Killing Thyme (24 page)

“Wow.” Arf lay down at my feet, and I silently promised him an extra-juicy bone tonight. “What do you think was going on?”

“I saw him again a few minutes later on my way out. His wife was giving him heck. I'd seen her before, too—she's one of the dance moms. A real witch.” Hannah extended her leg and flexed the foot. “My impression? Bonnie's his ex-wife, and he left her for the younger wife, the dance mom.
You know how some men keep picking women who look alike? I don't see women doing that, do you?”

I pictured Tag and the men I'd dated in the last couple of years. “Now that you mention it, no.”

“And Bonnie was back in town, and she wanted to tell their kids the truth about the new wife, and he didn't want her to.”

“Makes sense,” I said, and it did, though her story was completely off target. We're that way, we humans, standing on our heads to figure out the most logical explanation for something we don't understand, and convincing ourselves we're right.

When the real explanation is staring us in the face and we can't see it, until it clicks. But how I was going to prove what had just fallen into place, I didn't know.

“Hey, I'm sorry I gotta run. It's been really great to meet you, Hannah.” I pushed myself up off the rock. “I don't know what happened to this Bonnie. But I am absolutely sure you have nothing to feel guilty about.”

I wished I could say the same of myself.

I am a rock,

I am an island.

And a rock feels no pain;

And an island never cries.

—Paul Simon, “I Am a Rock”

Problem was, I had no proof. But I had a plan, and I had allies.

I also had a deep heartache. The downside of community, as my mother had learned so long ago, is that you sometimes discover truths you'd rather not know.

Matt had once worked in a wine shop, so I sent him up to Vinny's for the afternoon, promising a bottle of his choice, up to fifty dollars, as a bonus. I hoped Vinny wouldn't hate me too much tomorrow to give me the employee discount.

The rest of us gathered in the Spice Shop. Kristen pulled up the collar of Vinny's navy blue Windbreaker and tugged the khaki hat down low. If he hunched, kept his back to the street, and leaned hard on that three-iron, a parent parked half a block away, waiting for a kid, might be fooled.

Cayenne was the key. I coached her carefully. “Park out front. Double-park if you have to. This only works if the
driver of the white SUV with the front-end scraped from hitting the street sign sees you. When you help Vinny out of the car, keep your arm around him, so no one sees his face. Hustle him up the stairs and in the front door. Get him settled in the chair by the front window. Don't turn the light on—we need the shadows.”

“Right. Then I'll come out,” Cayenne said. “I'll stand by the car as long as I can, making sure I'm seen.”

“I can't decide whether this is brilliant or crazy,” Kristen said. “Vinny, watch where you swing that thing.”

We were hoping to pass a short, fiftyish white man off as a short black man well past eighty. I'd briefly considered recruiting Detective Tracy, the only black man anywhere near the right size who knew anything about the case. Then I'd come to my senses. Sort of.

Laurel would think I'd gone off my rocker. Tag would be furious that I'd done something so stupid—and roped other people into it.

It
was
stupid, in a certain light. But not too stupid to work.

Though I was sure of the killer's identity, I had no proof to take to Spencer and Tracy. This was the only way to get it. I had accidentally led the killer to Bonnie, and to Mr. Adams. Bonnie might not have felt the need to atone for her sins, but I did.

And Vinny could defend himself. Plus, when the action happened, Cayenne, Kristen, and I would be hiding in the kitchen, cell phones and other weapons at the ready.

“And if you have even an inkling that something is going wrong, call the police,” I told Vinny and Cayenne.

Mr. Adams himself was safely resting in his hospital room. If he ever found out what we'd done, I had to think he'd get a kick out of it.

And I was fairly sure Cadfael had set a trap or two, but at the moment, I couldn't remember in which tale.

The plan was for Vinny and Cayenne to drive to Beacon Hill and make the drop-off, as if Mr. Adams were returning home. I'd checked the dance studio schedule online, hoping I had this worked out right.

Then I got back to selling spice, trying not to think about the ruse and all that could go wrong.

During a lull, I flipped through the hibiscus recipes Cayenne had put together. They would need a thorough testing—no serious cook hasn't tried a recipe from a magazine, or even a cookbook, and wondered whether anyone ever actually attempted to make it. Any recipe that walks out of this shop with our logo on it has to be foolproof.

She was proving herself a great addition to the staff, aside from her willingness to help with the investigation. High hopes. I had high hopes.

“Stop watching the clock every two minutes,” Kristen said. “They'll be fine.”

I busied myself making another sample batch of the cocoa steak rub. It was nearly ready for production.

The door clanged opened, and my mother walked in, fresh from the school assembly. I composed my expression, sure she'd figured out I was up to something.

Instead, she took my face in her hands. “Pepper, I owe you an apology.”

“I think I owe you one, too.” When you're a kid, you think your parents have life all worked out. Then you become an adult and realize they were doing their best, struggling like you are. The trick is to shift your perspective, so you understand them through the eyes of an adult, not of a child. And sometimes that means reevaluating what you think you know about yourself.

“No. You were right. As soon as Peggy interjected herself into your life and Kristen's, I should have told you two everything I knew. I wanted to pretend it was all in the past.”

“Even though you think about it every day?”

“Amazing how we fool ourselves, isn't it?” Her voice rose and fell as she studied me, and I had the sense, not for the first time in the last week, that I was looking in a mirror that showed me myself in twenty years.

I could live with that.

My pocket buzzed. I pulled out the phone. Kristen held up both hands, fingers crossed.

Mission accomplished
, Cayenne's text read.
On my way home. Till 2nite!

I let out a whoop. My mother's eyebrows rose.

“Trust me, Mom. You don't want to know.”

*   *   *

The sun sets late this time of year, so there was no question of sneaking in under the cover of darkness. Instead, we parked two streets over and ambled down the alley as if we had every good reason to be there.

“It's a working garden,” Cayenne said to Kristen as she opened her grandfather's alley gate. “Not the fairytale paradise your backyard is.”

“It's delightful.” Kristen gazed at the fruit trees, the berry patches, the vegetable beds. “He takes care of all this himself?”

“We help. He says gardening keeps him young.”

“Then I'm taking lessons from him.”

We went in the back door. I left it unlocked, the porch light off.

“You bring me dinner?” Vinny called. “I'm sitting here starving.”

“In the kitchen,” I replied. “Don't forget to bend over and walk with the cane.”

The kitchen window looked over the sink to the backyard. The four of us ate at Mr. Adams's table, well out of sight,
then we sent Vinny back to the living room, lace curtains drawn, a single lamp lit, the TV broadcasting its blue glare.

Cayenne scrounged up a battered deck of cards, and she and Kristen played gin rummy. I was too nervous—plus it's a game for two.

This had to work.

At quarter to ten, I heard a sound and held out my hand. Nothing.

Kristen picked up her cards and opened her mouth to speak. Another sound stopped her—a metallic clang, followed by a creak.

“The gate latch,” Cayenne mouthed. We picked up our makeshift weapons and I made sure my phone was at the ready.

If I was right, our intruder had long ago sworn off guns and explosives. Lost physical strength, too, to time and regret. We could handle this.

Through the open window, we heard a scraping—footsteps on concrete. Then, the crunch of steps on the broken gravel we'd hauled in from the alley and spread at the base of the stoop. A long silence. We exchanged looks, and over my thumping heartbeat, I half hoped we were wrong.

We were not wrong. The screen door hinges squeaked. The main door latch clicked open. If you shove your way through a balky door, it may be silent, but if you push it too slowly, too carefully, it may squeal.

This one did.

“That you, Cayenne?” Vinny called in his best old-man imitation. “I'm coming.”

The end of the three-iron's handle made a soft thump on the thin living room carpet, growing louder when he reached the vinyl floor in the back hall. In the kitchen, Cayenne stood on one side of the door, ready to flick on the light as soon as we knew we had our man. I stood at the other, prepared to pounce.

“Say, you're not my granddaughter. Who are you?”

“You shut up, old man,” the muffled voice said. “You shut up about what you saw that night.”

“Saw what night?”

“That night the potter was killed. You told the police you saw me. Then you told that snoopy spice witch who won't give up.”

And I wasn't giving up now.

“Didn't see nothing but a car. A white SUV. That what you mean?”

“And the license plate. The police were looking at my license plate,” the voice said, rising in panic.

“You fool. I'm eighty-five. I can't read a license plate unless it's six inches from my nose. Now you get outta here before I make you regret it.” Vinny's feet scuffled on the floor, and he barked the prearranged code word. “Go on. Scat!”

Cayenne threw on the lights, and I jumped into the hallway. Grabbed the intruder and pushed. Strong arms pushed me back, but Vinny went for the low head butt and slammed the figure into the wall, then aimed his three-iron at the knees.

“Owrrwww,” the intruder yelled, dropping a small garden trowel and sliding to the floor.

I kicked the trowel aside. Kristen slammed a bowl over the intruder's head. Josh's roasted veggie salad slid over the intruder's head and chest, and filled the air with rosemary and thyme.

This person was way too short. I reached over and yanked the black ski mask off.

Revealing not the bearded figure I had expected, but his wife. The once-fierce blond dance mom now a whimpering puddle of veggies and vinaigrette: Sharon Stinson.

*   *   *

Half an hour later, the suspect whisked away by uniformed officers of the South Precinct, Detective Michael Tracy
closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “And you didn't tell us who you suspected
why
?”

“You wouldn't have believed me if I'd said Terry Stinson was the killer,” I said from my post by the kitchen sink. My three pals and Tracy were sitting at Mr. Adams's table. Spencer leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, her expression one of peeved amusement. I'd helped myself to a bottle of beer from the fridge. The detectives had declined, though Tracy looked longingly at the plate of gingersnaps.

“No,” he admitted. “And besides, you were wrong.”

I wasn't sure whether to be shocked or relieved that our attacker—Bonnie's killer—was Sharon. She'd been a blubbering wreck by the time we unmasked her, but I'd gotten her to admit this much: She'd been terrified that Bonnie would expose Terry's involvement in an old trouble, destroying the family that meant so much to them both.

“His involvement in what?” I'd needed her to say it. Vinny had wrapped his belt around her waist, cinching her into a kitchen chair, and Kristen and Cayenne used extension cords to tie her hands and feet.

“In the shooting over the computers,” she'd said, and then I knew I'd been right—and wrong. What my parents and Kristen's—the entire Grace House community—had believed in 1985 was wrong. And it was Terry who'd misled them.

Roger Russell's sidekick in the deadly vandalism that killed Walter Strasburg and Roger himself had been not Bonnie-Peggy, but Terry. She'd fled, horrified by what the two men she'd loved had done. He'd stayed and let everyone believe her guilty.

Had he truly believed in the cause, or gone along with the whole terrible scheme to impress her?

That, I didn't ask Sharon. She'd suffered enough, keeping her husband's secret all these years. I was suddenly, irrationally, furious with him for making her carry that burden.

After my talk with Hannah, I'd concluded that Terry killed Bonnie because he feared she would reveal that he had known of her involvement all along. That in coming home to atone, to make amends, she would reveal his obstruction of justice. Her crime was far worse than his—in my version of the past—but he had more to lose.

It was a logical mistake, over a series of illogical crimes.

Either way, it delivered a shockeroo to my belief system. To my certainty that Terry was one of the good guys, the unflappable one who had continued rousing rabble and walking the talk. When he said, “Support the troops,” he meant it—and when they came home, he took care of them.

Atonement.
Dressing as Uncle Sam, drawing attention to the lingering impact of war, while serving the men and women who bore its scars.

Hannah had misunderstood Terry's plea to Bonnie about the children; another logical mistake. He'd been warning Bonnie to keep quiet to protect his own children, the late-in-life family he cherished.

And then I'd remembered the Iraqi campaign medal. I'd bagged it for evidence but forgotten to turn it in. I hadn't looked closely at the pin that had stabbed me in Terry's office, the one lost in the couch, but odds were they'd belonged to the same man.

“The man who attacked Mr. Adams the other night. He's one of Terry's clients, isn't he?” I'd asked her. “He came to your office last week, with a man in a wheelchair. Short blond hair, tattoos, baggy fatigues. He's been down here before—you were the dance mom who hired him to build new shelves in the studio. You came back to finish the job he started on Mr. Adams. When I saw you at the bakery this morning, you were a mess. You'd been searching for the medal he lost.”