A Catered Thanksgiving (21 page)

And then she started thinking about Christmas and the gingerbread houses she was going to make for their window display. She figured she'd need twelve of them. This year she wasn't going to use a premade pattern. She was going to make her own. She'd make the usual two-story Colonials, but it might be fun to throw a ranch or two in there, and maybe a Spanish-style house as well.

They could have cacti in the yard. And maybe some gingerbread dogs and cats. And kids. They could do a whole village. It would be a lot of work, but worth it. Everyone would stop and look, and then they'd come in and buy things. She'd have to talk to Bernie and see what she thought, and on that note she fell asleep.

E
l Huron waited ten minutes until El Huron was certain that Bernie and Libby were in a deep sleep. El Huron was tired. Exhausted, really. Standing on the other side of the door, listening to the two women talk had made El Huron furious. They didn't know what they were speaking about. They had everything totally wrong. They understood nothing. Absolutely nothing. They were ridiculous in their surmises. And so sure of themselves. They were stupid. Very stupid. That should have made El Huron glad. But it didn't.

El Huron wanted to explain to them. El Huron wanted to jump out and yell at the women and tell them they were missing the point. El Huron wanted them to admire the artistry of what El Huron had done and what El Huron was going to do. The rightness of it. The moral validity. El Huron wanted the sisters to understand the lesson El Huron was about to teach the Field family, a lesson the Field family richly deserved. Of that there was no doubt.

El Huron pictured the sisters listening to what El Huron had to say. El Huron pictured them agreeing with El Huron, telling El Huron that what El Huron was doing was correct, admirable even. That wrongs had to be righted. That the universe demanded it. The sisters owed El Huron that.

After all, El Huron had spared their miserable little lives when El Huron could have locked the bunker door and left them to choke to death. But had El Huron done that? No. El Huron had not. El Huron had done the right thing. The correct thing. El Huron had left their lives in the hands of God, and God had chosen to spare them. For the moment. For this they owed El Huron. They owed him respect. And understanding.

But above all, the sisters owed El Huron silence.
Silencio profundo.
Profound silence. El Huron desperately wanted the sisters to shut up, to stop talking. All the words coming out of their mouths were hurting El Huron's ears. They were confusing El Huron, leading El Huron away from the path that had been settled on. The true path. The path of honor and of glory. But El Huron could not say that to them. Could not even hint at that. No. That would be a breach of discipline, something that El Huron never committed. El Huron could only stand on the other side of the door and remain absolutely still, even though every muscle in El Huron's body was crying out to move and El Huron desperately wanted to scratch the itch on El Huron's nose.

But no. One made a plan and stuck to it whatever happened. Of course, that said, one must always leave room for adjustments. Things did go wrong. Situations did change. So one must be committed but flexible at the same time. Watching Bruce Lee had taught El Huron that. In fact, that attitude, that ability to be both flexible and inflexible, was what made El Huron so good at what El Huron did. El Huron was like the bamboo. Strong but supple.

So instead of saying anything to the sisters, instead of setting them straight, which El Huron had so badly wanted to do, El Huron had followed the women from room to room, watching them while they searched for a place to sleep, wanting to tell them that there was only one place to go, but refraining.

And El Huron had done this shadowing so perfectly that they had not seen or heard El Huron. Not a single board had given out a crack or a creak as El Huron walked on them. That was because El Huron knew every inch of this house. Every nook and cranny. And El Huron had done this, had paid strict attention, despite being so tired that El Huron's eyelids felt as if they were closing by themselves and all of El Huron's muscles and bones and sinews were telling El Huron they wanted nothing more than to lie down.

But El Huron had persevered. And finally, as El Huron knew they must, the sisters had gone into the study, settled down on the sofas, and gone to sleep. El Huron peeked into the room and watched them for a moment.

Both of them were sleeping the sleep of the dead. The taller, thinner one, the one with the darker hair, had one of the throw pillows over her head, while the shorter, plumper one was using her parka as a pillow. Both were sleeping with their mouths slightly opened. They both looked peaceful, the result, El Huron supposed, of both brandy and exhaustion. Of course, El Huron knew what their names were, but El Huron preferred to think of them as the light-haired and the dark-haired ones,
la rubia
and
la morena.

As El Huron's mother used to say, “Name something and it's yours,” and El Huron did not want these two women. Not in any way. Not when they might become collateral damage, as the war movies that El Huron watched were fond of saying.

El Huron tiptoed closer. El Huron smiled. The darker-haired one had left her tote bag on the coffee table. Very, very carefully El Huron moved nearer. El Huron put El Huron's hand into the bag and felt around. El Huron heard a rustle and froze. The dark-haired one moved and mumbled something El Huron couldn't understand.

El Huron thought it had to do with mocha frosting and an attic, but El Huron wasn't sure and it didn't matter. Then she turned toward the back of the sofa, and the pillow she had over her face fell to the floor. That seemed to distress her, so very, very carefully, El Huron removed El Huron's hand from her bag. Then El Huron leaned over, picked the pillow up off the floor, and put it back where it had been. The thinner one sighed, lifted her hand up, brought the pillow down, and hugged it to her.

El Huron waited another moment, and when both women were resting comfortably, El Huron returned to the bag of the dark-haired one. El Huron carefully opened it and put El Huron's hand inside. A moment later El Huron had what El Huron was looking for. The dark-haired one's cell phone. El Huron deposited it in El Huron's pocket, along with the other ones El Huron had carefully collected from everyone's bedrooms a little while ago. It had been so easy. Now El Huron would put them in the bottom of the trash bags in the garage, where they would never be found.

The idea of locking everyone in was laughable. The locks were a joke. So was the booby trap the dark-haired one had set. El Huron had painstakingly picked up all the glass marbles on the steps and deposited them in a paper bag. At first El Huron had wanted to scatter them around the sofa the dark-haired one was sleeping on. The amusement value would have been considerable. But then El Huron had decided it would be better if they just disappeared, because uncertainty was always more unsettling.

Before El Huron had entered the rooms, El Huron had been worried that El Huron wouldn't be able to find the cell phones. That they would be buried in pants pockets. But that hadn't been the case at all. Everyone had left them out on their dressers or night tables. They were careless. And wasteful. As the rich tended to be. That was one thing El Huron had learned.

El Huron couldn't help smiling when El Huron thought about the scene that would ensue tomorrow morning, when everyone woke up and found their cells missing. There would be accusations. There would be fights. If El Huron was lucky, there would also be panic, and panic stopped people from thinking clearly.

Panic would distract everyone from what was to come. El Huron could hardly wait. The time was nearly at hand. But now it was time for El Huron to get to bed. El Huron had earned the right to sleep. And El Huron had to get up early. There was much for El Huron to do.

Part of El Huron wanted to keep going and fill the balloons with the gas now, but the other part of El Huron, the disciplined part, knew that sleep was essential. Sleep would ensure that no mistakes were made. Because if there were mistakes, all of El Huron's careful planning would be for nothing, and that was a thought that El Huron could not endure. El Huron had a responsibility, a responsibility El Huron would carry through until it was discharged. This El Huron had learned from El Huron's mother.

I
t was two o'clock in the morning and Sean was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, wishing he were back in his bedroom in Longely, instead of in Martha's condo in Florida. At least if he were home, he could turn the TV in his bedroom on. If he went out in the living room and tried that here, Martha would be up and on him like a tick on a dog, demanding to know what the matter was, wanting to make him tea, and generally driving him crazy. Why was it that some people couldn't understand that other people liked to be left alone? That was what he liked so much about Ines. She didn't fuss over him. It just annoyed him no end when people did that.

Here all he could do was lie in bed, listen to Martha's snoring coming from the next room, and think about what Joan had told him over gin rummy, and how that fit or didn't fit in with Monty Field's murder. And he had lots and lots of thinking to do.

It bothered him that for all these years he'd thought one person was guilty and that he could be wrong and it might turn out to be someone else. It was going to take him a while to wrap his mind around that. He'd been so positive that Monty Field had killed his wife Penny, and since he usually didn't make mistakes when it came to those kinds of things, Joan's comments had hit him hard.

And it wasn't as if he had been alone with his feelings. Clyde had thought so, too. Evidently so had Marvin's father. Or at least according to Marvin, he had. It was the conclusion that made sense. The obvious conclusion, and if there was one thing that Sean had learned from being on the force over the years, it was that the obvious conclusion was usually the correct conclusion. He'd thought that even though he'd never been able to prove that Monty had killed his wife. And that had eaten at his guts.

But maybe he hadn't been able to prove Monty had killed his wife, because it hadn't happened that way. Maybe he'd just attached the blame to Monty because he didn't like him after what had happened with Rose. Actually, he hadn't even liked him before anything had happened with Rose. He hadn't liked him, period, so maybe he'd just made the assumption that Monty was to blame and that had been that. Case closed. Sean didn't like to think that he worked off of personal biases, but maybe he did.

And maybe Marvin's father had felt the same way. Maybe it just irked him that Monty hadn't wanted to pay for a decent coffin for his wife and that he hadn't wanted a ceremony. That wasn't a crime. It was just mean-spirited. After all, nice people killed people, too. It happened more than people wanted to think it did.

Sean checked the time on the clock radio on the nightstand and then turned it around so it faced the wall. He didn't want to know what time it was. He'd fall asleep when he fell asleep. Then he went back to thinking about Penny's death. The truth was that he hadn't had a chance to conduct more than a cursory investigation. Not with the ME's ruling coming back the way it had. And that had rankled, too.

So even though he'd been furious with the ME at the time for his decision, maybe it was a good thing that the ME had ruled Penny's death a misadventure/suicide rather than a homicide. It had been one of those borderline cases where the ME could have come down on either side of the fence.

After all, Penny
could
have taken too much insulin on her own. She
could
have made a careless mistake. That was within the realm of possibility. Even though everyone Sean had talked to had told him that she had had an abnormal fear of doing exactly that, so she was extra careful with her insulin, and he couldn't see how anyone could give themselves almost thirty units—or was it forty units?—by accident.

One or two extra, yes. But not thirty. He'd seen the insulin pen she'd injected herself with three times a day, and decided that that was a mistake that one couldn't possibly make no matter how befuddled one was. And then she'd had three ounces of Scotch on top of that, which kind of sealed the deal. Because, evidently, hard liquor reduced blood sugar levels, especially if you didn't eat anything as well.

And Penny hadn't liked hard liquor. That was another thing. Everyone except Monty had said so. But the ME hadn't wanted to hear about that. He hadn't wanted to hear about any of it. Neither had the ADA, for that matter. Jackson had told him, “Maybe something bad had happened and she'd needed a drink. Just because she usually didn't drink didn't mean that she wouldn't given the correct circumstances.”

And nothing Sean could say could make him change his mind. Nor would Jackson agree with Sean that making that kind of mistake with your insulin wasn't suspicious. What Sean had pictured happening, what he'd told Jackson, was that Monty had come up to his wife when she was asleep and jabbed the insulin into her arm. Then he'd poured the Scotch down her throat and held her mouth shut until she'd swallowed it. After that it was just a matter of waiting for the insulin to take effect.

But Jackson had rejected Sean's hypothesis, pointing out that Penny would have woken up and would have had fifteen to twenty minutes before she went into a coma, and that she would have known her blood sugar was falling and either eaten something or called for help. In fact, there was a landline right next to her bed that she could have used. No, Jackson had continued, Penny's cause of death was either an accident or a suicide, but in either case she administered the insulin to herself. But despite the absence of hard evidence, Sean hadn't bought that. His gut had told him different. Aside from everything else, there was something off about Monty's reaction to his wife's death.

So Sean had put Penny's death in his unfinished business file, the file that he kept in his head. That, of course, was why he hadn't wanted the girls going out to the Field house, especially without him. Not that he was afraid that Monty would kill them. He wasn't, because in his experience, and statistics bore him out, most murderers were not repeat offenders.

However, that said, there were always exceptions to every rule, and you couldn't always tell who the nut jobs were. And it was the exceptions to the rule that bothered him. After all, he wouldn't be much of a father if he let his daughters get in harm's way, a thing he'd done his level best over the years to prevent, even though Rose had not approved of his methods. Like teaching the girls the three deadliest defense moves in the world when they were eight years old.

Sean smiled at the thought. Libby had been hopeless, but Bernie had proved to be an apt pupil, although in retrospect maybe teaching a kid how to tear someone's ear off hadn't been the best idea. Rose certainly hadn't thought so. She'd been apoplectic when Bernie had demonstrated the technique to her on her doll. She'd made him swear never to do anything like that again. Which he hadn't.

Sean took a deep breath and thought about Rose for a little while and their life together and about how much he missed her, and then, after a little while, his thoughts slowly drifted back to Monty's murder and his daughters and their current predicament.

When Clyde had called and told Sean he had heard that Monty Field was dead, part of Sean had been pleased that Monty had finally gotten what was coming to him after all these years, but a larger part of him had been worried there was a killer loose in the house, after all, and even though the person who killed Monty Field probably had a motive that didn't include his daughters, it didn't make Sean feel any better.

And then, when Clyde had told him his daughters were being looked at for the murder, he'd been furious at Lucy's temerity. The idea was ludicrous. And while he knew that everything would get straightened out eventually, he also knew that it could be a long, expensive process.

Which was why he'd advised Bernie and Libby to try and get to the bottom of this mess before Longely's finest came on the scene. Handing them a neatly wrapped package with all the i's dotted and the t's crossed would make life simpler for everyone. The police would be happy because they would have their perpetrator, and the girls would be happy because they wouldn't have to deal with the Longely police.

And now here was Joan telling him that it was Monty's brothers who were responsible for Penny's death, and he couldn't even get in touch with Bernie and Libby to tell them that. Even though the more he thought about the statement, the more he realized that it made no sense to him whatsoever.

Which was why he was lying in bed, unable to sleep, while he tried to figure out whether or not what Joan had said held even a slim chance of being true, whether her intuition was in any way valid. He had a tendency to think not. But maybe that was because he didn't want to believe what she was saying. He'd trusted her opinion before when she'd told him that she thought that Monty had killed his wife, but maybe that was because it confirmed his own. Joan obviously thought that what she was saying was true, and she had no reason to lie.

Of course, there was another possibility. Geoff could have been lying to her. Maybe Geoff had been making the whole thing up because he was angry with his uncles for something or other that they'd done. That would work. It was a fairly sick thing to do, but Sean had seen kids do things like that before. Take the Smith kid and his dad. The kid had accused his dad of killing his puppy, when the kid had done it himself.

Maybe that was why Geoff had said what he did to Joan. And then maybe Geoff had gotten embarrassed by what he'd done and started avoiding Joan at all costs, hence increasing Joan's level of concern, which increased Geoff's, which increased Joan's, and so on and so forth.

Then another thought occurred to Sean. Why would Perceval and Ralph kill Penny back then and Monty now? Why wait all this time? That was the question.
No,
Sean corrected himself. That was one of the questions. A subset really. Now he was allowing himself to get sidetracked from the other question, the more important one, which was, why would Ralph and Perceval kill Penny at all? How did Ralph and Perceval benefit from her death?

Monty got the company when Penny died. What did Ralph and Perceval get? As far as Sean knew, they got a chance to work in the company. Or maybe they got to own a part of the company. But still, Sean was sure it wouldn't be a big part. Monty was probably the chief stock owner. So what had Ralph and Perceval been doing before so that working in the company or even owning a piece of it was such a big step up for them that it was worth killing for?

Sean closed his eyes and tried to dredge up everything he remembered pertaining to Penny Field's death and Monty and Monty's brothers. He had vague memories of Perceval and Ralph.

There'd been a lot of drinking and smoking. A lot of dead-end jobs and a lot of getting fired from said dead-end jobs—mainly because Ralph and Perceval had been in the habit of not showing up for work—if Sean remembered rightly. But they didn't do anything criminal, unless you counted stupid stuff, like getting caught trespassing on the high school football field with a case of beer and a couple of girls.

Then their parents had been killed in a house fire started by a faulty electric heater, and that seemed to have sobered them up really fast. It had been the same summer that Penny had died. Everyone had had lots of sympathy for the Field boys. Which was another reason no one had wanted to touch Penny Field's death. Everyone had figured Monty had enough on his plate as it was.

Sean shook his head again. No matter how Sean figured it, he couldn't see Ralph and Perceval for Penny Field's death. They'd had no motive. Unless, of course, they'd colluded with their brother and all three of the Field boys had been in on Penny's murder and Monty had paid them off, as well as giving them a share in the company. That made a little more sense. And now maybe they'd had a falling-out and they'd killed Monty.

No. The theory that made the most sense was that Geoff had lied to Joan for reasons of his own and that Joan had believed him. That made Sean feel a little bit better, but not as much as he would have liked. Because what happened if he was wrong? God, he wished he were back in Longely. He sighed and rolled over and punched his pillow into submission.

He wasn't going to go there. He was going to tell himself that everything was fine and that his girls could protect themselves from anything that came along—at least Bernie could. After all, he'd taught her how. And he was going to keep telling himself that until he believed it. Otherwise he'd never get any sleep.

Ten minutes later he reached for his cell and tried Bernie's number again. It rang, so the network was back up. But there was no answer. He tried again five minutes later. Still no answer.
Plenty of reasons for that,
he told himself after he'd left a voice mail. She could have lost her phone. It could be dead. She was probably sleeping and didn't hear it. He was sure there was a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why she wasn't calling him back. Perfectly reasonable. But after ten minutes he caved and dialed Brandon's number. Sean let out a long sigh of relief when Brandon came on the line.