Grab & Go (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 2) (13 page)

CHAPTER 15

I waited until the exhaust trail from Matt’s beefy, government-issue, unmarked sedan dissipated. Then I turned back toward the kitchen table and a domestic situation of unrivaled stickiness.

“Are you trying out for a Vitamix infomercial, or what?” I asked.

Clarice flashed a scowl that put all others to shame. “There wasn’t a card.”

“Oh.” Understanding dawned. “And there wasn’t anything hidden—”

She shook her head. “But we couldn’t have our own Special Agent Jarvis making that discovery, could we?”

“Texas,” I muttered, picking at a stray sticker that had reaffixed itself to the countertop. “Does that mean something?”

She didn’t speak — it was more of a movement, something to just barely attract my attention. I turned my head to the side and glanced straight into Emmie’s worried golden-brown eyes. She had pulled the grapefruit basket to her edge of the table and held a scrap of paper — an envelope — pinched between her thumb and forefinger.

“Emmie?” I skirted the table and knelt beside her.

She pointed to the bottom of the basket where she’d pried apart a couple loose layers in the flimsy, laminated base that supported the wicker sides. Then she placed the envelope on my trembling palm.

A large shadow hovered over us — Clarice blocking the overhead light. “Well?” she grunted.

With shaking fingers, I peeled open the flap and pulled out a Polaroid picture.

Skip — it was definitely Skip — thinner, tanned, squinting in bright sunlight, standing on a patch of short dead grass as though he was in someone’s unwatered backyard. He wore a pair of saggy board shorts and a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and flip flops.

Flip flops. His stubby toes—

My eyes filled, and I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I made a choking noise.

“Okay, now. All right.” Clarice grabbed my elbow and hoisted me into a chair. She peered over my shoulder and clamped her own warm, gnarled hand over mine to steady the picture. “Huh.”

Emmie pressed against my knees, a look of distress on her pale face.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” I whimpered. Here I was falling apart in front of her when I was supposed to be taking care of her. “It’s just someone I know.”

“Uncle Skip?” she whispered.

I really cried then. Blubbered, in fact.

Emmie’s face swam, and I squeezed my eyes shut. But she climbed into my lap and wrapped her arms around my neck in a death grip. I heaved great sobs against her shoulder and clung to her just as hard.

A few minutes later, the unexpected waterworks were over, and I was gulping air through my mouth. Clarice pulled the picture out of my hand and replaced it with a paper towel printed all over with blue teapots.

Who thinks cutesy designs are a good idea for paper towels? They just get soggy and tossed in the trash, regardless. I blew my nose.

Emmie stayed in my lap, her eyes glued to my face as though I might dissolve again without warning. I patted her knee, trying to comfort both of us.

“I thought they went bankrupt,” I finally said when I could trust my voice.

Clarice gripped the corner of the picture so hard her knuckles were bloodless. She was also staring at the image as if she could scare a confession out of it. “Huh? Polaroid? No. Well, yes, but somebody bought the rapid-development film technology and is still running that portion of the company. Too many nostalgic customers for it to go completely under.” She tapped the photo on the edge of the table. “Think about it. No digital imprint.”

I blinked at her and blew my nose again.

“The cameras these days, they record all kinds of information, particularly date and time. It’s in the digital file that’s saved on the memory card or in the internal memory of the camera. And if that camera’s part of a phone, it could be broadcast anywhere.” She waved the Polaroid between us. “They didn’t want a trace, no later evidence of an image saved in an electronic format.”

“Proof of life,” I whispered. “Maybe now they’ll call for ransom money.”

“They?” Clarice’s tone was thick with sarcasm. “He looks healthy to me. What if he’s trying to tell you he’s fine, that he knows what he’s doing?” She snorted. “Fine and able-bodied and very much on the lam.”

“I have his passport,” I murmured. “If he’s in Texas, how’d he cross the border from Mexico?”

I became aware that Walt was in the doorway leading from the bedrooms, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed. The skin on his face was taut, pulling his sharp nose into high relief, his blue eyes piercing.

Clarice noticed too and reached down for Emmie’s hand. “I expect CeCe needs some help sorting that laundry.”

Emmie kept her gazed fixed on me as she trailed behind Clarice. I gave her a wobbly smile and nod.

I couldn’t put Walt off with a wobbly smile, though. He picked up the Polaroid and studied it. But he didn’t say anything — he’s very good at that — and I didn’t know where to start.

“How are Thomas and Bodie?” I asked instead.

“Shivering, which is good. Their bodies are working hard to create their own heat. They’ll recover. But I want them to stay here tonight.”

“Of course.” I nodded. “Dwayne?”

The tiniest smirk eased across the tension in Walt’s face. “Snoring. He’s a tough old coot. I’ll redo the dressing every day, watch for infection. You’ll have to try to keep him off that leg until it’s cleanly scabbed over. Good luck.”

“You’re going to dismantle his still?” I asked.

“More than that.” Walt frowned and sat on the corner of the table, one leg swinging free. “I’m going to tear down his shack too. He’s been squatting long enough. He’s too fragile to be on his own like that. If he wants to stick around, he can stay in the bunkhouse with the boys and me. But—” Walt stared at a spot on the turquoise and white checkered linoleum tile floor, somewhere near his left foot.

I tried Walt’s own tactic — role reversal with silent treatment — and just waited.

Walt sighed deeply. “I’d like him to stay here with you, permanently — if that’s agreeable to both parties. He needs looking after, and so do you.”

“In lieu of an FBI surveillance team?” I asked.

I meant it to be funny, but Walt’s head jerked up, placing me squarely in his stern sights again.

“They’re leaving?” His eyes narrowed, and he nodded slowly. “You’re up to something again, aren’t you?”

I gestured vaguely toward the Polaroid still in Walt’s hand.

“Then Dwayne and his shotgun are definitely staying here,” Walt said. “I’ll convince him. Do you know what you’re doing?” His tone was quiet, weary, but not accusatory.

“I’ll blunder through,” I whispered.

“This is recent?” He flicked the snapshot back onto the table, face up — a tanned Skip in a workaholic businessman’s idea of casual clothes.

“It’s not dated, but I think so. How long have you — and the boys’ camp — been here?”

“Close to five years.”

“So he bought the freight terminal at roughly the same time,” I muttered. “How’d you first connect with Skip?”

“I was running the camp on another property not far from here — a ranch that was in the process of being foreclosed on. The property was tied up with the bank plus it had a couple liens on it, and the owner had disappeared. A tenuous spot, at best. One day Skip drove up and offered Mayfield rent-free if I — the boys and I — worked on improvements and did general caretaking. Dwayne was here when we got here — at least I think he was. We only had fleeting encounters the first year or so. Skip knew all about the boys’ camp. I figured he been chatting up Etherea or the loan officer at the bank.”

“Did he tell you about his own childhood?” I asked.

Walt nodded. “Some. Made sense — why he’d be supportive of an alternative living arrangement for a bunch of foster kids who’d slipped through the cracks.”

I fingered the edge of the Polaroid, willing Skip’s image to talk to me, to explain his seemingly contradictory motives.

“Are we starting a girls’ camp now too?” Walt asked quietly.

I lifted my gaze to his. He was hunched over, leaning close, hands propped on his thighs. Sometimes his penetrating stare makes me jittery, nervous, uncomfortable, scrambling over my recent memories for something — anything — to confess, as though he knows my failings before I do. And sometimes his focused attention just warms me up, from a point in the center of my diaphragm through my lungs and all the way out my extremities, like the effects of a bowl of hearty soup on a cold day.

“I couldn’t leave her.” I pushed the words out. “She wasn’t safe with that woman. I made arrangements—”

Walt squeezed my shoulder with a warm, heavy hand. “We have a case worker from Children’s Services. She doesn’t make it out here very often. Mainly because she’s comfortable with what we’re doing, and because the rest of her cases are one crisis after another and she just doesn’t have the time. But we’ll need to have our stories straight before her next visit.”

“Emmie might be my — my niece,” I blurted.

Walt’s gaze flicked to the Polaroid of Skip then back to me. I watched his eyes change as the realization penetrated — he knew both Skip and I had been only children in our respective families, raised without siblings.

Suddenly he’d pulled me out of my chair and against his chest, his arms strong around me. “You did the right thing,” he murmured into my hair.

I walked with Walt out onto the patio and lingered while he jogged through the rain to Bertha. He had a month’s worth of groceries to unload and a bunkhouse full of boys to tend to tonight, minus the two who were under my roof.

Bertha’s single functioning taillight winked through the dripping dusk as Walt eased her across puddled ruts. I leaned against the mansion’s rough brick wall long after Walt had disappeared around the bend, listening to the rain patter, inhaling cleansing damp air.

Sorting. There were too many loose ends, too many trails which led to possibilities that scared me.

By their very nature, the other participants in my multi-faceted problems had to be reactive. If I stayed busy, I might be able to keep both the FBI and my husband’s revenge-seeking clients on their toes. It meant a lot of running, a lot of zigzagging, a lot of forced unpredictableness. All this for a girl who loved her minutely detailed daily planner. Foreign territory.

What worried me most was that in the middle of all this scrambling, maybe what I was really doing was trying to outwit my husband. Steal his own stolen money. Disrupt his illegal business channels. Why?

The idea roiled around in the black pit of my stomach, ricocheted off the inside of my skull.

Because I had to know. The truth, no matter how unsavory. I’d make sense of it when I had it in my hands. I had to. The alternative was unbearable.

And because Skip — and by default, I — had dependents now. A boys’ camp; a poor farm; an injured moonshiner; Skip’s lush of a mother who was, I hoped, still on her detox spa retreat; Clarice; the Gonzales family; and now Emmie.

Especially Emmie.

She’d recognized him. Called him Uncle Skip. Her first words when she’d finally trusted me enough to speak.

Was ‘uncle’ just his euphemistic designation since Emmie’s mother couldn’t acknowledge him as the father of her child? Or was he more of a benefactor, the way he had been for the boys’ camp, and not really, biologically, related at all?

I pushed off the wall and retreated to the kitchen. Spinning on the hamster wheel of my thoughts wasn’t going to solve anything. Sometimes you have to step off in a direction — any direction — to find out where you are.

CHAPTER 16

My only direction that night, though, was to bed. I mentioned my appointment — date and time undetermined, but urgent — with Tarquin Roe. But Clarice growled, “Not tonight you aren’t,” and hustled me toward my bedroom with a couple of hot water bottles and a second comforter.

I heard her heavy tread on the wood planks in the hallway, shuttling back and forth for what seemed like hours, as she cared for her other resting patients and put the girls to bed. But my awareness of her activity must have been in my dreams because I awoke still in my clothes, swaddled in blankets but not actually between the sheets, my neck crooked uncomfortably against the clammy, rubber bulge of an expired hot water bottle. I’d only managed to pull my feet up and tip over before succumbing.

The mansion was quiet when I rose, but heavier somehow with the breathing of slumbering people. I wondered what the place had felt like when every room was occupied by destitute residents who labored on the farm for their room and board. Family quarters with children and parents, segregated dormitories for single men and women — the men had outnumbered the women probably six or seven to one, attic coves for staff. It was as though their histories were palpable, ghostly, and followed me down the hall and into the kitchen.

My body was sluggish with a depth of fatigue I’d never experienced before, as though my muscles were mired in sludge and I couldn’t break them free. My movements were stiff and jerky, with an invisible half-speed governor on my internal motor. The aftereffects of hypothermia? Or the compound interest on a sleep-deprivation annuity?

I left a note for Clarice, swiped the keys to the Subaru, and stepped into the swirling mist with a flashlight. A thin layer of feather-crackled ice covered the car. I had to lie on my back, scooching through crunchy frost with my head under the bumper to get the right angle to remove the original GPS tracking device. Matt’s second addition from yesterday was only visible because it was still clean, but it was tinier, and he’d attached it to the side of a strut much higher in the car’s undercarriage. Clever.

I rolled out from under the car with the bugs in my hand. They couldn’t go far. They needed to give the impression that the Subaru was permanently parked near the kitchen door. I stood on tiptoe and tucked them into the crook of the downspout where it curved in from the gutter on the patio overhang.

I had three choices for locating Tarquin Roe’s house — call the owner, call Des again or stop by the general store for a chat with Etherea. I chose the latter as the least obtrusive.

Etherea was just unlocking the door when I climbed the creaking steps to the store’s covered porch. A streak of dawn peeked through a narrow slit under the heavy-hanging clouds, the angled light gilding the frost on the handrail and shooting sparkles across the gravel parking lot. It hardly seemed the same setting of a drive-by shooting a few days ago.

“You’re up early,” Etherea said as I followed her into the warmth of the store. “Everything all right out at Mayfield?” Her shaggy salt and pepper brows shadowed the quick glance she cast at me over her shoulder. “Walt sure left in a hurry yesterday. I had to holler after him to remember your grapefruit basket.”

I didn’t want to get into details with her. And I didn’t want to test her knowledge of Dwayne and his distilling activities even though she was the local repository of information, accurate or otherwise. So I quickly sidestepped down an aisle toward the bank of coolers in the back of the store.

“Can you give me directions to Tarquin Roe’s house?” I called, snagging a bottle of orange juice. The cooler door slapped closed behind me. I grabbed a box of glazed doughnuts from the Entenmann’s display and headed for the cash register. Get me out from under Clarice’s nose, and this was my kind of balanced diet.

“Tarq?” Etherea repeated. “You headed there? Then you could do me a favor.” She pounded keys, and the cash drawer dinged open. “Got his monthly grocery order here. Just give me a minute to fill in the refrigerated stuff. It’d save him a trip if you could take it to him. He really shouldn’t be driving.”

“That bad?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “It was that bad back when his only problem was the bottle. Now the shakes he gets from the cancer drugs are even worse than the effects of his drinking. What do you want with Tarq, anyway?”

I shrugged. “I need a lawyer.”

Etherea snorted but refrained from comment — quite possibly a first for her. She hustled into the backroom.

Etherea’s reticence wrapped another layer of worry to the veneer that was already weighing me down. But when she returned with a loaded cardboard apple box, I still hadn’t figured out how to ask for more information about Tarq without offering too much of my own.

Armed with Etherea’s deft descriptions of the landmarks I should pass if I made the correct turns, I set out. Fog fingered through the massive tree trucks crowding the shoulders of the backroads. All roads around here are backroads, but these were even more so. They were certainly not designed for rapid thoroughfare or easy access. They meandered past homesteads and skirted natural impediments, dotted only occasionally by mailboxes on sturdy posts indicating houses buried deep in the forest.

I passed a mailbox labeled ‘Forbes’ next to a gravel track that took off to the right. Smoke pooled in a hollow as the road curved, probably from a woodstove at Des’s place. Sunlight had yet to — and might not ever — penetrate through the dense roof of needled boughs. I slowed even more and flipped the high beams on, watching for three blue reflectors nailed to a stump. Etherea had warned me that Tarq kept a post office box with Gus and so didn’t have a mailbox.

Tarq’s driveway almost matched Mayfield’s for subtlety. Mud slicked up onto the station wagon’s fenders as I slid more than motored into a shallow dip off the road. The engine ground low and ineffectually for a moment, then chugged as the tires gained traction on firmer ground, and I bounced up over a small ridge.

The wall of skyscraper fir trees opened into a small clearing, with a cabin nestled against the far side where the trees took over again. A doe and her almost full-grown fawn watched me roll past, their huge ears pivoting like satellite dishes to my trajectory, their bodies alert, springy, but not afraid. In my rearview mirror, I saw them flick their tails and drop their heads to continue grazing.

An ancient Datsun pickup with an algae-coated canopy homemade from plywood was parked under a carport attached to the side of the cabin. The carport’s support posts had rotted at uneven rates, and the whole contraption tilted at a dizzying angle. But it appeared that Tarq was at home.

I parked a safe distance from the precarious carport and lugged my tote bag crammed with pertinent paperwork from the passenger seat. I hefted Tarq’s groceries out of the back and climbed the cinderblock steps to his narrow front porch.

I dropped the box next to a two-person swing hanging from the roof on chains and knocked, scraping my knuckles on the door’s rough, peeling surface. A lone bird high in the treetops released a sweet, fluting trill. His notes dipped and swirled, soaring into pure pleasure. When he finished, the silence sounded like jackhammers.

I held my breath, enthralled, and scanned the raggedy points of the tall evergreens, searching in vain for a tiny brown body, a swooping flight.

When it became clear the winged performer wasn’t going to provide an encore, I reluctantly turned back to the door and banged on it with my fist. I hoped Tarq hadn’t changed his mind. Maybe he was still asleep.

Under my third volley of pounding, the door swung open.

I gasped and staggered backwards. My heel caught the lip of a step, and I started windmilling, teetering on the edge of balance. A sinewy hand shot out and grabbed my flailing arm and yanked so that I pitched forward. I latched onto the doorjamb, my fingernails biting into the soft wood, desperate not to come into additional contact with him.

“What’s wrong with you?” Tarq growled.

At my open-mouthed stare, he glanced down at his tank-style t-shirt which was smeared with blood from the armpits to the hem. Bits of silvery skin and gelatinous flesh glistened from amid the thick hair on his forearms. His fingernails were crusted red. I almost gagged.

“Gutting fish,” he muttered. “Should have known a city girl couldn’t handle it.” He spun and stomped into the dim cabin. I heard a door creak on rusty hinges then slam closed.

Since he’d left the front door wide open, I assumed that meant I could enter. Which I did.

Tarquin Roe had not earned the lavish amount of money you’d expect of a lawyer. Or if he had, then he kept it in a tube sock stuffed under a mattress or something, because it certainly had never been spent on home improvements. Maybe this was his second house — the rustic cabin in the rugged wilderness that urbanites who fancy themselves sportsmen brag about to conjure up a sense of manliness and adventure compared to the domesticities of a comfortable pad close to the courthouse.

Then I remembered the drinking. Maybe Tarquin had spent all his earnings on booze. Maybe he wasn’t that good of a lawyer, even though Des had mentioned his varied areas of practice. Most likely May County wasn’t a lucrative place to practice law. Or maybe I was jaded from my past experience with lawyers.

Freddy Whelan, of the polished brass and mahogany law firm of Wiley, Jones & Parch in San Francisco and the attorney on retainer with Turbo-Tidy Clean, LLC, my husband’s front company, and an illustrious member of Lee Gomes’s contact list, had yet to return any of my many phone calls. I guessed having green-shaded banker’s lamps on all their beautifully inlaid desks didn’t make dealing with certain clients any more savory — or give their lawyers additional backbone. He was either a coward or a criminal — or both. Freddy obviously wasn’t going to go out of his way to help me. Although when it came time for me to declare the company bankrupt, he’d have to because he’d accepted plenty of Turbo-Tidy’s money over the years.

In the meantime, I needed Tarquin Roe — for better or for worse.

It was a central shotgun-style cabin — doorways straight through from front to back. I lugged the groceries through the living room, across a narrow hallway that branched both directions — to a bedroom on the left and a bathroom on the right — and into a kitchen resplendent in 1970’s goldenrod and burnt orange.

I don’t think the place had been cleaned since the 1970s either. A thick, sticky coating of cooking grease — the kind that becomes airborne in steam at the stove, condenses near the ceiling and precipitates in amber droplets — covered everything.

The countertops were littered with remnants — empty or partially-empty food packages, dirty dishes, unidentifiable mechanical parts, newspapers, a few books creased open on their spines, fishing tackle. Tarquin Roe was definitely living without female companionship. I made a place for the grocery box by pulling out a kitchen chair and swiping the seat free of a bread crust and dry peach pit. The crust was so hard it clattered when it hit the floor.

A white-muzzled chocolate Labrador slowly lurched up from a nest of old blankets in the corner, his front and back halves requiring separate and painful concentration to engage. He shuffled over and waited patiently for me to acknowledge his presence.  His labored breath was edged with a high-pitched wheeze, and his lower eyelids drooped.

I knelt and took his jowly jaw between my hands. “Hey, old fella.” I was rewarded with a low sway of his tired tail and a blast of gum-rotted breath.

Frigid air flowed through the open back door. Schlucky noises and thumps sounded from beyond the holey screen door that covered the opening.

“Mr. Roe?” I called.

“Unless you want your sensibilities further offended, stay in there,” he replied, his voice surprisingly close and stronger than I expected for a cancer patient.

The dog ambled back to his bed, and I surveyed the kitchen wondering if I could do a little quick tidying without offending the owner. Probably not.

A weekly pill organizer and a dozen translucent orange prescription bottles sat on the kitchen table. It took a minute for me to recognize the mix-up in dates. I hadn’t been keeping very good track of which day of the week it was myself, now that I didn’t have a Monday through Friday job to go to or any kind of social calendar. I ticked days backwards on my fingers and came to the conclusion that it was a Friday.

The pill organizer was empty for Sunday and Monday but full of little tablets and gel caps like jewels in a treasure box the rest of the week. I assumed that refilling the organizer would be similar to dealing cards — all the slots open and one type of pill distributed at a time, then moving on to the next type, etc. To have two completely empty compartments meant Tarq hadn’t been taking his pills every day, and had quite possibly missed two or three days in the past week.

Seeing Tarq’s living conditions put a framework around Des’s concerns for his neighbor. What was it about old bachelor men and not taking care of themselves? Dwayne and Tarq, while at opposite ends of the law, were cast from the same mold.