Paula K. Perrin - Small Town Deadly (5 page)

“Promise.”

“He was telling me how great
Annamaria was, and there was such a depth of feeling in how he said it.  It
made me wonder if there was anything between them.  I’ve always wondered why a
young, unmarried man would settle in Warfield where everyone’s already married.
 Have you heard anything?”

Fran made a miniscule adjustment
to the rear view mirror.  “Not about them.  Why would they be attracted to
each other?”

“Kirk’s cute if you like the
boyish type.  And Annamaria was absolutely gorgeous.”

“She was nearly fifty!  And a
good fifteen pounds over—”

“She was still beautiful.”

“Well, Tony’s the gorgeous one,
and he must make lots of money.  Kirk’s as poor as—”

“Maybe it appears silly on
the surface, but there was something.  They were more than ordinary
friends.”

“He’s bound to admire a woman
who did so much work for the community,” Fran argued.

“In addition to her travel
agency.”

“Yeah, and she always had
time for her family.”  Sunlight came in the window gilding Fran’s hair.

I added, “And all their
friends.  I can’t count the number of times Meg called from their house begging
to stay the night with Patricia.  I was worried that she’d wear out her
welcome, but Annamaria said, Don’t worry—I just add more water to the soup!’”

“Watery soup?  That doesn’t
sound like her.  I’ve never had lasagna as good—”

“No, no, it’s an expression
for making things stretch,” I said.  “I always forget you need an
interpreter, not being from these parts.”

“Just you wait, you northwest
chauvinist.  I’m going to take you south to my old stomping grounds some day
and see how you like being the outsider.”

The same thought hit us both. 
Fran’s foot came off the gas, “It’s not going to be the same without
Annamaria, is it?”

“She made travel planning
almost as much fun as actually going.”  I shivered.

Fran nodded.  “She took such
joy in things.”

“She loved the play.  She asked me
to alter her dress with basting stitches because she hoped she’d feel well
enough to perform tonight.”

We passed the power substation. 
Its chain link fence was softened by rhododendrons with yellow blossoms just
beginning to open.

“Yesterday afternoon, I ran
into Andre at the market,” Fran said.  “He was buying a case of champagne for
the cast party.”

We passed the Elk’s hall, the
lumberyard, then the huge white building that had been converted into a
fundamentalist church.  Ghostly grey letters spelling out “Macrae’s
Grocery” showed on the side of the building through two coats of white
paint.  “Grandfather’s revenge,” I said, “he’ll never stop
haunting them, couldn’t abide self-righteous Bible-thumpers.”

Fran smiled as she turned left
onto Main Street and said, “Episcopalians are not self-righteous
Bible-thumpers?”

“We only pat the Bible
occasionally.”  I pointed to our old-fashioned brick church with its
belfry.  “See what dignity we have?”

“Thanks to the Catholics. 
Since they built it, they ought to get the credit, don’t you think?”

“They lost their claim when
they sold it and moved.”

She shook her head.  “Do you
think atheists get het up over their street corners?”

“Nope.  You can only get het
up when you’re convinced God’s on your side.”

She guffawed, turned left past the
excrescence of the new McDonald’s and pulled up in front of the combination
police station/fire station/meeting hall.

“Are you going to tell Gene
where you went last night?” I asked.

She withdrew her keys from the
ignition and carefully stored them in her purse.  “Yes, of course I am.  I
don’t know why I was so secretive.”

“So where did you go?”

Her cellular phone buzzed in her
purse.  She snatched it out.  “Oh, hi, Max.”  She shook the phone,
then said, “Talk fast, Max, I’m on low bat again.”

I could dimly hear the gnat’s
whine of the voice on the other end of the call.  I felt awkward sitting so
close to a phone conversation, but I was determined to get Fran to tell me what
lie she’d made up to tell Gene. 

I studied the grey, cement-block
building.  To the right were huge glass doors behind which the fire trucks
rested.  In the middle of the building was a recessed, covered entryway that
led to lobby doors.  I’d waited there several times while the city council
wrangled in private session.  I’d never had to visit the police section before.

Fran said sharply, “No!  Are
you sure?”

I turned.  She stared at me, her
green eyes wide.

“What?” I said.

She waved me to silence, listening
intently.  Soon she said, “Okay, Max, thanks.”

“Remind me to recharge this,” she
said as she folded the phone.  “Now, Liz, I’m going to tell you something,
and you have to promise me you won’t let anyone know you know about it because
I’m not supposed to know either.”

“What?”

“Promise.”

“Well, of course I
promise.”

“Remember I told you the cops
found something under Andre’s body but Max couldn’t see what it was?  Well, he
found out.  It was a string of sequins from Meg’s costume.”

I went ice-cold.  “Not
Meg,” I whispered.  “He was hit so hard.”  My voice rose.  “I
saw his brain!”

Fran clutched my shaking hands in
hers.  “We’d better start calling lawyers.”

“She couldn’t have done
it.”

“I don’t want to think so,
either, but remember what you told me after Andre ran over Mr. Dickens?”

“Oh, God.”  Meg had made
such a terrible scene when Andre killed her beloved old cat.  “Even so,
Fran—it’s been months.”

“Six weeks.”

“Whatever, you don’t kill a
man because he ran over a cat.”

“No, a normal person
wouldn’t, but you’ve told me repeatedly that Meg’s been strange—”

“No, Fran!  No!  It’s obscene
that you’d even think it!”  I pushed open the car door, struggled with the
seat belt release, and staggered up onto the curb.

She leaned over the passenger seat
and peered up at me, saying, “Calm down, Liz, I’m only trying to
help!”

“Help?  When you’re
suggesting—” my throat closed.

Fran came around the front of the
car and reached for me.

I drew back.  “Don’t you dare
breathe those foul suspicions to anyone just to divert attention from yourself
and whatever you were up to last night.”

Tears shimmered in her green
eyes.  “Liz!  Please.  I’d never do anything to hurt Meg—”

I turned and ran across the
sidewalk and up the steps to the police station.  I yanked open one of the
glass doors and told the receptionist I was there to be fingerprinted.  Millay,
standing behind her, said he’d do it.  She buzzed me through the security door,
and I followed him down a hallway between cement block walls.  Small, square
light fixtures recessed in the ceiling shone patches of glare on the cement
floor.  Our steps echoed as we walked to a brightly lit room.

After the prints, as I tried to
scrub off the black ink with the rough paper towel Millay handed me, he said,
“Gene wants to talk to you.”

“I need to wash my
hands.”

“Okay, down the hall, first
door on the left after the lobby.”

I headed down the hall.  Gene
pounced on me from a door on the right.  “Let’s talk,” he said. 
Dressed in his blue uniform, he wore his gun at his hip today.  His red hair
was carefully combed, his boots glossy.

“In a minute.”

“I haven’t got a minute to
spare this morning.”

I held up my blackened
fingertips.  “I need to wash.”

“It won’t kill you.”  He
pulled me into his office.

“You’ve always been a
bully.”

“No.  I was never a bully.  I
might have scared people because I didn’t do a great job of handling my temper,
but it was never with the intention of intimidating anyone.  You, on the other
hand, routinely bully people.”

I pulled away and stared up at
him.  “Obviously we’re working with different definitions.”

“See, you’re doing it
now—trying to intimidate with a raised eyebrow.  You ought to use your fists. 
That’s honest.”

“Ah, the Neanderthal
mentality.  Fits you well.”

He laughed.  “You just can’t
stop, can you?”

The blood roared in my ears.  I’d
always hated him.  He and my brother George and the group of boys known as
“George’s Gang” always teasing, taking my dolls, my books, my
microscope, whatever they pleased, waiting for me to beg to have them back.

When we were young, there’d been
occasional truces, mostly on hot summer afternoons when I was recruited for
games with a stern warning from George not to cry.  I never did, not through a
sprained ankle, black eyes, or the concussion that caused my mother once and
for all to forbid me to play with the boys.

I wanted to walk out of Gene’s
office and keep on going, but after what Fran had said about the sequins from
Meg’s skirt, I had to appear cooperative.  Possibly Gene would tell me
something I could use to clear Meg.

I took a deep breath and walked
over to one of the chairs facing Gene’s desk.  It had a tubular metal frame and
a green plastic seat and back.  It was every bit as uncomfortable as it looked.

Gene surprised me by taking its
twin rather than the chair behind the desk.

His lips stretched beneath his
moustache.  It was supposed to be a smile, but it looked like he was
contemplating where to sink his big white teeth.  “We’re cousins, we ought
to be friends.”

“We’re cousins so far removed
that I’m more closely related to Darwin’s monkey than I am to you.”

He snorted and shook his head,
“Jeez, Liz, you never make it easy.”

I looked around, groping for a
conciliatory manner.  The office was nearly filled by the large, institutional
grey desk.  A computer screen and keyboard shared the desktop with a phone,
neat black in-and-out trays stacked with papers, coffee mugs, and a lush
piggyback plant.

Off center, to the right on the
wall behind his desk, was a reinforced-glass door with a red alarm bar across
it.  Sunshine streamed in through the door, bathing the two red geraniums that
hung from the ceiling.  On the floor crouched wicked-looking cacti in terra
cotta pots, among them one as large as a man’s head with long, evil spines.

“I take it you don’t use that
door frequently,” I said.

“Never.  It got left there
when they remodeled.  If I did have to use it, I’d step real high.”

I laughed.  “You have quite a
green thumb.”

He said, “You can take the
boy off the farm, but you can’t take the farming out the boy.”

“Last night you said you’d
shaken the shit off your shoes.”

His lean cheeks turned red. 
“I believe I was a little more refined than that.”

“Sorry if your efforts went
unnoticed.”

His blue eyes glittered, and I
felt like smacking myself.  Getting him riled was no way to help Meg.  I took a
deep breath.  “Sorry.”

He took a deep breath of his own
then asked me to tell him exactly what had happened from the time I arrived at
the high school last night.  He didn’t interrupt until after the part about
meeting Fran, Meg, and Kirk in the hallway after finding Andre’s body.  He
said, “What did Fran do then?”

My heart started to pound.  “She
said she had to call The Bird and find Max.”

“So she went up into the
library to call.”

“To the checkout
counter.”

“When was the next time you
saw her?”

I looked down at my white-knuckled
hands clasped in my lap.  I forced them to relax.  Fran had told me to tell the
truth.  I knew she was intending to tell Gene a big lie.  I wished I knew why.

“Liz?  This is a murder
investigation.  I know Fran left the library last night.  Don’t try to protect
her.  You might end up hiding something I need to know.”

The soft, smooth flesh inside my
upper lip was sore from me biting it.  Once again I felt near tears, and it
made me furious.  I never cried.  “So you’ll arrest me for impeding your
investigation?” I sneered.

“Obstruction of justice.  No,
Liz, I said that because I was mad.”  He ran his long fingers through his
hair.  “Don’t you see I have to be impartial here?  It doesn’t matter what
I want to do or who I want to believe; there are things I have to do and
evidence I have to believe.”

A river of ice poured through me. 
Was that a warning about Meg?  I rubbed my fingers across my forehead.  Why
hadn’t I woken Meg last night after Fran left and demanded to know what she’d
been up to?  Having failed to do that, why hadn’t I confronted her this morning
when I heard her yelling for the poodle?  Now I admitted it to myself for the
first time:  I was terrified that Meg had killed Andre.  It should seem as
impossible as I’d told Fran it was, but Meg had become someone I didn’t know.

She’d always been vibrant and
energetic, passionate about causes, but with that had been inexhaustible
goodwill.  Now she was depressed, sullen, with occasional, unpredictable bursts
of violent anger.  Two weeks ago, she’d thrown Mother’s hobnailed pitcher
through a window.  Then she’d smiled.  She’d known that Mother loved that
pitcher more than anything in the world except Meg herself.

When Andre had run over Mr.
Dickens six weeks ago, Mother had truly believed Meg would do him serious
injury.  I hadn’t been home, but Jill Ferguson had seen the whole thing.

Meg had been turning the compost
pile.  Her old tiger-striped cat Mr. Dickens was frisking around the yard, glad
to have Meg home again.  Then, he’d gone into the street.  There’d been a
squeal of brakes, a terrible shriek from the cat, and the gold Mercedes had
come to a stop halfway down the block from the limp, crushed body of Mr.
Dickens.  Meg ran into the street screaming at Andre, using words Jill said
would make a sailor blush.

“She pulled him out of the
car!” Jill said.  “It was like a police movie—she slammed that man
against the car and started beating him!”

Mother came onto the porch and
called to Meg.  Andre was trying to defend himself but getting hurt.  Mother
made her way to them as quickly as she could.

By the time she reached them,
Andre had managed to get hold of Meg’s wrists and was holding her away.  She
kicked him.

Mother said, “Margery Macrae,
you stop that right now!  I hope to never hear such language from a woman
again!  You go into the house this minute.”

“She almost swore at your
mother!” Jill told me.  “But your mother’s face was something
terrible—it would have taken paint off a barn!  Meg stood there a moment, her
face so white, and then she said to the man, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ as calmly
as if she were inviting him in for tea.  Then she pulled away and without
looking back went into the house.”

Andre had said, “Thanks,
Claire, I thought she was going to tear me apart.”

“It’s Ms. Macrae.  And you’d
deserve to be torn apart.  That cat you just ran over was more a gentleman than
you’ll ever hope to be.

“Now I’ll thank you to go
around the back of the house to our garden shed and get a shovel while I get a
box, and we’ll give this cat a proper burial.”

Meg had never again referred to
the pet she’d brought home when she was seven, but she planted primroses on his
grave and often sat beside it.

Even allowing for Jill Ferguson’s
melodramatic nature, I had seen that Meg’s behavior had frightened her.  Had
Meg kept that promise?  Had she accepted a part in the play for easy access to
Andre in order to kill him?

The picture of Andre’s ruined head
rose in my mind again.  My cold hands covered my eyes as I groaned.

“Are you all right?”
Gene asked.

I dropped my hands.  They made
fists in my lap.

“You look sick.”

“I’m all right,” I
said.  It came out a whisper.

“Let me get you some
coffee.”  He went to the doorway, called to someone.  A little later he
thrust a mug into my hands.

I took a sip, nearly burning my
tongue.  “This is wonderful,” I said in surprise.

“Millay takes his coffee
seriously,” Gene said.

“But in books they always say
how wretched the coffee is in police stations.”

“That’s fiction.  Jeez, Liz,
get a grip.”

I laughed.

“Can we go on now?” he
asked.

“Yes,” I sighed.

“Okay, when was the next time
you saw Fran?”

Dear God, please forgive me.
 
“At the house after I got Bunny.”

“How long would you say she’d
been gone?”

“I don’t know.”

He glared at me.

“It seemed like things would
go fast, then as if time stopped.  All I know is when I last saw her and when I
saw her next, and I’ve told you that.”

He sighed.  He smoothed his
moustache.  “Okay, now that wasn’t so hard, was it?”  He grinned like
an executioner who’d just offered his client a place to rest his head.