Orchids and Stone (6 page)

“Because?”

“He called me a dumb bitch.”

“That’s terrible. And ridiculous. You’re not dumb.” Daphne patted Thea’s arm. “You’re the smartest person I know. I, I mean . . .”

Thea’s sharp look muffled Daphne’s stuttering attempt to recover. Nothing made a person gulp like Thea’s curt
Leave It
glare. Then Thea crossed her arms and lowered her voice. “Okay, so tell me the real reason you called.”

Daphne wondered if her face flushed as she nodded rather than fight Thea’s insight. “I saw something. And I don’t want to leave things unfinished. I don’t want things to end the way they are.”

Thea beamed and reached for Daphne in a wide-armed hug. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard in a while.”

Daphne’s return hug was uncertain. “Uh, yeah, well. I just, I need your help to find a guy, a detective who retired from the Seattle Police Department.”

Thea’s smile vanished. “What? Who?”

“The guy who was assigned to my sister’s case. I want to talk to him.”

Thea stared, openmouthed. “That’s what this is about?”

“What did you think this was about?”

“Honey, I thought you were going back to school.”

“What? School! Why would I do that?”

“To finish.”

“God, no. I’m done with that. Forever ago.”

Taking plenty of time pouring the last of the coffee from the paper cups into her ceramic mug, Thea asked, “Why did you quit school?”

Daphne sandwiched eggs in toast and ate in huge mouthfuls.

Thea sighed. “To get a retired guy’s contact info, I’d have to go shmooze Henry—”

“He’s one of your contacts at the police department?”

“Yeah, but even then, he’s not going to want to tell me.”

“But I want . . . I need to talk to him, Thee.”

“Then you go blow Henry Fragher.” Thea gave a wicked grin that melted to a kind expression when Daphne got near tears. “Listen to me. Your sister dying her senior year did not mean you shouldn’t have graduated when your turn came. You only need a semester to get your degree. You could do it in a snap.”

To keep herself from bawling, Daphne set about making her mid-morning sandwich, a peanut butter and jelly to go. “I don’t want a degree. I want to go back in time. I don’t want my sister’s case to be suspended. And I want to fix yesterday. I want to know that lady is all right.”

“Daphne.”

With her eyes closed, Daphne raised both hands to stop Thea from pushing any further. “The retired detective? Can you put me in touch with him?”

“You’re going to make me go smoke a guy I promised myself I’d never smoke again just to get you some police information?”

“Thee . . .” Daphne opened her eyes. Thea’s smile grew strained.

“You know, you never used to call me that.”

Daphne felt confusion drape over her. “What?”

“Not until you’d been with Vic a while and he started calling you
Daph
. Now you’re doing it to other people. You’re calling me
Thee
instead of Thea.”

“Umm . . .” Daphne hesitated, rattled by a sudden crystallizing thought. Thea and Vic’s half friendship slipped early on into the sort of adversarial mood sometimes found between friends of friends.

Thea’s prior claim as Daphne’s college friend and postcollege roommate competed with his now four-year live-in relationship with Daphne. Sometimes he asked Thea what groundbreaking interviews or investigations she was working on and she asked him if he and the other meteorologists had stopped any meteors of late. Their under-the-table animosity puzzled but had a comparison. Daphne remembered being eleven, feeling pangs over Suzanne going away for another semester. It would be the start of her big sister’s senior year and who knew what would happen come graduation at the school year’s end. And Suzanne had said something odd, that her best friend and her boyfriend didn’t like each other.

The memory was a few seconds of life Daphne hadn’t thought about before, only now making the link to her experience with Vic and Thea.

Suzanne’s best friend and boyfriend didn’t get along.

And Daphne couldn’t think about the boyfriend without recalling the accusations that flew in the weeks Suzanne was missing, before they found her body.

After the murder, he was questioned.

At the funeral, as he was escorted from the church by uniformed police officers, awe-struck eleven-year-old Daphne had felt the seal of judgment fall on Ross Bouchard.

Thea tapped a few keys with her right hand. “If that old lady were actually in trouble, someone else probably—”

“Saw something.” Daphne said, failing to keep the memories at bay. Her voice became a whisper. “I saw something.”

“Aha!” Thea’s victory shout was directed at the computer and she scribbled another note on the page she’d printed. “Address. Minerva Watts on Eastpark Avenue. Want to go run this thing down to the end?”

“Yes.” The phone rang and Daphne checked the caller ID screen. “My mom.”

“I can come with you if we go around ten.”

“I can’t, I’ve got work. Only a half day, though.” Daphne shook her head as the phone stopped ringing with no message left.

Thea made a face. “You get all the fun.”

“I ought to stop in on my mother. And I have to go to a volleyball game for Vic’s daughter this afternoon. His ex might be there.”

Snorting, Thea said, “You get all the dysfunction.”

Fingering the slip of paper, Daphne read Thea’s note: 11243 Eastpark Ave, original sale to John and Minerva Watts (taxes show under M. Watts now). She frowned as her mind circled. “The police could have done what you just did to get her address.”

Thea licked her lips. “They could have, they just wouldn’t for such a little thing. I mean, if someone has just been murdered in the street, they run it all down, but they don’t pull out all the stops for every odd complaint that raises someone’s eyebrows.”

“Why not?” Daphne realized she sounded like a toddler, but she wanted to know.

“Don’t be silly. They just can’t.”

“Am I silly to go there?”

“Yes. But going will put your mind at ease, so go.”

Daphne looked at the phone, thinking of Vic picking it up the moment he had a notion. “Should I call the police and give them the address?”

“Did they fall over themselves when you called in the hot tip of her actual name last night?”

“Forget it. I am being silly on this.”

Thea made each word a pronouncement. “Yes. You. Are.”

“As soon as you can, please get me a way to contact that retired cop.”

“Oh, Daphne, why?” Thea folded her arms and waited.

Daphne grabbed her Carhartt jacket. It was stiff and heavy, still the rich tan-brown of new canvas because she only wore it to and from work, never while working. When roofing, her shoulders needed to swing freely and the labor kept her warm, so she didn’t need more than a sweatshirt. Vic bought the Carhartt jacket for her assuming she had a big liking of the brand.

How often did people assume something about another person? How often did they get it flat wrong?

Thea pulled out a lipstick from her capacious leather purse and asked, “Daphne, why do you want to talk to the retired cop?” She puckered and glossed.

Purseless, Daphne grabbed her wallet and truck keys from the kitchen counter, unplugged her phone from its power cord, and stowed her things in the jacket pockets. After buttoning the flaps shut, she remembered Vic’s request and took keys to his car from the hook in the cabinet where they kept spares.

“Why, Daphne?”

Daphne looked back, mute. Of course the unanswerable couldn’t be explained. That’s why people didn’t try.

CHAPTER 6

At the vast commercial building where Daphne’s work schedule demanded today’s half shift, the other roofers milled about, some at the bottom of the ladder, others waiting on the rooftop, but at the peak, not at the bottom left corner where shingling would begin.

“Have Mayfield start it,” was the foreman’s direction to Walt, one of the guys who stood in for Bob when he was at another construction project.

Daphne liked being referred to by her last name at the job site almost as much as she liked being the preferred roofer to start shingling. Some of the guys said the boss chose her to start shingles because Daphne was the smallest roofer. They thought her size made it easiest for her to crouch on an overhanging eave. But she knew what her foreman knew: she started shingles with perfection and only a roof well started could be finished to high standards.

Perfect starts were where she’d made herself whole. Daphne had never wanted to move up to supervising the roofing crew. Perfect roofing was enough. Bob, Walt, and Hal knew how many man-hours—a term Walt never failed to use—would be needed to complete a job and ordered different crew members to different job sites accordingly. Because of his ability to predict workloads, Bob had okayed her half shift today and Friday off.

She regretted the wasted day-and-a-half off now. She and Vic would have none of this afternoon or the next day together, which had been her hope when she requested the leave. Her seniority on the crew gave her good assignments and good time off, but nothing let her predict when Vic’s life would be waylaid by his kids or work.

Just yesterday in the Peace Park, with her mind roiling about being the live-in girlfriend of a good man with kids—good kids—whose mother pushed their buttons, she’d wondered:
Do I need this?

Frowning as she thought of her time in the park the last afternoon, of the old lady pleading for help, she pushed a hand into her right jacket pocket. The sheet of paper where Thea noted an address for Minerva Watts rested between her phone and wallet in the pocket.

“Hey, Mayfield,” one of the guys teased from the ladder, “that all you got today?”

In her left hand and under her arm, Daphne carried a bare minimum of equipment, sure she’d get through to lunch on so little and not wanting to transfer more of her tools to Vic’s car. She shucked her jacket at the water cooler, leaving it in the truck bed with the others.

“It’s all I’ll need,” she said. Having no tools for the job was an error she’d not made since her first week in construction. When she switched cars with Vic this morning, she’d taken only her loaded tool belt and her favorite coil nailer, plus a hundred-foot silicon air hose. The silicon hoses were so much easier to handle than the old rubber ones. They didn’t tangle, didn’t drag heavily across unprotected tar paper, and flipped easily across the peak of a ridge.

At the mid-morning break, Walt tapped Daphne’s shoulder as he headed for the ladder. “Boss wants to see you before you leave.”

She paused in her sandwich, one booted foot on each side of the roof’s
peak. “Huh, m’kay.” If he’d sent her to the boss as soon as she’d arrived,
she
would have been able to leave as soon as the lunch horn sounded.

Would the boss need her to work more than this half day? She had to get to Josie’s volleyball tourney by three o’clock. Before the game, she wanted to check on Minerva Watts. And if they did need her to work this afternoon, suppose the job required tools she’d left in her truck? She reminded herself to call Vic and let him know she wouldn’t make Josie’s volleyball game if it turned out she had to work past noon.

When the lunch horn blared, Daphne was first down the ladder, heading for the Atco trailer and giving the customary rap on the door as she went inside.

“You wanted to see me, Mr. Wellsley?” She never addressed Dick by his first name. No one at the site did.

The owner and operator of Wellsley Construction, an outfit that had pioneered the Women-In-Construction program right when she’d needed her life changed, pointed to the chair opposite his desk in the trailer. “Sit down, kiddo. I’ll get right to it. Did you do an off-hours job? Earlier this week?” He looked at a piece of paper in his hand, nodded, and added, “Tuesday?” Then he tossed the paper on his desk.

“I . . .” Daphne looked around the office and wondered if she seemed as unforthcoming as a kid, as Jed or Josie. She hadn’t done anything wrong but was caught off guard with the inquiry.

Her boss waited with one eyebrow cocked, his manner pleasant enough but he didn’t wait for her answer before adding, “I do not want union trouble.”

She let her shoulders drop as she nodded. “Yes. It was a detached garage, a small one. Just a straight reroof. Tore off the old stuff, down to the wood.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else.”

“This shed, did it have rafters or trusses?”

“Rafters.”

“How much work did you do on the old rafters?”

“None.”

“
’Bout how much repair on the subroof?”

Daphne cut her hands across her waist. “None.”

“If it needed new shingles and paper, there must have been some water damage, kiddo.”

“No, nothing else was needed, just new paper and new shingles. It was a cosmetic thing. They had a new house roof and wanted the detached garage to match. The roof was old, but it was solid. No damage to the sub, rafters all good. I didn’t do carpentry there.”

“So if Walt says you did . . .”

She looked up. Walt was the one who reported her as perhaps working beyond her scope? How did he even know she’d had a roofing job on the side? She loosened her elastic band one wrap, easing tension in her scalp. Fiddling with her hair when nervous wasn’t her habit, but she wore her ponytail tight while working and always ached to loosen it as soon as she left the rooftop.

“It was truly a nonunion kind of job,” Daphne said. “I didn’t miss work for it. At the other site, on Tuesday, Bob let four of us go early because the sheet metal wasn’t there yet. He offered afternoon work by seniority and I passed.”

“Because you knew you had this other private job in the wings?” His phone rang and he grabbed it, telling the caller to hold on, then held the phone against his chest.

“Well, yes.” Daphne cleared her throat, feeling like she should say more, but he brought the phone to his mouth and motioned her out the door.

She went. The boss was something of a father figure to her, a man who’d given her a chance the day after she lost her own father. She didn’t want to think of father figures or fathers now. Her dad’s final hideous choice left a residue of incomprehension and anger, left her mother alone. And Daphne, knowing she was the one person who could best balm her mother, despised herself for holding comfort back.

Sliding into Vic’s car, she wished she were driving her truck. Not since her first days in construction had she been in a sedan—her father’s car—at a job site.

“Oh, Dad . . .” She rubbed her forehead as his rants pounded in her head.
Nobody makes an effort.
Pushing a fist against her teeth, Daphne bit down and screwed her eyes tight to shut out his old mantra, but the memories ran and she had to stop the car.

The ten troubled years her father survived after his firstborn’s murder would have seen his second daughter graduate college in one more half semester—if Daphne and he had both stuck with life plans. “Dad, I didn’t know . . .”

She didn’t talk to him often, save for the annual visit to the grave, but his words came back unbidden whenever she went home.

If she visited her mom, then slipped upstairs to talk in secrets to her missing sister, the memory of his voice—
someone saw something
—haunted her all the way up the stairs to her old bedroom.

Someone saw her, thought my girl needed help, saw him. Someone thought they should say something, do something. That’s what happened. People don’t make a goddamn effort.

At home, all the remaining questions and withheld explanations rang louder in a static world.

So she avoided her childhood home and her mother. But this choice left her scourged.

An image of her half-living mother summoned wild thoughts of shucking blame. Daphne wiped her eyes.

Had she blamed her mother, just a bit, for not knowing details of sorrow Daphne herself hadn’t known?

She shook against the guilt and forced her mind to the task at hand, lurching Vic’s car into traffic with one admission.

“Dad, I quit, too.”

The Eastpark Avenue address Thea uncovered was easy to find and easy to believe as home for a little old lady.

Minerva Watts’s house was tidy enough, but the eaves sagged and paint peeled in curls at the edges of sun-battered siding. Clumps of striving tulips pushed up near the windows. The bulbs had grown overpacked from years of not being dug up and divided. The home needed a new roof and the lawn was weedy. The lower windows and the front door had security bars that spoke of an elderly woman’s fears. A thin crumbling walkway led to the front door.

The driveway lined the edge of the lawn, and a car—a navy blue Lincoln Town Car, Daphne noted—parked at the house had its trunk open.

Relax, it’s a different car, Daphne coached herself. Just go say hello.

Because how could she go up to a stranger and say: Hey, you weren’t in real trouble, were you?

I just wanted to stop in and see how you are
. That could work but the words sounded odd and awkward as she rehearsed. Daphne rolled her eyes and tried again.

The other day,
she began in her head as she parked Vic’s car just past the house—wait, it wasn’t the other day, some distant time. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since their encounter.

Okay,
yesterday afternoon in the park
. . . Daphne allowed her lips to move, though she did not speak aloud as she tried to summon what to say . . .
well, we saw each other and you were upset. You said some things and I just wanted to know if you’re getting along all right. Do you need anything?

Daphne pulled on her jacket, stepped out of the Honda, and pushed the car keys deep into one pocket of her pants just as Minerva Watts’s front door opened. A man—the same man?—propped open the door’s security gate, his back to Daphne. He wore a hip-length black leather jacket over jeans and running shoes and he grasped a cardboard box with both hands. Then he leaned into the open doorway and someone stacked another box on top of the one he held.

He made for the car with his double load. Daphne hesitated, deciding between following him to initiate a conversation and finishing her walk to the front door. Through the front window, Daphne could see a woman—the daughter, she reminded herself—standing in the living room, hands on her hips, her back to Daphne and the man outside.

I saw something and I
. . . no, that would not be the way to start.

Knocking on the doorjamb as she stood in the open threshold, Daphne looked past the woman in jeans and a fleece sweater who held a small box on her hip. Beyond her in a powder-blue wingback chair, Minerva Watts sat wearing a quilted calico housedress over pink slacks, her bobby-socked feet tucked into blue loafers.

The old lady’s face carried the unsure countenance of a scolded child about to break a rule.

“It was my grandmother Miller’s brooch. Please don’t take that.” As she spoke, Minerva Watts leaned and peered around the woman in fleece and jeans. “Daphne!”

“Lady, I told you to shut it and—”

“Oh, Daphne!” Minerva Watts’s smile showed sad joy.

The other woman whirled and looked Daphne up and down. “Yes?”

“Um,” Daphne said, her mind reeling.
She remembers my name
. “I saw you in the park yesterday and the, um, Mrs. Watts here said—”

“I’m Mrs. Watts,” Minerva Watts said, stating her name with purpose, sitting up straighter, smiling at Daphne.

“Mother, be quiet now.” The woman pointed a finger at Minerva Watts, whose smile evaporated as she cast a worried gaze down at the cream high-low carpeting.

Daphne took one small step forward. The other woman raised a palm toward Daphne and the front door and cleared her throat, squinting at Daphne while she spoke to Mrs. Watts.

“Mother, it’s time for your pill.”

“Listen,” Daphne said, a foot on each side of the threshold, “I know, I mean I don’t know what’s . . . Wait. I—”

Minerva Watts leaned forward, her bright and watery gaze fixed on Daphne. “Please help me.”

“Guff!” The woman’s shriek sparked the man outside to slam the car’s trunk. Daphne turned on the threshold, her back against the doorjamb just as the man whipped his head around.

He glanced at the house and cut across the lawn in a jog, pointing a finger at Daphne, holding up his other hand like a traffic cop.

“You. Stand there. Hold up.”

A few steps would put him on top of her.

“What?” Daphne said, blinking at the man. He was beside her now,
six inches taller, eighty pounds heavier. She tried an encouraging, peaceable
smile, looking from the man to the woman and back again. From the cor
ner of her eye, she could see the woman bend to set her box on the floor.