Silent End (2 page)

But Dick was calling the club to order. Judith sat opposite Phyllis and played, but quite badly. She kept forgetting to tap the timer, she kept forgetting to mark down letters used so she would know what her opponent was holding during the end game; she even forgot to keep score. Instead, she kept talking, while Phyllis and several eavesdroppers listened with varying degrees of incredulity, discomfort and fascination. Eventually, stopping the timer, Phyllis asked, “You really think the police suspect you of
murder
?”

“Yes! They’re treating it as a homicide. They told me not to leave town.”

“But they don’t know who the victim is?”

“How could they? There’s not even teeth left.”

“But you think your ex-husband did it just to implicate you?”

“I wouldn’t put it beyond him!” Though honestly, Judith thought, she had never believed It could murder anyone—other than herself. The bastard, if he had gone and murdered some other woman, it was infidelity all over again. Judith bleated, “If it wasn’t him, then who? Who else would want to break in and cremate somebody in
my
kiln?” Seeing Doug glance at her from a neighboring table, she added lamely, “Or kill, whatever.”

Phyllis murmured, “I think it’s correct either way.” Starting the timer, she said, “Your turn.” But presumably she was not speaking of Scrabble when she added, “Poor thing, what are you going to do?”

Judith had no idea. She attempted “cadaver,” misspelled it, missed a turn and lost. During the evening she lost all three of her games, the third one to Dick, whose post-trophy gratification only increased when he scored above 400.

“Eloise beat me 478 to 290 on Saturday,” he said. “I wonder where she is? She said she would be here.”

Judith didn’t care where the hell Eloise was. These people gave her the creeps. Without even saying goodnight she went home.

*

“We’ve been over this a thousand times,” Judith complained to the detective the next day. She hadn’t slept well at all, was not yet allowed to reopen her shop for business, she was losing money, Personal Pottery was headlined in the morning paper as a murder scene, life stunk. “I told you who did it.”

Seated across from her at one of Personal Pottery’s tables, the detective sighed through his large nose. He was an aging man with elephantine earlobes and a snout to match. Judith wondered whether any other body parts had grown as he got older. Probably not. Probably the opposite. She got the feeling he did not like women as he said, “You
think
your former husband did it.”

“He’s mean enough. He put a Calvin-pissing-on-an-X sticker on the window of his pickup.”

The detective didn’t even blink, just went on woodenly. “And you claim that the broken merchandise was removed before the kiln started to heat on Sunday evening—”

“No claim about it. Simple fact.” It would mean third-degree burns to open the kiln after its first hour of heating. ”What if he had a welder’s mask and gloves?”

“Maybe…. No. The overglaze is still blue. Those things had barely begun to fire.”

The detective accepted this with a snort of his potato nose. “Well, ma’am, if the break-in was Sunday night, you can forget the idea that your ex did it. He was at work. Thirty-five miles away from here.”

Judith took this in slowly, with a chill, as bisque figurines looked on white-eyed from the shelves all around her. “Are you
sure?
”

“Twenty coworkers say he was there.”

“But who else… I mean, it’s so weird…” If somebody really needed to get rid of a corpse, there had to be a thousand ways. Why break into her shop? If they really wanted to burn it, every factory in the county had an incinerator; why use the kiln?

In a cold, bored tone the detective asked, “You still think time of death was Sunday night?”

“Yes! I mean, no, I don’t know when she was killed, if she was dead when he put her in there—” Dear God, please let that poor woman have been dead, or at least unconscious.

“But the perpetrator must have come in Sunday evening, knowing that the crime would not be discovered until Tuesday morning.”

“Right.”

“So it must have been someone familiar with your routine.”

“Not necessarily.” He wasn’t going to pin it on her, dammit. “Anyone could look at the store hours. And I advertise delivery on Tuesdays.”

“You seem to have a lot of answers, ma’am. Maybe you can explain this.” Reaching into a pocket of his suit jacket, the detective pulled out a zip-locked, labeled plastic bag containing a white blob of something.

“What’s that?”

“You tell me. It was found along with the ashes in your kiln.”

He pronounced it with the final
n
. “Kill,” Judith said just to put him down. “The ‘n’ is silent.” She peered at the white blob with black spots in it. “Is that
plastic
?”

“Yes.”

“But—how can it be? Plastic would have vaporized.”

“Exactly. But it’s only melted. It appears to be one of a pair of dice. Do you have any idea how it got in there?”

“No!”

“Would you agree that it must have been put in afterward?”

“Um, yes. Monday night, probably. Once the kiln gets down to 130 degrees, you can open it—”

“Is that what you did, Judy? Opened it and put this in? Part of your game, maybe?”

“It’s Judith,” she said icily, “and I will not answer any further questions without a lawyer.”

*

“But he must be absolutely obsessed,” she bleated to Phyllis the next Tuesday at Scrabble Club. Judith herself felt obsessed; all week she had been missing sleep, missing meals, unable to think of anything except: Why? Why me, why
my
kiln? And who? Who was the victim? Who was the murderer, if not It?

Phyllis prompted, “Obsessed?”

“Yes, or insane.” Judith herself felt half-insane, what with the articles in the newspaper, the cops suspecting her, everybody talking about her; she felt the plastic Jesus on top of the piano watching her. The Scrabble timer flashed its red warning light like a police cruiser’s beacon. She covered it with her hand, telling Phyllis earnestly, “He must have come back later to throw a die in the kiln. But why?”

“Something to do with the victim? Have they identified her?”

“No. How can they? All that’s left is bits of bone and a jewel stone and that stupid die. Why would he throw a die in my kiln? Kill, I mean.”

Die. Kill.

The words hung in the air. Staring at Phyllis, Judith breathed, “Oh, my God.”

“What?”

Judith whispered, “Nothing.” She darted a panicked glance around her. Dick and Doug sat two tables away in utter silence, heads bowed, intent on an epic Scrabble contest. Other players, less serious, chatted over their games. But Judith did not see the member she was looking for. The one who gloated. The one who showed off. The one who always wore lots of jewelry, including, Judith seemed to remember, a large oval aquamarine. She hissed at Phyllis, “Where’s Eloise?”

“Huh.” Phyllis glanced around, mildly curious. “I don’t see her. You’d think she would have been here last week, too, bragging about her trophy.”

Without even excusing herself, Judith staggered up and ran to look for a phone. The church office was locked, but way down a dark hallway by the boiler room she found a pay phone on the wall.

“Yeah?” a barking voice answered her at the township police station.

Yes, the big-nosed detective was there, as she expected. The paper had said the police were working around the clock on this one, and even though the guy was a potato-faced misogynist, Judith could not wait to talk with him, help him out, get herself off the hook.

Standing in the darkest corner of the church basement, she told him eagerly, “I think I know who the victim was. A woman named Eloise Hamilton.”

But instead of asking her why she thought this, the detective said in a chilly drawl, “Well, isn’t that interesting. That’s what we think too.”

“But—but how did you find out?” Too late, Judith realized how bad that sounded.

“Traced the stone. Jewelers keep records, you know.” The detective’s voice turned frostier yet. “How did you know Eloise Hamilton?”

His tone made Judith grab at the wall-mounted phone for support, yet she found herself babbling, “I’m—I was—in Scrabble Club with her.”

“Is that right? I understand she was quite an obnoxious person.”

“Yes, she was.”
Shut up
, Judith told herself, almost crying, yet she kept going. She had to make this stupid cop get a clue. Had to. “Look, whoever killed her was a word freak. ‘Kill,’ that’s why he put her in my kiln, because of the pun, don’t you see? And ‘die,’ that thing he put in with her was a die. He couldn’t stand it that she—”

A heavy hand clamped over her mouth from behind, choking her off. Another hand wrested the phone receiver away from her and hung it up. Judith struggled, clawed at the fingers bruising her face, tried to bite, tried to scream, but already she knew she was dead. He was very strong. Unexpectedly strong, for such a nerd.

*

“Good thing we had you under surveillance,” the elephant-eared, potato-nosed detective said.

In the hospital emergency room being treated for bruises and shock, Judith found it difficult to reply politely, so she did not answer at all.

He tried again. “Good thing I had two of my best men right there in the church parking lot.”

Judith said nothing.

“When they got to you,” said the detective, “he had you in the boiler room, with your face on the concrete and his knee in the middle of your back, and he was tinkering with the gauges.”

Judith shuddered. That part she didn’t remember. All she remembered was heavy hands choking her, then nothing. Until she found herself being picked up, brushed off, and watching them take Doug away in handcuffs.

“Are you okay?” the detective asked. “Say something.”

Judith cleared her throat and tried out her voice. “He killed Eloise,” she said unsteadily.

“So it is alleged, yes.”

Judith had a handle on this kettle of fish now. “He kilned her,” she declared, as crisp as bisque, “but he should have never said ‘die.’ He Doug his own grave.”

Edgar Award–winning author
Nancy Springer
,

well known for her science fiction, fantasy, and young adult novels,

has written a gripping psychological thriller—smart, chilling, and unrelenting…

DARK LIE

available in paperback and e-book in November 2012

from New American Library

Dorrie and Sam White are not the ordinary Midwestern couple they seem. For plain, hard-working Sam hides a deep passion for his wife. And Dorrie is secretly following the sixteen-year-old daughter, Juliet, she gave up for adoption long ago. Then one day at the mall, Dorrie watches horror-stricken as Juliet is forced into a van that drives away. Instinctively, Dorrie sends her own car speeding after it—an act of reckless courage that puts her on a collision course with a depraved killer…and draws Sam into a desperate search to save his wife. And as mother and daughter unite in a terrifying struggle to survive, Dorrie must confront her own dark, tormented past.

“A darkly riveting read...compelling.”

—Wendy Corsi Staub, national bestselling author
of Nightwatcher
and
Sleepwalker

“
A fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller that will have you reading late into the night and cheering for the novel's unlikely but steadfast heroine.”

—Heather Gudenkauf,
New York Tim
es best-selling author of
The Weight of Silence
and
These Things Hidden

Learn more about all of Nancy’s titles at her website, www.nancyspringer.com.