Elizabeth C. Main - Jane Serrano 01 - Murder of the Month (23 page)

“Vanessa’s death was an accident—”

“No, it wasn’t. I’m almost sure of that now, and if somebody killed her, the chances are about a million to one that the same person who murdered Vanessa shot Gil. It wasn’t my daughter. Please, please help me.” I waited, unsure from her silence whether I had touched a chord with my somewhat shaky argument.

“Anyway, why should I talk to you?” she asked. “Maybe your daughter killed both of them. Why don’t you ask her?”

“Because I don’t know where she is. No one has seen her since Wednesday night. She was going to come and talk to you sometime after that. Did you see her?”

When she finally answered me, her voice was flat. “I didn’t see her and I can’t help you. I really can’t. Go away and leave me alone.”

What other lever could I pull? “I know you lied about Gil’s alibi,” I bluffed. “If you help me now, no one else will ever have to know you did that.”

Jenna looked up abruptly and narrowed her eyes. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve said all I’m going to say.” Without waiting for my reaction, she stretched out on the loveseat and put one arm across her face. Our conversation was over.

“All right. I’m going, but I’ll be back. Think about what I said.”

Brave words to Jenna, but what more could I do? I returned to my empty house, out of ideas and out of hope. When the phone rang, I didn’t even reach for it. It would just be something else I couldn’t deal with.

Once I recognized Jenna’s hesitant voice, I jumped to cut off the answering machine. “Hello? Hello?”

“Oh, you’re there,” Jenna said. “Okay, come back and I’ll tell—”

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” I said, and I was, running yellow lights without a second thought and ignoring the speed bumps in her development.

This time, she opened the door to me without an argument. She looked somehow smaller than she had just a few minutes ago. Maybe it was the slumped shoulders. She led the way inside without a word and then turned to face me.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what I know.” Her quiet start shifted quickly to belligerence with her very next words. “But I’m warning you right now that I’ll deny everything if you blab it to the police.”

“Believe me, I have even less interest in talking to the police than you do,” I assured her. I waited in silence for her to continue. Without knowing what had changed her mind, I didn’t want to say anything that would upset her. Her vacillation between cooperation and belligerence told me that she was still ambivalent about talking to me.

To distract myself while I waited for her to decide how much to divulge, I studied the tasteful furnishings. She had several Cascade Festival of Music prints on the walls and an enormous free-form bronze filling the lighted niche in the twelve-foot-high wall between this area and whatever palatial rooms lay beyond it. I looked in vain for a stray sock or a pile of newspapers beside a comfortable chair. Even the framed pictures sitting on various polished surfaces looked as though they had come as a color-coordinated set. No snapshots of Jenna laughing while holding up a fish or standing proudly atop South Sister with her family.

My rough estimate told me that either Jenna was the most successful interior designer in the state, or she had gained access to her family trust funds immediately upon reaching adulthood. Either way, her life probably wasn’t exactly going according to plan. By the time I had completed my survey of the room, she was ready to talk.

“Their marriage was a sham,” she stated, “and Gil was going to divorce her. He’d outgrown her provincialism years ago, and he and I were in love. Nobody else knew.”

Even though she’d grown up in Juniper, Jenna apparently didn’t understand how the small-town grapevine worked. If Alix’s assertions about Gil’s general philandering were true, Jenna didn’t know much about him either.

“I know for a fact that he didn’t kill her. That’s why I said he was at the open house the whole time.”

“But you can’t be sure of the exact time she fell. Just because you loved him doesn’t mean he—”

“I’ll spell it out for you,” Jenna said impatiently. “We saw her fall. Gil and I were together down in the gorge. She must have been trying to catch us on camera and she fell, right near us.”

“You were there!” My thoughts spun. No wonder Jenna had given him an alibi. She knew he hadn’t killed Vanessa, but she didn’t want the whole community to learn about their affair.

“You actually saw …?”

“She didn’t make a sound, just … dropped out of the sky like a rock.”

“Did you see anyone else?”

She shook her head. “It didn’t occur to me. I was looking at her … and then Gil figured out what she must have been doing. He told me to get back to the open house, so I just ran. We had separate cars, of course. He said he’d see what he could do for Vanessa and no one would know I’d been there. I didn’t see the harm.”

“I’m sure you didn’t,” I said soothingly.

“Besides, I thought it was an accident.” She looked pleadingly at me. “I really did … until I heard about Gil. Now I don’t know what to think.”

“But you knew all this when I talked to you a few minutes ago. What made you change your mind about talking to me?”

“I turned on the TV after you left,” she said. “Of course they’re talking about Gil’s murder and a lot of background, including the day Vanessa died, about how she didn’t die right away. I didn’t know that. Somehow I’d missed it before.”

“The end was the same,” I said. “Does it matter so much?”

“Yes, it matters! When Gil got to the open house, he told me that the fall had killed Vanessa instantly. On the news they said she lived for at least half an hour. She even tried to crawl. She must have been in terrible pain, and he just left her there to die. I didn’t know. Really, I didn’t.”

Now I understood. Jenna had believed in Gil, believed everything he’d told her, but now she was seeing him in a new light.

“And another thing,” she said. “They said the camcorder was smashed, but it wasn’t, not when she fell. When I left, it was fine. It seemed ironic that she was all smashed up, but it wasn’t.”

“So you think Gil took the tape?”

“Could he have done that?” Jenna asked in wonder. “It’s so calculating.”

“I can understand why you don’t want to talk to the police,” I said. “If they learn about your relationship with Gil, they might even think you had something to do with his death. Maybe he broke up with you, or maybe you were the one who pushed Vanessa. Nobody can corroborate your version, now that Gil is dead.”

“It was nothing like that! I’ve told you the truth about what happened!” Jenna cried.

“I believe you,” I said. “I’m just pointing out how things might look to the police. We each have our reasons for wanting to know what happened this week. It’s a fact that Gil was murdered. I believe that Vanessa was also murdered, probably by the same person. I need your help to prove that that person wasn’t my daughter.”

“I’ve told you everything I know,” Jenna said. “I didn’t even see your daughter this week.”

I needed to press her further and now I had a lever. She didn’t want her reputation destroyed if she could avoid it. “Maybe if we work together, no one will ever have to know that you lied about Gil’s alibi. That might not be possible, but it’s the best chance you have.”

Jenna was convinced. “What do you want to know?”

“You were here all day yesterday?”

“Gil came over mid-morning and we left for a while. I worked at the office in the afternoon.”

“Weren’t you nervous about being seen together? I mean—”

“I know what you mean. We had a system. He’d call on his cell phone when he was getting close and I’d walk down the road to the cul-de-sac by the woods there. It’s right at the edge of the developed area, out of the way. That’s what he did yesterday. We drove around and talked for a while about our future, what we should do next … and then he brought me back. That was the last time I saw him. We were trying not to see each other too openly for a while. We thought we had plenty of time.”

Don’t react, I told myself, willing my face to remain neutral. Jenna had been horrified to find that Gil had been a cold, calculating person, but she should take a look at herself. Still, Jenna was talking, focused on yesterday, and that was the important thing. “What about later?”

“He called last night about nine.”

“Had he seen Bianca?”

“No. I’m sure he’d have mentioned that.”

“How about today?”

“He was going to meet Harley downtown for breakfast. That was a regular thing.”

“Anyone else ever join them?”

“Vanessa sometimes insisted on going.” Her face closed again.

Oops. She’d be more likely to cooperate if the topic was Gil’s murder rather than his marriage. “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted Gil dead?”

“Kurt Wendorf maybe. He hated Gil, I guess, for prosecuting his rotten kid.”

I let her subjective interpretation of Max go by. Jenna had been thoroughly indoctrinated by Gil on the necessity for maintaining the safety and moral fiber of the community—so long at it didn’t interrupt their affair. “Did Gil feel Kurt was dangerous?”

“He thought Kurt was making a fool of himself.”

That made sense. And Kurt was even stupid enough to do it publicly, giving Gil free publicity and enhancing his glow as the aggrieved community hero. His political future would have been a slam dunk, if only he had lived long enough to cash in. I wondered again whether Kurt had an alibi for the time Gil was shot. And where he had been the day Vanessa died. “Do you know of anything Kurt had against Vanessa? Maybe something going way back?”

Jenna shrugged. “He probably was in love with her in high school. I hear everybody was.” The look on her face showed that she couldn’t quite see why. She probably had trouble imagining that Vanessa, in her late thirties, had ever been attractive. The eternal arrogance of youth. Bianca had it too, as well as the knockout figure and long blonde hair. I sincerely hoped that that was where the similarity between Bianca and Jenna stopped.

Jenna might not have seen Bianca yesterday, but perhaps Bianca had seen her. “You said Gil parked at the end of the road. Could you show me where?”

Jenna was eager to get me out of her townhouse and I was eager to go. Leading me back onto the tiny front porch, she indicated a clump of aspens that was just barely visible from here as the road curved. We didn’t bother with cordial good-byes.

The cul-de-sac Jenna indicated had obviously been the designated location for workers’ cars and cigarette breaks during the latest building phase. They hadn’t yet spruced up the area. There had been too much traffic through here to distinguish footprints, so I brushed aside branches and walked a few yards further into the trees. Jenna’s townhouse was visible from here, so Bianca might have found this an ideal place to lie in wait for her. Thinking like Bianca was tough, but I had to try.

Just then I spotted light bouncing off something metallic, something that didn’t belong in the woods. It was too high off the ground to be a stray beer can. An old washing machine illegally dumped? I moved cautiously toward it. Lying on its side and half-covered with branches was Bianca’s bicycle. I didn’t touch it.

“Bianca!” I shouted. No sound but the rush of nearby traffic. I looked wildly around and called several more times. Nothing. She had been here, but she wasn’t here now. How and when did she leave? Someone—and I could only hope it was Bianca—had attempted to hide the bicycle. The police needed to know about this right away, but first, I had another question for Jenna.

Back on her front porch, I kept my finger steadily on the chimes until she opened the door. Still out of breath from my run up the street, I asked, “When you met Gil at the end of the road, did you get right into the car?”

“What possible difference—”

“Please, it’s important.”

“We walked back into the woods for a couple of minutes— so we wouldn’t be seen—to talk over what we should do.”

“But you didn’t see Bianca?”

“In the woods? No, of course not.” Then Jenna’s face, already pale, lost all color. “Oh, no. You didn’t … Is she …?”

No one could fake that reaction. I was sure of it. This development was a surprise to her.

“Bianca’s bicycle was hidden in the trees. Did Gil get there before you?”

“No, he called as he was driving and we arrived at the same time.”

“What happened after you and Gil talked?”

“I told you. We got into his car and drove around for a while. And then he brought me back here and left.”

At last I had a small piece of the puzzle. Bianca had been near this place sometime after Wednesday night. It might not be much, but it was a start.

“You’re not going to tell the police about me, are you?” Jenna asked.

I dodged a direct answer. “Right now I’m going home.” I wanted to check again to see whether Bianca had finally showed up. After that, I didn’t know what I’d do. I’d keep Jenna’s name private if I possibly could, but her chances of coming out of this situation with her reputation intact were looking worse by the minute.

My house appeared empty, just the way I had left it, but I called out anyway, “Bianca? It’s okay. I’m alone.” I listened intently for any sound of her presence, but there was nothing other than the steady ticking of the mantle clock. Today its sound reminded me of how much time had gone by without any word from Bianca.