Dolled Up to Die (11 page)

Was it possible Eddie
had
“come to his senses” and wanted out of the marriage so he could go back to Jo-Jo? And Celeste wasn’t about to let that happen?

 10 

Cate was backing her car around the car parked next to her Honda, thinking about all LeAnne had said, when an unexpected connection popped into her head.

Rolf Wildrider, vineyard manager. Big. Muscular. Dark-haired. A bike rider.

Another big, dark-haired, muscular guy, the one coming into the Mystic Mirage as she barged out. With a motorcycle sitting at the curb.

She hadn’t seen him clearly that day. She’d been too flustered, too distracted and embarrassed. But there was a definite resemblance.

Had Rolf recognized her today from that previous meeting? Although he’d been flirty, she hadn’t noted any sign of recognition. She had the impression, there on the walkway, that he figured he was, as LeAnne had put it, “God’s gift to women,” and it was his duty to bestow a passing gift on her.

But Rolf Wildrider may not have been in a flirty frame of mind that day at the Mystic Mirage. Why was he there? Hoping to see Kim and offer the beautiful widow some solicitous comfort?

Although his presence there could have been totally innocent. Kim was actually his employer now. Or maybe he
knew, with Ed Kieferson dead, that Celeste would really be the person in control and he’d gone to see her, checking on his job security?

On impulse, Cate took the narrow gravel road that circled around back of the Lodge Hill building. The steep-roofed cottage was only a hundred yards or so from the main building, although a line of evergreens probably obscured view of it from inside the lodge itself. A motorcycle was parked out front. She didn’t know much about motorcycles, but, as she got closer, it didn’t take any expertise to see that the bike had those same high handlebars she’d almost run into outside the Mystic Mirage. Two more motorcycles stood in a carport attached to the house. They were partially dismantled, and bike parts littered the dirt floor, as if this might be a spare-time repair project for Rolf.

She would, she decided, ask Mitch to put his computer skills to work on Rolf Wildrider.

Cate picked Jo-Jo up twenty minutes before the scheduled start of Eddie’s service. Ever practical, even if she was coming into a half million dollars, Jo-Jo had bought a black suit suitable for the occasion but not so funeral-ish that it wouldn’t be appropriate for other occasions.

“You look beautiful,” Cate told her honestly. Jo-Jo had also had her hair done, and the frisky gray curls gave her face a youthful uplift. “Eddie would be proud of you.”

Jo-Jo blinked and touched her eyes with the corner of a tissue. She gave Cate directions to the funeral home, where services for Donna’s husband had also been held only a year ago.

A considerable crowd filled the flower-laden room. The coffin up front was closed, and brilliant red, spiky-looking flowers that Cate couldn’t identify covered it from end to end.

“I wonder why they chose those strange flowers?” Jo-Jo whispered. “Eddie liked roses. Yellow ones especially.”

Cate and Jo-Jo slipped into a pew near the rear of the room. Cate didn’t see either Kim or Celeste, but Jo-Jo nodded toward a curtained-off area and whispered that was where she and Donna had sat for Donna’s husband’s funeral. If Eddie’s grown son was present, he was also behind the curtain, because Jo-Jo couldn’t spot him. Cate wondered if she should be including him on her list of suspects. No sign of Rolf Wildrider.

Cate hadn’t really expected to pick up any useful information at the funeral, which was fortunate, because she didn’t see or hear anything helpful. But, for Jo-Jo’s sake, she was glad she’d come.

After taking Jo-Jo home, Cate decided she’d take advantage of the time for some PI work she’d been thinking might be helpful.

Jo-Jo’s rural house was in a dip between two hills, and no other houses were visible from it. Cate drove on by and, from the top of the next hill, spotted a single-wide trailer and several houses. The trailer was closest to Jo-Jo’s place. Cate pulled into the driveway.

A hound that looked big enough to drag her away and bury her like an old bone bounded out to meet her. Cate, half-in, half-out of the car, started to jump all the way back in, but then she noted the dog’s tail was wagging enthusiastically. She tentatively put out a hand, and the dog licked it.

“Okay, you want to take me to your leader?”

The dog bounded back toward the trailer. Cate heard unidentifiable thunks and clunks coming from around behind it, and she was suddenly aware how vulnerably alone she was out here. Mitch would think this was a terrible idea . . .

Then a yell came from the far side of the trailer. “Yo! I’m around here.”

Cate cautiously circled the end of the trailer. A middle-aged man with gray hair and a droopy mustache stood thigh-deep in a ditch with a shovel in his hand. A pile of fresh dirt lined the far side of the ditch. Cate’s first macabre thought was that he was digging a grave.

“Septic line’s got a break in it.” He swiped a grimy sleeve across his sweaty forehead. “Gotta dig it up and replace it. If you’re sellin’ something, I ain’t buyin’.”

Cate was relieved that she was wrong about the purpose of his digging. “I’m not selling anything. Actually, I’m looking for information about a neighbor.”

“You from the sheriff’s department too?”

“Someone from the sheriff’s department has been here?”

“Oh yeah. Asking all kinds of questions about that guy got killed over there.” He jerked the shovel handle toward Jo-Jo’s place. “But I don’t know nothin’. I work nights at the mill and sleep days. Except today I have to dig up this fool septic line.”

“Did you happen to hear the donkey bray that day?”

“Deputies wanted to know that too. It could of brayed. I dunno. I was probably asleep if it did, and I wouldn’t of noticed if I was awake.”

The questions the deputies asked about Maude meant they knew the donkey’s braying wasn’t random noise-making, that it announced someone was entering the property. So this wasn’t a fact she knew and they didn’t, something she could whip out as a clever clue to prove Jo-Jo’s innocence. It was a mildly deflating realization.

“So you never drove by the place that day, never saw an unfamiliar vehicle there?”

“Nope.”

“How about a motorcycle?”

“Might of heard one once. I don’t know that it was over there, though. Guy over on Dickens Road has a couple of ’em.”

“Oh. Well, thanks anyway, then.”

The hound gave her hand another friendly slurp as she headed back to the car. A maybe motorcycle. Not exactly a “gotcha” clue, but possibly a tie-in with Rolf Wildrider and the guy she’d bumped into at the Mystic Mirage. Who she was almost certain now were one and the same.

The four other people Cate contacted on Randolph Road were equally unhelpful. A sheriff’s department investigator had already talked to all of them. No one had seen or heard anything unusual that day, and one woman drew herself up and said frostily, as if Cate had accused her of Peeping Tom activities, “I don’t snoop into what the neighbors are doing or who their visitors are.”

Uncle Joe had once warned Cate that she might have to interview ten people to get one snippet of information. Today, both here and at the funeral, she’d encountered a fair percentage of that snippet-less number. But surely, sooner or later, if she persisted, she’d run into someone who knew something.

That evening Cate looked up a phone number and called the woman whose name Mitch had given her as a former employee of the Mystic Mirage. Lola Makston was friendly and seemed willing to talk. She said she didn’t really know Mr. Kieferson, but he’d come into the Mystic Mirage several times, and she was shocked by the newspaper account of his death.

“Did you ever notice any tension between Mr. Kieferson and his wife?”

“Between him and Kim? No.” She paused and then amended that. “Well, maybe. I got the impression he really doted on her, but sometimes she seemed impatient with him. He was a lot older, you know.”

“Did he get along okay with Celeste?”

“Well, you know men and mother-in-laws.” Cate heard a shrug in the woman’s voice, as if she spoke from experience. “Maybe it’s especially hard when your mother-in-law is younger than you.”

“Did anything in particular happen?”

“He came in once to take Kim to lunch, but she’d gone shopping somewhere and only Celeste was there. He and Celeste got in an argument about something, but I don’t know what.” Her laugh held a tinge of self-consciousness. “Ol’ nosy me, I wanted to listen in. But it was my lunch hour, and I couldn’t think of any reason to hang around without it being really obvious that I was listening in. He was gone by the time I got back.”