Fit to Die (18 page)

“Ronnie might very well refund our money tomorrow evening when we come in for class,” she insisted quietly. “How can you all assume the worst of a fellow human being? She made a mistake. Let’s give her a chance to correct it.”

Gillian’s pacifistic attitude gave the rest of them pause.

“You’re right about giving her a chance, Gillian,” Lindy said, smiling appreciatively at her friend. “However, I still think we should go over to Ronnie’s house and talk to her. I think she should know how we all feel and I’d sleep a whole lot easier tonight knowing that she’s going to do right by us tomorrow.”

“All right then,” Gillian stood as well, fluffing out the bottom hem of her black and chartreuse polka-dot blouse. “But we’re not a lynch mob. We need to approach her with kindness and respect.”

“You’d better be our spokesperson then, ’cause I’m not feelin’ too kind toward that swindling praying mantis right now,” Bennett growled.

“I’ll drive,” James offered as he locked up his office. “I know where she lives because I had to give her a ride home awhile back. Plus, my truck can hold all of us.”

“Yeah,” Bennett made an hourglass figure in the air. “Witness to Fitness has slimmed us down, but not enough to squeeze all five of us into my old mail truck. Lead the way, James. I’m gonna shake the pom-poms right out of that cheerleader’s hands.”

James pulled into the Cozy Valley Town Homes and struggled to recall which unit belonged to Ronnie. Fortunately, her VW Bug was sitting outside her home. He parked his truck in the street and opened one of the back doors in order to let two of the ladies slide out.

“This place is so cute!” Lindy declared. “I love the replica gaslights and how everyone has flower boxes.”

“Except Ronnie’s daisies are fake,” Lucy scoffed, pointing at the window box perched next to Ronnie’s gray front door. “How appropriate.”

“Now, friends,” Gillian cautioned. “Let’s get a feel for the tone we want to set here. Think gentle. Imagine yourselves approaching a scared animal. We need to speak softly and—”

“Carry a big stick,” Bennett grunted, pretending to look around on the trim square of lawn for one.

James gazed up at the townhouse. “She may not even be home. Go ahead Gillian. You’re our voice of reason.”

With a take-charge set to her shoulders, Gillian tugged downward on her shirt and rang the doorbell. A tripping of chimes could be heard from within. They all waited. James pulled nervously at a jagged fingernail. He disliked confrontation and wanted to get his money back and retreat to the safety of his home as soon as possible. He hated waiting for Ronnie to appear almost as much as he resented being swindled by her. Gillian pressed the doorbell again.

“Figures,” Bennett huffed after a full minute had passed. “She’s probably out on a leisurely and relaxing fifteen-mile run followed by a few thousand stomach crunches. Then she’ll eat a wheat germ and alfalfa sandwich while watching exercise videos.”

Gillian peered in the vertical rectangle of glass flanking the front door and said, “She’s got to be in there. I see a candle burning on the table inside.”

“Can you see anything else?” Lindy asked.

“No. I’ll just knock once and then we’ll have to assume she’s …
indisposed.” Gillian raised her fist and began to pound heavily on the door. She uttered a startled “Oh!” as the door swung noiselessly inward.

“Guess it wasn’t closed all the way,” Lucy said in a hushed tone and James felt an inexplicable chill tickle the length of his spine.

“Ronnie!” Gillian called gaily. “Yoo hoo! It’s some of your clients. We’ve come to have a dialogue with you.” She paused. “Ronnie?”

James stepped onto the stoop and pulled at Gillian’s sleeve. “Let’s just go. She’s obviously not going to come to the door.”

Gillian sniffed. “Smells like eucalyptus. What a nice fragrance. Let me just tiptoe in and blow out that candle. If Ronnie’s gone out, I don’t want her to return to a house made of cinders just because she was careless.”

“Why not?” Bennett asked crossly. “Would serve her right.”

After casting a long look of reproach at Bennett, Gillian breezed inside while the others watched her progress from the open doorway.

“Uh oh,” Gillian hissed back at them as she pointed at the table where the candle burned. “She must have company. There’s an empty wine bottle here and two goblets.” She gestured wildly toward the stairs. “Who knows what’s happening on the second floor?”

“Get out of there!” James whispered urgently, but Gillian was too busy examining something else on the dining room table.

“What are you looking at, woman?” Bennett demanded, craning his neck.

“A plate of cheese.” Gillian wore an expression of bewilderment. “It can’t be fresh, though. Some of these slices of Gouda and Jarlsberg are hard as a rock. I think Ronnie may not be here after all.”

“Or she’s wasted and is passed out upstairs,” Lucy suggested, the idea clearly pleasing to her. “Remember that she was out sick yesterday.”

“I’m going to run up and check on her,” Gillian announced. “There was a time, back in my wilder days, when I had a few wine coolers too many myself. I just want to make sure she doesn’t need any help. I know some splendid natural cures for a hangover.”

Before anyone could protest, Gillian began mounting the stairs. Pushed from behind by both Lucy and Lindy, James found himself inside the house, peering up at Gillian’s form as she made her way to the top.

A door opened somewhere above their heads. “She’s not in the bedroom!” Gillian called down. “But there are more candles aflame up here. They’re all burned down pretty low, too.” Another door was opened.

Suddenly, they heard a heavy thump.

“Gillian? You okay?” Lindy shouted.

There was no answer.

“Gillian?” Lucy yelled and then began running up the stairs. James, Lindy, and Bennett were right on her heels.

In the small, carpeted hallway, lit by a dim overhead light, they saw Gillian sitting on her bottom, her legs stretched out straight in front of her and her mouth hanging open as if it had come unhinged. Her eyes were glazed. Without turning to her friends or speaking a word, she lifted her right arm and pointed toward the open door across from her.

Following a hair’s breadth behind Lucy, James entered into a bathroom. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness, as the only source of light emitted from half a dozen narrow white candles and they had burned so low that the wicks were smoking. Shadows bounced around the walls. James swept his eyes over the countertop, noting a bottle of Jack Daniels among the candles. It was about a quarter full. He saw a pile of towels stacked neatly by the sink, a toilet at the far end of the room, and a large whirlpool tub to his right.

James sucked in his breath at the same time Lucy released a faint cry. Ronnie was in the bathtub, her naked body entirely submerged with the exception of the tip of her nose and her knuckles and toes, which poked over the waterline like small archipelagos of flesh. Her brown hair floated out around her head like a Japanese fan and her open eyes stared up at them from beneath the stagnant water. Her arms hung weightless and her lips were slightly parted. The shapes of her small breasts were barely visible in the darkness and a series of deeper shadows kept her modestly covered from her abdomen to her knees. James couldn’t help but notice the small tattoo of a multi-colored lizard or salamander that had been carefully inked into the skin above Ronnie’s immobile heart. The impression her lifeless body created was that of incredible relaxation, as if at any moment she would blink, or perhaps sit up and scream at them for invading her privacy.

James couldn’t tear his gaze away from her sunken face. He could not shake the similarities between Ronnie’s death pose and that of the drowned girl in Millais’s haunting painting of Ophelia, only Ronnie was not surrounded by flowers but by tired candles and a bottle of nearly empty booze.

“We’re too late!” Gillian wailed from the hallway, breaking the silence. “She’s drunk herself to death!”

It was then that James noticed the note taped in the middle of the bathroom mirror. It had been typed on a plain piece of white copier paper.

“What does that say?” Lindy murmured almost inaudibly, pointing at the note.

James leaned toward the paper and read its contents aloud.

To the Authorities,

I am responsible for the Polar Pagoda fire. I started it using whiskey and matches. I wanted Willy’s business to fail and now
I can’t live with myself any longer. I am truly sorry.

After James fell silent, Lucy exhaled a long breath and then turned to the others. “We’d better back on out of here. We don’t want to touch anything. Let’s go, Gillian.”

Bennett and James helped Gillian to her feet. She was trembling with shock. Lucy put an arm around Lindy and ushered her downstairs. The friends settled themselves numbly around Ronnie’s kitchen table while Lucy called Sheriff Huckabee.

James examined the tableau before him. As Gillian had mentioned earlier, there was a bottle of wine, an inexpensive California Cabernet sold at most grocery stores, two goblets, a plate of cheese, and a breadbasket filled with an untouched loaf of what appeared to be the kind of miniature French Baguette only made locally by the Sweet Tooth. Lipstick marks ringed the rim of the goblet with a swallow of wine in its bowl while the second goblet, which seemed to be completely full, looked as if it had not even been picked up. James squinted in the light in order to see if fingerprints had marred the surface, but it looked fresh off the drying rack. In fact, there were even little watermarks that showed where Ronnie had missed a few spots in polishing the exterior of the delicate glass.

As Gillian, Lindy, and Bennett sat motionless and unspeaking, Lucy also began to inspect the area. She eyed the contents on the table as closely as James did, and then walked around the kitchen, her arms crossed, as she absorbed every little detail. As the sound of sirens invaded the still air, James met Lucy’s eyes. There was a mixture of trepidation and excitement flickering within her blue irises, and James knew that she would have to handle all of the difficult questioning in regard to why the five of them were congregated in a dead woman’s kitchen.

He nodded at Lucy as outside, the doors of the patrol cars opened and then slammed shut again. She stood a fraction taller and issued a slight smile for his benefit. “Don’t worry,” she said softly as she moved alongside James, “this will be a good test for me. If I pass, I’ll know that I’m ready to get out from behind my desk.” She gazed toward the front door. “Then I’ll be the one responding to calls for help.”

“I should have known you’d be here,” Deputy Donovan snarled at Lucy as he burst through the doorway, his gun drawn and his body poised in an aggressive stance. “You’ve always got to be in the thick of things, don’t ya?” He puffed up his cheeks in a childish attempt to impersonate a heavy person.

“Holster your gun, Keith. There are no assailants present,” Lucy replied in a dismissive tone. “But you do look kind of cute when you puff your face out like that. I think I saw a similar mating technique on one of those Mutual of Omaha wildlife shows the other night. Yes … that’s it!” she snapped her fingers together. “At first I thought it was the special on bullfrogs, but now I remember. It was a special on baboons,” she lowered her voice, “and how they attracted females by drawing attention to their bright red asses!”

The freckles on Donovan’s face merged into a crimson mass. Just as he was about to launch a full-fledged verbal assault on his co-worker, Sheriff Huckabee and Deputy Truett marched over the threshold.

“Evening, Lucy,” the sheriff said as he glanced around the entranceway and into the front room of Ronnie’s home. “You always seem to be callin’ me away from a good meal. The missus made beef brisket tonight. It was as tender as a groom on his weddin’ night.” He frowned. “It’ll never reheat as good. Never does. Now, you say we got a dead woman upstairs in the tub?”

“Yes, sir.” Lucy immediately switched on a professional demeanor, completely ignoring Donovan as he rudely brushed by her and bounded up the stairs. “It looks like she had a good deal to drink and maybe drowned in the bath. There’s a suicide note as well. None of us have touched a thing.”

“Except for the cheese!” Gillian piped up from the other room. “I squished a piece or two to see if it was fresh.”

Huckabee moved deeper into the front room and took in the foursome seated at Ronnie’s table. “I can’t for the life of me imagine what kind of party you’ve got going on here, Lucy. Why don’t you tell me the whole story while we take a look-see at the scene?”

“It would be my pleasure, sir.” Lucy began talking rapidly until her voice became muffled to the others waiting anxiously in the kitchen. After what seemed like an interminable amount of time, the two deputies returned from upstairs and began taking statements from them on an individual basis.

James was relieved that Glenn Truett was interviewing him. Truett seemed like a simple soul whose main purpose was to get his job done so that he could spend his time on other pursuits. Lucy had mentioned that he was an avid fisherman as well as an obsessive NASCAR fan. Truett jotted down a few disinterested notes based on the story James told, and then told him to swing by the station the next day in order to sign an official statement about the evening’s events. Free to leave, James waited for Lucy and the others by his truck, but Lindy informed him that although Lucy was staying put, the rest of them were more than ready to go home.

“Here comes the coroner,” Bennett noted as a small man carrying a toolbox in one hand and an old-fashioned, leather physician’s bag in the other nodded politely in their direction.

“Well, you don’t have to watch too many episodes of CSI to be able to make a ruling in this case,” Lindy said as she issued the man a quick wave.

“Oh,” Gillian moaned from the back seat. “I feel so contaminated from being in that house. I can’t wait to put my feet up and sip some Lemon Myrtle leaf tea. You are all welcome to join me recover if you’d like.”

“Thanks for the offer,” James answered as they drove away from Ronnie’s townhouse, now ablaze with light as a troop of uniformed figures moved about within. “But I think my recovery is only going to be helped along by raiding my father’s supply of Cutty Sark.”

Lucy became so involved with work that James barely heard from her. She sent out a brief e-mail to the supper club members in order to inform them that drowning had indeed caused Ronnie’s death, but that the coroner refused to label the cause of death as suicide. The astute man noticed that there were some suspicious bruises around Ronnie’s ankles, implying that someone may have forced her head under the surface of the water by holding her forcefully by the feet until the oxygen in her lungs was replaced by tepid bath water.

“Her blood alcohol levels were through the roof,” Lucy told James during a short phone call Thursday night. “She may have barely been conscious when she was drowned.”

“It’s a murder case, then?” James asked, both horrified and intrigued by the news.

“Oh yes.” Lucy was in her element. “The whole townhouse had been wiped clean of prints. What’s more is that bottle of Jack Daniels we saw in her bathroom had a familiar-looking residue inside.”

“As in the bottle found at the Polar Pagoda fire?”

“Exactly! It’s been sent to the lab for analysis, but I’d bet five bucks that the residue was left from crushed-up Valium tablets.”

James felt his mind spinning. “But does that mean Ronnie actually did set that fire, like her note says, or did her killer start it? After all, I still don’t believe she had any reason to put Willy out of business.”

“I know.” Lucy sighed into the receiver and then perked up again. “Another thing is, that note didn’t sound like her. It was so flat, so …”

“Without personality?” James suggested.

“Yes! If Ronnie were to leave a suicide note, I could see it on cute stationery with a lot of exclamation marks, you know?” James heard a click and knew that Lucy was receiving an incoming call. “I’d better go, James. Can you fill in the others for me?”

James initiated the supper club phone tree by calling Lindy. Witness to Fitness was shut up tight on Wednesday with a sign taped to the front door that the business would be closed until further notice. James checked out a low-fat cookbook from the library and decided to create his own menus until Phoebe and Dylan were finished sorting out what would become of Ronnie’s business. Murphy’s headline in The Star about the fraudulent meals was instantly forgotten after it was replaced the next day by the news of the death of the popular Witness to Fitness proprietor. Murphy had left James several messages to call her, but so far he had avoided talking to her directly about the case. He felt that if anyone should receive any limelight over the incident, it should be Lucy.

Lindy picked up on the first ring. James invited her to his house for their Sunday supper club meeting and then gave her an update on the investigation into Ronnie’s death.

“Wow! Murder!” Lindy breathed excitedly. “Here I thought the case of the fire was all wrapped up with Ronnie’s suicide. Now, we’re just as confused about that as before. We’ve got two victims and no suspects. Looks like we make some mighty pitiful detectives.” She paused. “I know this is totally off the subject, but what are you going to cook on Sunday since we don’t seem to be full members of the Witness to Fitness program at the moment?”

James explained his plan and then asked Lindy to forward all of the information on to Gillian. Just as he was settling down in a recliner to finish the final chapter of the latest Michael Crichton novel, the phone rang and Bennett, sounding uncharacteristically unsettled, asked James to meet him at the Woodrow Wilson Tavern, the town’s only bar.

“Now?” James frowned as he gazed longingly at his book and at his feet ensconced in his raggedy slippers.

“I need your advice, man.”

“I’ll be right there.”

Bennett slid a mug filled with blonde beer in front of James as soon as he was seated on one of the Tavern’s red leather-covered barstools.

“What are we drinking?” James asked, picking up the heavy mug and eyeing the generous head of foam appreciatively.

“Presidential Ale Light. Our faithful bartender Sammy bought it from a brewery in Staunton.”

James caught the bartender’s eye and raised his glass. “Here’s to President Wilson.”

“To Wilson.” Sammy raised his own glass and took a sip. Froth dotted his gray mustache and he gave it a satisfied wipe with the hem of his apron. As always, Sammy wore a “Made in the U.S.A.” baseball cap and his sideburns were as thick and unruly as a rock star’s. Sammy fancied himself a dead ringer for the famous Southern Civil War hero General Joseph Johnston and styled his facial hair so that it mirrored some of the black and white photographs of Johnston decorating the walls of Wilson’s Tavern. Sammy was a lover of Virginia history and he knew more about the Old Dominion than anyone James had ever met. The Tavern was located on a side road off the highway and was never short of groups of husbands avoiding wives, truckers seeking a respite from the long road, or friends coming together to relax over a cold beer.

Bennett cracked open one of the whole peanuts from the bowl in front of him and plucked the nut from its shell. “I’ve got a professional dilemma, James. As one of the supervisors at the post office, I am the man lucky enough to have to deal with all the customer complaints.” He popped the peanut in his mouth and shrugged. “Usually, they’re about nothin’. Mail got delivered to the wrong Mr. Jones, the protective wrapper on some guys nudie magazine is missin’, one of our mail carriers looked sideways at some lady’s prize pooch—that kind of thing.”

As Bennett paused, James drank some of his beer. It was rich and honey-smooth on his tongue and for a few seconds as he swished it around inside his mouth, he was able to ignore the tension in Bennett’s hands as his friend roughly cracked open another peanut shell.

“Anyway,” Bennett continued, “I got a complaint on Monday that I normally wouldn’t give a flyin’ fiddle about, but since Gillian called me this evening and told me that Ronnie’s death wasn’t really a suicide …” Bennett shoved several peanuts into his mouth and stared at the counter with a pair of tormented brown eyes.

“You think this complaint might be tied to the murder, but you want to protect an employee?” James guessed.