The Winter Widow (17 page)

She lit a cigarette and smoked in short, frustrated puffs, wondering what Jack Guthman could tell her about McClay. Crushing out the cigarette, she rang Jack's number, then tried the Guthmans'. The housekeeper informed her Jack had gone into Emerson.

She slid on her white trench coat, slung the strap of her bag over her shoulder and went out to the pickup. When she pulled out of the lot, she had to brake quickly to avoid a dusty gray Mustang that turned abruptly in front of her.

Emerson College, founded in 1858, now covered 320 acres with buildings including dorms, labs, chapels and a small theater, all settled into gently rolling hills with large ancient trees: bare-limbed maples, elms and walnuts. The buildings were a mixture of old and modern, many of them made of the warm, creamy-colored limestone. Pathways cut across snow-covered slopes that sparkled in the bright sunshine, and students in jeans and down jackets hurried along heading for classes.

Susan turned into an oval street with a canopy of giant maples and stopped in front of the administration building. It was one of the older buildings, rectangular, three-storied with a flat roof and three imposing stone arches guarding the main door.

The office seemed dark after the bright sunshine; she blinked to help her eyes adjust, then asked a young woman behind the counter where she could find Jack Guthman. The woman consulted a schedule and said Dr. Guthman was at the Rumen Metabolism Laboratory in the rear of Lehman Hall. Susan asked for directions and set off on one of the pathways, slushy with trampled snow.

A student ran flat-footed toward her, papers clutched between his outstretched hands, and muttering, “Oh God, oh God.” He gave her a wild-eyed stare. “I didn't hear the alarm,” he said, and plunged down the path.

She smiled sympathetically. Her student days at the University of California in Berkeley were long in the past, but not so long that she'd forgotten the late nights finishing assignments and the frantic scrambles getting to class in the morning. Back then, she was working for civil rights and calling cops pigs. Things do change.

At Lehman Hall, she wandered down a corridor and stopped in the doorway of a lab to ask a student in a white smock where experiments in bovine nutrition were being done. She was told the doorway at the end.

The large metal door held a sign that read “
EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS. DO NOT ENTER
.” She knocked. Jack, wearing a long white lab coat and carrying a clipboard, opened the door. He looked terrible, face haggard and gray, dark shadows under his eyes. There seemed to be less of him, as though he'd lost weight overnight.

“A few questions,” she said gently.

A spark of emotion flashed briefly in his eyes, but was gone before she could interpret it. Anger, probably, at the messenger who'd brought the bad news.

He hesitated a moment, then looked at his watch. “I have a few things to check.”

“I'll wait.”

The large, high-ceilinged room was windowless and dimly lit. Four cows, mahogany-colored with white faces, stood placidly in head stanchions. Each one had a round, black object like half a tennis ball protruding from its side. A student in a long black apron, with an elbow-length plastic glove on one arm, waited by the cows, looking at her with interest.

“Eric,” Jack said as they walked toward him, “this is Chief Wren. My assistant,” he said to Susan. He made a notation on the clipboard, then nodded to Eric, who reached for the black cap and pulled, removing it like a cork from a bottle and exposing the interior of the cow's stomach. Susan felt her own stomach muscles tighten and she swallowed.

“It was done surgically,” Jack said. “So we can see what's happening in the digestive tract.”

Inching closer, she bent to look at the deep inner secrets of the animal: dark, humid reservoir, gurgling sounds. A mass of partially digested hay floated on liquid.

Jack nodded again at Eric, who reached into the cow and pulled out a handful of grayish-yellow hay. The cow seemed sublimely unconcerned. Eric held out the steaming, dripping mass for Jack's inspection.

He made a notation on the clipboard. “This one's healthy. Nice mat of hay for the scratching action that's vital.”

Delicately, like an ornithologist replacing a hatchling in its nest, Eric reinserted the sodden hay and put back the rubber cap. The next cow seemed listless. It was swaybacked and stood with its feet spread as though to keep from falling. When Eric removed the cap, the animal wheezed and lurched. A dirty gray froth bubbled up from the hole.

“This is the result of a high-starch diet and no hay. Bacteria overproduce and create the foam.” Jack made notes on the clipboard and, when he finished, went to a deep sink in the corner to wash his hands.

Taking off the lab coat, he hung it in a cupboard and pulled on a tweed jacket. “My office,” he said, and she nodded.

They walked along the dim corridor and out into the cold air and bright sunshine. She squinted. He didn't speak as they took a pathway down a slope to another building, but she could sense some strong internal struggle going on in his mind. As they passed the admin building, she noticed a dusty gray Mustang pull up in front.

In his office, she sat in a chair by the metal desk piled with exam papers. He sat behind it, as though it were a barricade that might protect him, with his back to the window, which looked out over the path they had just walked down. Chemistry textbooks and bound copies of professional journals jammed all the bookshelves except one in the middle that had a neat row of plastic bags. A poster of Swiss Alps and a framed sketch of an old man peering through a microscope hung on the wall.

Wearily, he rubbed eyes that had the slightly unfocused look of shock, then ran a thumb and forefinger down his moustache. “I canceled my classes, but you can't just cancel experiments. They don't wait. You have to—” He shook his head and shoved his hand in his jacket pocket.

“Yes.” If he thought she disapproved of his working on the day after learning of Lucille's death, he was wrong. Whatever gets you through. “I believe Lucille was killed because she knew something about Daniel's murder.”

“I keep seeing her. Lucille. I was eight when she was born. Red-faced squalling little thing. Seeing her. The new bike she got for her birthday. She was ten, I think. Always following me around. Graduation from high school. First job. First day at the newspaper.”

“What did Lucille know?”

He shook his head.

“Think, Jack. She knew something. What was it?”

“I've tried to think. My mind just—”

That neat, efficient mind, so good at solving problems with cows' stomachs, was unequipped to cope with his sister's death.

“Anything, Jack. A comment, a question, an odd response.”

“I— No,” he said. “No, nothing.”

“She knew something, suspected something that made her death imperative. What was it?”

His face seemed even grayer and he looked at her blankly, then shook his head, more as though trying to clear it than in negative response to her questions.

“Why would she go to Kansas City?”

“I don't know.”

“What reason could she have?”

“Maybe—maybe simply to get away.”

“Why, Jack? Why would she want to get away?”

He slumped back in his chair and she could feel him drawing further in on himself, putting up protective barriers against her probing.

“What do you know about Doug McClay?”

“He's a reporter for the
Kansas City News,
doing the kind of thing Lucille wanted to do.” Jack took his hand from his pocket and bounced five or six small colorless pebbles on his palm.

“He was a friend?”

“Yes.”

“Close friend? A lover?”

Jack turned to stare out the window and let the pellets trickle through his fingers. “I expect so. He asked her to marry him. She told him she wasn't ready to get married.”

“Have you met him?”

“Once. He didn't like me.”

“Why?”

Holding the pellets in one palm, he rubbed his thumb over them. “Just one of those things.”

Not surprising maybe, jealousy of the adored brother. None of this was getting her anywhere; her shotgun questions weren't penetrating his shock and grief. Maybe he didn't know anything to tell her. She watched him toss the pellets from one hand to the other.

“What are those?”

He looked at the pellets as though he didn't know how they'd gotten there. “Artificial roughage.” He let them dribble through his fingers onto the desk. “They always seem to be in my pockets. I'm not sure how that happens.” He tried a smile that didn't work.

She picked up a pebble that looked like a miniature ten-gallon hat.

“I think that's it,” he said.

“What?”

“The right shape.” He rose, collected several plastic bags from the shelf and lined them up on the desk.

“This is what I started with.” Opening a bag, he poured out a handful of dish-shaped pellets. “This has all taken so long because I've had to hustle around for grant money.”

He opened another. “I had high hopes for this shape, but cattle wouldn't eat them.” Picking up a handful of cylindrical pellets, he let them slip through his fingers like a prospector handling gold nuggets.

“After it's been chewed and swallowed, it looks like this.” From another bag, he pulled out a clump of grated material that looked like some sort of weird seaweed that might accompany a Japanese dinner.

He flipped a hat-shaped pellet toward her. “Try it.”

She looked at it dubiously.

“Go ahead. It's not harmful.”

She stuck it in her mouth and tried to bite down. It felt like chomping on a toothbrush handle.

“It's incredible,” he said. “It works fantastically better than I ever expected. It's going to make great changes in the cattle business.”

She chewed. Gradually, the pellet flattened and became the consistency of the jujubes she used to get at the movies when she was a kid. Her jaw muscles ached. She took it out and stuck it in her pocket.

“Jack.” She was sorry to bring him back. “If you think of anything that might help, please let me know.”

The lines of strain returned and a look of pain crossed his face. She thought he was again seeing images of Lucille.

“I—” He picked up a handful of pellets. “Yes, of course.”

She stood up. “I will find out who killed her,” she told him quietly.

“Will you?” His voice was distant. His hand scooped up a few pellets and he pushed them into his pocket.

“Oh yes,” she said softly.

She trudged back up to the admin building where she'd left the pickup. A dusty gray Mustang was parked next to it. Waste of time, she thought as she started the truck. She'd made Jack think about Lucille's death and gotten nothing. Better if she'd spent the time tracking down Doug McClay. Why was he so hard to get hold of? She stopped at Erle's Market and bought soup, cheese and bread and went home to have lunch.

Taking the mail from the box, she tucked it under her arm and unlocked the door. She turned up the heat and glanced through the mail. The letter from her mother brought a rush of homesickness. The rest of the mail she added to the pile on the desk in the small room with French doors off the living room.

In the kitchen, she put away groceries and opened a can of chicken noodle soup. While it heated, she read the letter. Tears puddled up. She saw her mother's face looking down at her with great tenderness. She was six years old and miserable with some kind of flu. She wanted to rush right home and give herself up to her mother's care.

Across the bottom, her father had written, “When are you going to stop this nonsense and get back here!” That did it. A perceptive man in so many ways, he had never learned that pushing his only child was guaranteed to make her go the opposite way.

She stirred the soup, then stared out the window over the sink at the bird feeder on the elm tree. A pair of starlings perched briefly and then flew away. Daniel liked to feed the birds. The feeder hadn't been filled since he died, one week and one day ago. Maybe she ought to buy birdseed. Just as she poured soup in a bowl, the door bell rang.

The tall blond man on her doorstep was the man she'd seen at the Kansas City police station last night. He wore a dark blue jacket, corduroy pants and black gloves. Parked in the driveway was a dusty gray Mustang.

“Chief Wren?” It was a statement more than a question, and he gave her a diffident smile. “My name is McClay. I've been trying to catch up with you all morning.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“I GOT messages you wanted to see me.” He sprawled in one of the blue-flowered curved-back chairs near the fireplace.

Indeed, she did, and nice of him to oblige, she thought with mild suspicion. No tracking him down, no insistence, no taking herself to him at his convenience. What did he want?

“Thanks,” he murmured when she handed him a cup of coffee.

She took a sip from the cup she was carrying, settled in an identical curved-back chair and put the cup and saucer on the small table between them.

Winter sunshine slanted through the window and made a bright rectangle on the silvery-gray carpet. He stared at it, blinked and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired, as though he'd been up all night. He probably had.

“I want to know what happened to Lucille,” he said.

She could see anger in his eyes and tension in the tightness of muscles around his mouth. Another male grappling with paralyzing emotions. Jack tried to insulate himself with work; Doug was apparently handling grief and anger by trying to comprehend, make sense out of the senseless. She understood that. “The Kansas City police are investigating Lucille's death.”

He brushed that aside with an impatient gesture. “The answer is here and so is the killer.”