Goose in the Pond (11 page)

Sam shook his head dubiously. “I think you’re wrong but I need the money.” He took the bills and slipped them into the pockets of his shorts. “I’ll pay you back.”

“Maybe I am,” I agreed. “But let’s give it a try anyway. And consider the money a late graduation present.”

“So,” he said, his face relaxing. “What’s there to do in this town? What are you going to do today?”

“As you probably saw last night, downtown’s a nice place to hang out. Lots of boutiques and coffeehouses. Pick up the
Freedom Press
. It has an entertainment section that tells what’s going on in town. As for me, I’m going to go visit a friend of mine this morning and then go to the folk-art museum and finish getting the grounds set up for the storytelling festival this weekend.” I smiled at him encouragingly. “We can always use more volunteers. Why don’t you come by the museum this afternoon? I’ll give you the two-bit tour.”

“Maybe I will,” he said. “But the problem is, I’m pretty much hoofing it. How’s your rapid-transit system around here?”

“Lousy,” I said, thinking for a moment. I took the spare key to my old truck from a kitchen drawer. “You can drive my truck, and I’ll drive your grandpa’s old truck.”

“The restored one?” Sam’s eyes lit up. “Wow, Dad told me about it over the phone. That was so cool of Otis. Why can’t I drive that?”

“ ’Cause your dad isn’t quite ready for that yet,” I said wryly. “He’s not going to be thrilled about me driving it, but it’s the only way we can get you some wheels.”

“Maybe I can talk him into it,” he said, his eyes still dreamy.

“Maybe,” I humored him, thinking,
Not in this lifetime, sonny boy.

I was thankful Sam was in the bathroom when Gabe came into the living room dressed for work. I straightened his tie and informed him of our plans.

“Be careful,” he said. “Maybe I should drive Dad’s truck.”

“Okay, but then I drive the Corvette.”

I watched his face struggle with the choices. “I guess I’ll take the Corvette. You’re not going anyplace off-road, are you?”

“Oh, go catch some bad guys,” I said, kissing him and pushing him toward the door.

I dressed quickly in jeans, a sleeveless denim shirt, and boots. With a quick brush of hair and teeth, I was ready for my visit with Nick. All I had to do was stop by the bakery and buy a pie. When I walked back into the kitchen, Sam was loading both last night’s and this morning’s dishes in the dishwasher. A package of chicken breasts lay on the counter.

“Thanks,” I said. “What are you doing with the chicken?”

He smiled at me. “I’m not a complete scrounge,
madrastra
.” He took a long glass pan from the bottom cupboard. “I thought I’d marinate some chicken breasts in this great teriaki-ginger sauce I learned in Hawaii. We can broil them for dinner. Maybe steam some vegetables and rice to go with it.”

I unsuccessfully hid my surprise. “You cook?”

He wiped his wet hands on his sweatshirt. “I worked for a few months as a chef’s helper in a hotel restaurant in Haleiwa. I mostly just cut up vegetables, but I learned a few things watching the chef.”

“Well, anyone who cooks around here is more than welcome.”

After picking up a fresh cherry pie at the bakery, I drove to Nick’s house. He lived near the college on a cul-de-sac that ended at one of Cal Poly’s pastures. The street had become more familiar to me in the last few months because Gabe’s leased house was at the end of the same street. Nick’s house sat above the pavement, perched over his two-car garage. A red Harley-Davidson Sportster was parked in front of the garage doors, a black helmet resting in the bushes as if he’d flung it there when he dismounted. I picked it up and balanced it carefully on the leather motorcycle seat. A steep set of white wooden stairs led to an intricately carved front door with a stained-glass porthole window. An overgrown ash tree in his tiny front yard canopied the deep front porch.

He answered the door on my third knock. He looked thinner than the last time I saw him a week ago, though I knew that was just an illusion. Death, it seemed to me, did that to survivors, seemed to shrink them for a time, as if a part of them physically left when the person they loved did. His shaggy auburn hair was slightly greasy at the crown, and the whites of his blue eyes were faintly yellow and webbed with red lines. He wore a pair of dark jeans, a gray athletic shirt, and scuffed black motorcycle boots.

“Nick, I’m so sorry,” I said. We did an awkward dance for a moment as I tried to hug him while balancing the pink box holding the pie.

“Come on in,” he said, taking the box from my hands.

I followed him into his shaded living room. With the greenish sunlight dappling the room and the large picture window peering over his neighbors’ rooftops, it felt like we were in a tree house. He pushed aside a pile of newspapers on the leather sofa to give me a place to sit. Crumpled fast-food containers and empty beer bottles littered the glass coffee table. He sat across from me in a plaid chair, cradling the pink bakery box in his lap.

“Thanks for the cake,” he finally said.

“It’s a pie, and you’re welcome.”

We sat uncomfortably silent for a moment. He set the box down next to him and picked up a worn acoustic guitar propped next to the white brick fireplace. “What’s Gabe found out so far?” he asked, running his fingers along the edge of the instrument.

“Not much,” I said. “But he’s got everyone he can spare working on it.” I hugged my bare upper arms. For some reason, though the temperature had already started climbing toward the high eighties, his house felt like a refrigerator. “They’ll find who did this, Nick.”

He squinted at me, his light eyes cynical. “I’m glad you have so much confidence in our boys in blue. Too bad they couldn’t be there when someone decided to kill her.”

I didn’t answer. His remark was unfair, but I also knew from experience that during those first few days after such a shock, a person can’t always be held responsible for what they say. I picked up a pillow needlepointed with the figure of a soaring eagle and pretended to study the stitchwork. “Do you need help planning the service?” I asked gently.

He rubbed a hand over his face. “Man, I’m sorry, Benni. I sound like an ungrateful ass. I know Gabe’s doing his best. I’m just so angry at whoever did this, I can’t see straight.” He thrummed his fingers down the strings of the guitar, then stopped their sound with the flat of his hand. “Truthfully, I don’t know what to do and I don’t even know who to ask.”

“I can ask Gabe when they will release her,” I offered.

“You know it was just me and her. This is all my responsibility now, and with the two of us she was always the one—” His voice broke. “She would be the one to find out these things.”

“I know, but she had friends. You have friends. We’ll help you.”

“Thanks,” he mumbled, staring out the huge picture window into the ash tree’s thick foliage. I followed his gaze. Through the leaves, the sloping umber hills of San Celina seemed to undulate before our eyes. “I hope they found something in her apartment.” He looked back at me. “And I hope they’re looking real close at Roy and his horsey girlfriend. They had more reason to want her dead than anyone.”

Again I didn’t answer. One of the problems with living in the same small town your entire life was sometimes your loyalties got intertwined and complicated. Although Roy annoyed me sometimes with his smart-ass personality, he was basically a good guy. And I liked Grace. I liked her a lot. I didn’t want to believe either of them would kill Nora.

“I’ll call you as soon as I find out about when they’ll release Nora,” I said, standing up. “Is there anything else I can do? Do you have enough food? Want me to go grocery shopping for you?”

His face softened, and he gave a quiet laugh. For the first time since I walked in, he looked more like the kindhearted guy I’d known for years. The guy who would spend an hour helping a schoolchild find all the right reference materials for an overdue report on California missions or help a frightened senior citizen research a list of medicines prescribed to them by a doctor too busy to explain the side effects. “I’m eating fine,” he said, pointing to the coffee table full of fast food wrappers. “You remind me of Nora. She was always concerned I wasn’t eating enough.”

“You loved each other very much,” I said.

His eyes teared up. “Yes.”

“We’re doing a special tribute to her at the storytelling festival,” I said. “Maybe you’d like to come see it.”

“Is Roy going to be there?”

“There’s nothing I can do about that, Nick. He’s in the program.”

“Then I’ll pass. But thanks for thinking of her.”

“Nick, when the detectives talked to you, did they ask who—”

He broke in. “I think I know what you’re going to ask. I told them that the only person I knew who could possibly want her dead was Roy Hudson and that woman he left my sister for. They are the only ones who could benefit from her death, and frankly, any man who could screw around on his wife when his son is dying is capable of anything in my book.”

At the door, he studied me for a long minute before speaking. “I was the last one to see her.”

“What?”

“Gabe didn’t tell you?”

I shook my head, not wanting to go into detail about how little Gabe told me about his work.

“I left her at the library at six o’clock. She knew the lockdown procedure and she had some stuff she said she wanted to work on in the computer lab. It was really against the rules, but Jillian’s pretty relaxed about that kind of stuff. We’d done it lots of times. We were supposed to have breakfast together the next morning.” His voice cracked again. “If I’d only stayed. If I’d—“

“Nick, don’t beat yourself up. There’s no way you could have known.” The path he was walking down was one way too familiar to me. That overwhelming, but entirely false feeling that somehow, if we’d just done things differently, we could have changed fate and prevented the tragedy. “I’m so sorry,” I said again.

He just nodded and closed the door behind me without answering.

On the drive to the folk-art museum I castigated myself for even bringing up the investigation. Some friend I was. But Grace was my friend, too, and I didn’t want her and Roy to be hurt by this either. We’d become pretty close in the few months we’d exercised, trained, and doctored her horses together. Going to the stables three or four times a week eased somewhat my homesickness for daily ranch life. Our small rented house didn’t allow pets, so playing with Grace’s dogs and helping with her animals had become a welcomed respite to this new life in town that deep down I couldn’t believe was permanent.

I pulled into the museum parking lot and parked in my habitual spot under a huge oak tree whose dark gray trunk was crisscrossed with tree scars professing various undying loves and the nineties equivalent of “Kilroy was here.” The parking lot was jammed with vehicles, and there was a corresponding amount of frantic activity in the neighboring field. The barbed-wire fencing normally separating the pasture from our parking lot had been temporarily removed, so I walked straight into the field, waving at different local merchants as they decorated their booths for the festival. In the center of the field D-Daddy was supervising a group of boisterous college boys unloading hay bales from a new Ford pickup.

We were providing three storytelling areas—the main one in the center under a rented canopy, which would have a plain wood backdrop and hay bales for seating, and two smaller areas, both under large, leafy oak trees. They would also have hay bales for seating, but the storytellers themselves would have to provide any backdrop—imaginative or otherwise. All of them were far enough from each other so one storyteller’s voice wouldn’t overshadow another. The workshops would be held at staggered times in the main room of the co-op studios.

“To the left,” D-Daddy yelled. “Left!” Three young men pushed the backdrop up. One kid wearing a peach-colored bowling shirt with
WORLEY’S ELECTRICAL SUPPLY
embroidered on back ran around and caught the teetering wall. They steadied it with long two-by-fours while trying to figure out how to add another brace to make it steady. “
C’est ça,
” D-Daddy said. “That’s it.”

“Everything’s looking great,” I said, walking up to him.

He pulled out a dark blue bandanna and wiped his perspiring face. “Told them boys in the wood shop two braces weren’t near enough. Guess they’ll listen next time. Everything’s close to done, you bet.”

“Gee, D-Daddy, what do you need me for?”

“To give light to the heavens,
ange,
” he said, giving me a toothy smile and gesturing skyward. His thick white pompadour glistened in the sunlight.

One of the kids struggling with the backdrop snorted loudly. D-Daddy snapped his long fingers and told him to get cracking or there’ d be no lunch for him come noon.

Inside the museum I walked through the exhibit, thankful again for D-Daddy’s unexpected presence in my life. The story quilts were all hung evenly and properly with the wooden clip hangers the woodworkers had recently made. On the other side of one of the freestanding walls in the main exhibit hall, I heard a voice singing softly “
Jolie blonde,
you steal my heart away” in that sweet lilting tempo common to Cajun music. I peeked around and found Evangeline standing on a footstool making a few finishing stitches on her already-hung story quilt. Though I hadn’t made a sound on the museum’s speckled commercial carpet, she must have sensed my presence. She spun around quick as a sparrow, her face icy with panic, small embroidery scissors held point outward.

I held up my hands. “I surrender.”

She laughed uneasily. “Benni, you startled me.” She hopped down off the folding stool, her wide cheekbones flushed with tiny rosebuds.

“Sorry,” I said. “What are you doing?”

She glanced over her shoulder, then gave me a rueful smile. “You know quilters. We just can’t ever really finish anything.” She laughed. “Or maybe I should say
fabric artists
.”

I laughed at her emphasis. There’ d been a constant though good-natured rivalry between the traditional quilters, who preferred utilizing historic patterns and reworking them in creative ways, and the avant-garde quilters, who believed in free-form expression, tended to avoid traditional piecing, and insisted on being called fabric artists rather than quilters. This exhibit celebrated both groups, as storytelling quilts used both techniques. But even looking at the displayed quilts, you could guess each quilter’s preference. Evangeline, being a natural peacemaker, moved effortlessly between the two groups, her gentle sense of humor keeping the conflict light and playful.