Elizabeth Zelvin - Bruce Kohler 04 - Death Will Save Your Life (8 page)

A three-quarter moon rode high in the sky. Silvery mist rose from the water. The performance started with the throbbing beat of a drum floating across the lake, then more drums and the drone of didges. Male voices began to chant.

“Hey-ah hey-ah.” Native American tribal, more or less.

Women began to sing in high, slightly nasal harmonies.

“Balkan peasants,” Barbara whispered. “What next?”

The drums and didges kicked in again.

“Africa,” Jimmy whispered back. “The Australian outback. No culture left behind.”

The song floated over the water toward us. The words might have been in any language but English.

“Gaelic?” Barbara guessed. “Navajo?”

“Could be Klingon,” Jimmy said.

Torches sprang into flame. Now we could see the singers, sitting very tall and straight in the canoes as they dipped and feathered their paddles. I spotted Lorenzo the chiropractor among them. Madhouse, sitting in the bow of his canoe with arms outstretched and two flaming torches held high in his hands, wore an elaborate feathered headdress. Someone struck a single resonant note on a Tibetan temple gong.

The display on the lake gave way to a jumble of traditions that got more and more eclectic. The morris dancers did their turn, the bells on their legs jingling as they galumphed and bobbed. Some heretic finally turned on a boom box, and the Aquarians turned from things spiritual to some serious getting down. Many of the paddlers and torch bearers could be seen twisting and shouting. Barbara pointed out her Tibetan friend bouncing cheerfully and flinging himself about in his own brand of disco.

I felt a hand on my arm and jumped. Feather stood at my shoulder. She was the only person in sight besides me who was standing still. She screamed something over the noise, but I couldn’t catch it. I shook my head.

Feather leaned closer and screamed louder.

“I said, have you seen Madhusudhana? He was supposed to do the morris dance, but he never showed up.”

I shook my head and yelled, “Sorry!”

“Can you ask your friends?”

I nodded. Barbara and Jimmy were so absorbed in the dance and each other that I had to kind of dance along before they noticed me.

“Have you seen Madhouse? Feather is looking for him.”

“Nope,” Jimmy said, “not since the canoes and torches.”

“Me neither,” Barbara said. “He shouldn’t have worn those eagle feathers. You’re supposed to earn them.”

I made my way back to the sidelines, shaking my head and holding out my hands in apology.

“Sorry. None of us has seen him.”

“Never mind. Thanks for trying.” I saw her approach another group of dancers and forgot about her.

I think Barbara and Jimmy would have danced till dawn. I was half asleep but too wrung out to make my way back to my room. So I was still there, dozing with my back against a tree, when Feather finally located Madhouse in the reeds on the lake shore. She found him with his head bashed in, hanging half out of a canoe pulled up partway on the bank. The weapon, his own paddle, had been tossed in among the reeds a few feet away.

Her screaming stopped the music.

“The good news,” I told Jimmy and Barbara, “is that Honey couldn’t possibly have done it.”

“She couldn’t have a better alibi,” Barbara agreed.

We sat beneath a cluster of pines that bordered the brook, enjoying the spicy scent of pine needles and dabbling our feet in the rushing water.

“She’s trying to get Callaghan to let her go into the city,” I said. “She has all Melvin’s stuff to deal with.”

“Why can’t
we
go back to the city?” Jimmy said.

I didn’t want to leave Honey, though I didn’t want to say so. And I had trouble believing that things would stay the same when we were both back in the city.

“We
will
, Jimmy,” Barbara said. “Poor Honey. I keep forgetting that she was Melvin’s wife.”

“So do I,” I said.

Feather came up to us before Barbara could go all Dear Abby on me. Her skin had a grayish pallor. Her hair was escaping from its braid, and her slightly protuberant eyes were red from crying.

“Barbara, can I talk to you?”

“Of course,” Barbara said. “Don’t go anywhere, guys. I’ll be right back.”

“Another excuse not to leave,” Jimmy said. “Bet you anything she promises to help. Why does she always have to have a mission?”

“She has a good heart.” I threw a twig into the brook and watched it sail downstream. “And the codependency of a golden retriever.”

Barbara came back with her new best friend trotting after her.

“Feather needs support,” she announced.

“Here come the Marines,” Jimmy muttered.

“Thanks for being nice to me,” Feather said. “The other girls who work here, they’re all single. They bunk together, so they get close. But being married—it’s been hard to make friends. We have our own cabin—just a hut, really, but Madhouse likes—liked—the privacy. It’s way up the hill, so it feels like we’re all alone in the woods.”

So if she’d killed him in the cabin, she would have been the only suspect. No matter how much Madhouse needed killing, who’d think it was worth the climb?

“You feel lonely sometimes.” Barbara said in her most empathic counselor voice.

No kidding. That cabin must have felt like a desert island in the warm, fuzzy sea of the Woo-Woo community.

“He drove people away,” Feather said. “Nobody liked him.” One corner of her mouth quirked downward. “I loved him, but I don’t think I liked him much myself.”

“You felt isolated.”

“That was nothing new. I told you at the meeting.” She nodded to Barbara. “Our dad started drinking heavily after Mom ran off. Then he offed himself.”

She said it like she didn’t care, but I’d done the same myself with painful family history. It was an act. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to help her out. I knew how scared you got, being suspected of murder.

“I’m going with her to see Callaghan,” Barbara said.

“What makes you think he’ll let you in?” Jimmy asked.

“He probably won’t—the big bully. But I can glare at him when he turns me away and sit in the waiting room looking determined until he’s through with her.”

“Oh, please come,” Feather said. “I’d feel so much braver with you there. Those cops in town—they don’t like anyone from Aquarius.”

“Yeah, we noticed that,” I said.

“Especially that Callaghan,” she said. “Last summer, he stopped Madhouse a couple of times for speeding, and—well, Madhouse doesn’t think highly of the police… I’m afraid he let it show.”

I could imagine.

“He could be secretive,” Feather said. “When he didn’t like someone, he liked to find out something, well, bad about them. He wouldn’t tell, but he’d get kind of smug and puffed up.”

“He didn’t go to AA, did he?” Jimmy asked.

“He said he didn’t need another set of shibboleths. He always said if he found a real guru, one who he felt in his soul was farther along the Path, then he would submit to being a follower.”

“Was that supposed to happen here?” Barbara asked.

“Oh, no! He was just, like, building up seed money. He meant to go to the East—Nepal, someplace like that.”

“Would you have gone with him?”

“I don’t know.” Feather stared at the ground and twisted her fingers together. “He wanted to go soon.”

“But somebody stopped him.”

Feather licked her lips and glanced over her shoulder before she spoke again.

“He was only waiting for what he called one big score. He wouldn’t tell me what he meant, but I’d almost be glad if it turned out to be drugs.”

I hadn’t seen much of Jojo lately. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen him at the Midsummer bash. I found him in our room, throwing things into the Louis Vuitton. The shoe in his hand had given a crocodile something to cry about.

“What do you think of our latest drama, dear? I can’t believe I’m only three degrees of separation from the murderer. Or is it four?
I
knew Melvin, and
he
had a sister, and
she
had a husband, and
he
got murdered.”

“How exciting for you,” I said. “You’re leaving?”

“Tchoo! Tchoo!” Jojo clawed at a box of tissues lying on the bed. “I can’t wait to get back to central air. Whoever told me hay fever season hasn’t started yet lied. I’ve hardly gotten a wink of sleep since I got here.”

I was about to point out that I’d heard him snoring myself when I realized I’d heard that dainty double sneeze before. Maybe he hadn’t been asleep after all while we were climbing up to the Outlook on the morning Melvin died.

“The cops didn’t ask you to stick around?”

“They don’t suspect me, and they don’t need me.
I
didn’t find any bodies. Tchoo
tshchit
!” He grabbed a handful of tissues and blew less languidly than I expected. “Poor Annabel swears she’ll be fine, and I do have other clients.”

“Gesundheit,” I said. “Why poor Annabel? She and Melvin didn’t get along.”

Jojo’s eyes gleamed with malice.

“They
loved
not getting along. But that was a big secret. They wrote the book, as it were, on good relationships. They couldn’t tell the world that quarreling turned them on, now could they?”

“But they got divorced.”

“Ah, that’s another story. Money, recognition. They were both mega competitive. But their hostility was greatly exaggerated. Fabulous PR, of course.”

“Did you go to the ceremony at the lake?” I asked. Now I wanted to know where he’d been on Midsummer Night when someone bashed Madhouse with a paddle.

“The torches! The chanting! The dancers with bells on!” Jojo cocked his head and clasped his hands together. “Have you had your past lives done? A marvelous woman at the wellness center regresses you in no time flat. I was a medieval morris dancer who got burnt as a warlock. Isn’t that delicious?”

He was good at blowing smoke. I tried to think of a trick question.

“What did you think of the tassels on the morris dancers’ hats?” The morris dancers hadn’t worn hats.

“Unh unh unh,” Jojo caroled. He waggled a finger at me. “I don’t make fashion statements, dear. I
am
a fashion statement. But what a build to the final act. The murder! The screams! The minions of the law! Poor Annabel had to miss it. She needed to use her cell phone.”

So she couldn’t give him an alibi.

He pressed his jammed suitcase closed—he was stronger than he looked—and snapped the locks.

“Farewell, Woo-Woo Farm! It’s been quite an experience. I only wish I’d treated myself to another past life regression or two. I’m an old soul, you know.”

I couldn’t stop him. On an impulse, I said, “Can I have your business card? You never know, I might write a book some day.”

Jojo’s pained expression showed what he thought of that idea. But I held out my hand and kept it out until he took a card from a brushed steel case and forked it over. If we could figure out how he might have done it, we’d know where to find him.

Over the next couple of days, it began to feel as if we’d spent a year at Woo-Woo Farm and might not ever get away. I went with Honey to an ACOA meeting in town, where we saw Lorenzo exchanging more-than-fellowship hugs with the town librarian. We knew she was the librarian because small-town meetings are a lot less anonymous than meetings in New York City. We knew she wasn’t his wife because Jimmy visited the library to get online and saw a picture of her husband and kids at the checkout desk. The kids looked like her, and he recognized the husband as one of the morris dancers at the Midsummer bash.