Ruby was right about that. McMasters isn’t a mall business, it’s a local business, patronized by other local businesses. It’s about six blocks from here, off by itself. There wouldn’t be any reason for Sally to be in that area.
“And what’s more,” Ruby went on, “the car is cold. I walked over there and touched the hood. It’s been parked there for a while, China.”
“Okay,” I said. “Stay where you are and phone the cops. And keep out of sight, okay? If Sally comes back and sees you, she’s going to wonder what the heck is going on.”
“I will, definitely.” In a lower voice she added, “Does Sally know that Leslie’s been murdered?”
“Not unless she did it herself,” I said.
“Weeeellll . . .” Ruby dragged out the word.
“She
didn’t
,” I said firmly. “She could not have murdered her sister and then sat at our dinner table with the kids and McQuaid and me without giving us some sort of clue. It’s just not possible, Ruby.” As a former criminal attorney, I’ve seen my share of killers, some of them pretty cool characters. Sally was an accomplished liar, and she had already fooled me once. But I didn’t think she was capable of killing someone—especially her sister—and then acting normally afterward.
“Mmmm,” Ruby replied in a thoughtful tone. “Well, maybe it was Juanita.”
I closed my eyes. Juanita. I didn’t want to think about Juanita.
“In which case Sally would have been there,” Ruby was saying, “but she might not know what happened. That’s why she could act normal, sort of.” She paused. “As normal as Sally ever acts. Remember what they call it? Dissociative identity disorder? It means that you dissociate. And when you dissociate, you might as well not be there, because you don’t remember.”
I opened my eyes again. “If the case goes to trial, which it won’t, that will likely be the defense.” Insanity is a very hard row to hoe in Texas. It’s the defense attorney’s last resort, when nothing else will work. “But I still don’t believe it,” I added stubbornly. “I can’t believe that the Lake City police have anything concrete against her.”
“That’s because you have a defense attorney’s mind-set. You’re used to rooting for the underdog.”
“It is
not
,” I snapped. “I don’t believe it because . . . because I don’t believe it,” I finished lamely.
Ruby didn’t respond to that, for which I was grateful. “When is McQuaid coming home?” she asked.
“Tomorrow. He’s on his way to Sanders right now.”
“Sanders? Where’s that?”
“Kansas. Sally’s hometown.”
“For pete’s sake.” She was surprised. “Why?”
“Because Sally asked him to, and I thought it was a good idea.” I didn’t want to go into the whole story just now. It was too complicated. “He wants me to spend the night with you. And Sally, too—if she’s not in custody. In case Myers decides to show up at our house.”
“Works for me. You know you’re always welcome. Both of you—although Sally has to promise to send Juanita somewhere else.”
“Thanks.” The bell over Ruby’s door jangled. “Listen, Ruby, I’ve got to hang up now and check out a customer in your shop. Phone the police about that car right now. Okay?”
I went next door and sold Ruby’s customer two books on astrology, a folder of blank birth charts, and a Capricorn T-shirt. After that, I came back and waited on two customers of my own, which took a little time, because they wanted to find out about natural dyes, a fairly complex subject. I discouraged them from buying dried herbs, since from my experience, it’s much better to work with fresh material you can grow or gather. I also suggested that if they wanted to try some easy vegetable dyes, they might experiment with onion skins and tea leaves for beige, coffee grounds for brown, red cabbage leaves for blue and purple, carrot tops and spinach leaves for green. Oh, and turmeric, a spice that makes a vibrant orange. They bought a book—
A Dyer’s Garden
, by Rita Buchanan—that will help them decide what to plant in the spring garden, and left happy.
By this time, I was seriously worried about Sally. I tried calling her cell again, but there was no answer. I didn’t bother leaving a message—I’d already left several, and none had been returned. I called the police department, but all they would tell me was that she hadn’t been located yet.
Ruby returned a half hour later, bubbling over with excitement about her surveillance adventure.
“Sheila has assigned somebody to stake out Brian’s car,” she said. “They’re hoping Sally will come back to get it. Then they’ll take her into custody.”
I frowned. I was wondering whether Sally had deliberately left the car there. The church is on a quiet street, in a quiet neighborhood, and that blue Ford hardly calls attention to itself. If she wanted to stash it there, it might not be noticed for a couple of weeks.
Of course, there was another possibility, one that I didn’t much like to think about. Maybe Jess Myers had spotted Sally and grabbed her—assuming that their relationship was adversarial. Or (assuming that it was collaborative) she had gotten in touch with him, and the two of them had gone off together somewhere. Either way, now that I knew about Leslie’s death, finding Myers seemed every bit as urgent as finding Sally, perhaps even more.
Ruby was apparently thinking along the same lines. “How was Leslie killed, China?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Sheila either doesn’t know the facts or has decided that I’m too close to Sally, so I’m not to be trusted with them. And without the facts, I have no idea whether the Lake City police have even a shred of a case against Sally. Maybe she was in Lake City before she came here. Maybe they just want to talk to her. Anyway, I called Justine Wyzinski.”
“Oh, good,” Ruby exclaimed. She’s a fan of the Whiz. “I was just about to suggest that. Will she help?”
“She’s agreed to consider taking the case—if there is one—and she’ll sit in on Sally’s interview. But she’s asked me to ‘dig up the facts,’ as she put it, so she doesn’t have to jump into the interview ‘naked.’ ” I chuckled. “I know she meant it metaphorically, but still, it’s an interesting thought.”
Ruby snickered at the idea of Justine—who is short, shaped like a fireplug, and twenty pounds overweight—jumping into an interview stark naked. Then she frowned.
“Dig up the facts,” she said thoughtfully, tilting her head to one side. “Maybe we should—” She paused, tapping her long, scarlet-painted fingernail against her teeth. “Lake City,” she mused. “I know that town. It’s a cute little place. Shannon taught there for two semesters a couple of years ago.” Shannon is Ruby’s younger daughter. She teaches high school girls’ phys ed and coaches girls’ basketball and track. “It’s not much more than an hour and a half from here, depending on the traffic. Maybe we should—”
“Ruby,” I said warningly.
She didn’t pay any attention. “I think you and I should drive up there and do our own investigation.” She paused, her eyes seemed to glaze just slightly, and an intent, listening look came over her face. I knew that look. It signals that she’s got a hunch—one of those skyrocket bursts of intuition that Ruby gets every now and then, and always insists on acting upon, for better or worse.
“No, Ruby, no,” I said. “You don’t go jumping into an investigation without some idea of what you’re going to—”
“Yes, China, yes.” She looked at her watch. “If we leave now, we can be there by six.”
“We are
not
going to Lake City,” I said firmly. “For one thing, there’s the kids. They’ll be home from school in an hour. I need to fix supper and—” I stopped, remembering.
Ruby said it for me. “Not tonight, you don’t. Caitlin is staying with Amy and Brian is sleeping over with a friend. You’ve already made the arrangements. It’s all set.”
I backed up and regrouped. “Well, then, what about Sally? We can’t just go off and leave her to—”
“Of course we can. For one thing, we have no idea where she is. For all we know, she could have ditched Brian’s car and caught a bus to San Antonio or Houston or El Paso. Or maybe she and her stalker connected and they’re taking a lovers’ holiday—or something. For another, if she walked in the door right now, you would call the police, and Sheila would come and take her off to the hoosegow.” She eyed me. “Wouldn’t you?”
I sighed. Fair point. I’m no longer in practice, but I’m still a member of the bar and an officer of the court. Which means that if I don’t stay on the right side of the law, I risk losing my privileges. And anyway, I had already decided that Sally in custody is safer than Sally on the street. Ruby was right. I’d call Sheila.
“But what do we do about the shops?” I asked. “Cass isn’t available, and Laurel’s out of town. We’d have to close early.”
“So what’s wrong with that?” Ruby replied. “It’s after three o’clock. We’d be shutting up shop in a couple of hours, anyway. Let’s just put up the Closed sign and be on our way—or you could add ‘Family Emergency, ’ if you want to include an explanation. Sally is family, sort of, and this is definitely an emergency.” She looked at me, straight and hard. “Something is telling me that we should do this, China.”
I shook my head. But after a number of years hanging around with Ruby, I have learned to honor her hunches. And I definitely wanted to find out what had happened to Leslie, although that might be easier said than done. As far as the Lake City police were concerned, we had no authority whatever. They wouldn’t give us the time of day, let alone hand out information about a homicide that was under investigation.
Still, it was worth a shot. I wasn’t going to get any information for the Whiz hanging around Pecan Springs. And Ruby was right. It wouldn’t kill us to close the shops early for once. Lake City wasn’t that far. And the kids were settled for the night.
“Okay, we’ll go,” I agreed reluctantly. “But I’ll need to let Justine know. She can contact the Pecan Springs police and have them telephone her directly when they pick Sally up.”
If
they picked her up. As the afternoon wore on, that
if
was looming larger and larger.
“Are you going to call McQuaid, too?” Ruby asked.
I hesitated. “Yes, but maybe I’ll wait until we get there, so he can’t tell me not to go.” Or rather, he could tell me and he probably would, but it wouldn’t do any good, since I’d already be there. Anyway, he wanted me to spend the evening with Ruby, didn’t he? So I was spending the evening with Ruby—in Lake City.
“Good plan,” Ruby said with satisfaction, “but we’ll need a cover story.”
“A cover story?” I asked warily.
“Well, yes,” Ruby replied in a sensible tone. “You don’t expect us just to barge into the Lake City police station and tell the cops that we’re there to investigate Leslie’s death. That’ll get us nowhere fast. Kinsey Millhone would have a reason, you know. A cover story.”
I regarded her suspiciously. “What do you suggest?” Ruby has roped me into more than one crazy adventure. “And it had better be a reasonable reason,” I added. I wasn’t eager to try out another of her idiotic schemes.
“Give me a minute,” she said, casting her eyes to the ceiling, as if inspiration might be waiting somewhere above, in the loft. And maybe it was, for within thirty seconds, she had concocted a plan. We would drive the Party Thyme van and take a couple of boxes of Cass’ Thymely Gourmet dinners to go, with Leslie’s name and address written on the boxes. That way, we could say we were delivering a special order.
“A couple of boxes of takeout, all the way to Lake City?” I scoffed. “Come on, Ruby, get real.”
“I am real,” she insisted. “It’s a surprise, you see. One of Leslie’s friends wanted to give her a holiday gift. And you and I just happened to be going up to Temple, to cater little Mickey Hitchcock’s afternoon birthday party. We told Cass we’d deliver her dinners to Ms. Strahorn on the way back.”
I regarded her. “Temple?” It’s a small city halfway between Austin and Waco, on I-35. “And who’s Mickey Hitchcock? I’ve never heard of him.”
“Of course you haven’t. I just made him up. The decorations from the party Cass and I catered for Janine Kelly’s little boy’s birthday are still in the van. If somebody—a nosy cop, say—wants to check us out, he’ll find boxes of crepe paper, a dartboard, a couple of piñatas, and the railroad caboose we made to hold the gifts. How’s that for a cover?”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, which I often do when Ruby comes up with one of her wild ideas. But since I thought the Lake City cops had better things to do than check us out, and I couldn’t come up with anything better on such short notice, I nodded, humoring her.
“Good.” Ruby reached for the phone. “You call Justine. I’ll call Amy. I always let her know when I’m going somewhere. Oh, and we also have to do today’s deposits.”
A half hour later, phone calls completed and the cash deposits readied, we were in Big Red Mama, with two Thymely Gourmet boxes we had filled with Cass’ croissant sandwiches, salad, chips, and cookies. Mama is the red shop van that replaced our beat-up old blue van two years ago. Her former owner was a hippie artist named Gerald who lived in Wimberley until he was arrested for running a crystal meth lab, and the Hayes County Sheriff ’s Office impounded and sold his van. Ruby and I bought Mama primarily because of the imaginative, Art Deco designs of blue, green, and yellow that Gerald painted on her sides, probably under the influence of a certain hallucinatory herb. Mama looks like a cross between a Crayola box scuttling down the road and a Sweet Potato Queen float in a Mardi Gras parade.
Mama rolled out of the alley, and we turned left. “I need to go to my house and change,” Ruby reminded me. “We’re headed in the wrong direction.”
“We have to go to the bank first,” I said, nodding to the deposit bag, although the deposit wasn’t the only thing on my mind. Five minutes later, we were there, and in luck. Bonnie Roth was working the drive-through window. I dropped the deposit bag into the automated box below the window. Bonnie zapped it inside and got to work.