Smoke in Mirrors (24 page)

“So, Rhodes was checking up on her?” Deke asked.

“Either that or he was planning to steal her identity but it seems a little unlikely that he’d choose her for a target.”

“Yeah. He was checking her out,” Deke said softly. “Just like we checked him out. What the hell is going on here?”

“Wish I had an answer to that one.”

“She’s stirring things up, isn’t she?”

“Who? Leonora?” Thomas exhaled deeply. “I think you can say that, yes.”

“I had a feeling she would. Like I said, she’s a catalyst.”

“You were right.”

A brisk, martial-sounding
thud-thud-thud
preceded a sturdy aerobic walker who appeared briefly and then vanished in the mist.

“She seemed right at home at your place last night,” Deke offered very casually. “Using your shower and all.”

“Uh huh.”

“Cassie mentioned that she passed Leonora on the jogging path early this morning. Said it looked like she was on the way to your house. For breakfast maybe.”

“We’re both early risers.”

Deke nodded. “Something else you two have in common.”

“Something else?” Thomas glanced at him and then went back to watching the ghostly joggers. “You’ve noticed other things Leonora and I have in common?”

“Sure.”

Thomas hesitated but curiosity got the better of him. “Such as?”

“Hard to explain. Maybe it’s the way you two do things.”

“The way we do things?”

“Yeah, you know.” Deke moved one hand a little, searching for the words. “Once you’ve made up your mind to do something, you just keep at it until it’s done. You make a commitment, you keep it, even when you’ve got some doubts. Look at how you’ve stuck by me this past year. I know you’ve wondered, deep down, if I was looney-tunes.”

“Hey, so what if you are a wack-job? You’re still my brother.”

“And the Walker brothers stick together, right?”

“Right.” Thomas wrapped both hands around the railing. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t have any doubts about your mental health. Not anymore. When it comes to your conspiracy theories, you’ve made a believer out of me.”

“I think I’ve got Leonora to thank for that,” Deke answered. “My point is that she is a lot like you in some respects. Look how she put her life on hold to come here to
find out what happened to her half sister. That’s the kind of thing you would have done. Hell, it’s exactly what you did.”

Thomas shrugged. “You’d have done it for me.”

“Sure.”

They both looked out at the cove for a while. The fog coalesced into an impenetrable veil. The
thud-thud-thud
on the path announced a covey of joggers. They materialized in the mist, three middle-aged men who should have known better. Thomas wondered if any of them had started to notice some problems in his knees. Just a matter of time when you got close to forty.

“I hear we’re invited to Leonora’s house for dinner tonight,” he said after a while.

“Cassie called about an hour ago. She said she and Leonora are going to cook for us.”

“Be a good chance for all of us to put our heads together and discuss strategy.”

Deke’s face became impassive. “Cassie thinks I’m obsessing.”

“You are. So what? It’s what we Walker boys do.”

“Might be a little embarrassing talking about some of this stuff in front of her,” Deke said.

“Nah. Look at it this way, after six months of doing yoga with you she knows as much about this mess as the rest of us. Maybe she can give us a different perspective, the way Leonora is doing.”

“I never thought about it that way.” Deke hesitated. “I just don’t want her to conclude that I’m a total space cadet, you know? Things are awkward enough between us as it is.”

“Give her a chance, Deke. Also, you could look on the bright side.”

“What’s the bright side?”

“Worst-case scenario is that, even if Cassie decides you’re a total nut case, we get a home-cooked meal and the company of two very nice ladies tonight.”

“There is that,” Deke said.

Maybe Leonora really was some sort of catalyst, Thomas thought. A lot of things around here were starting to show signs of movement and change.

He and Wrench
walked back to the house along the jogging path. The late afternoon rush hour was in full swing. Runners, bikers, walkers and people with dogs crowded the trail. Twice he almost got run down by a jogger. Life in the fast lane was dangerous.

The phone was ringing when he and Wrench let themselves into the hall. He closed the door and picked up the cordless extension.

“This is Walker.”

“Thomas?” Leonora said.

“I’ll be there in about half an hour.” He glanced at his watch. “I need to shower and change.”

“No rush. Cassie and I are still fussing with the last-minute stuff. I called to ask if you would mind bringing your tools?”

A rush of red-hot anticipation warmed his blood. “Don’t worry. I never go anywhere without my tools.”

There was a short, startled pause on the other end of the line.

Leonora giggled.

“Actually, I was referring to your
other
tools,” she said. “The kind you keep in your workshop. I’ve got a leaky faucet in the bath that has gotten so loud it’s keeping me awake at night.”

“Oh, those tools. Sure, I’ll bring some of them, too.”

Half an hour later, freshly showered and dressed in a
button-down shirt and chinos, he went into the workshop. He selected a wrench and some other odds and ends he figured he might need to fix a leaky faucet.

When he emerged, Wrench was waiting for him at the front door, leash in his mouth.

“Sorry, pal, not this time.”

Wrench looked pathetic.

Thomas crouched in front of him and rubbed his ears. “Here’s the situation. There’s a possibility that I might get asked to spend the night at her place. I don’t think I’ve got a chance in hell if you’re there with me. It’s one thing to ask a man to stay over. It’s another thing altogether to invite him and his dog to spend the night. See what I mean?”

Wrench remained unconvinced.

Thomas gave him one last pat, rose and went out the door. The wrench was heavy in the pocket of his jacket.

“Care for some
hors d’oeuvres, Deke?” Cassie said.

She offered him the bowl of steamed and salted soybean pods. He eyed them closely and then took a small handful.

“These are interesting,” he said. “Tricky looking, but interesting.”

“You’ll get the hang of it after a while,” Leonora assured him. “Watch me.”

She put the end of one of the salted pods into her mouth, held on to the other end with her fingers and winkled out the soybeans with her front teeth. She dropped the empty pod into a small bowl.

Deke tried the same process. There was a loud sucking sound.

“Got ’em,” he announced. He tossed the empty pod into the bowl.

“If you can do it, so can I,” Thomas said.

He put the tip of a soybean pod into his mouth and scraped lightly with his front teeth. When he was finished he held up the empty pod in triumph.

Everyone laughed and reached for more.

Leonora exchanged a look with Cassie. So far, so good. The evening was off to a promising start.

Thomas sniffed the aromas emanating from the kitchen. “Smells good. What’s for dinner?”

“Spinach and feta cheese lasagna,” Leonora said. “Cassie made an apple pie for dessert.”

“Lasagna?” Thomas got a dreamy expression. “Oh, man. I really, really like lasagna.”

“I can’t even recall the last time I had homemade apple pie,” Deke said. “It’s my favorite.” He looked at Cassie. “Didn’t know you could cook.”

“You never asked,” she said sweetly.

He blushed furiously, reached for his beer and changed the topic. “Good news, bad news from the grad student who ran the tests on that sample of Rhodes’s nutritional supplement.”

“What’s the good news?” Thomas asked.

“It’s just colored sugar and cornstarch.”

Leonora raised her brows. “And the bad news?”

“It’s just colored sugar and cornstarch.”

Thomas grunted. “In other words, we’re not going to get him for selling drugs.”

“Not this easily, at any rate,” Deke said. “He’s a phony but I don’t think you can say he’s doing anything that’s dangerous or illegal with that nutritional supplement he’s selling.”

Leonora looked at him. “Anything new on the old Eubanks murder?”

He swallowed more beer and slowly lowered the bottle. “Like I told Thomas, nothing that would explain
Bethany’s interest in the case. According to the old records, it was just one more interrupted burglary in progress.”

Thomas picked up another soybean pod and put it between his teeth. “Eubanks was in the math department. Bethany was a mathematician. Are you sure there’s no connection?”

Deke shook his head. “Not that I can see.”

“You know, she was your wife, but I knew her, too,” Thomas said. “If you ask me, there’s only one reason why Bethany might have taken an interest in an old murder case. And that’s because it somehow impacted her own work in mathematics.”

Deke stiffened. “You make it sound like she didn’t care about people.”

Thomas shrugged. “I’m not sure she did. Not in the way you care about them. Oh, she liked to have people take care of her so that she could focus on her work, but she didn’t go out of her way to help anyone else. You know that, Deke.”

There was a short, strained silence. Leonora met Cassie’s anxious eyes. She knew they were both wondering if Deke would explode into a furious defense of his dead wife.

End of dinner party.

But to her amazement, Deke just scowled.

“She wasn’t cruel or mean or unkind,” he said, sounding stubborn but not angry.

“No.” Thomas leaned back in his chair and regarded his brother. “She wasn’t any of those things. She was simply self-absorbed. Most of the time she was off in her own world, doing her own thing. All she wanted was to be left alone with her work.”

“She was brilliant.” Deke took another swallow of beer. “A genius. Geniuses are different.”

He didn’t offer anything else in defense of his dead wife.

Cassie seized the bowl of soybeans. “Have some more?”

“Thanks,” Leonora said quickly. “I’d love another one.”

There was a small flurry of action as Cassie shoved the bowl in front of everyone, one by one. Deke and Thomas were both equally willing to be distracted. They helped themselves to more of the green pods.

Leonora released the breath she had been holding. “All right, it looks like the Eubanks connection is a dead end for now. We’ll have to concentrate on another angle.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Cassie said slowly.

They all turned to look at her as if she had just announced that she could fly.

“What do you mean?” Deke asked in surprise.

“If you really want to find out if there’s anything more to the Eubanks murder than what was in the papers,” Cassie said quietly. “I have a suggestion.”

“Go on,” Thomas said.

Cassie sat forward. “On Tuesdays I teach a yoga class for seniors at the Cove View Retirement Community. One of the members of that class, a woman named Margaret Lewis, used to be the chief secretary in the Department of Mathematics at Eubanks. She worked at the college for over forty years. She would have been there at the time Sebastian Eubanks was murdered.”

“Oh, my,” Leonora whispered. “The department secretary from thirty years ago is still alive?”

“And kicking,” Cassie added. “One of my best students.”

Deke stared at Cassie. “Holy shit. The department secretary.”

Thomas looked bemused. “I get the feeling I’m missing something here. So one of the math department secretaries is still around. So what?”

They all turned toward him.

“What’s wrong?” He looked down at the front of his shirt. “Did I drop a soybean pod or something?”

“Thomas,” Leonora said with exasperation, “we are talking about a
department secretary
. Don’t you understand? There is no one on a college staff who is more wired into what is going on behind the scenes. Only the good lord above would be a better source of gossip. And he’s not talking.”

“Leonora is right,” Deke said enthusiastically. “You’ve got to trust us on this one, Thomas.”

“If you say so.”

Cassie chuckled. “There are a lot of old jokes about the hierarchy of the academic world, Thomas. The general theme of all of them is that while the dean, department chair, professor, associate professor, assistant professor and instructor all have their place and a certain measure of authority, it’s really the department secretary who runs the show.”

“Okay, okay, I get the point.” Thomas contemplated them each in turn. “You think it might be worth talking to this Margaret Lewis, is that it?”

“Oh, yeah,” Deke said. “If there was anything unusual going on at the time of the Eubanks murder, the department secretary would have known about it.”

Leonora got up and went into the kitchen to check on the lasagna. “If this Margaret Lewis can’t recall anything more about the events surrounding the Eubanks murder than what was in the newspaper clippings, we can rest assured that there was nothing more going on at the time.”

Thomas concentrated on
reassembling the bathroom faucet. Out of long habit he had arranged the various small components one by one on the counter in the order in which he had removed them. The theory was that all he
had to do now to complete the leak repair was put the faucet back together in reverse order. It was a good theory and sometimes it actually worked. But plumbing was an art, not a science. It did not always respond to logic. In that, it had a lot in common with whatever was going on between Leonora and himself.

“I thought things went well,” Leonora said from the doorway behind him. “Deke and Cassie were getting along great by the end of the evening.”

He thought about how close together Deke and Cassie had been walking when they had gone down the steps to the footpath a short while earlier. They hadn’t been holding hands, but there had been a sense of intimacy that seemed new in their relationship.