Occasion of Revenge (16 page)

“Mrs. Ives, there was enough clonidine in that bottle to knock out everyone at the party. Clonidine is particularly dangerous in combination with alcohol.”

“But … but … Ruth would hardly be so stupid as to doctor a gift meant for Darlene and then tell everybody about it!” I set my half-eaten croissant down on a napkin. “Besides, when my husband and I came to Darlene’s on Sunday morning, that bottle was sitting right out on the counter, wide open. Anybody could have put something into it.” I grabbed Paul’s hand for support and he squeezed it back, hard. “It would be
pretty safe to do that, you see. Everyone knew it was Darlene’s favorite drink. I can’t imagine anybody else wanting to drink that stuff, can you? It’s positively vile.”

Younger jotted something down in his notebook with a ballpoint pen, then tucked the notebook back into his pocket. “By the way, we’ve found your father’s rental car.”

My heart flopped. “Where?”

“In a satellite parking lot at BWI, the Blue lot.” Anticipating my next question, he raised a hand. “But we checked with all the airlines and there’s no indication that he flew anywhere.”

I folded my hands and sat silently. I studied my ragged fingernails, promising myself for the umpteenth time to stop gnawing on them.

“Have you heard from him, Mrs. Ives?”

“No, I haven’t. Not a word, and I’m really worried.”

Younger looked so skeptical that I suspected he’d order a wiretap the minute he got back to his office. “If he does contact you, you will get in touch with me, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

“You have my number?”

I patted my pocket where I could just feel the outline of the business card he had given me. “I certainly do.”

On the drive home, with Paul a captive audience, I tried to sort it out. Darlene, celebrating her upcoming marriage to our father, had waited until the last guests had gone home, then poured herself a congratulatory glass of peppermint schnapps and taken it into the bath.

Wait a minute! Where would Daddy have been?

That was easy. Passed out on the couch.

OK. So, Darlene tucks Daddy in, steps into the bath, takes a drink and shortly after that, goes to sleep and never wakes up. Later, Daddy comes to, looks around in confusion, realizes the party’s over, and stumbles upstairs to the bedroom. No Darlene. Then he looks in the bathroom …

By the time we reached the spot on the bridge where my father had rear-ended the truck, I was fighting back tears of frustration. I’d looked everywhere, talked to everyone. If the police couldn’t find my father, how on earth could I?

It was almost noon when we got back to Annapolis. Pinned to the fridge was a note from Emily saying that Dante had taken her and Chloe house-hunting. Presumably Chloe’s opinion on her nursery was required. Paul was supposed to attend a departmental Christmas luncheon. He had invited me along, but I said I wasn’t in the mood. He offered to stay home and keep me company, but I urged him to go on alone and he reluctantly agreed.

After the front door closed behind him, I nuked some cider in the microwave, stirred it with a cinnamon stick, slipped some Mozart into the CD player, threw myself into a chair in the living room, and stared at the Christmas tree. If Mozart, hot cider, and the beauty of a well-decorated Christmas tree failed to cheer me up, I was in trouble.

In my absence, the elves had been busy. Scattered among the gaily wrapped packages I had arranged beneath the tree myself were several surprises. A box the size of a small suitcase, wrapped in gold-and-silver paper, caught my eye. Maybe just a peek?

I eased out of my chair and bent over for a closer look at the tag. “For Emily, with love always, Dante.” Sweet. I hoped their love
would
last forever. I sat on the floor and retrieved some smaller gifts that had been shoved to the rear when Dante set the box for Emily in front of them. Cuff links for Paul. Earrings for Emily. A key chain for the paper boy. The vase I’d chosen for L.K. Bromley. I fingered the ribbon on Ms. Bromley’s gift and wondered if she’d be at home. If so, this might be the perfect time to deliver it. Bromley’s intelligent, eccentric company would be a tonic for my worry over Daddy.

I called ahead and she met me at the door of her apartment in the Ginger Cove retirement community wearing blue jeans, a pink turtleneck sweater, and a man’s white shirt buttoned up the back like a smock. An orange bandanna covered her short, gray hair. She held a paintbrush in one hand. “Excuse my appearance,” she apologized. “I hadn’t forgotten you were coming, Hannah, but I wanted to work a bit more on this painting. Come on in. Let me show you.”

I handed Ms. Bromley her present, an oblong package wrapped in silver paper and tied with a fancy gold ribbon. I’d bought the wrapping as a kit at the grocery store. “Merry Christmas, Ms. Bromley. This is to put under your tree.”

“How thoughtful, Hannah. Thank you, although I don’t have much of a tree this year, as you can see, just this little bush.” She accepted the package and placed it on a small, round table underneath a white-painted branch resembling reindeer antlers from which red-and-green glass ornaments hung. “But this will certainly look jolly underneath it.”

Ms. Bromley led me to an easel set up in her dining
alcove, which was surrounded by windows on three sides. She pointed with the wooden end of the brush. “There! What do you think?”

She had painted some exquisitely lifelike geraniums in a Mexican earthenware pot. “I love it,” I said, truthfully.

“That’s good, because the painting’s for you! Merry Christmas.”

“Oh, I couldn’t! That’s way too generous!”

“Of course you can. It’s the least I can do after all you’ve done to catalog my books.”

I felt guilty, because I hadn’t set foot in the St. John’s College library for at least two weeks. I still had a month’s worth of work to do before the extensive collection of mystery novels Ms. Bromley had written over the course of a fifty-year career would be completely processed into the library’s Special Collections section.

I perched gingerly on the arm of a chair and admired the painting. Suddenly the pottery vase I had bought for my friend—I thought she might use it as a paintbrush holder—seemed woefully inadequate.

Ms. Bromley used a rag to squeeze excess paint out of her brush, then turned to me. “Come talk to me while I clean up.”

I followed her into the modest kitchen and watched while she lathered up with soap and scrubbed her hands using a fingernail brush shaped like a pig to coax the paint from beneath her fingernails. She dried her hands thoroughly on a towel, then beamed at me. “So, what’s new with you?”

I thought the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to wipe that cheerful smile off her face. “Well, you know me,” I said. “Never dull. Can we sit down?”

She looked at me with dismay. “Such a long face! I think you need some coffee. Decaf or regular?”

Normally I would have chosen decaf, but under the circumstances, I thought I could use something stronger. “High-test.”

Ms. Bromley started the water gurgling through the filter, then invited me to join her on the living room sofa. “OK. So what is it?”

“Do you want the bad news first, or the bad news?”

The corners of her mouth turned up slightly. Clearly she expected me to follow this quip with a joke. I took a deep breath. “The bad news is that my father just got engaged to a totally unsuitable woman.”

“And …?”

“And the bad news is that she’s dead.”

Ms. Bromley’s eyes grew wide. “My goodness! How did she die?”

“The police think she was murdered. An overdose of clonidine.”

Ms. Bromley sank back into the goose-down cushions. “Clonidine? Hmmm. I know about clonidine. Hard not to, living in a place like this.”

I explained about Darlene’s normal blood pressure readings, about the peppermint schnapps, and about the empty glass the police had found in the bathtub.

“So, any one of the guests at the party could have slipped the medicine into the bottle, right?” She blinked. “Any fingerprints?”

“There could have been a hundred fingerprints on that bottle.” I turned on the sofa to face her, tucking a foot between me and the cushion. “But what really worries me now is that my father has disappeared.”

I told her about the suspicious hit-and-run and that the police had found my father’s car at BWI. She
looked thoughtful. “Nobody knows your father better than you do. If you want to find him, I’d advise going to the last place he was seen and try thinking like he would.”

While Ms. Bromley went to fetch the coffee, I considered her suggestion.

“Do you have a recent picture of your father?” she called over her shoulder.

“I don’t think so.” I heard the rattling of the cups as she arranged them on a tray. “Wait a minute! Emily had one of those disposable cameras and was using it to take pictures of Chloe at the party. There may be a snapshot or two of Dad on the roll.”

“Perfect! And if they were taken at the party, he’s likely to be wearing the same outfit as when he disappeared.”

After she served the coffee, Ms. Bromley excused herself and went to the bedroom that I knew served as her office, returning in a few minutes carrying a familiar volume, the
Physicians’ Desk Reference
. With the book balanced on her knees, she leafed through it to a series of color photographs. “Here we are.” She stabbed at the page with a stubby finger, its cuticle outlined with a trace of red paint. “Look here. This is clonidine. Have you ever seen any pills like these before?”

Still holding my cup, I scooted closer to her. Clonidine hydrochloride seemed to come in three sizes. The 0.3 tablet was slightly oval and a light brownish-pink. The next size down was the 0.2 pill, a pale burnt orange tablet about the size of an Advil. The smallest, 0.1, was a taupey color. I tried to memorize the markings in case I should ever see them again.

After we’d finished reading the complete description
of the drug in all its gobbledegooky glory, Ms. Bromley snapped the book shut and laid it on the floor next to her feet. I picked up my coffee, took a sip, and sloshed the warm liquid around in my mouth, enjoying the taste of fresh ground beans, natural sugar, and half-and-half before swallowing. “I see you didn’t give
all
your reference books to the library.” I peered at her over the rim of my cup. “I thought you’d retired old Charlie to the Florida Keys, Ms. Bromley.” Charlie Mackey was one of Ms. Bromley’s several sleuths, a Cleveland-based bookstore owner with a checkered past. “Don’t tell me …”

She smiled at me slyly. “You never know, Hannah. The other day I read the most interesting article …” She waved the thought away. “But we can talk about that later. What you need to do now is get that film developed and get yourself out to the airport.”

I hated going through Emily’s things, and she would have hated it, too. Five years ago there would have been a sign on her door—
Danger: Nuclear Fallout Zone
—and I wouldn’t have dared to go in without her permission. Back then, she’d have thrown a tantrum, and the next thing we knew, she’d be calling from a truck stop in Des Moines, Iowa, begging for bus fare to get herself back home.

Even though Emily had mellowed considerably with age, marriage, and motherhood, I still stood outside her room and thought about it for several long minutes before opening the door. Fortunately I didn’t have to do any rummaging because the camera was sitting on the Ikea desk Emily’d used since junior high. Then the desk had been littered with cosmetics and bottles of
nail polish in colors named “Sludge” and “Acid Rain,” but now it held a pile of clean, neatly folded baby clothes, a box of hypoallergenic baby wipes, a tube of zinc oxide ointment, and several paperback books. I picked up the instant camera and decided it was worth sacrificing the three pictures remaining on the roll. The new Emily would certainly understand.

I usually took my film to Ritz Camera in the Annapolis Mall, but in my present mood, I didn’t think I could tolerate the relentless Christmas cheer being cranked out over the sound system while I waited the hour or so it would take to have the film developed. So I drove to the Giant Mall on Riva Road instead, dropped off the film at MotoFoto, then walked a couple of doors down to House of Hunan for some serious comfort food: hot-and-sour soup. An hour later, with my mouth still tingling, I picked up the finished photos and took the packet to my car. I started the engine, turned on the heat, and relaxed against the seat.

For some reason, I was almost afraid to look at the pictures. I had brought along a waxed paper bag of those crunchy doodads you’re supposed to sprinkle on top of your hot-and-sour soup, so I munched on one, then another, fingering the packet of photos between bites and chiding myself for being such a coward. Finally I ran out of doodads and excuses. I tore open the packet.

Most of the pictures were of Chloe. I lingered over the pictures of my granddaughter longer than I ought, but I’m a grandmother; it goes with the territory. There was Chloe looking darling in a red headband with poinsettia trim; Chloe grinning at the camera, her chin covered with chocolate. In a third picture, Dante held
Chloe up in front of our tree and I realized, with a pang, how much Chloe took after her father, especially when she screwed up her cute little nose like that.

I sorted the pictures into three piles on the passenger seat. Of the twenty-four pictures that had been exposed, ten were of Chloe, one was of me with my eyes shut (pitch that one!), and the rest were photographs taken at the party. Among the party shots, there were two of Paul, one of Chloe napping on the sofa, and several of Daddy himself. I selected a particularly fine close-up of Daddy standing next to Darlene in her kitchen. Darlene’s artificial curls rested lightly on his shoulder and the happy couple, surrounded by guests, smiled directly into the camera. I shivered. Was I looking at a picture of one ghost or two? I stared out my windshield at the crowds of holiday shoppers, fighting the urge to rest my head against the steering wheel and bawl. Not knowing she had only a few hours more to live, Darlene looked radiant. I promised myself I would try to remember her that way rather than as the pathetic heap of wrinkled flesh that I’d found in her bathtub only a few mornings ago. Sad to think that those curls were now separated from their owner, resting in a sealed plastic evidence bag somewhere with the cops or at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in downtown Baltimore.