Ellen McKenzie 04-Murder Half-Baked (22 page)

Aunt Mary laughed out loud. “Couldn’t have put it better myself. Gina, have you gotten what you need? Good. Let’s go home. I’m beat.”

Susannah, Neil, and Rose left out the back door
,
everyone else out the front. Aunt Mary waved to Gary before she got into her car. I waited until she drove off, then walked back into the living room and set the dead bolt on the front door. I’d leave the back door unlocked. Dan
w
ould be home sometime before dawn
,
and that’s the door he would use. I stood in the middle of the room, thinking about that. I’d grown up in this house and couldn’t remember my parents ever locking the back door. It hadn’t even had a lock when I
had
moved back in. Dan was the one who thought we needed one. He called Mr. Leeds at the hardware store and the next day I had a dead bolt. Only, I never could remember to set it. Maybe, tonight, I would. Dan had a key. Did he have it on him? If not, he could wake me up. If I
could
sleep. I was exhausted, but not one bit sleepy. I walked back into the living room and looked out the window. The street was empty except for the black and white patrol car
stationed
in front of my house. No lights shown in any window in this respectable neighborhood, where all good citizens were in bed by ten o’clock and where crime was something that happened on TV. I’d bet there were half a dozen homes on this street with unlocked doors.

Headlights
were shining
. Someone had turned the corner and was slowly coming our way. Car? Truck? Grady Wilcox? I couldn’t tell. I fr
o
ze. What if he threw a firebomb at my house? He could open his window and lob it over here before Gary could open his car door. What should I do? Run upstairs and wake up the girls? The baby. Could we get the baby out? And Jake. My cat. Where was he? I hadn’t seen him all evening. Under the bed upstairs? On top of the refrigerator? I stared out the window, watching the lights approach. I needed to move. But somehow I couldn’t. Little beads of sweat pooled up around my hairline
,
and I could feel my heart beat faster, my breathing
become
shallow. If he threw something, I was right in the way. Move! The only thing that moved was my hand, reaching out to clutch the curtain. The lights slowed down. Move! I couldn’t.
 

It was a Toyota Camry. Light blue. Not orange and not a truck. The Witherspoons from a couple of houses down had a Toyota Camry. The car slowed more. I could see the driver take a good look at the patrol car, then at my front window before gathering speed again. I watched it pull into the Witherspoon
’
s driveway. I let the curtain drop and sighed. Just the neighbors coming home from the movies, or a friend’s house, curious about a patrol car, sitting without lights in front of my house. My heart slowed to a more dignified pace and my breathing settled down. I’d been terrified for the second time in two days. Damn Grady Wilcox! I had never laid eyes on him, but the thought of him, what he might have done, what he still might do, reduced me to jelly. I could not let this happen. I would
n
o
t let it happen. I would leave the back door unlocked, just as I always did, and march myself upstairs to bed and to sleep. I headed for the kitchen, meaning to turn out the light, but stopped. Dan would need it when he came in. He might
also
need the light in the living room. Should I turn on the staircase light? That might wake up one of the girls. I’d leave it off for now. And the stairs squeaked. Wasn’t there a quilt in the hall closet? Yes. There it was. Maybe, because I didn’t want to disturb anyone, I’d just lie here on the sofa where I could see out the window. That way, I’d be able to see Dan’s headlights. Or anyone else’s. Not that I was scared. It was just that
…
Jake
sauntered
into the room, purring. I picked him up, set him on the sofa and covered both of us with the quilt. Now I could relax and get some sleep. Only I didn’t.

“N
ot again.” Dan rolled over and groaned. “I know newborns don’t sleep through the night, but this is too much.”

I had to agree with him, especially as I was the one getting up to help Marilee. He was the one going back to sleep.

“How many times does this make?” The question came out from under the covers a bit muffled.

“Before or after you got home?”

The answer was lost under the quilt.

I pushed my feet into slippers and managed to get my arms into the sleeves of my bathrobe. “Dan, since you’re awake
…”

“Who said I was awake?”

“You sound awake. And it’s six thirty. Almost time to get up anyway. Dan, do you know where Grady is?”

“No.”

“Do you know why he set the house on fire?”

“No.”

“Do you know for sure it was him?”

“No.”

I was getting exasperated. “You don’t know much.”

“I know I got home at two o’clock this morning, that every time I go to sleep that kid starts howling, and that I have a nine o’clock meeting with Dick Hadley. He’s the fire chief.”

“I know.”

“Then you also know I’m going back to sleep for an hour. Maybe more if that kid shuts up. Good night, Ellie.”

He turned over and buried his head under a pillow. The baby continued to scream. I sighed and headed for Susannah’s
—
Marilee’s
—
room.

The screaming
stopped. I stood outside the door and listened to the quiet. I didn’t know if he’d fallen back asleep or if Marilee had figured out that breast-feeding could be really easy. You didn’t even have to get up. But since I was up and awake
… O
r was I
?

I made it downstairs without tripping over Jake or anything else. The coffeepot was right where I’d left it. Somehow I managed to fill it with water and coffee with my eyes half closed. I was sitting at the table, wondering if caffeine would be enough to get me awake and moving again, when Leona walked in.

“I smelled coffee and thought I’d come down. Hope you don’t mind.”

My eyes snapped open at the sight of her. The nightgown she’d picked up last night was about three sizes too big.
The
light cotton hung in soft folds from the shoulders, the sleeves full and flowing. She had found a cord somewhere and had tied it around her waist, probably to keep the gown up off the floor. She looked like a medieval nun. Only, with Leona, I was fairly certain the resemblance was surface only.

“It should be finished in just a minute. Grab a mug off the hutch. Cream and sugar?”

“Yeah.”

She headed for the hutch, lifted a mug off the shelf, took the lid off the sugar bowl, and peered inside. The cream pitcher sat empty and clean beside it. She ignored it. The refrigerator door opened
. S
he straightened up and put the whole carton of milk on the kitchen table, the sugar beside it. The coffee gurgled to a stop.

“Where’s your mug?”

“I haven’t gotten it yet.”

“You want I should
—
?”

“Thanks, yes.” I don’t know why I was surprised. Maybe because she hadn’t made one move to help last night, because she seemed so ineffectual the only other time I’d seen her in a kitchen, the day I met her at the now defunct Grace House.

She took down another coffee mug, poured and pushed the full
—
very full
—
mug my way, and sat down opposite me, shoving away a pile of clothes. “Bunch of ol’ junk.” She liberally spooned sugar into her coffee.

“I hope you didn’t lose anything you can’t replace.” I looked at the mug. How was I going to get that to my mouth without half of it ending up on the table? Or down my front?

“No. Didn’t have much, anyway.”

“But you had your purse with you? So, you have no clothes, but you still have some money, your checkbook, your driver’s license?”

“Only money I had was what I made at the Yum Yum. I had that with me. I don’t believe in leaving good money lying around.”

Did she think someone at Grace House would steal it? “How about your other things? Your charge cards, checkbook, that kind of thing?”

She snorted. “Hell, nobody’s goin
’
to give me a charge card. I’ve got a bank account but there’s never nothing in it. As for a driver’s license, well, I haven’t had one of them for a while.”

“So, the only thing you’re really out is your clothes?” I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. Could someone really have so little of their own in their life?

“I guess. No loss, though.”

If the rest of Leona’s clothes were like the ones she had on last night, she was right. “Then it’s a good thing Anne and Nathan got all those people to donate. We’re going to have to get this stuff off the table before breakfast anyway, so let’s see if there’s something here you can use. Gina and Marilee will have to have something also.”

I pushed some of the clothes her way and started through a pile next to my coffee. The first thing I picked up was a T-shirt with a ripped neck and unidentifiable stains down the front. Why
give
something like this? It belonged in the trash or under my coffee mug. That’s where it went, and I kept on looking.

“Here.” I held up a pair of sweatpants with the tags still on. Size small. “These should fit you, and here’s a sweatshirt.” I held it up and,
recalling
the T-shirt, went over it critically. “It looks new. You’ll need some underwear, but I don’t think we’re going to find any here.”

“Never wear it.” Leona took the clothes gingerly. “Guess these will be all right. For now. These should fit Marilee.” She held up a pair of plaid flannel pants. They had a drawstring at the waist, and for a girl who had just given birth that seemed like a good idea. “She could use this as a top.” The big shirt was
—
big, but it had buttons down the front.

“Did Marilee get her money out?” Leona threw out the words in an offhand manner, but I could feel her eyes on my face.

I was concentrating on the pile of clothes, dropping the impossibles on the floor, wondering how Aunt Mary could do this for all of the rummage sales she ran, so I almost missed
her comment
.
“Money?” I dropped a size
-
forty skirt, decorated liberally with purple pansies, on the send to the rummage sale pile and looked up. “What money?”

“Marilee had some money saved. I don’t know where she kept it. She sure wouldn’t have been happy to lose it.”

“How much money?”

Leona shrugged. “Enough to get her started somewhere else, least that’s what she told me.”

Money. Grady. Is that why he was looking so hard for Marilee? Had she taken
—
helped herself
—
to money before he kicked her out?

“Do they know who set the fire yet?” Leona watched me out of the corner of her eye. Her hand on her coffee mug tightened. “Was it Grady Wilcox?”

“I don’t know,” I replied truthfully. “But I do know he was seen in the neighborhood about the
same
time.”

“Idiot,” Leona told her coffee cup softly.

“Do you know Grady?” I hadn’t thought about that, I suppose because Leona was a whole generation older than Grady and Marilee.

“You could say so.” She glanced up at me for a moment, then resumed staring at her light brown coffee. “We lived in the same trailer park. Until I got kicked out by the landlord. I wasn’t late with my rent that often.”

“So you knew Marilee also?”

This time Leona lifted her head and stared at me. “Yeah. Somethin’ wrong with that?”

“Of course not,” I said hastily. “It sounds as if you both ended up at Grace House at the same time.”

“Humm.”

I took another really good look at her. Bony arms, long sharp nose, thin lips tightly pursed together, dirty blond hair that hung limply down her back And she didn’t wear underwear. Well, I guess it saved on the wash. Which we were going to have to do. Everyone who had been near that fire had smoke
-
saturated clothes.

But first, Leona needed to hit the shower. She was giving off a distinct smoky aroma, but hers was cigarette smoke. At least, I
thought
it was cigarette smoke.

“There’s a shower in the little bath down here, right off the service porch.” Thank goodness for Paul’s Plumbing. The shower now worked.

She looked blank.

“Where the washer and dryer are.” I pointed to the door, right beside the hutch.

She still looked blank.

“Everyone’s going to be up soon. You can get yours in first.”

“You telling me I need a shower? And there’s one in that little bathroom by the washing machine?”

I nodded. “There are towels in the bathroom. And shampoo.”

“Funny place for a bathroom.”

“My father had it put in when my sister and I got to be teenagers. Said it was the only place he could go where no one banged on the door and shouted for him to get out. Anyway, it’s all yours for the moment.”

I didn’t think she was going to move, but finally she got up, hitched her new clothes under one arm, and headed for the back porch and the little bathroom. She left her coffee mug on the table.

I picked my own mug up, wiped the bottom of it with the soiled T-shirt
—
which I dropped in the trash
—
put Leona’s mug in the dishwasher, and leaned up against the sink, sipping. All the donated articles stared back at me, silently reminding me of the huge needs of Leona, Marilee, and Gina. How had they ended up at Grace House? Leona was easy. Chronically out of work, in and out of alcohol abuse programs, I wondered how many different jobs Grace House had tried to train her for. I had no doubt Ruthie, whose standards were high, wouldn’t put up with her marginal performance for very long. What was it that Leona had said that first day? Something about her husband. He’d taken her kids and left. She had hinted that he’d been abusive. I wondered. There was a sullen air about her. Not open hostility, that would take too much effort, but more of a “I can’t ever catch a break” attitude. Except when she was around the baby. She didn’t want anyone to touch that baby, even his mother, and she didn’t want him out of her sight. Well, most of the time. I hadn’t seen her helping Marilee in the middle of the night. And she wasn’t there when the fire started. What was so important that she left the house? It seemed strange. Although, if she really had needed cigarettes
…
I pushed myself off of the counter, walked over to the coffeemaker and refilled my mug.
There was a convenience store about four blocks from Grace House. She could have walked there. If she had, her timing was sure good.