Stranded (24 page)

“You probably don’t remember me, but I was in the Nugget not long ago? I admired your earrings?”

Her look told me no, she didn’t remember me. Not surprising, given all the people she undoubtedly waited on in the café. Plus the fact that age seems to create its own aura of invisibility. “Could I come in and talk to you for a minute?”

“What for?”

“It won’t take long. I’m not selling anything.”

“Sure, I guess so.” She turned and I followed. A faint scent of floral shampoo trailed after her. She bent over and toweled her hair vigorously for a minute, then let it fall free. With the long blond hair around her shoulders, she looked even younger than she had at the café.

The apartment was one room divided into living, dining, and kitchen areas, with doors leading off to bedroom and bath. A very ordinary-looking place except for how she’d decorated it. A miniature merry-go-round stood on a cabinet. Another merry-go-round formed the base of a lamp. A carousel horse painted on black velvet hung over the sofa. A collection of wooden and ceramic carousel horses filled three shelves on a wall. Even the oversupply of throw pillows that covered the sofa were decorated with carousel horses. Yellow silk roses in a carousel-decorated vase stood on the kitchen windowsill. The flowers matched the lone rose in Hiram’s kitchen.

“You said you had a thing for merry-go-rounds, and you really do, don’t you?” KaySue would love those carousel horses in my bedroom. No doubt in my mind now but that Hiram had acquired them with her in mind. I wondered if she knew about them.

She laughed. “I don’t know why, but I’ve always loved them. It’s like you could get on a carousel horse and just ride off into some wonderful fairyland.” Her tone went momentarily dreamy, but then she came back to earth with a roll of expressive eyes. “My sister thinks they’re dumb, but you should see her stupid collection of doughy-faced old dolls.” KaySue wrinkled her nose.

“Hiram didn’t think carousel horses were dumb, did he?”

KaySue’s big blue eyes got even bigger. “You knew Hiram?”

“Well, um, in a way . . .”

Her expression changed, like a person who’s suddenly horrified to spot a cockroach crawling across her foot. “Are you Lucinda?”

“You knew about Lucinda?”

“What’s this about?” she demanded. “Who are you, and why are you here?”

“May I sit down? It was a long walk over here. And no, I’m not Lucinda.”

KaySue’s blond eyebrows scrunched together in a frown, but she tossed a couple of pillows aside to make room for me on the sofa.

“My name is Ivy Malone, and Hiram’s niece is letting me and a friend live in Hiram’s house. When we were turning the mattress in the bedroom, we found the letters you’d written to him hidden there. I suppose I should apologize, because we read them.”

She swallowed, perhaps remembering some of the details of those letters, but her tone was challenging when she said, “So?”

“Hiram must have valued the letters very highly to save them so carefully.”

Her expression softened. “We were going to get married this spring. On our honeymoon we were planning to visit all these fabulous merry-go-rounds all across the country.”

“What about Lucinda? She thought Hiram was going to marry her this spring.”

KaySue studied a fingernail, then bit off a smidgen of cuticle. More nervous than she was letting on, I guessed. “Hiram felt really bad about Lucinda. He said she was a nice woman, and he didn’t want to hurt her. But he couldn’t marry her once he’d met me. He was going to tell her very soon.”

“But wasn’t it . . .” I paused and searched for some suitable word. “Wasn’t it frustrating that he hadn’t yet told her? You must have been seeing him for some time.”

She shrugged, her eyes not meeting mine, but the stiffened line of her body told me this had indeed been a point of contention between them.

“Did Lucinda know about you?”

“No, I told you, he hadn’t told her yet. He wanted to let her down easy, he said.”

Which didn’t mean Lucinda didn’t know about KaySue, no matter what KaySue thought. Lucinda was neither stupid nor non-observant.

“You met Hiram when he came into the Nugget?”

“He came in quite a few times before we started seeing each other. He was always such a gentlemen, unlike most of the clods I meet. And he wasn’t into drugs like so many guys my age.”

“Did his smoking bother you?”

KaySue looked blank, and I realized that for her the smoking was a non-issue. I saw a green ashtray by the carousel lamp, although there was no sign that it had been used recently. I had to remember how, with Lucinda, Hiram’s smoking had been relegated to her back porch.

“Did the police question you after Hiram was killed?”

“No. No one knew about us. Hiram wanted to wait until after he told Lucinda before he introduced me to people.” She looked at her left hand. “And give me a ring.”

“A carousel-horse ring?”

“No, a diamond. A big diamond.”

“It seems someone in Hello would have known about you and Hiram. Didn’t you ever run into any of his friends from up there? Hayward isn’t all that far from Hello.”

“Hiram liked it here in my apartment. He said it was cozy and soothing. So lots of times we wouldn’t even go out. I’d cook dinner for him, and then we’d watch a video or something. When we did go out, Hiram liked to go to some other town. Once I went with him on a business trip to Denver.”

Busy Hiram. Seeing both KaySue and Lucinda. Dodging people he knew. He must have spent a fortune on gas, dashing off to towns where he figured he wouldn’t be identified. And with Lucinda and KaySue both feeding him, it was a wonder he could still make it up to the third floor of the house in Hello.

“Were you ever at the house in Hello?”

“Hiram didn’t think that would be a good idea.”

“But I found a yellow ribbon from your hair in his office, so you must have been there sometime.”

That was a wild guess, because I couldn’t be positive what the vacuum cleaner had sucked up, but my guess was on target. Her hand flew to her hair, as if checking for a missing ribbon. “Well, I, uh, did go there once. Though I don’t remember losing anything.”

“When was this?”

“A few days before he was killed.”

“He invited you there after all?”

“No. I-I was kind of mad at him. He was supposed to come down, and I was going to cook dinner for him. Then we were going to watch
Sleepless in Seattle
together. I love it, and he’d never seen it.”

“But?”

“He called and said he wasn’t feeling good. That’s when I got mad, because I figured the real reason he wasn’t coming was because he was doing something with Lucinda. So I tore up there to—” She broke off, a flash in her eyes revealing her angry passions of the moment. She touched her lips with her fingertips, as if to close off whatever she’d started to say.

“To?”

“Not to murder him, if that’s what you’re thinking. This was before he was killed.”

I didn’t say anything. Sometimes it’s more profitable to stay silent and see what fills the empty space.

“I just went up to tell him if he didn’t tell Lucinda about us, I was going to. Or maybe I’d break up with him. Or both.”

I thought of her altercation with the guy in the parking lot. Somehow I doubted she’d have confronted Hiram with a calm ultimatum. KaySue did fireworks. Even fisticuffs.

“And?”

“I wound up not saying anything about either one, because when I got there he really
was
sick. I was still a little mad because he and that old guy from the mine had been drinking together the night before, drinking
all night
, can you believe that? And he was sick because he still had an awful hangover.” Another blue flash in her eyes. Apparently she disapproved of drinking and hangovers, which I found admirable. “But his telling me he was sick didn’t have anything to do with Lucinda. So then I felt kind of awful, being so suspicious.”

I murmured something noncommittal.

“I feel awful now too, with him . . . gone. I never saw him again after that night. It’s still hard to believe somebody killed him.”

“Do you know who could have done it?”

She shook her head.

“Did he ever mention anyone threatening him? Anyone he was afraid of? Anything?”

Another shake of head. “I don’t know why anyone would want to kill Hiram. He was a wonderful man.”

“Did he write you letters too?”

“No, Hiram wasn’t a letter writer. But he had my carousel earrings especially made for me. And he gave me that lamp too.” She pressed a button on the lamp with a merry-go-round base, and the carousel horses rose and fell to a tinny tinkle of music.

“You didn’t go to the funeral?”

“I didn’t even know he was dead until the funeral was over.”

“How did you find out he was dead?”

“Those old guys in the Nugget were talking about this guy getting murdered up in Hello, and then one of them mentioned a name. And it was Hiram.”

“That was a hard way to find out.”

She nodded, and her throat moved in a swallow. “I know you probably don’t believe it, because of the difference in our ages and all, but I really, really did love him. And he loved me.”

So young. So earnest. I sighed. “How much difference in age was there?”

“Well, he was fifty-seven and I’m twenty-six. So not all that much,” she said defensively. “And age doesn’t matter anyway.”

Fifty-seven. I shook my head. Oh, Hiram. “You weren’t concerned about his bad track record with all his marriages?”

“Two isn’t all that many marriages. My mom’s been married more than that.”

So, dear ol’ Hiram hadn’t exactly been up front with her about his age or his marital history. Should I tell her? I also thought about the carousel horses in the bedroom back home. Were they to be a wedding surprise for her, after he dumped Lucinda? I didn’t want to go there.

“Did anything come of your, um, altercation in the parking lot a while back?”

“Which one?”

With that answer, I decided there was no point in pursuing that line of inquiry. KaySue definitely met any requirements Hiram may have had for spitfire temperament.

KaySue started braiding her hair and unexpectedly became quite chatty about Hiram, telling me about all the things they had in common besides carousel horses. Perhaps, I thought, to convince me the relationship had been true love. They both liked Chinese food, long walks, rap music, and old John Wayne movies. I couldn’t help but wonder who was fooling whom with that list, and in the end I didn’t tell her about all the wives, Hiram’s age, or the carousel horses. At this point, none of it seemed particularly relevant.

What was relevant was that my big question had been answered: this relationship had been going on parallel to Hiram’s relationship with Lucinda. Which raised the ominous question: had Lucinda found out about KaySue? And had she grimly decided that Hiram had dumped and humiliated her once, and he wasn’t going to get away with it again?

She could have gotten him up to the third floor easily enough. Just told him she hadn’t seen the view from up there since their high school days and wanted to see it again. She was strong and fit from her walking and health club workouts. She’d have no difficulty pushing him out the window.

Oh no. No, no. I didn’t want to think such thoughts about Lucinda.

Another side of the coin occurred to me. What about the reverse of Lucinda finding out about KaySue and being angry enough to kill him? Maybe Hiram had decided he was going to marry Lucinda after all, and he’d broken it off with KaySue. How would she take the news? Calmly and graciously?

About as likely as Three Stooges Moe breaking into operatic aria.

18

Good news when I got back to the pickup. Abilene had passed both written and driving tests. She proudly showed me her new license, complete with terrible photo. I wouldn’t have thought Abilene could look unattractive under any circumstances, but the curse of the DMV photo held true even for Abilene. Her mouth had an odd, off-center tilt, her eyes bulged in a way they never did in real life, and her hair looked like a blond wig one of Norman’s chickens had been scratching in. She didn’t mind, I knew. She’d have happily accepted a license that made her look like Frankenstein, just so she could now drive legally.

Which she did, all the way back to Hello, smiling all the way, wheeling that oversized pickup down the road as if she’d been driving all her life. Although she sobered when I gave her a brief rundown on my meeting with KaySue, whose last name I still didn’t know, and my two-sided suspicions.

“So either one of them could have done it.” Abilene sounded as dismayed as I felt. She liked Lucinda too.

But, I asked myself, wasn’t KaySue the more likely perpetrator? She admitted to being in Hiram’s house. She could have been fudging about when she was there. She could also have been lying about the drinking/hangover thing. If she’d gone up to Hello and found Hiram was with Lucinda that evening, she might have waited for him, her temper spiraling to the murderous level.

The scenario fell apart there. If KaySue was angry enough to kill Hiram, she’d have clobbered him right there in the driveway or kitchen. She wouldn’t have wasted time luring him up to the third floor.