Eine Kleine Murder (7 page)

Chapter 11

Con Fiero: With fire; wild, fierce (Ital.)

It was so homey at the Harmons' home.
Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring
by Bach was even returning to me. The dark event of Gram's death had silenced my old favorite. When nothing else is running in my head for background music, Bach usually is, and it's almost always
Jesu
.

This time it was Al who broke the mood. “Well, dear,” said Al, rising with a smile. “Isn't it about time?”

“You go get started, Al. I'll just put these dishes to soak.”

Grace shooed me outside with Al, refusing to let me help with the clean-up, and soon a leaping blaze from their patio fire pit was sending sparks into the cool night sky.

Grace brought out a basket with some knitting and clicked her needles as she sat glancing from time to time at the flames. Al stood poking at the logs with a long stick for a few minutes, then brought over straightened wire hangers from a hook by the door and handed one to me.

Just then a familiar-sounding car that badly needed a muffler roared past at the bottom of the hill.

“That dolt must be visiting his idiot parents again,” he muttered. “He might as well live with them. He's always out here.”

His hands shook slightly as he threaded two marshmallows onto his own wire.

Grace saw his difficulty and stirred in her seat.

“Al, dear, don't get so upset about it.”

I stuck two marshmallows on my wire and held it over the flames, pretty sure I knew who the dolt was.

Al's face clouded. “No one's allowed to make noise at night, we agree on that. But all you have to do is be related to Mr. God Almighty Toombs.” The veins in his neck stood out as he struggled to repress his emotions. “Then you can do whatever you want …”

“Al, please,” Grace pleaded. She set her needles and yarn down in her lap.

“It's true, Grace, and you know it.” He whirled toward me. “He even complains about our having a camp fire every night.”

His eyes blazed in the firelight. They scared me. The homey feeling had gone up with the smoke. “He says we shouldn't build one so often. Makes the air too smoky. It isn't the city, for God's sake. There's enough air here to go around.”

He lowered his face and peered earnestly into mine. I cringed slightly and tried to avoid his fiery eyes by peeling my browned marshmallows off the wire and stuffing the sticky mess into my mouth. “Did you see that camper trailer in front of Hayley's?” he asked.

“The house with the pretty blue shutters?” I mumbled through my marshmallows.

“That's where the two little girls, Rachel and Rebecca, live,” said Grace. She had started knitting again. It appeared to be a sleeve for a sweater. “Their mother is Hayley.”

So they did live in the house I'd seen Toombs coming from. They were the girls he “would never hurt.”

“Ask Toombs if you could park a camper in front of your place,” snarled Al. “Go ahead. There's a ‘rule' about it. No one is allowed to park trailers at cabins here. They all have to be put up on the campground. The regulations apply to everyone but his relatives.”

“Al, she doesn't leave it there very long. She'll move it soon. Your ulcer.” Grace reached into her basket for another skein, pushed her glasses up as she shot him a warning look, then tied the yarn on. If Grace was the bow to Al's violin, she was lifting up, lightening the pressure, trying to stop his strings from vibrating so forcefully.

“All right, all right, I'll quit talking about him. Cressa will think I have an obsession. It's just that he's such a Neanderthal. I surely feel sorry for Martha. She's a better person than he is.”

I'd ask them another time about Toombs and the girls. Right now he needed to cool down. Would talking about Mo set him off?

“What's his son like?” I ventured, wanting their opinion of the “dolt.”

Al sighed and they exchanged a glance.

“Tell her about your earrings, Grace.”

She looked up, then gave me an abashed smile. “I'm not really sure I didn't lose them myself, that's the trouble. Just like Ida and her rings.”

“Rings?” My voice came out gravelly. The smoke was starting to burn my throat a bit.

“Ida lost her wedding rings and we always thought Mo took them. Then, a few weeks ago, my good diamond earrings, Al's gift to me on our twenty-fifth anniversary, went missing. Mo has a bad reputation for stealing jewelry. But enough about problems. Would you like another marshmallow, Cressa?”

“No thanks, two is plenty after that fabulous dinner. It's fun, though. I haven't roasted marshmallows for years.”

Mo said he wanted to open a jewelry store. With stolen goods? The subject of God Almighty Toombs seemed to be, thankfully, dropped. But Mo—did he steal Gram's rings
and
kill her?

“I'd better get going,” I said. “I'm about to be yawning in your faces.”

“Let me show you my garden on your way out.” Grace got up and stuffed her work into the basket. “What you can see of it in the dark. I'm experimenting with edible plants. Herbs and such. I've learned so much about what to eat. And what not to.”

“What do you mean?” We strolled away from the patio.

“There are so many things in a regular garden that are poison. You'd be amazed. A daffodil bulb will kill you if you eat it. Of course, who'd eat a daffodil bulb?” Grace laughed, her bright gray curls bobbing in the moonlight.

She squatted down and pointed to the edge of the bed.

“See these cute little things?” she continued, pointing to a clump of small tan mushrooms with white spots on the tops, just visible with the light of the fire behind us. “They're called Death Angel. Never pick a mushroom with white gills.”

“I would never pick any mushrooms. I don't know anything about them at all.”

“Well, some are tasty, but these can make a person very sick, even kill you. And you don't start to get sick until hours after you've eaten them. Sometimes the next day. They pop up all around here, too. I have to dig them out almost every week.”

Grace offered to walk me part of the way back.

“You don't really need to,” I told her.

“That's all right. I was getting stiff sitting. I need a short walk. And I think I'll take my evening dip shortly.”

“You're going swimming this late?”

“Oh yes. This is about the time Ida and I have always loved to swim.”

“But you're going alone?”

“Don't worry, I'm very careful and I don't swim when it starts getting chilly out. It's cool tonight, but not too bad. Would you like to join me?”

I shuddered. Could I go into that water again? Do the get-back-on-the-horse thing? “Maybe not tonight.”

“I understand.”

When we were out of earshot of her yard, she started apologizing for her husband's earlier tirade.

“It was Mo roaring around here tonight in his car that got him started.”

I ducked my head, glad I hadn't mentioned I'd gone to lunch with him. That might have set off another rant.

“It's mostly,” Grace continued, “that Al hates the way Toombs sets himself up as such an important personage and lords it over everybody. I think he resents having such an illiterate person in a position of authority over him. Al is used to being the professor, you know. In charge of things and looked up to. Toombs is really ignorant. You should see some of the notes he writes.”

“Well, I've heard him talk. He has strange ideas about the meanings of some words.”

“He has
no
ideas about the meanings of some words.” She tossed her curls. Even in the darkness, anger distorted her round face. She was free to express it away from her husband, whose rage she had to keep in check. “He'll be the death of us. He would rub Al the wrong way even if we only saw him once a month. I think Toombs knows that, and I think he takes pleasure in objecting to almost everything we try to do.” She pounded one fist into her other hand. “I'm convinced the reason they stopped keeping up the footpath around the lake is because Al and I used it so much. It was weedy and buggy the last time we attempted it.”

Grace sighed as we crossed the gravel road in the pale moonlight, sadness on her usually placid face, worry on her brow. The crunch of our shoes was becoming a familiar sound. “I can't really blame Al for disliking Toombs so,” she said, “but I wish he wouldn't let it get to him. It's bad for his health.”

“I'm getting the idea Toombs isn't very popular. Couldn't the members get someone else?”

The dewy grass in my front yard was so tall we were almost wading through it. I would have to get it mowed before Toombs complained about me.

“It wouldn't be that easy to get a new manager. They have to live here, to be on hand all the time. We complain a lot about the Toombses, but I don't think anyone else around here would want the job. By the way, we'd love to have you join us for lunch or dinner any time. Al's been catching so many catfish we can't eat them all.”

“Your catfish is wonderful. I'll probably take you up on that.”

We had reached my front door and I thanked her again for dinner and for walking me to my place.

“See you tomorrow,” she said as she turned back.

Chapter 12

Lagrimoso: “Tearful,”polic plaintive, like a lament (Ital.)

For the second time, I pounded on Al Harmon's door in panic. “I found her in the same place I found Gram.” My voice was screechy. He looked past me, not comprehending. His body stilled and I had to shy away from his hollow eyes.

When I had looked out my front window at Grace's dark form heading for the swimming area, a large towel draped over her arm, I realized I couldn't let her go alone. I could hear her flip-flops'
twup
,
twup
as she went. Her step was springy for someone her age. A beam of moonlight glinted off her bifocals. I knew I really should join her; she was as vulnerable as Gram. So I stuck my cell phone in the charger and started to gather my things. My bathing suit from last night was still wet, but I dug my spare out of my suitcase, grabbed a beach towel from the armoire, ignored the envelope with my name on it again, and put on my beach shoes. I lifted my locket over my head and threw it onto the couch next to the door.

When I had reached the beach, Grace was nowhere in sight, so I'd headed across the lake to find her. Looking back, I suppose, somewhere in the dark part of my mind, I expected to find her body there, on the west side, but it was a shock nonetheless.

Now I led Al to the couch and gently sat him down, much as he'd done for me after I'd found Gram's body. But I wasn't sure I should wrap the afghan around his shoulders, as Grace had done. Thinking it might remind him too sharply of that night, I sat and rubbed his thin hands instead.

“I called nine-one-one already,” I told him.

I'd run to the nearest phone when I'd found her, immediately after throwing up that wonderful meal Grace had cooked, complete with marshmallows. The mess had floated on the water, then dissipated as I retrieved her lifeless form and dragged it onto the far shore, as I had with Gram. The nearest phone, since mine was on the charger back at my cabin, was at the Toombses' house.

Martha had opened the door wide at my frantic pounding. I noticed Mo's car was there. If he left while we were eating, he must have come back.

“Oh, it's you, Cressa,” she had breathed, and let me into the living room.

“The mister is out,” Martha confided, confirming my thought at seeing the one big comfortable chair empty. Her perpetual worried expression made her look distraught over the fact that he was gone. I would have been relieved, myself, if I were her.

There was no sign of Mo in the house, either, thank God.

As she did at my last visit, she stood in the middle of the room, looking like she couldn't decide what to do next. I decided for her this time.

“I need to use the phone. It's an emergency.”

“Oh dear.” Her eyebrows tented higher and she clutched her worn hands together. Her pink rollers shook with her head. She took in my bathing suit and beach coat. “What seems to be…?”

“I'll tell you in a minute.” I used the phone on the corner desk to call it in. The operator made it easy, asking what my emergency was (a dead body), what my location was (Crescent Lake), and telling me to stay put until an official arrived. I said I'd be at the Harmons' place, then left Martha standing agape at what she'd heard me say, and made my way up the hill to be with Al.

Now Al stared around the room. The cottage bore Grace's touch on almost every inch. Her framed needlework adorned the walls, her unfinished knitting sat on an end table, and books on herb gardening and cooking stood in piles on the kitchen counter. Her gardening gloves were flung onto a shelf by the door.

“What am I going to do?” he asked me. All I could do was grab his hand again. There was no answer I could give. I brought him a glass of water, but he set it down in front of him, shaking his head back and forth in his own private rhythm of grief.

“Is there anyone I should call? Your sons?”

“Yes. Their numbers are over there.” He motioned to the spindle-legged desk under a side window. I rifled through the top drawer and managed to find a cloth-bound address book with the sons' names listed under H.

I patted his long gnarled hand and went into his kitchen to make the call.

Not ten minutes later, an extremely tall dark-haired man in uniform knocked on the door. His name tag read Kyle Bailey, and I led the Alpha police chief down to the beach area and pointed toward the far shore where I had found Grace's body. Al didn't want to come with us. I had to scurry to keep up with the chief's long strides. The man must have been six and a half feet tall.

The ambulance had arrived and the EMTs were already setting off in Al's boat.

Chief Bailey stared across the lake for a minute. The water lay peaceful, the boat's wake barely rippling in the moonlight.

“It's the same place I found my grandmother.” My voice came out as a whisper.

“Your grandmother was Ida Miller?” He peered down and gave me a quick look, his face shadowed in the darkness.

“Yes. I'm staying here in her cabin until the funeral.” I screwed up my courage to give him my opinion. “And I don't see how they could both have drowned. Do you think that's likely?”

“You'd better go back to that cabin. I'll need to get a statement from you, in light of the two deaths being so similar, but I can do it tomorrow. We'll work on getting the body recovered tonight. See what it looks like.”

He said he would be around the next morning, then turned and strode toward his car. I was officially dismissed. So I did as he asked and started my trudge up the hill to sit with Al, but he hadn't answered my question. I wasn't at all sure my Gram, or Grace, had died accidentally. And Bach had again deserted me.

I looked toward the heavens for some answers. A shooting star arced in cold brilliance across the sky. Its trail split the blackness surrounding it. Was that an answer?