Paula K. Perrin - Small Town Deadly (16 page)

I got up and crossed to the desk
and slowly picked up the phone.  I put it down again.  I stared out the window
at the police cruiser Gene had left parked at the curb.

The truth was, I hadn’t much cared
for Fran’s family.

Her father and brother were both
doctors and quite stuck up about it.  Her mother was a physician’s wife and
took it seriously, even though he was a proctologist.

I sighed.  Thinking about doctors
made me think of Hugh Cameron.  How little Mother understood!  I’d loved him so
much, for so many reasons, and one reason had been that Hugh had enjoyed his
patients on a human level.  He never had that nose-in-the-air attitude.  He was
like Gene that way.  He loved this little town and settled in for life.  Not
much satisfaction to Alisz who’d thought that in marrying a doctor, she’d move
on to bigger and better places.

I realized I was leaning over the
desk, picking brown leaves off the grape ivy that hung in the corner formed by
the windows.  “Oh, God, Fran, what am I going to say to your family?”

I sank into the desk chair and
dropped the browned leaves into the brass wastebasket.  I noticed dust on the
desk.  I always cleaned the study on Friday morning.  My routine had been
broken with a vengeance yesterday.

I trailed a finger over the smooth
Koa wood.  The day I’d signed the contract for my first five-figure advance,
Fran and I had gone down to The Real Mother Goose and bought this desk made by
Anthony Kahn.

Restlessly, I swiveled my chair
from side to side.  The desk’s file drawer was ajar, the edge of a manila
envelope sticking out.  I smiled, remembering Fran standing here yesterday
morning intent on theft.  I opened the drawer to push the envelope all the way
in.  As I moved it, I realized there was something in it.  I plucked it out of
the drawer and dumped the contents.

Color photographs rubber banded
together plopped onto the desk.  The top one showed a couple kissing
passionately, their bodies molded together.  Uncomfortable, I nevertheless
continued to look at the picture, the man’s broad shoulders, the long, lean
line of his back.

I knew those shoulders, that back,
that red hair.

“Men are dogs,” I said, and
stuffed the packet of photos back into the envelope.  I threw it in the trash. 
The last thing on earth I cared about seeing was pictures of Gene kissing some
woman.

I was turning away when it hit
me.  I whispered, “My God, Fran, what were you doing with these?” and turned
back.

I pulled the rubber band off the
packet and looked at the picture underneath.  Pretty much the same shot.  So
was the next.  Somebody’d been clicking off shots rapidly, but by the fourth
one the couple was pulling apart.  The woman looking up at Gene was Sibyl
Aynesworth, director of the library system and one of Andre’s rivals for the
Senate.

Not Sybil!  How could he?

Her mouth was slightly open, her
large brown eyes locked on Gene’s.  I couldn’t tell if she was dazed, pleased,
outraged.  She looked as if she were about to say something.

I turned the photo over and looked
at the next.  Smiling, definitely pleased.

I felt heat rise up my neck and
into my face.  “And you such a family-values kinda gal.”

Sibyl’s story literally made
people weep.  She’d had two little boys, both afflicted with a rare
neurological disorder that doomed them to death in their early teens.  No
sooner had the diagnosis been delivered than Sibyl’s husband crashed his car
into a freeway divider and was tied to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. 
This had happened back in Iowa or Kansas or Nebraska somewhere.  Sibyl and her
husband had moved to the northwest after the death of the second child.

How the idea of running for the
senate developed, I wasn’t sure, but I did know that her untarnished image as a
wife and mother were crucial to her success in this conservative part of the
northwest.

These pictures were dynamite!

I studied them closely.  Behind
Gene pink roses bloomed.  I recognized the shirt Gene was wearing, a hokey
cowboy shirt with turquoise piping along the yoke.  It had been new at the big
family picnic last June.

The next photo showed Sybil
reaching for Gene, and the rest showed her leading him away, through a
Chinese-red gate overshadowed by a tall hedge.  I riffled through the pictures
again, this time noticing the small envelope of negatives.

Someone had shot frame after frame
of an incident that had taken only a few moments.  It must have been someone in
hiding.  Not Fran—she was hopeless with a camera.

“How did you get these and where
were you going to send them?” I whispered.  I couldn’t tell if I was more
shocked by the fact Fran had had these photos or that Gene was in them.  I
huffed out a breath.  Anybody who knew Gene would realize he’s warming up for
wife #4.  I slapped them down on the desk.

There was a heavy feeling in my
heart.  Fran had hidden these, she’d been searching for an envelope so she
could mail them, and in our conservative area, they were an excellent tool for
blackmail.  Oh, God, not Fran.  I swept the photographs aside and crossed my
arms on the desk, resting my hot forehead on them.

I stared at the wood grain close
to my eyes.  I tried to lose myself in Rampal’s soaring rendition of Mozart.  I
tried to convince myself that Fran had the photos for some innocent reason.  It
just wouldn’t wash.  Why had Fran left them here?  Because I wouldn’t let her
take the envelope, and I was watching so she couldn’t take the photos out.

I remembered Mother saying Fran
had come while I was in the police station.  Why hadn’t Fran taken them then? 
Because Mother told her she couldn’t go upstairs.  It was only a joke, but
apparently made her afraid Mother would look at her too closely when she came
back down.

Was it possible Sybil or someone
connected to her campaign would have killed Fran to get these back? 
You’ve
been watching too much TV.
  I got up, thinking I should go tell Gene, when
I realized these photographs would be almost as bad for his campaign as for
Sybil’s.  Not as bad in our boys-will-be-boys atmosphere, but almost.  And if
he suspected Fran had them—I sank back in my chair.

“What am I going to do?” I
whispered.

“Talking to yourself again? 
You’ve got to watch that,” Gene’s cheerful voice said behind me.  “Nice office,
mind if I come in?”

I swept the photographs into a
pile, laid the envelope over them, and swiveled to face him.

He looked awfully large looming in
the doorway.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle
you,” he said.

Ignoring my racing heart, I said,
“No problem.”

He began moving along the wall,
looking at the things I had posted on the cork-covered walls and the elephant
figurines on the shelves beneath them.  “Quite a collection you’ve got here.”

I stood and took a step toward
him.  “I’ve been bringing them back from trips for years.”

He fingered a pair of glass
elephants with their trunks raised.  “So you’re the one who got Grandma
Douglas’ elephants.  I always kind of wanted them.”

“Your mom gave them to me when she
was clearing out her father’s house because the great-grandmother—or was she a
great-great—?”

He shrugged.

“Anyway, because the grandmother
who first had them was named Elizabeth.  I didn’t ask for them.”

He moved on, then stopped abruptly
and stared at the brightly-colored cover proofs for my books that I had pinned
on the cork board.  They were alike, though the woman portrayed might have hair
of spun gold and the man of darkest umber, or the woman have hair of flame and
the man the gold of a Spanish doubloon.  Sure as rain falls downward, each
woman had a nearly bare and heaving bosom and the man’s shirt was ripped open
or discarded altogether.  And each one had my pseudonym in large letters.

“Aha!” Gene said, turning,
smiling.  When he saw my face, he said, “I’ll never tell, Liz.”

“Why did you come up here?”

“Did you get hold of Fran’s
family?”

“No one was home,” I lied to cover
the time that had passed while I looked at those awful photographs.

Gene studied my face.  He said,
“You’ve got a lot of books.”  He strolled over to the floor-to-ceiling
bookcases that covered two walls, circling around the love seat to get close to
them.  “You’ve filled up a whole shelf with your own.  Guess you work pretty
hard at it.”

“Some of them are the same book,
foreign editions.”

“Do you know if Fran had a will?”
he asked, coming around the love seat, pretending he wasn’t trying to look
around me.

I backed up a step, pressing into
the desk, acutely conscious of the pile of photographs hidden only by a 9x12
envelope.  “She made a new one after James died.”

“Know where she kept it?”

“Safety deposit box,” I said. 
It’d be silly to tell him I had a key.

“Which bank?”

I told him.

He moved closer.  “What else is in
the box?”

“Her passport.  I don’t know what
else.”

“Do you know what’s in her will?”

“As a matter of fact, she left
everything to me except for a few mementos to her family.”

“Everything?  Including The Bird?”

I sagged against the desk.  “Oh,
God, yes.”

He stepped closer.  “She left
nothing to her family?”

“She said they had everything they
needed.”

“Apparently, so do you,” he said,
taking another step.

I hoisted myself onto the desk and
sat on the photos.  “Does Fran’s will make me a suspect?” I asked.

“What are you sitting on, Liz?”

“None of your business.”

“You look guilty as sin.”

One part of me wanted to show him
the pictures and ask for an explanation.  But I was afraid, now, so I took the
tack that never failed and said, “Why don’t you quit invading my privacy and
get to work solving these murders?  Or as a concerned citizen, do I need to
call the sheriff’s office and express doubts about your abilities?”

His blue eyes narrowed.  He took a
step closer, crowding me, but I held still.  “I’ve been trying to help you out
because Fran and you were so close, but you haven’t given anything back.”  His
hand came up, but it was only to sweep the hair off his forehead.

“No more slack, Liz.  From now on
you get treated the same as anybody else.  And that might mean a search warrant
since you just moved up on the suspect list.”  He nodded at the desk, “You want
to turn that over to me now?”

I shook my head.

“Well, don’t try to hide it or
destroy it.”  He looked around my quiet, ordered study, his eyes narrowed
slits.  “I just might have to tear things to pieces looking for it.”  He turned
on his heel.  His boots thudded down the stairs and across the porch, and a
moment later the cruiser started with a roar.

I pressed the heels of my hands
into my burning eyes.  I never cried.  Just too many things piling up.  So what
if Gene were mad at me?  I’d seen Gene angry before.

But I’d never seen that vicious
look in his eyes, never heard that tone in his voice.  Could he suspect what
I’d found?  If he knew of the photographs’ existence and if he’d looked for
them amongst Fran’s things and didn’t find them, he’d suspect she’d hidden them
with me.  And the questions about the safety deposit box—he must be after the
photos.

Once again I wondered about the
casting for the play.  Who’d been recruits and who’d been volunteers?

I stood up and stared down at the
pictures.  The one of Sibyl smiling up at Gene was now on top.  Had he ever
refused any woman?

I felt drained.  I looked around
my study, my serene cocoon.

I wound the rubber bands around
the photos and negatives, put them in the envelope, and sealed it.

I turned to scan the room for
hiding places.  My heart nearly stopped when I saw Meg and Kirk in the doorway.

Meg’s eyes were vacant, her head
tilted, as she said, “I’ve always loved this piece of music.  It’s so elegant.”

Kirk said, “Who’s the composer?”

“Telemann,” Meg and I said as one.

“Nice,” he said.  “We came to see
if you wanted to go over to the church with us.”

I stared at him, guiltily aware of
the envelope I was holding.

Used to my blankness when I was
working, Meg ignored that but noticed the envelope.  “Oh, you finished your
proposal.  Want me to mail it while I’m out?”

I clutched the envelope tighter. 
“No, thanks, I have to go out anyway.”

“Do you have time to come with
us?” Meg asked.  “We’re going to choose music in case Kirk does a service for
Andre.  And I think we should have a service for Fran, too, whether her family
chooses to have the funeral in California or not.  Finding the right music is
something I’d like to do for her.”

At that moment all I could think
of was getting rid of them, so I said, “You’ll do a great job.  Don’t forget
she loved country and western.”

Meg wrinkled her nose.

Kirk asked, “Did you get hold of
her family?  Will the funeral be in California?”

“Oh, no, I didn’t get them,” I
said.

“Shall we try again?”

“All right,” I said calmly,
sacrificing tooth enamel as I ground my teeth.  I crossed to the desk where I’d
left my phone book open.

Fran’s mother answered on the
first ring.  To my surprise, in a crisis, Fran’s mother was as warm and
gracious as Fran had always been.  They’d decided that Fran’s funeral should be
held in Warfield before they took her body home.

I told Kirk and Meg they had a
provisional okay to plan the music and the service; the Maddoxes would call
later with their ideas.

After they’d left, I realized Meg
had given me the perfect idea.  I’d mail the photos to the post office box I
kept in Vancouver.  I’d gotten it when I first started writing so Mother
wouldn’t see my rejected manuscripts.

This way the photographs would be
in transit at least over the weekend, and by Monday I’d have come up with a
plan.

It also occurred to me that if
Gene came looking for what I’d hidden, I could save my office by planting a
decoy.  Gene thought the biggest secret in my life was my romance novel
writing, so I turned on the computer and printed out the last love scene I’d
written.  For his sake, I even added the thrust of a “male member.”

“Take that, Gene Cudworthy!” I
said, placing the manuscript pages on the desk.

I looked out the window.  Kirk and
Meg, with Bunny trotting beside them, were walking down the sidewalk toward the
church.  Oh, my God—I’d placed Meg in Kirk’s hands.

It was so hard to get used to
suspecting everyone.

Grabbing the envelope, I dashed
down the stairs.  As I opened the front door, Mother called from her room,
“Liz, Kirk and Meg are going to be back in a few minutes, will you put the
teakettle on?”

I walked to the door of her room. 
“You thought it was all right for Meg to go alone with him?”

“Don’t start that again.”

“But we don’t know who the killer
is.”

“It isn’t Kirk.  And if it were,
he’d hardly do anything when we both know she was with him, would he?  For
heaven’s sake stop acting like a crazy woman!”

“I have to run an errand.”

“You’re not going to help plan
Fran’s service?”

“I’ll help later, I just can’t
now.”

As I crossed the back porch, my
eye fell on Squeaky, the rusty red three-speed bike my grandfather had given me
on my twelfth birthday.  I put the envelope in the bike’s basket.  Never in my
life had I so needed to burn off frustration.