gaze after the bird, and began to clean her paws in a sulky way. I was recalled to my obligations, and fed her; she did her very best running when she heard me call her for food.
Then I had the pleasure of opening my package. It was heavy, and I wondered how Martin had managed to cope with it on the flight home. I slid off the ribbon and put it aside, and tore off the paper. The box was a plain brown one of thick cardboard, not one of the thin ones that clothes come in.
Not jewelry, not clothes . . . hmmmm.
Books. Seven books by some of my favorite mystery writers. Bookmarks from a Chicago bookstore protruded from each one, and I opened the top book, a Sharyn McCrumb, at the marked page.
Each one was signed. Not only signed, but personalized.
I examined each book happily, looking forward to hours of reading, and tried to think of a special place to keep my gift.
While I was still smiling, the phone rang.
There was silence on the other end of the line after I answered. It wasn’t empty silence, like when the other person has realized he didn’t mean to call your number after all and has hung up—this was heavy silence, breathing silence. My smile slid off my face and I could feel my scalp crawl.
“Hello?” I said again, hoping against hope someone would speak.
Someone did.
“Are you alone?” asked a man’s voice. And the phone went dead.
I tried to slow my breathing, reminded myself that everyone gets prank or obscene calls from time to time (such is humankind’s determination to communicate, on whatever low plane) and I should not particularly be upset by this. But I felt so alone today; Martin wasn’t here, and the garage apartment was empty, too.
The phone rang again, and I jumped. I stared at it, wondering whether to answer it or not. As it kept ringing, I crossed the hall to the study and waited for the answering machine to come on. Martin had recorded the message, and hearing his voice made me feel better. When the recording ended and the signal beep came, the voice leaving the message was also reassuring.
“Sally!” I stopped the recording and picked up the phone. “What are you up to?”
“I wondered if you were free to take a little ride with me,” Sally said. “I didn’t know if that husband of yours was in town or not.”
“He’s in town, but not at home right now, so I’m footloose,” I said, relieved at having a reason to leave the house without calling it retreating in fear. “Where are you going to go?”
“I’m going to drive to that airport where Jack Burns was taking flying lessons, the one where he rented the plane before he took his
final
flying lesson, so to speak. I need an extra person—I have a plan—and since I haven’t gotten to talk to you in a coon’s age, I thought I’d combine the two goals.”
Put like that, how could I resist?
“Want me to drive in and meet you at the newspaper office?”
“That’s where I am now. That’d be great.”
“Okay. Give me a few minutes, I’ll be on my way.”
I called the hospital to ask Angel if she needed anything urgently, and she told me that Shelby was much better, but still didn’t remember anything about the attack. She sounded a lot better herself. She’d run home the night before to change clothes, and she told me she might come home to take a nap in the afternoon if he continued to improve.
Then I called Martin. If he was at the plant, he wasn’t answering his phone. I left a message at the Athletic Club with the intimidatingly streamlined girl who answered the phone, kept the sun-bed appointment schedule, and presided over the check-in book. She sounded quite pleased to have a reason to approach Martin.
I ran upstairs, looked myself over in the mirror, and decided that almost anything was good enough to run an errand with Sally. I brushed my hair quickly, securing it at the nape of my neck with a green band to match my T-shirt, and cleaned my Saturday glasses, huge ones with white-and-purple mottled frames.
Sally made a choking sound when she saw them. “God Almighty, Roe, where’d you get those? You look like a clown.” She was shoveling papers and fast-food bags out of the passenger’s seat of her car.
Talk about the honesty of friends.
“They’re my Saturday glasses,” I said with dignity, locking my car and walking over to Sally’s even older and more beat-up Toyota. The parking lot that served the newspaper staff was empty except for our cars and a Cadillac in the corner, which I recognized as the property of Macon Turner, owner and editor of the
Lawrenceton Sentinel
.
“Indicating that on Saturdays you are in a whoopee mood? Carefree and fun-loving?” Sally’s voice was muffled as she bent back in. She’d opened a garbage bag and was swiftly sorting through the debris. Between the assorted paperwork, grocery bags, and cardboard cartons, I figured Sally had a whole tree in her front seat.
“Sorry about this,” she continued, as she emerged and carried the garbage bag over to the Dumpster. “I have to do this under duress or not at all, and asking you to ride with me provided the duress.”

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