Caught Redhanded (11 page)

I sat up and turned to face him. “And you’re going?”

“Of course.”

I thought I detected a wariness underneath. What did he think I’d do, throw a tantrum at the very idea? Well, I might have felt like it, but I had too much class. Besides, I was too busy trying to figure out how to show him that Pittsburgh was much better for us than North Carolina.

Where was Jolene when I needed her? She was great at stuff like getting her way.

“This is so last minute, the tickets’ll cost the school a fortune.” Which meant they really must want him, I thought without pleasure.

He shrugged. “That’s their problem. I’m just glad we don’t have to pay for them.”

We
don’t have to pay? Consciously or unconsciously he’d hit on just the right word. We. He wouldn’t accept the job in North Carolina if I didn’t want him to because we were a
we.
So what was the harm in visiting? Let him see the place and get it out of his system.

I took a deep breath. “Okay, go and check the place out.” I hoped he was impressed with my magnanimous spirit. “But don’t make any commitments, okay?”

Curt nodded. “I wouldn’t without your input and agreement.”

I nodded and tried to push my niggling fear to the back of my mind. It wouldn’t stay there, so I voiced it. “What if we never reach an agreement?”

He was quiet for a minute, thinking it over. “I could always say I’m the head of the family and you have to do as I say.”

“Now that’d really make me feel loved.”

“Mmm. Whatever happened to ‘Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God’?”

Dirty pool, pulling out scripture, but I wasn’t thrown. I had a good answer which just proves there’s a lot to be gained from listening in church. “That quote from the book of Ruth is a daughter-in-law talking to her mother-in-law. It’s not a wife to her husband even if lots of people do use it at their weddings.”

He looked at me with my smug smile. “You’re too smart for my own good.”

“And don’t you forget it, bucko.” I kissed him. “Now, when you get home from North Carolina, we’ll make a list of good and bad for both places.”

He sighed and stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. He didn’t like lists nearly as much as I did.

“All right,” he finally said. “We’ll make a list.” He turned his dark gaze to me. “But don’t think that just because I love you, I’m going to cave and agree to move west. This opportunity may be too good for me to pass up.”

I looked at him and knew he meant what he said. There was no way I was going to cajole him into doing what I wanted just because it was what I wanted. Even Jolene lessons wouldn’t be of any help here.

Oh, Lord, You’re going to have to break him for me.

TWELVE

W
hen I got up on Thursday morning, I pulled on white slacks and a navy blouse with a sailor collar that was piped in white. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen anyone over five wear a sailor collar, but I liked it, so who cared? It made me feel jaunty, like a yachtsman standing before the great chrome wheel, my feet planted wide on a teak deck.

While I ate a little tub of strawberry-banana yogurt and crunched a piece of my Jewish rye washed down with Diet Coke, I planned my day. First, visit the police station to seek the latest on Martha. Then begin work on the Tony Compton piece and set up a time to get a picture of him in his new office. Have lunch with Jolene and Edie. Visit Good Hands clients with Bailey. Take my off-season clothes over to Curt’s and figure out where they could be stored.

Here I grinned. Moving my things slowly into his home made the wedding, which could seem a mirage despite all the preparation being made, take on a vivid realness. There was something very intimate about my blouses and his shirts hanging side by side, my towels and his sitting together in the linen closet.

Then I’d cook dinner for Curt and go to bell choir practice.

All in all, an interesting day.

I scraped a can of food into Whiskers’s bowl as he wrapped himself happily around my ankles. Trying to trick him, I mixed some of his dried food with the wet. He began to eat and I heard the
tap, tap
of dry nuggets as he spat them on the floor. He’d snack on them during the day, but he didn’t like them interfering with his enjoyment of the wet food.

Intelligent pets can be trying.

When I left the apartment, I met Mrs. Anderson, my next-door neighbor for the past three months, on the little porch we shared. An elderly lady who was to her generation what Jolene was to hers, Mrs. Anderson had an extremely active social life. I rarely saw her, but when I did, she was always dressed to the nines for some meeting or luncheon or dinner. Upon occasion I had seen her and other of her blue-haired friends at Ferretti’s.

Not that Mrs. Anderson had blue hair. No, sir. Her hair was suspiciously golden-brown with patches of a strange purple at her temples that I finally figured out came from her rouge, which she brushed on with a little too much enthusiasm. She wore bright, youthful colors and while she didn’t trot along at the same clip as Mrs. Wilson, she was pretty spry. She was a friendly, alert, intelligent woman. I wanted to be like her when I grew up.

Which is why I was so startled to see her in her bathrobe with her hair uncombed and her face devoid of makeup.

“Did you hear him, Merry?” she whispered. “Or see him?”

“Who, Mrs. Anderson?” I looked around for an interloper.

“That man last night.” She peered over my shoulder as if she expected to see him standing behind me. “He was skulking around the house.”

Our carriage house held four apartments, two down and two up. An extremely quiet teacher, who was currently in France for the summer, lived above Mrs. Anderson. A pimply faced, very young couple whose ambition was to be roadies for a rock group used to live above me. Last month they’d gotten their wish and were on the road with a local band called Don’t Rush Me. No new tenants had taken their place, assuming they had broken their lease.

That left Mrs. Anderson and me, and I would be gone in another week.

“What was this man you saw doing?” I asked, fighting the urge to look over my shoulder, too.

“I don’t know.” She hugged herself and rubbed her hands up and down her upper arms. “I was having one of my sleepless nights—I have about two a week—and I was sitting in the rocker by my bedroom window that looks out on the alley when I saw him. He was dressed in black and slinking along.” She pursed her lips. “Anyone slinking along at three in the morning is up to no good.”

I had to agree with that thought. “Did you call the police?”

She shook her head. “All I saw was a man in black. I didn’t see him do anything. I don’t think they come for everyone who sneaks down alleys. He’d have to commit a crime for them to be interested.”

I nodded. “Maybe it was just a husband stealing home and he didn’t want his neighbors or his wife knowing he’d been out so late, especially if he’d been with another woman or something.”

Mrs. Anderson relaxed visibly. “See? It could be something that innocent, couldn’t it? Though if Mr. Anderson ever tried to sneak in like that, I’d have had a word or two for him, let me tell you.” She sniffed. “Innocent, my foot.”

I grinned. I was willing to bet that Mr. Anderson had had no more chance of stealing in late than Sergeant Major Wilson.

“I’ll just keep my ear out for any reports of trouble and if I hear something, then I’ll call the police. I wrote it all down—the times and all—so I wouldn’t forget.”

“He didn’t see you, did he?” I don’t know why, but the thought that he might have made me nervous. Finding dead people tended to activate any latent tendencies toward anxiety.

“No, no. I was sitting in the dark. A glass of warm water and a good rock and I’m usually back to sleep. If I turn on the lights, I’m awake for the rest of the night.” She reached for her door. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer, dear. I feel much better for having talked with you. Have a good day.”

With a wave, I headed for the parking area located on my side of the building. I pulled out my keys and hit the button to unlock the driver’s door. I loved the little electronic gadget. It was so cool to open the car when you weren’t even near it yet.

I slid behind the wheel and slipped the key in the ignition. The engine turned over without protest. I was about to slip the car into Reverse when Mrs. Anderson appeared on the walk, waving her arm frantically at me.

Uh-oh. I undid my seat belt and slid out, leaving the motor running in my hurry.

“What’s wrong?” I called as I jogged toward her.

“I forgot to tell you,” she began, holding out a piece of paper.

What she was going to tell me was lost in the roar of a great explosion very close by. The force of it sent air waves rushing at Mrs. Anderson and me, and we were both thrown through the air. I ended up in the lilac bush, the branches poking at me even as the leaves cushioned my fall.

I clawed my way out of the lilac, slashing my left palm on a freshly pruned length of old growth. Mrs. Anderson! She was a little old lady. Fragile bones and all that. What did this fall do to her?

And what had exploded?

I staggered away from the tree and saw Mrs. Anderson sitting on the ground looking dazed, holding her right arm.

“Are you all right?” I asked as I dropped down beside her.

“I’m fine, dear. Just knocked my arm.”

That’s when I noticed that I was dripping blood on my white slacks. My new white slacks, slated for the honeymoon.

“Oh dear,” Mrs. Anderson said. “Your hand!”

I stared at the blood welling in my palm. The landlord who wouldn’t even give us higher-wattage lightbulbs in the parking area and the front walk had had the lilac pruned, leaving sharp, jagged branches for a person to fall on?

“I’m fine,” I said, knowing the cut wasn’t serious.

She looked beyond me. “I’m afraid your car isn’t.”

I turned and caught my breath. My wonderful little car was blazing and it hit me that if it hadn’t been for Mrs. Anderson, it would have been my funeral pyre.

I began to shake.

THIRTEEN

W
illiam and his people arrived in a dead heat with Curt, whom I called as soon as I hung up from 911. We all stood around the dead carcass of my vehicle and stared at it as it smoked and made groaning noises as it settled and the metal contracted. I was pressed hard against Curt’s side, my injured hand wrapped in a kitchen towel and held up in the air so it was higher than my heart.

“It’ll lessen the bleeding,” Mrs. Anderson assured me.

With my good hand I held Mrs. Anderson’s hand, in which she clasped the piece of paper she’d waved at me, consequently saving my life. She held her other arm to her chest, her wrist already swelling.

“Mrs. Anderson needs to go to the hospital to have her wrist checked out,” I said.

“An ambulance is on its way,” William said.

Mrs. Anderson straightened her shoulders. “I do not need an ambulance, young man.”

He grinned, his face undergoing that fascinating seismic shift. “I’m sure you don’t, ma’am, but please let the EMTs tell you whether you need a physician to look at your injury, okay?”

Mrs. Anderson seemed mollified, if only barely, and we turned our attention back to my car.

“What could have happened?” I asked. “I never heard of a car just blowing up like that.”

“I’d guess it was intentional, sweetheart,” Curt said, looking pale and strained. “Right, William? She’s right that cars don’t just explode.”

One look at William confirmed that he agreed with Curt’s analysis and that he didn’t like the fact one little bit.

Come to think of it, neither did I.

“Do you think it has something to do with that dead girl you found?” Mrs. Anderson asked. “Maybe you saw something that would incriminate someone.” She had rallied amazingly well from her short flight in the air, her injured arm aside. But then it wasn’t her car that had fried.

“I didn’t see anything!” I exclaimed.

“Maybe you did and just don’t realize it,” she persisted.

There was a small silence as we all thought about that.

Then I shook my head emphatically. “I saw nothing.”

“Then why?” she asked.

No one had an answer, so we just stood and watched the car smolder while we waited for the EMTs.

When they arrived, they checked out Mrs. Anderson, who insisted she was fine.

“But you have a broken wrist,” one of the EMTs told her. “You need to get it set.”

“So set it,” she told him.

He bit back a smile. “We don’t set bones, I’m afraid.”

“You can save my life, but you can’t set my bones?”

“I’m afraid that’s right,” he said.

“Ridiculous,” she muttered. “But I’m not riding in any ambulance. I am not sick.”

Another EMT examined my cut palm. “It’d be a good idea for you to get stitched up,” she said. “Only take a few minutes in emergency.”

I didn’t want to ride in an ambulance any more that Mrs. Anderson did. I looked at the unhappy woman and the equally unhappy EMT trying to talk her into climbing aboard the ambulance.

“How about we take Mrs. Anderson to the hospital with us when I go for my stitches?” I suggested.

This happy solution let the EMTs leave and let us watch when the bomb squad from the state police arrived in answer to William’s call. They circled the car, but they couldn’t do much of anything until the smoking metal skeleton cooled. They talked briefly among themselves, then offered their consensus that there were two possible scenarios. One was a timed device activated when the engine turned over.

“Thirty seconds, max, from when I turned the key until the explosion,” I said. “Why the delay?”

Everyone shrugged.

The other option was that the bomb was activated by my cell phone, which I carried in my purse like most other women.

“Like in Iraq?” Curt said. “IEDs?”

“What?” Mrs. Anderson and I looked at him without understanding.

“Improvised Explosive Devices. You call a cell phone near the device and the ring detonates it.”