Murder at Moot Point (31 page)

Charlie was totally helpless, is what Charlie was. How she'd ever expected to get herself seated from this angle she hadn't a clue.

Maybe if she flopped forward one more time and landed on her stomach she could turn over on her back, then hoist her way up to a sitting position from there. Charlie's rational mind told her flat out that wouldn't work even as she tried it.

Charlie's rational mind was right. The chair took off on its four wheels and its ball bearings across the wooden floor. No cushions to trip it up here. Just electrical sockets in the floor and wires and big rubber plug-ins. No telling which the chair hit when it came to a halt, dumped her, and then fell over on top of her.

It was a desk chair with a small oblong back made for assistants-once-known-as-secretaries who had to sit straight at a keyboard all day, not the boss kind where you can lean back with full back support and put your feet on the desk. So Charlie could see Doc Withers's expression when he hit the top of the stairs, running, from the floor below. His fear had transmogrified into terror.

Why had they sent their weakest link? Or was he the only one down there, the others off on more important duties?

Doc Withers pulled the chair off Charlie. For a moment she thought the hand he jabbed toward her was reaching fingers to feel her nose to see if it was dry or wet. His fingers went for the pulse in her neck instead. What, did he think she might be dead? She was still blinking wasn't she?

The more she thought about it, the terror plus the doctor in this guy had possibilities.

Charlie moaned behind the tape and rolled her eyes—bulging them until she almost popped her contacts. How did you make eyes suggest nausea? She talked to her gag reflex and it solved the problem.

“My God, don't vomit now—you'll choke to death,” Doc said, and it felt like he ripped half of Charlie's face off when he tore the tape from her mouth.

He rolled her over and she made a pretense at retching, the real thing not all that remote a possibility.

“What do you care if I choke to death? You're going to kill me anyway,” Charlie whined.

“I never killed anybody in my life.” His hand on her back prevented her from rolling over but he jerked for some reason and his wired-together eyeglasses fell to the floor next to her face.

Charlie wished like hell they'd broken. “I was sure of it,” she said now, triumphantly. “The rest have some kind of hold over you and are making you go along with them. You know how I knew?”

“You don't know anything,” he said defensively.

“I know because anybody who can write like you can can't be a murderer.”

“Thought you didn't like my book.”

“You thought I didn't like animals, too. I'll have you know I have a pet kitty named Tuxedo. He's still a kitten. He's black and white and—”

“Thought you wanted to vomit, all you want to do is talk. I'm going to put this tape back on.” He rolled her over.

“
Holistic Medicine for Pets
would be a perfect candidate for Morton and Fish's new line of New Age nonfiction. I was going to show your proposal to Jack's editor there. But now I won't be able to, will I? Because I'll be dead. Nobody will because you'll be charged with murdering three peop—”

He slapped the tape back over her mouth before she could finish. But the tape was no longer as tight or as sticky.

And his expression wasn't as dangerous. “There're a lot of people out there looking hard at alternatives to the mess the establishment has gotten personal lives into. They are educated, thinking people, and most of them relate to animals we call pets. These are caring people,” he said earnestly. “They'd buy a book like that.”

Charlie nodded agreement and tried to make her eyes look earnest too. She began to feel a surge of hope.

Until Paige Magill's face appeared suddenly over his shoulder. “Doc, what are you doing up here? What's going on? We need help with Eddie.”

“She overturned a chair and I heard the noise, came up to see what was happening.”

“I thought I heard you talking about a book. She hasn't gotten to you, has she? You know what has to be done.”

“I was just telling her off about her low opinion of my proposal is all. How often do you get to tell one of these kind of people off?” But he winked quickly at Charlie before he stood. “Where's Eddie? And why can't Brother Dennis handle him?”

“Brother Dennis is having to handle things at the party right now.” Paige gave Charlie a suspicious look, rolled the desk chair back to the desk, and switched off the light. “You're the only other one who can handle Eddie. He's out at the grave.”

Chapter 34

Charlie lay in darkness, no better off than before, maybe worse, listening to Eddie howl out at some grave. She'd be willing to bet it was Olie Bergkvist's, but what difference did it make? Maybe Eddie was just digging hers. Tears burned her eyes and without thinking she opened her mouth to moan an expletive.

The tape came loose from her face on one side. She listened to see if it might be a good time to start screaming. But now she couldn't even hear Eddie. Could the partiers hear her over their noise on the first floor? Could there still be somebody on the second?

Charlie did have an excellent idea where the desk was located. She sidewinded her way in that direction. Shoulders first, then rear with its taped appendages, then shoulders again. She'd come up against the back wheels of the chair. One hand could feel the shape of one little metal wheel. Great. Now what?

Well, she could go back to the screaming idea. Her mouth was about all she had going for her.… Still, she wouldn't have to try to sit in the chair now to get to that long thin drawer most desks had above the knee space, where sharp office supplies were kept. If she could nudge the chair out of the way she could open the drawer with her teeth.

“
You get a scissors, manage to position it so you can use it, and then you're going to use your teeth to make the scissors scissor and cut the tape strung around behind your back? Give me a break,
” her rational mind pleaded.

“
I can't just give up. I have to do something.
”

“
You can lie still and wait for the sheriff. You can lie still and wait for the good animal doctor to figure you and he might find a way out of this. He did look as if you'd persuaded him to turn on his buddies. What you can't do is bring somebody back up here by making another stupid mistake
—
as in noise. Somebody who'll be a lot smarter than Doc Withers.
”

What Charlie couldn't do was lay still and wait for someone to come up here and kill her. She nudged the chair and it rolled away to hit something in the dark. No alarm sounded below. She used one shoulder to leverage her way up a layer of desk drawers until she was balanced, but again just barely, on the ends of her knees, her chin resting on the desk top. Charlie wished Paige had not turned off the light.

The tape pulled away from the seat of her pants just then, and Charlie discovered why the pros used things you could knot instead. Her Keds hit the floor with the sudden release and her chin left the desk. She fell back onto her heels and when she rose off them, trying to pull away the excess line of tape running from wrist to ankle so it wouldn't stick again, she found she'd grabbed a trailing of loose tape. She gave it a tug and felt the pressure on her wrists lighten as she heard the sucking sound of tape separating. Working it with her fingers, rotating her wrists painfully, Charlie unwrapped the tape that bound her hands behind her back.

When she sat down this time it was with her knees and feet in front of her. But she couldn't find an end to unwind in all the stickiness to unwrap the binding on her ankles. So, balancing against the desk, she stood and felt around until she found the lamp and the lamp's toggle switch. She left the light on only long enough to find a pair of scissors. She found them not in the drawer as she'd expected—a drawer she'd never have opened with her teeth because it had no knob or handle—but right on top.

Lowering herself quietly to the floor, Charlie proceeded to scissor and saw at the sticky tape.

Charlie Greene stood outside the back door of the Moot Point Consciousness Training Institute, disoriented. There had been no one to stop her on the cushioned second floor and no one to save her on the first. All human sound had disappeared, and all light. Everyone couldn't have gone to bed that quickly.

After two flights of stairs, Charlie had ended up at the back door and decided in the total silence of the dark she'd rather be outside. Outside was dark too, so dark she couldn't see the fog, but she could feel its damp fingers brushing her face. She heard a car pass on 101 above her but saw no lights, either because of night fog or the obstruction of trees.

She waited for her rational mind to offer up a sensible solution, but even it was silent. So Charlie began to feel her way around the building. She'd traversed the ground outside two tentacles before she realized that could take all week. But none of the windows she'd come to had shown any light, as if the fog had cut off the electrical power to the institute.

Even up here, this high on the mountain, the fog smelled fishy. And so did the sudden absence of human life.

What could have happened to them all while Charlie struggled with the tape and the desk?

Charlie saw a tree, and then another. Not complete trees, just pieces in the fog. Eddie's lament rose in mournful tempo from the direction of those trees and Charlie turned around to skirt the house in the opposite direction, figuring that her captors would be off at the grave trying to control the dog. She was halfway back the way she'd come before the fog choked off all sight again and she couldn't see where to step next.

Charlie recognized her own shadow suddenly silhouetted by the limited circumference of flashlight on the night fog in front of her. Unfortunately she noticed it a fraction of a second before someone gathered her elbows together behind her back in an iron grip.

Rose had gone to get Brother Dennis at the Earth Spirit, where he and Jack had moved the party to listen to some spooky tapes on channeling—a sort of New Age version of late-night ghost stories. The talk at the party had apparently turned to the recent murders in Moot Point and it seemed to fit into the party atmosphere. It was also a way to get the searchers away from the institute for a while. Charlie learned all this from the conversation between the two as they forced her to walk ahead of them.

Eddie had not responded to Doc's attempts to quiet and calm him and had instead insisted upon clawing the earth and howling, even with Paige and Gladys trying to drive him off with shovels. But he came immediately to heel when Brother Dennis walked into the circle of light, Rose Kortinemi pushing Charlie along behind him.

“Look who got herself free and was hanging around outside?” Rose said. “Lucky we moved the party.”

“He's torn the dressing off his foot.” Doc knelt to examine Eddie, who sat next to his master's left knee, trembling. “I can't understand his passion for digging here.”

“Me neither,” Gladys said. “He hated Olie. Maybe that's it.” And then to her half sister, “Should you have brought her here?”

“Doesn't matter anymore. We have two things to do and quick, before the party comes back.”

Doc Withers looked up from his patient and his glasses slid down his nose as his eyebrows shot up. “Where did you get that?”

Charlie turned to see Rose holding a long-barreled handgun. She'd stopped in at Irene Olafson's on the way to get Brother Dennis. The gun had belonged to Irene's husband. The widow, when washing windows at the restaurant, had told Rose that she had checked it over and loaded it when she heard there was a murderer loose in Moot Point. “Even told me where it was.”

“You didn't kill Irene for it?” Doc rose slowly from his crouch, his face pasty even in the oscillating lantern glow.

“She was sleeping like a ton of bricks after I sent what was left of the jug wine home with her tonight. When we're done with the gun, we put it back and she'll never know.”

“You planned this even at the picnic?” Brother Dennis said.

“Somebody had to plan ahead. What were you guys going to do, beat her over the head with shovels?”

“I take it this is Gladys's missing husband, Olie, buried here,” Charlie said. “Don't you think a fourth murder is going to be hard to get away with, Rose?”

“Olie wasn't murdered.” Gladys Bergkvist sank heavily to the ground next to the tortured earth, oblivious to the stench rising from it. Charlie thought she could see clothing, and a grayish substance that could have been flesh, but she didn't particularly want to study it. “She's right, Rose. It'll look too funny. And the sheriff's got the hots for her. He won't let it rest.”

“He may not be much of a danger for a while. Maybe never.” Rose and the weapon moved up beside Charlie. “That accident up on the highway? That was him. And Clara and Frank Glick.”

“Wes was
in
the accident?” Charlie said. “Are you sure?”

“That's right, sweet cheeks. Your knight won't be charging up to save your little tush, if that's what you were counting on. Mary and Norma were clucking themselves into strokes about it when I was down at the Earth Spirit just now. They seemed to think it was all your fault.”

“Frank apparently panicked and forced Clara to drive him out of town,” Brother Dennis added uncomfortably. “She got rattled and pulled out in front of the sheriff.”

“The word is there are three badly injured people in the hospital in Chinook right now,” Rose said. “And my powers are telling me now is the time to do what has to be done.”

Charlie watched them thinking again, their eyes darting from Rose's to the long-barreled gun to the grave to Charlie. Eddie whined and Brother Dennis patted his lamp shade absently. Paige had been uncharacteristically quiet through all this, but she stepped into the center of the lighted circle now and turned completely around to study each face but Charlie's.