Elizabeth C. Main - Jane Serrano 01 - Murder of the Month (6 page)

“
Susannah?” she asked. At my nod she started backing out the door. “Everything all right?” Another nod. “Don’t let me keep you then. Just order those books, Jane. The sooner we clear this up, the better. Poor Gil.”

“
Susannah? Sorry. That was Minnie Salter. Look—”

Wendell hurtled down the stairs and out the open door, with Bianca in hot pursuit. She paused long enough to ask, “Is everything okay with Susannah?”

I gave her the thumbs up signal.

“
Great! Fill her in, will you? I need to catch Wendell. He kept getting under my feet, so I just called out, ‘Wendell! Dinnertime!’ and he took off. I was afraid he’d break Laurence’s leg or something. Gosh, that man is really decrepit, isn’t he? Talk to you later. Say hi to Susannah and the sprout.” She paused in the doorway to locate Wendell before sprinting across the lawn. “Wendell, drop it!”

Susannah’s voice came through the receiver again, bringing me back to the conversation I’d been hoping to avoid. “What’s going on?”

“It’s complicated. Vanessa Fortune had an accident at the Crooked River Gorge this morning … and she died. Everyone’s very upset, of course.”
“Any chance she was pushed?” Susannah asked.

“Uh … not really. She was alone.”

“
And …? Oh, I see. Let me guess. In spite of that fact, dear Louise has concluded that Vanessa was murdered.”

“
Well, yes.” Susannah really did know her sister well.

“Do the police agree?”

“Uh, apparently not.”

“
And, according to Sleuth Louise, this murder was committed by …?”

I really didn’t want to tell her, so I said the name in a very quiet voice.

Unfortunately, she heard me anyway. “Gil? Louise thinks Gil murdered Vanessa?”

“
I told you it was hard to explain. Apparently the plot of a book your sister was reading resembles the situation with Vanessa.”

“I’ll just bet it does.”

I ignored the sarcasm and plodded on with my explanation. “In the book something looked like an accident, but it really was a murder. We’re going to discuss the book at our next meeting.”

“I can’t believe it! Don’t let her walk all over you, Mom. You have to do something about her. She can’t just go around accusing people of murder.”

“I know.”

“What planet is she on? Can’t you try to get her back into the real world for once?”
“I think maybe she’s simmered down since she called, but you know your sister.”

“I certainly do.” Susannah’s disapproval dial was set on high. She had never encountered a rule she wanted to break, never looked at a pond she wanted to rile, so Bianca’s penchant for stirring things up was a constant source of friction between them. As someone who loved them both, I found it hard to watch them clash, though there was little I could do. It was easier for me to understand Susannah’s more rational viewpoint, but that merely made me redouble my efforts to make sense of Bianca’s need to break free of restrictions. Each of the girls of course thought I took the side of the other, so I couldn’t win.

Between Bianca telling me to loosen up and Susannah urging me to tighten up, I found myself doing quite a balancing act. Thank goodness Emily was off in her own little world, one that counted Inca civilization far more fascinating than anything since the sixteenth century. Emily noticed people only if they had been covered with dirt for a few centuries and then discovered as a pile of bones.

When I tuned in once more to the current conversation, Susannah was still giving directions. “Well, she’s your daughter. Talk to her …”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried?”

“Do it some more.”

The fact that I’d been talking to Louise/Bianca for nineteen years without result seemed to have escaped Susannah’s notice. Susannah used to line up her dolls and order them to behave, so presumably she’d mastered a better maternal technique than I had. Thank goodness she’d married a nice, relaxed man like Mike, or Kevin and his soon-to-be-born new baby sister or brother would have stood a good chance of being pressed into little robot molds.

“How about Emily?” Susannah apparently had decided we needed reinforcements. “Have you talked to her?”

“About this? Well, no. It only came up today, and besides …”

“You’re right. She hasn’t noticed anything that’s happened in the past five hundred years, so she wouldn’t be much help. You need to talk to her about being a more active member of this family.” Another failing of mine. Susannah had a whole list of improvements in mind for me, just as Bianca did. The only trouble was that they were two entirely different lists. Apparently I needed improvement in an astounding number of areas. I imagined that the items on Susannah’s list were alphabetized and arranged in order of priority.

At times like this, I missed Tony more than ever.

“What’s that all about?” Harley Cunningham, Gil Fortune’s best friend, stood in the open doorway and watched Bianca chase Wendell across the grass. Harley’s words were light, but his handsome face was etched with strain, his dress shirt open at the collar, and his short blond hair uncharacteristically disheveled. As the manager of the Juniper Frontier Bank, he usually looked as though he’d stepped directly out of the pages of
GQ
, but he’d obviously put in a rough day.

“Just Wendell being Wendell,” I answered.

“Bianca signed him up for obedience school?” He tried for the small joke, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“Well, no, but maybe she should.” This poor man. My thoughts were in an uproar, but it seemed better to blame Bianca’s precipitous exit on her unruly dog than to tell Harley that Bianca was probably off to gather evidence against his best friend. There was no way to ignore the subject of Vanessa’s horrible accident though, so I waded in. “Harley, I’m so sorry to hear about Vanessa. How’s Gil doing?”

“About the way you’d expect. He’s just basically in shock.” Harley rubbed a hand over his eyes. “I guess we all are.”

“I can imagine,” I said. “Especially since you grew up together—”

“Since the eighth grade. That’s when Vanessa’s family moved here. You know how most girls that age are sort of awkward? Not Vanessa. Every boy in school was in love with her, including Gil. Vanessa fell for him, too, and that was that. Like a fairy tale romance.” Harley’s deep voice grew husky as he struggled for control. “Who’d have guessed it would end like this? I don’t know how Gil’s going to make it.”

I didn’t know how to respond. If Bianca could see the sadness on Harley’s face when he described Gil’s anguish at Vanessa’s death, maybe she’d drop the nonsense about murder. Vanessa’s fall was part of the same cruel reality that explained—or failed to explain—Tony’s accident a year ago. People mostly don’t die by getting murdered. Instead, their planes crash or they fall off cliffs or they get sick and die sad little deaths that leave everyone around them scrambling to find satisfactory explanations.

Bianca hadn’t yet lived long enough to gain the perspective to grasp that. Though her father’s death had certainly wounded her, she was young enough to believe that death didn’t really have all that much to do with her. She still had the luxury of making a drama out of death and then going on with life, instead of undertaking the long, slow healing that must be endured after your life’s partner has been wrenched from you. I had faced that situation and now Gil was about to start through it. I pushed from my mind Alix’s comments about Gil’s alleged infidelities. After all, Alix’s cynicism about most things was well known.

“If you’re able to talk about it,” I said, “do they know yet what happened?”

“I don’t mind,” Harley answered. “We’ll have to get used to it sooner or later, and I can’t think of anything else right now anyway. Arnie thinks it was a freak accident, that she somehow slipped off the trail while taking pictures. She was alone, so we’ll never know for sure, I guess.” He appeared lost in contemplation for a moment before resuming his train of thought. “She was always so graceful and light on her feet that it’s hard to imagine her falling. I always thought she should have been a dancer.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. Even women responded to Vanessa’s porcelain beauty. Her dark cloud of hair had framed features so lovely that they were almost unreal. “She seemed to float in a world of her own. In fact, just yesterday when she was here in the store for the Women’s Empowerment Group meeting upstairs, she was so alive, so vibrant—”

“I know, I know.” Harley cut in, as though he couldn’t bear to hear more. It struck me that maybe he hadn’t ever quite gotten over his schoolboy crush on Vanessa. He had been briefly married long ago to someone else, but no one ever talked about it and he had never remarried.

“Well, I’m sorry for all of you who were close to her, Harley. It’s just a terrible tragedy.”

“Thank you. She was the best. No doubt about it. Look, Jane, there’s a reason I came. I hate to bother you with it, but—”

“Still open?” Nick Constantine’s stocky frame almost filled the doorway. “Sorry to interrupt your conversation,” he added politely. Nick was an attorney from Santa Monica taking an extended vacation in Juniper this summer. His taste in reading was wide-ranging, and I always enjoyed seeing which books he’d choose next.

“That’s okay,” Harley said with a frown. “Go ahead, Jane.”

“We’re not open, technically,” I answered Nick, “but as long as you’re here—”

“Thanks.” Nick grinned and made straight for the sports books. “I hope you have more copies of those
100 Hikes in Central Oregon
books. I bought the first one for Pete, but now Theo wants one, too. That’s the trouble with twins. Sometimes they like the same things and it gets expensive.”

“They’re both coming to see you?”

“Yep, and they want plenty of activities lined up. They don’t want to be stuck in the house listening to me the whole time they’re here.”

“Oh, wait. I sold the last copy earlier. More due in tomorrow though. Is that okay?”

“If you don’t mind, I’ll just check to see if anything else might work.”

“Sure.”

He disappeared behind the shelves and I turned back to Harley. “Sorry. You were saying—”

“Really a couple of things. The reunion meeting, for one.”

“Oh, of course. That’s what? … tomorrow night?” Once Bianca had discovered that Thornton’s Books was in financial trouble, she had suggested that Laurence offer the upstairs as a place for other meetings in addition to those of the mystery book club, hoping the increased foot traffic would bring in new business. Laurence had agreed without a murmur. Thus, both the Women’s Empowerment Group and the Class of 1984 Reunion Committee had recently started trooping through the bookstore on a regular basis. Unfortunately, the WEG members tended to buy only the kind of self-help books that Laurence detested. I always hustled him off to the back room to keep him from telling customers that they were reading tripe when they came to pick up any books they had ordered.

On the bright side, however, at least the WEG members bought books, whereas the members of the reunion committee didn’t pause to buy anything in their haste to get upstairs to their meetings. They were far more interested in trying to remember whose cousin it was that Sandi Millican had gone skinny dipping with in Tumalo Reservoir after the senior prom, or chasing down the latest lead from long-retired custodians about the whereabouts of the time capsule supposedly buried within the walls of Juniper Senior High School the year they had graduated. They were having such a fine time reliving their high school years that they had no time for buying books. Gil had been senior class president, and Vanessa the secretary, so they had been the natural choices to co-chair the reunion committee. “I assume the meeting is cancelled?”

“No, we’re going ahead … without Gil, of course. Just let people know, if you wouldn’t mind—”

“But what about the reunion itself? It’s supposed to be—”

“Two weeks from now, and we’re not canceling.” Harley’s voice was firm. “Gil was adamant. He didn’t immediately think of it, but he was all in favor of going forward, once I mentioned it to him. He doesn’t want our classmates to forfeit all their hard work, and he doesn’t think Vanessa would have wanted it either.”

“Tough for the committee.”

“We’ll just do the best we can. I’m sure it will all work out. I was the vice-president of our class, so I’ve had plenty of practice filling in for Gil before this.”

“I didn’t realize that. But won’t you be busy helping Gil with—”

“The funeral arrangements? Yes, that, too.”

“Not to mention your job.”

“This is one time when being my own boss will come in extremely handy.” He shrugged. “Anyway, helping Gil is my top priority. We can’t always pick the times our friends need us.”

“Let me know if there’s anything more I can do … “

“Really? That’s great. I don’t suppose—”

“Ask it.”

“Would you reconsider going to the reunion as my date?”

Though I had begged off when he’d asked me the same question last week, now I hesitated only briefly before replying with as much warmth as I could muster. “Well, sure, Harley. I could do that.” I wasn’t interested in going out with Harley, though my kids had been teasing me all summer about the attention he paid me. Besides, Harley was five years younger than I, and even though he was the nicest guy in the world, I couldn’t see him ever being more than a friend. Still, it seemed important to him, and it wouldn’t hurt me to go out with him just this once. “That’d be great, if the offer’s still open.”