Invisible (17 page)

“That church is gone now. The freeway off-ramp goes across where it was.”

“And I’ve been a few times since. For a while I had a girlfriend who belonged to a church near the community college, and I went with her sometimes.”

“Often?”

“Well, like . . . once or twice, maybe.”

“That church might be a good place to go again, then.”

“Our breakup was a bit . . . hostile. I don’t think I’d feel comfortable there.”

Okay, here it was. Time for me to jump in and say brightly, “Why don’t you come to my church, then? We’d love to have you.”

And Riverview United would love to have him. They’d jump on young, personable, good-looking Detective Matt Dixon like a Bottom-Buck Barney’s salesman jumping on a guy waving an inheritance check from a rich uncle.

I could say some good things about Riverview United. That it had a magnificent building, with enough stained-glass flowers and doves to impress Michelangelo. A terrific choir, lots of young people and activities from bowling to barbecues. A senior pastor, several associate and youth pastors, and a nursery run by a registered nurse.

But not a cross in sight, and Christ-centered messages scarce as pennies in the collection plate. At my church, Detective Dixon might learn about getting empowered through self-reliance, but he wasn’t going to learn much about salvation and the eternal consequences of not having it.

Then it hit me. If I was reluctant to invite Detective Dixon to my church because of its deficiencies in leading a newcomer to Christ, what was I doing there? The thought that had been lurking in the depths of my mind, like a knitting needle in a mattress, rose up to jab me.

“Actually, I’ve been a bit . . . dissatisfied with the church I’ve been attending. I’ve been thinking about trying to find a different one. Maybe smaller. Maybe one not quite so . . . busy.”

“There’s a little brick church out on the other side of town, beyond my apartment building. I don’t know what kind. I jogged by there one Sunday morning and heard them singing. One guy was really off key, but they sounded enthusiastic.”

Harley used to be as off-key as a garage-sale piano. But no one ever sang more enthusiastically. “I doubt the Lord subtracts points for being off-key.”

The detective gave me a sideways glance. “Want to give it a try?”

It took me a moment to realize he was suggesting we go together. And even if I hadn’t just realized I wanted to find a different church, I’d have said yes. There’s something to be said about the character—and potential—of a young man who’s willing to tackle a churchful of strangers with a faux grandma in tow. I suddenly wished I did have a granddaughter to introduce him to.

“I think I would,” I said.

We agreed on this coming Sunday. He offered to come pick me up, but I said going to a new church wasn’t quite like visiting a morgue, and I could make it there on my own.

I gave him several tomatoes before he left, advising him to put them in a paper sack to help them ripen. I didn’t point out that one had an amazing resemblance to Barbra Streisand’s profile. But I did tell him he’d better wash them thoroughly before he ate them. I was uncertain about both the taste and nutritional properties of Pledge.

After a woman from the crime scene unit returned the key, I figured I’d save Magnolia a trip and went over to her place.

Geoff was off somewhere getting a valve fixed on the motor home, and Magnolia was writing a letter to a Scottish man who might be a descendant of her great-great-grandfather’s second cousin. Neither geographical nor relationship distances ever dampened Magnolia’s enthusiasm for possible genealogical connections. I spotted what was apparently Mac MacPherson’s gift vase on the sideboard. Very nice. Decorated with the obligatory magnolias, but discreetly so.

I gave her the not-surprising news that the evidence-collecting crew hadn’t informed me if they’d found anything helpful in Kendra’s apartment. “Of course, they probably don’t know anything yet,” I added. “Everything has to go to a lab.”

I didn’t pass along the information Detective Dixon had given me about Kendra not being Kendra, since that was confidential. Magnolia tapped her chin with her old Parker pen filled with turquoise ink.

“You know, I’ve been getting some vibes about this situation,” she said.

Considering that before we knew Kendra had been murdered, Magnolia had expressed the view that Kendra might be in some sort of trouble, I couldn’t totally discount her vibes. “About Kendra?”

“About her car.”

This was a new one. Even Magnolia had never come up with vehicle vibes before.

“What about the car?”

“Well, I’m not sure.” She squeezed her eyes shut, which apparently helped connect her to the vibe world. “She had the hood of her car up one time when we were walking by. She was leaning over as if she was looking for something in the engine. Geoff asked if anything was wrong, and she said the engine sounded funny, and she was wondering if the spark plugs were in backwards.”

This struck me as more peculiar than enlightening. I don’t know much about cars, but I doubt an engine would even run if the spark plugs were in backwards. Or if it was even possible to put them in backwards. I also recalled seeing Kendra competently change a flat on the car herself one time, which suggested she probably wasn’t totally ignorant about the workings of other parts of the vehicle.

But one word jumped out at me.

Backwards.

I got a peculiar little vibe of my own that had nothing to do with spark plugs.

Had I been looking at Kendra’s reason for being here backwards?

15

What if Kendra had not been running away, as I’d been thinking, but had instead been running
to
someone?

From what Detective Dixon had said, it looked as if she’d headed for Bottom-Buck Barney’s like me racing for a dollar sale on Sara Lee cheesecake at the supermarket. Thinking back, I again remembered Kendra saying she had something to do here, something that should be finished within a few days or weeks.

Could she, rather than hiding from the man in the photo, have been searching for him? A lost love and a foolish quarrel or misunderstanding she wanted to rectify?

But if that was the situation, why was she using a phony name and background and dyed hair? Why would searching for this man get her killed?

Magnolia reached over and shook my arm. “Ivy, are you okay? You look as if you drifted off to some other world.”

The S-word world, no doubt. “I’m fine,” I assured her. I stood up. “I was just thinking about some things I should be doing.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what they were, but I did feel a sudden urgency. Kendra was dead, her killer was still out there somewhere, time was flying, and I was sitting here looking at Mac’s magnolia vase.

On the way across the street, a different and more chilling twist on the possibility that Kendra was searching for the guy in the photo occurred to me. What if she’d wanted to find him not because he was someone dear to her but because he’d done something unscrupulous, even horrific, to her or her family? Had she been trying to run him down and bring him to justice? But when she found him, he killed her?

Yes, that fit with a phony name and dyed hair and eyebrows.

I intended to go over to Bottom-Buck Barney’s the next morning, but Detective Dixon called and said they did want my fingerprints. He met me at the station, and we took care of the interesting process of rolling my fingers in ink and pressing them on a little card. Then he gave me a map he’d drawn so I could find the church on Sunday.

“Did they find many different fingerprints in the apartment?” I asked as I tucked the map into my purse.

“Actually, no. Lots of Kendra’s prints, of course. Plus some blurry smudges. But only one other clear set, which I suspect will turn out to be yours.”

“Which means that Kendra either removed the apartment’s contents herself, or whoever did it was wearing gloves.”

“Right.”

We didn’t have to exchange more words to know we both leaned toward the glove theory. So where was all that stuff from her apartment? And where was her car?

I walked over to Bottom-Buck Barney’s about midmorning on Saturday. The used cars gleamed brighter than my Pledge-enhanced tomatoes. Flags waved, balloons bounced in the breeze, and a banner draped over the entrance read a tongue-boggling “Bottom-Buck Barney’s Blow-Your-Mind Blowout Sale!” A scent of chili drifted from a big pot simmering over a gas stove set up along one side of the building. Behind the paper-covered counter a young guy in a white chef’s hat stirred the pot, and two girls in short skirts vivaciously handed out soft drinks. A four-dinosaur merry-go-round for the kids tinkled carnival music. Very festive.

The lot wasn’t crowded with customers, but a few were wandering around. As soon as a car pulled into the parking area, a salesman would break out of the vulture congregation around the main door and rush to greet the occupants. The salesmen, a couple of whom I tardily realized were women, wore identical dark pants, white shirts, spiffy little straw hats, and big smiles.

I tried to think of something appropriate I could say if one of the salesmen cornered me. I wasn’t even sure what I was doing here, except that Kendra and Bottom-Buck Barney’s somehow seemed ominously intertwined. I finally settled on the old “I’m just looking” standby, although I suspected Barney’s salesmen were experts at transforming lookers into buyers. I reminded myself that no matter how convincing they were, I was not going to become the new owner of a ’92 Buick.

I needn’t have worried, however. No salesman rushed to greet me. No one asked if I was looking for some specific vehicle. No one inquired if I’d like to take a test drive. They were, so far as I could determine from a stroll past one salesman studying his fingernails, totally unaware of my existence. LOL Ivy Malone was not even a blip on the screen of their potential buyer radar.

I resisted an urge to stick my fingers in the corners of my mouth and cross my eyes to see if I could even make myself visible to them. Instead, I reminded myself to enjoy my freedom as I wandered unnoticed among the bright rows of cars and pickups. Yet after some fifteen minutes of this, I still didn’t know why I was here. The day was also getting uncomfortably hot, and I decided with some frustration that I might as well just pick up a bowl of free chili and head for home. It was then I spotted the car. I stopped short.

It was a Corolla. Red. Exactly like Kendra’s car. A double take assured me it was Kendra’s car. Same gray upholstery. Same rearview mirrors. Same radio antenna.

But then I also realized that I was surrounded by Corollas; it was as if a wagon train of them had moved in and circled up for the night. And, except for color, I couldn’t see a smidgen of difference among them.

So perhaps this wasn’t Kendra’s car. Maybe it was just another red Corolla.

But then, maybe it
was
her car.

An easy way to find out. Detective Dixon could check the license plate numbers.

Except the red Corolla had no license plates. The metal-rimmed oblong squares were empty.

This was definitely a situation for Detective Dixon, but I was reluctant to bother him with something totally off the wall. He was a generous-minded young man. He thought I had guts. But I also suspected he viewed my spending nights in a cemetery of overturned tombstones as borderline eccentric, and I didn’t want to cross over that border by coming up with some goofball idea about a look-alike red Corolla.

Then I remembered. The key! Kendra had said she always kept a spare key in a really out-of-the-way space behind the front bumper. Someone could have found and removed it, of course. But if the key was there, I’d know this was Kendra’s car.

I got down on my knees and felt around the metallic underpinnings of the car. No luck. I couldn’t even find the hiding space Kendra had mentioned. I scrunched lower, until I was lying on my side half under the bumper. Now my arms wouldn’t bend right for the search. I turned over on my back and scooted further under.

And that was when I learned that while I might in total be invisible, the lower half of my body sticking out from under a Corolla was not.

“Hey, what’re you doing under there?” a male voice yelled.

While I was trying to figure out an appropriate answer to that question, another even more excited female voice yelled, “You idiot! Maybe she fell and broke something. Maybe she’s had a heart attack! Get an ambulance.”

With a screaming ambulance a complication I definitely did not want, I hooked my elbows in the asphalt and shoved. I shot out from under the car like an oiled pig.

So there I was, flat on my back on the asphalt at Bottom-Buck Barney’s, with my derrière feeling like shredded cheese and a flower-petal arrangement of salesmen and curious customers peering down at me. “I’m fine,” I croaked hastily. “I don’t need an ambulance. I was just . . .”

Just what? In the mystery and detective books I read, the clever characters have no problem with blithe lies or pretenses to gain information or get out of awkward situations. But I’d always had a squeamish relationship with untruths.

“Just looking for a lost key,” I finished on a surge of mild elation for holding to my standards. No need to be specific about what key or where I was looking for it.