Safe from Harm (9781101619629) (16 page)

When I got back, Wanderley was sitting in my chair sipping from a giant mug that said
BIG BOSS
that was clearly mine, but I didn't make a fuss. I poured myself a cup, which was still good even though it had been in a thermos since Annie Laurie and Jo had left, and added real half and half. None of that powdered awfulness.

I removed the pugs from the couch and sat down. Baby Bear was attempting to mouth one of Wanderley's immaculate cowboy-booted feet.

“What is your dog doing?”

“He's inviting you to play Steal the Sneaker but he can't find a shoelace or an edge to get ahold of.” Baby Bear had given up looking for a handle and had gently clamped his teeth around Wanderley's ankle. Wanderley said, “No!” so loudly and emphatically that Baby Bear released him at once and scurried over to my side looking frightened and wounded. In league with Baby Bear, Tommy ran over to Wanderley and tried a stare down. Wanderley didn't notice.

“I don't mind the dog slobber so much, Bear, but I don't want my boots scratched.” Wanderley pulled out a handkerchief and polished the offended boot. One of his grandfather's, I surmised, knowing that Wanderley had a whole collection of vintage cowboy boots left to him by his grandfather. They're all beautiful and he takes good care of them.

He said, “You're keeping Rebecca's pugs?”

“How'd you know they were Rebecca's?”

“We keep in touch. Talk books sometimes. I like her.”

“I understand.” I sipped my coffee. “So, do you know how Phoebe died yet?”

“No. We're pretty sure, but there hasn't been an autopsy yet.”

“Do you think it was drugs?”

“We know she didn't get shot or bashed over the head or stabbed.”

“So you've narrowed things down quite a bit,” I said. I got a sour look.

“Is Jo here?”

I put my coffee cup down. I didn't slam it down. There's glass over the wood so it makes a lot of noise, that's all. “Wanderley, you can't really think Jo had anything to do with this.”

His eyes didn't waver. “Bear, your daughter was the first person here when Phoebe Pickersley was dead or dying. I want to talk to her. If you feel like there's something to protect Jo from, if you're afraid she might incriminate herself, call a lawyer. He'll sit in on the interview and listen to me ask my very reasonable questions and then he'll send you a bill for five to seven hundred dollars.” He gave a shrug to let me know how he didn't care one way or another—he was going to talk to Jo.

“She's out with her mom,” I said. “You could have called and I'd have told you.”

“I was in the area.”

Okay. We drank our coffee for a while.

“Pretty tough last night, huh?”

I agreed that it had been, but told him this morning had not been any more fun. I gave him a rundown of the morning's events. Wanderley listened carefully and grunted when I finished.

“One big happy family over there, huh? I feel for the girl, though it would have been smarter and braver to strike out on her own instead of offing herself, if that's what she did.”

Wanderley finished his coffee and set it down. He took out a guitar pick and popped it in his mouth the way another man would have a breath mint. He folded a leg over a knee and clasped the shank of his boot with one hand. “I don't like this. Last night felt wrong. Phoebe Pickersley won't be my first teen suicide by a long shot. It happens. But last night felt . . .” He struggled for the word. “. . . off. Something is off about this one.” He pulled the pick out of his mouth and fiddled with it.

Baby Bear jumped up on the couch. Like I was going to miss a 180-pound beast making himself comfortable. I shoved him back down and he nosed the pugs away to make room for himself at my feet.

“Did you notice the stepmom last night?” Wanderley said. He was quiet for a while. “Does Annie wear makeup to bed?”

“Why do you want to know what Annie wears to bed?”

Wanderley grimaced. “Don't be a perv. Does she?”

“No she doesn't wear makeup to bed. We sleep in the dark, so what would be the point?”

“The point is that Lizabeth Pickersley-Smythe was made-up last night. Her hair was brushed and she had makeup on and it wasn't smudged as though she'd left some of it on a pillowcase.”

“Okay . . .”

“But the big thing for me is, she never asked what had happened.”

“What?”

“Mark went straight to Phoebe's room, he's screaming his head off, and there's an appreciable passage of time before Lizabeth joined him. The kids were there. You and I were there. And then Lizabeth appears, all tidy and hair brushed and makeup on, and her husband and kids are screaming, and she never says, ‘What the hell happened?' Did you hear her ask?”

No, reviewing the evening, I didn't remember Liz asking what had happened.

“Yeah, but Wanderley, Mark was screaming Phoebe's name. She knew it had to be Phoebe.”

“Phoebe what? Phoebe had a car accident? Phoebe's in the hospital, or in jail, or joined the army, or got pregnant by a biker? The stepmom didn't ask. I don't like it. And we couldn't find Phoebe's phone. It wasn't with her clothes in Jo's room, or in her purse, it wasn't in her car—”

“Phoebe has her own car?” She hadn't, the last time I'd seen her.

“Of course she has her own car. She's over sixteen and she lives in First Colony. Everybody there over sixteen has a car. And if you live in Sweetwater, your
dog
has a car.”

Baby Bear's ears pricked up but I told him to forget it.

“There's no phone in her room. We'd very much like to have that phone. And there's no letter. No last words. No message. Teenage girls
always
leave a message. They leave long, dramatic, romantic messages. They like to imagine the letters being read out loud, all their loved ones sobbing. But not Phoebe. No letter. Except for a cryptic message on Facebook, there was nothing.”

“What was the post?”

“Around eight last night, Phoebe Pickersley wrote ‘A mercy.'”

“Is that all?”

Wanderley nodded.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Wanderley looked like his patience was being tried. “Bear? You know what ‘cryptic' means?”

I ignored the taunt. “You checked everywhere?”

“What? Yes, we checked everywhere, Bear, we're detectives. We detect. What do you think? Did we look everywhere—hah. Except for those two words on Facebook, she didn't tweet, no mystery e-mails.”

“Okay. It was a stupid question.”

“Yes, it was a stupid question.”

“Okay, then. Settle down. Climb off your high horse, cowboy. I get why you don't like the situation. But Phoebe didn't look like she'd been attacked. There was no overturned furniture, nothing like that when we got home. We didn't touch anything except for Phoebe.”

“Oh, yeah, and can we talk about that for a minute?” Wanderley got up, still talking. He went into the kitchen and got himself some ice water. It's interesting how at home he makes himself in my house. Not that it's a problem. “What were you
thinking
moving that girl? Don't you watch television? Your
dog
knows better than to move a dead body. The sandwich you had for
lunch
yesterday knows better than to move a dead body. The nutrias in the
levee
—”

“You want to rein that in, cowboy?”

“And what the hell is with all the ‘cowboy' talk? It's getting on my nerves.”

He'd started it the night before, telling me to “cowboy up,” but I told him okay. “Annie Laurie and I got a text from Jo telling us to come home and we come home to find our daughter on the floor, holding a girl who is clearly dead. What did you want us to say, ‘Don't move a muscle, Jo, we don't want to corrupt the scene'? Maybe that's what you would do if it had been a fifteen-year-old Molly.”

“Watch it, Bear.”

“It's a legitimate point.”

“I took it, Bear. I don't want to talk about Molly in this context.”

“No? Well I don't want to talk about
Jo
in this context. I don't want her a part of this. I want this to never have happened. How is she ever going to sleep in her room again?
I
don't want to sleep in that room!”

Wanderley nodded. “I hear you. I'm sorry.” He crunched on his ice, the sound of which had the pugs lined up at his feet, looking at him expectantly.

“I'll tell you what I know,” I said, “about the Pickersley-Smythes. Do you want only what I know firsthand, or do you want what I've heard, too?”

“Everything, Bear. Every rumor, every bit of gossip, the hearsay, the scuttlebutt, and what the pot told the pan. Start with Liz and Phoebe. Not that I'm on about the wicked stepmother—stepfathers are the lethal ones. But tell me how the two of them got on. Did Liz welcome the addition of a new stepdaughter?”

“That's going to be a no. Liz tries hard at the happy family picture—Phoebe didn't fit in that picture and she didn't have any interest in trying to.”

I went on and told Wanderley about Liz's frustration with Phoebe—the conversation we'd had months ago in the church hall. I told him about how shortly after that conversation, Phoebe had made a visit to my office, wanting a “private” consultation. And how, when she learned that the consultation could be no more private than what could be managed either with Rebecca present or in an all-glass conference room, she left in a huff. I added the story of the New Braunfels overnighter and the subsequent scene with the elders. I told him about Phoebe accusing Liz of trapping her dad into marriage. I told him about Liz slapping Phoebe. Everything I could think of, I told him.

He listened carefully, even after Mr. Wiggles began a loud, cement-grinding snore.

“After that scene with the elders—you're telling me the Pickersley-Smythes kept coming to your church?”

“Yep. Not Phoebe but Liz and Mark and the boys did.”

Wanderley whistled. I'd been surprised, too.
I
had been humiliated by the scene and no one had called
me
a slut.

“That Lizabeth Pickersley-Smythe is one ballsy woman, Bear.”

I agreed that she was. I would never have told Wanderley if it hadn't been for Phoebe's death and the questions he was asking. Neither the elders nor the youth ministers would have dreamed of discussing the particulars with anyone who hadn't been at the meeting. So if Liz was assuming we wouldn't have spread the story around, she was assuming correctly. But it would have been nearly impossible for Liz to come to church and not bump into at least one of us who had been there. I don't know what went down with the others, but when she next met me, she acted as if nothing untoward had ever passed between us. I, on the other hand, blushed so deeply I could feel it in my hair follicles though I kept my preacher smile on and shook hands with Mark and Liz and asked about Phoebe who, they told me, was home with a cold.

Wanderley asked, “What happened between Jo and Phoebe?”

“They had a fight, is all. They're girls. Girls fight.”

Wanderley let the silence go on long enough to make me uncomfortable. I knew what he was doing. I wasn't going to fall for it.

Tommy added his own whiffling snore to Mr. Wiggles's. Baby Bear paddled in his sleep.

“What?” I said. “You want me to tell you the whole fight?”

“Please.”

I told him. “The last time Phoebe was our guest, Jo was not her most welcoming. Phoebe left on bad terms and Annie Laurie and I couldn't get Jo to apologize.”

Wanderley gave a snort through his nose. “Why not?”

“We said surely she was sorry that she had hurt Phoebe's feelings, and she said she wasn't. But a little while after that, Phoebe asked Jo to go to the movies and spend the night. Jo felt manipulated into accepting but she did anyway. Turned out it was payback.”

“Can I have one of those rolls in the kitchen?” Wanderley indicated the bag with Gina Redman's homemade rolls.

I said he could, and he found the butter, got himself a plate and made himself a pile of butter and roll sandwiches. He poured himself a glass of milk and settled back into my chair. At the sight of food, the pugs were instantly awake and on full alert.

“Go on,” he said.

“That's it. That's why they weren't friends anymore.”

“The payback. That part. How did Phoebe pay Jo back?”

“You're making too big a deal out of it, Wanderley. Sometimes girls fall out with each other.”

Wanderley sat up straight, briefly losing control of his plate and tipping one roll to the ground. The pugs were on it like red-bellied piranha. Before Baby Bear could so much as raise his head, that roll was a memory. “Listen. Here's what I can't get around, Bear. You tell me, and Jo tells me, that Jo and Phoebe weren't friends, hadn't been friends for months—that's a long time when you're a kid. But last night Phoebe was in your house. This is where she died. And Jo was with her, either right before or right after she died. I'm trying to understand that. That's why you're getting the questions.” Tommy stood on his hind legs to see if Wanderley had any more rolls that could be persuaded onto the floor. The detective held his plate up higher.

“So could you tell me how Phoebe worked her ‘payback'?”

I told him all about Jo's terrible night—about Phoebe humiliating Jo and implying that I had hit on her, and the blender drink and making her look young in front of Alex . . . I gave him the whole blow-by-blow. Took about half an hour.

Wanderley heard me out, fingers steepled between his thighs.

“Let me tell you how I would have told that story,” he said when I was finished. “I'd've said, ‘Phoebe claimed I hit on her and Jo gave Phoebe a smack in the face and that was the end of the friendship.'”