Rosemary Remembered (27 page)

Chapter Eighteen

As for Rosmarine, I lett it runne all over my garden walls, not onlie because my bees love it, but because it is the herb sacred to remembrance, and, therefore, to friendship; whence a sprig of it hath a dumb language that maketh it the chosen emblem of our funeral wakes and in our buriall grounds.

Sir Thomas More 1478-1535

Fifteen minutes later, Blackie, Sheila, and I were sitting in the hotel coffee bar with Brian, having a late lunch and trying to make sense out of what had happened over the past couple of days. Little by little, question by question, the pieces were beginning to fit together.

Desperate to get to the Star Trek convention and chase down the Mr. Data hologram card, Brian had accepted his mother's offer to pick him up on Thursday evening and take him to Austin so that he could be in the dealer's room the minute it opened Friday morning. They had cooked up the arrangement on the telephone Wednesday evening. Sally would park out on the road and wait, and Brian would simply pick his moment to walk out.

"I didn't mean to scare you," he said, his freckled face pinched and white. He pushed his hamburger away, half-eaten. "Honest, I didn't, China. I was going to call you the minute we got to the hotel and tell you not to worry."

"What about the stuff that looked like blood?" Blackie asked. He put both elbows on the table and leaned forward, his voice stern. "It sure looks like you wanted to convince everybody you'd been kidnapped."

"Blood?" Brian sounded confused.

"That red stuff that dripped on the drive," I said.

Brian bit his lip. "It dripped on the drive, too?" He blinked hard, as if he were trying not to cry. "That was an accident. Arnold gave me this stuff he made. Karo syrup with red food coloring and catsup in it. It was in a plastic baggie and I stuck it in my gear bag and forgot about it. I didn't know it was leaking until Mom started yelling at me about getting it all over the seat of her car." He looked at me, anguished. "It was totally fake, China. I never thought it would really
foot
anybody!"

Sheila rolled her eyes at me and the corners of Blackie's mouth twitched.

"Forget the fake blood," I said. "So how come you didn't call?"

Brian's chin quivered. "Because when we got to the hotel, Mom wouldn't let me." His voice broke and he swallowed. "I asked and asked, and first she said I could, as soon as room service brought us something to eat. Then after we ate she said I couldn't call because things were going to be different from now on. I was supposed to live with
her,
because that was the way you and Dad wanted it. Now that you guys were together, I was just in the way. You didn't need me.
She
needed me a lot more. She did, too. I could see how much she needed me."

I put my arm around his shoulders. "That's not the way it is, Brian. With us, I mean. You're
not
in the way."

"I'm not?" His eyes looked lost in his pale face.

"No, you're not," I said firmly. I pushed his hamburger back toward him. "What did she say after that?"

He took a bite of his burger. "She said we weren't going to waste money going to court. We were just going away. California maybe, or Alaska, maybe even Europe. We were going to have different names, and I wasn't supposed to tell anybody who we really were. If I did, everybody would be very upset at her, and they'd put her in jail." He swallowed. "She said before she let that happen, she'd kill herself."

I tightened my arm around his shoulder. Blackie muttered something under his breath.

"That must have been pretty tough," Sheila said.

Brian nodded, struggling against the tears. "I tried to call home last night, but the line was busy. When I finally got hold of you, she caught me. She went out on the balcony and started to climb over the railing. That's why I hung up."

"She probably didn't really mean to jump," Sheila said. "She was just trying to scare you."

"I figured that." He put the burger down and wiped his nose with the sleeve of his jersey. "She wasn't, like, well, thinking straight. I mean, I didn't think we could do all the stuff she said. Mom isn't
...
well, I just couldn't see her in Alaska, with the snow and the bears and everything. I thought I ought to go with her, just to keep her from freezing to death or getting eaten by a polar bear."

So it isn't just dads and moms who have a hard time drawing the line between holding on and letting go.

"So what did you say to her?" I asked gently.

"Well, I said I'd go, and she said we should check out. But I said I wanted to play the games first. I was hoping you'd figure out where I was and come for me."

"For a kid, you have a lot of courage," I said. I hugged him. "I love you very much."

He leaned his head against me. "What's going to happen to her?" He looked at Blackie. "Will she have to go to jail?"

"Your father will have to decide whether to press charges," Blackie said. "Right now, the Austin police have her in custody. A doctor will talk to her, too, and maybe put her in the hospital for a day or two. She was a little upset."

That was an understatement. Sally had smashed the Romulan in the face with a Coke bottle, pushed a small purple elf off a chair, and tipped over a table. She might have gone on creating general havoc, but she was collared by an impassive young Vulcan and a beefy Boraalan in a silver jumpsuit. Somebody called hotel security, and a few minutes later a security officer had come, with Blackie and the Austin cops right behind.

Brian looked up at me. "Will she be all right, China?"

"I don't know," I said honestly. "It depends, I guess. On a lot of things." I could see that some good might come from what had happened in the last couple of days. No judge would turn a child over to an emotionally unbalanced woman who had kidnapped her child and held him by threatening suicide. Under the circumstances, Sally's lawyer would advise her to drop the suit. And she would be forced to get counseling.

I touched his face. "The important thing right now is that you're safe. Have you had enough adventure for one weekend?"

He managed a smile. "I guess. But I still didn't get my Mr. Data hologram card." He looked across the table at Sheila. "It's a very big hotel. How did you guys know to look for me in the Gurps room?"

Sheila cleared her throat. "Superior detective work," she said. Ruby, no doubt, would have another explanation.

At that moment, a man came over to the table. He was dressed in a Next Generation tee shirt with a dragon stick-on tattoo on one cheek. He gave Brian a questioning look. "You the kid who was looking for the Mr. Data card?"

"Yeah," Brian said eagerly. "You got one?"

"Matter of fact, I have," the man said, "back in the dealers' room. Just picked it up not half an hour ago. Thirty-five bucks."

"Thirty," Brian said.

The man scowled. "Thirty-two."

"I gotta see it first," Brian said. He looked at me. "Can I?"

"Have you got thirty dollars?"

His face fell. "Not anymore, I guess."

"How much do you need?" I asked with a sigh. I opened my wallet. "Will twelve dollars do it? That's all I have."

"That's great," he said. "Thanks!" I gave him the money and stood up to let him out. "Ten minutes," I said. "And then beam yourself back here." He hugged me and was gone.

Blackie laughed as I sat down. "All's well that ends well, I guess."

"It hasn't ended yet," I said.

"Right," Sheila said meaningfully. "You'd better tell him about Carol's phone call."

It took me five minutes. At a certain point in the narrative, I handed him the photograph of the crooked rosemary bush I had stuck in my purse. He stared at it, incredulous. "Say that again," he demanded.

I repeated what Carol had told me, added my interpretation, and described what needed to be done. When I finished, there was a silence. Finally he gave a long, low whistle.

"Puts a whole new face on things, doesn't it?" Sheila asked.

"You bet," he said grimly, handing back my photograph. "Does Bubba know?"

"Not yet," I replied. "I guess that's the next step. That, and having a face-to-face talk with Carol." I glanced at Sheila. "That's a job for Sheila and me, though. Bubba wouldn't get to first base."

Blackie gave me a crooked grin. "Better leave Bubba to me."

So that's how it was decided. Blackie would take Brian back to Pecan Springs and drop the boy off at the county jail before he went to talk to Bubba. Sheila and I would talk to Carol. After that —

"Hey, I
got
it!" Brian said, coming toward us, waving a trading card.

"Terrific," I said. "You ready to go?"

"Yeah," he said. He looked up at me shyly. "Thanks for the twelve bucks, Mom."

Sheila and I spent the next hour in Nancy's kitchen, talking to Carol over cups of coffee and butterscotch rolls left from the kids' lunch. After a while, Nancy came to join us, with her baby at her full, heavy breast.

Carol didn't want to do what we asked. "I'm afraid," she said. "If it doesn't work — "

Nancy broke in. "You have to," she said. "You'll never have any peace in your heart until you've told it."

"I
have
told it," Carol objected. "I told her." She pointed at me.

Sheila leaned forward. "That's not good enough," she said. "You've got to tell the police."

"Okay," she said finally, red-eyed. "I'll do it."

I stood up, feeling sticky from too many butterscotch rolls. "I need to make a couple of phone calls," I said.

We caravanned down to Pecan Springs in two vehicles and went directly to Judge Porterfield's house, where Nancy and the kids waited in the van while Sheila and I took Carol inside. I introduced Carol to Judge Porterfield and Bubba Harris, who arrived just as we did. She told them what she had seen, and I showed them my photograph. Bubba looked as if he didn't believe us, in spite of having already heard most of the story from the sheriff, but the judge didn't have any problem. She thought about it for, oh, maybe all of thirty seconds before she signed the search warrant.

So that's how Sheila and Bubba Harris happened to be standing on either side of Matt Monroe in the herb garden at the hotel later that evening, with Judge Porterfield and me. All of us were watching Hector Gomez dig up the crooked rosemary bush. It was still very hot, but the newly installed fountain played a cooling melody of cascading water and the sun was sinking into a rosy puddle of clouds on the western edge of the Edwards Plateau. At the edge of the lake a frog harrumphed hollowly, and somewhere in the cedars and live oaks a rain crow chuckled a sardonic greeting.

"I still don't understand what all this is about," Matt said with nervous bravado. He glanced at Gomez, who was lifting the rosemary, its burlap root wrap still intact around the unopened ball of soil. "You guys are crazy as fucking bullbats. I'll fix your wagon. I'll sue your asses!"

Judge Porterfield looked sternly at Matt. The red silk rose trembled at the throat of her white dress. "You cut that out, Mr. Monroe." She wagged her finger at him like a third-grade teacher at a recalcitrant small boy. "It's hot an' we got work to do, an'you're not makin' it any easier with your foul mouth. Now you hush up."

Hector Gomez, sweating from his exertion, continued to dig. After a few minutes, he straightened up.

"Mebbe you'd better check this out, chief," he said, and stepped out of the hole. Bubba squatted down and studied something intently. Then he dug at the loose dirt with his fingers. In a minute, he got out a pocket knife, worked a little longer, then stood up.

"Have a look, judge," h
e said loudly, into Miss Porter
field's good ear.

"What is it?" the judge asked, bending forward to peer into the hole. "What am I lookin' at?"

"It's not a what," Bubba said. "It's a who."

I stepped forward. The sweetish odor of decomposing human flesh told me I had been right. Bubba had cut open the plastic garbage bag that wrapped the body of Jeff Clark.

"I still don't see what you're tryin' to prove," Matt Monroe said desperately. Sheila had her hand on his arm.

The judge wheeled on him. "Mr. Monroe, you have been slicker than a slop jar. But you had just better shut your mouth, because anything you say can be held against you in a court of law. You got that?"

The rain crow gave one last bitter chuckle and fell silent.

But the excitement wasn't over. Late that afternoon, I had picked up The Beast, no longer an official crime scene, and driven to the county jail to bail out Brian. Then, feeling like a mother on car pool duty, I had driven him to Ruby's, where I
dropped him off. Now, I went to
pick him up and sketch out for Ruby the details of what had happened.

"Stay for coffee," she urged. "I want to hear
more."

"It's late," I said. "I have to get home and put in calls to McQuaid and The Whiz. And I need to stop at the store and see what kind of progress we've made on the air conditioner. I didn't have time to check with Laurel before she closed."

The lights from Maggie's Magnolia Kitchen spilled out onto the street when Brian and I drove up Crockett. All the street parking in.front of the shop was taken, and I remembered that Maggie was hosting a wedding rehearsal parry that night.

"I guess we'll park in the alley out back," I said, and made a right onto Guadalupe. A flare of auto lights close behind me caught the mirror and I blinked.

"I think I’ll
come in with you," Brian said in a small voice. "It might be kind of creepy sitting in the truck, thinking about that woman getting killed right here." He patted the seat beside him.

I made another right into the alley. "I don't want you to stay in the truck," I said. I pulled in beside the stone guest house at the back of my lot, turned off the lights and the ignition, and dropped the keys into my purse. "Come on. Let's — "

The lights had turned into the alley behind us, illuminating the cab of the truck with a bright glare. Suddenly an old Ford scraped around us in the narrow alley and braked to a hard stop at an angle, in front of us. The lights went off and the darkness closed around us like a heavy curtain.

"Brian," I said urgently, "get down!"

"What?" Brian asked, startled. His door was half-open. "What are we — ?"

"Just get
down,"
I snapped. I yanked him back into the truck and shoved him onto the floor, pulling his door shut and locking it. Ahead of us, a car door had slammed, and heavy footsteps were crunching on the gravel. I locked my door and began to grope in my purse. Why hadn't I kept the keys in my hand? I couldn't pull forward, but I could've put the truck into reverse and —

"Is it a robber?" Brian's whisper was terrified. "Is it that Jacoby guy?"

"I don't know," I said, fumbling desperately. "Stay down." If only I'd brought the gun. I might not have to use it, but it could have been a deterrent. My fingers closed over something the size of a pocket flash. The air conditioner was off and and the sweat was beginning to run down my face and neck and trickle down my back, sticky and warm. Warm like blood. I suddenly had a vision of Rosemary lying on her back on this seat, a bullet through her head. Brian made a whimpering noise. No, it wasn't Brian, it was
me.
I was whimpering. I tightened my throat. McQuaid hadn't been paranoid. He'd been
right.

There was a rapping on the door. "Roll down the window," a raspy voice growled. "I wanna talk to you." "No," I said.

"I ain't got no gun," he said. "I ain't gonna hurt you. I bin waitin' for you. I just wanna talk." His laugh was high-pitched, too shrill for such a big man. I could see the ominous hulk of him, silhouetted against Mr. Cowan's back porch light, which had just gone on across the alley. Mr. Cowan, who is eighty-something, is a one-man Neighborhood Watch.

"What do you want to talk about?"

"Stop stallin'. Roll it down."

"McQuaid isn't here. He's in Mexico. If you want to get even, he's the man you want."

The laugh was short and sharp. "I'll do that. But right now, I'm gonna fix you and that kid of his." He moved his head to peer around me. "I see you found him. Where was he? Out shootin' pool with his buddies?"

Beside me, Brian stiffened. "I was
not,"
he said indignantly. "I was with — "

I cut in. "You knew Brian was gone?"

"Course I knew." Jacoby was deeply injured. "I watch TV, don't I? Didn't make me feel good to see my face plastered all over the TV screen, did it? Made me feel like a criminal. What kinda crap is McQuaid tryin' to pull, anyway? Puttin' me away once wasn't enough for him?"

"McQuaid didn't have anything to do with this. And I'm sorry about the TV coverage," I added sincerely. "I really thought you were the one who — "

"You're gonna be sorrier." His voice was bitter. "I lied. I got a gun right here." He brandished it. "You gonna roll this window down, or do I gotta blast a hole in it?"

The hot stillness closed around me, smothery. I took my right hand out of my purse and with my left, began to roll down the window.

"No, China!" Brian whispered.

"Hey, that's more like it," Jacoby said, pleased. He leaned forward and I could see the glint of light along a barrel, could smell garlic mixed with cheap booze on his breath. I raised my right hand slowly, my heart in my throat. "Now we kin talk friendly-like," he said. "I bin waitin' a long time for this."

As my hand cleared the top of the window, I pulled back hard on the trigger. It was point-blank range.

"Yiii!"

Jacoby staggered backward, dropping his gun, flinging both hands up to his face. I leaned on the horn as he fell to his knees, clawing at his eyes and screeching, a raw, horrible scream that even the blast of the horn couldn't drown out.

Across the alley. Air. Cowan's door opened, and I let up on the horn. "What's that racket out there?" he cried. The old man's quavery voice was accompanied by a shrill yapping. "Shut up, Aliss Lula. I cain't hear a gol-durned thing with you bar kin' like a idiot."

"It's me, Air. Cowan," I yelled. "China Bayles. I've got a murderer out here. Call 911, please. Quick!"

Air. Cowan's door slammed. Jacoby was on his hands and knees, trying to crawl in the direction of his car. Tears were streaming down his face and he was wrenched by spasms. I scrambled out of the truck and grabbed up the gun.

"On the ground!" I shouted.

Jacoby collapsed and rolled over, hands digging at his eyes, groaning. Brian jumped out of the truck.

"Wow," he said. "Just like on TV. What'd you blast that guy with, China?"

I held up the small metal cylinder McQuaid had given me. "The mother of all hot peppers," I said.