Tea-Totally Dead (26 page)

The Skeritts were all gathered in the bar under a pink neon version of a dancing mango, this one sporting bulging eyes and a top hat. But somehow the Skeritts didn’t look as if they really appreciated the fun decor. Bill and Dru sat silently frowning with drinks in hand at a table they shared with Gail. Trent, Lori and Ingrid sat at another table, without the drinks but with similar frowns. Trent looked up as we entered the bar and gave us a strained, polite smile. Ace was at yet another table with the two kids. No one was talking. Except for Eric, of course.

“You know what?” he was saying to Mandy. He didn’t wait for her answer. “In New York they’re training these totally cool seals to retrieve stuff from the ocean for the police. Like guns and drugs and stuff—”

“That’s really hideous,” Mandy drawled. “What if a gun goes off?”

“But they’re only seals,” Eric objected. “That’s why it’s so totally cool.”

Mandy’s chocolate-brown eyes narrowed. I felt an animal rights lecture approaching.

“Hi, everyone,” I called out quickly. “They have a place set up for us outside.”

It was supposed to be fun outside, too, on the whitewashed cement patio. We sat at a long table made up of a series of smaller tables covered in blue-checked linen. We had a sideways view of the bay over a fence made of metal pylons and thick brown rope. It was all very nautical. There were gulls galore, flying around and screeching over the sound of waves and wind. And the wind was cold, much colder than I expected. I wondered if they could move us to a table inside. But before I could propose the idea, Eric started up again.

“So these seals can even take pictures,” he told Clara. She had made the tactical error of sitting next to the boy. “Really. It’s totally incredible! And they can unbuckle seat belts too….”

I looked down at my menu. There were plenty of burgers under the dancing mango logo: tofu burgers, bean burgers, turkey burgers and beef burgers. And lots of fish, including tequila prawns and blackened red fish with mango chutney. And tostadas, and tacos—

“These are such cute little menus,” Dru said. She and Bill were at the other end of the table. I could just hear her high, tinkling voice over the wind. “And the food looks so fun. Don’t you think so, Bill?”

In reply, Bill took a sip from his glass.

A busboy tossed a few baskets of bread and mini crocks of butter on our table and then retreated. Lori passed a basket to me, exclaiming over the corn and molasses breads. I took a piece of each kind and passed the rest along to Gail. I bit into the molasses bread gratefully. It was as good as I remembered, and warm besides.

“Do you know what else?” Eric asked Clara, his eyes eager under his thick glasses. I could hear
his
voice just fine.

“What?” she answered, looking at him with apparent interest. I had thought Clara was a saint before, the way she’d put up with Vesta. Now I was certain.

“I read this totally audacious article about DNA profiling last night,” he told her. He crammed bread into his mouth and went on, spitting crumbs. “If they get a trace of your blood, it’s practically like a fingerprint. Or sperm. Or…”

He was still lecturing when the waiter came for our order. And Clara was still listening. Actually, everyone seemed to be. It was easier than talking, I guessed.

“Bean burger with mango relish,” I ordered when my turn came.

Eric looked over at Mandy before he placed his order, then muttered something inaudible into the wind.

“What was that?” the waiter asked.

“Beef burger,” he said in a normal tone.

Mandy turned to him and mouthed one word, “Hideous,” then turned away. It looked as if that budding relationship was doomed. But Eric was irrepressible. Once the waiter was gone, he started in about genetics again.

“This really smart dude named Mendel figured it out,” he told Clara. He looked over at Mandy. Was he still hoping to impress her? “There’s like recessive genes and dominant genes and they control all sorts of things like… like…” He faltered as Mandy glared back at him.

“Like eye color,” Clara put in gently. She smiled encouragingly. “Blue is—”

“Yeah, oh sure,” he said. “Like eye color. Blue’s recessive and brown’s dominant, so two blues make—” He broke off again. This time he seemed to be staring at Gail, sitting beside me. “Hey, why are Gail’s eyes brown? Both of her parents’ eyes are blue!”

You could almost hear the whoosh as heads turned simultaneously to look at Gail.

“Because Bill Norton is not my real father,” she answered brusquely. “My
real
father had brown eyes.”

“So,” Clara said. “Father with brown eyes and a mother with blue eyes could make a child with brown—”

“Oh, yeah,” Eric said quickly. “I knew that.”

“I’ll bet you did,” Mandy drawled, rolling her eyes to the cloudy sky above.

“Now, sweetie,” Lori said reprovingly to her daughter, but I could hear the laughter in her voice.

I buried my own laughter in a cough. Poor Eric. I wondered if he had stayed up late last night studying genetics to impress Mandy.

“And you know what else?” he said a few moments later. Fortunately, the kid knew how to bounce back. Fortunately for him anyway.

“What?” Clara replied. Her eyes were creased into an affectionate smile.

“I read that male sperm count is down to half of what it was fifty years ago—”

“Uh-oh!” Ace interrupted. He opened his eyes wide and rolled them slowly toward his lap.

Everyone laughed at that one. Well, not everyone, actually. Gail didn’t laugh. Or Trent. Or Wayne, for that matter. But a lot of us did. Even Eric.

“Hey,” the boy followed up, “does anyone know what an entomologist studies?” He gave us approximately three seconds to come up with an answer, then answered himself. “Bugs!” he announced gleefully. “These dudes are totally awesome. They can tell all sorts of things about a dead body by the bugs. See, first there’s flies, then eggs, and then maggots—”

“Whoa, boy!” Ace interrupted. “Enough is enough.”

“But Grampy!” Eric objected. “I was just—”

“Why don’t you tell everyone about your sports career,” Ace suggested quickly.

“Ah, I’m not that good,” Eric said. He lowered his eyes for a moment. Was he being modest? Or was he really terrible? “But I did hit a totally awesome home run for our baseball team. You see, I figured it out…”

But I didn’t hear the rest of his sentence. The minute Eric had said “baseball,” I’d stopped breathing. I blinked my eyes and saw the living room of Vesta’s condo as it had been yesterday morning when we’d found Harmony’s body. And finally, I knew what was missing. It was Harmony’s baseball bat.

- Twenty -

I figured I’d just close my eyes until I could breathe better, but the all too familiar vision of Harmony’s battered body appeared the instant my eyelids came down. I pulled them back up and looked over at Wayne, hoping for a little visual relief. He sat silent and still between his Uncle Ace and Aunt Ingrid, his gaze straight ahead and unreadable. Had he thought of the baseball bat too, the baseball bat that Harmony had carried for protection? Had he wondered if it had been turned on her and used to beat her into— No, I told myself. I wasn’t going to think about that anymore.

The wind raised the hair on my forearms. It was too damn cold out here, I decided, shifting in my chair impatiently. I surveyed the faces around the table. No one else looked cold. No one was shivering but me. Ingrid was smiling vaguely at Eric as he continued his monologue. Trent was smiling at the boy too, but the effect was marred by the muscle that twitched in his jaw. Ace leaned back in his chair, looking comfortable as he listened to his grandson. And Mandy was still glaring in Eric’s direction.

“… and I’m, like, way taller than the other kids on the basketball team,” he was saying. “It’s totally cool…”

When I finally got around to looking at Gail sitting beside me, I realized she wasn’t watching Eric like the rest of the table. She was watching me. Her stare seemed to intensify as my eyes met hers. I resisted the urge to look away, and clamped my teeth into a smile. She didn’t return the smile. She just stared. God, she was a spooky woman, I thought. Then I wondered if she knew what I was thinking.

“I played basketball in high school too,” Lori announced loudly from my other side. My heart jumped in my chest like a startled deer. Gail didn’t even blink. I turned slowly to face Lori, my heart beating double time.

“It’s a wonderful way to get in touch with your body,” Lori went on enthusiastically, waving a piece of cornbread in the air to make her point. “Sports can be a true meditation….”

I had just managed to get my pulse back to normal, when our meal came.

Dru tasted one of her tequila prawns and pronounced it “delicious.” Ace grunted his appreciation of the grilled salmon with mango chutney. Wayne poked at his tostada. And I stared at my bean burger, wondering if I could eat it. I snuck a look at Gail. She shoved a forkful of fettucini in her mouth and looked back at me. I picked up the burger and bit into it.

“Yum,” I mumbled through my mouthful, banishing all thoughts of Harmony. Or at least trying to. “The mango relish is great.”

I swallowed hard and wondered why it seemed so important to eat the damn burger. A duel of nerves with Gail, with fettucini and bean burgers as our chosen weapons? But why duel with Gail in the first place? Because she was the murderer? I snuck another glance at her. She was still watching me out of the corner of her eye as she ate. I forced myself to take another bite and suddenly my viewpoint shifted. What if Gail thought
I
was the murderer?

“So, Kate,” she said to me quietly. “How do you feel about your mother?”

After I had finished choking on my bean burger, I told her I felt “just fine” about my mother. She didn’t ask me any more questions.

It was deep into twilight by the time everyone had finished eating. The patio lights buzzed on as the waiter came back with dessert menus.

“None for me, thank you,” Clara said and stood. Then she murmured, “ladies’ room,” and turned away from the table.

“Me too,” I announced, popping out of my seat like a jack-in-the-box.

The rest room had a Looney Tunes poster, a painted plaster of Paris laughing mango and two stalls. Clara was washing her hands when I came out of my stall. I couldn’t wait any longer.

“Do any of these guys act like murderers to you?” I blurted out.

She sighed and suddenly I saw the age in her serene face. It was in the wrinkles around her eyes and the hollows beneath them. I even thought I could see more gray hairs than before in her black pageboy. Maybe it was the lighting in the bathroom.

“I wish I could tell you that I recognized the murderer among them,” she said slowly. “But I just can’t. Oh, they’re an odd bunch. Bill Norton seems very depressed as well as alcoholic. And Mrs. Norton appears to be in complete denial about his condition. I’d guess that Trent Skeritt is quite distressed beneath his smile. And Ingrid Skeritt is certainly upset, but that would seem to me to be a normal reaction to these circumstances.”

She turned to the mirror above the sink and stared, apparently lost in thought.

“What about Gail?” I asked.

Clara smiled gently. “I would guess that Gail is a very emotional woman trying very hard to be unemotional,” she replied. “A common malady among psychotherapists, I can assure you.”

“But not necessarily a murderer,” I finished for her.

“No,” she agreed, the smile leaving her face. “I’ve known a few murderers in the course of my work. A man who killed his wife. A much younger man who killed his mother. And a mother who killed her own child.” She shook her head sadly. “Each of them was quite clearly psychotic. The mother heard voices telling her to kill her child and then herself, but—” She broke off suddenly. “I didn’t mean to go on like this, my dear,” she apologized. “Sometimes the despair weighs on me.”

“I understand,” I told her. And I did. That’s why I had left psychiatric work twenty years ago.

“Anyway,” she said more cheerfully, “the only murderers I’ve known have been obvious in their insanity. If the murderer in this case is one of Mrs. Caruso’s relatives, then he or she is not so obvious.”

I nodded glumly. Clara wrapped an arm around me and hugged. For a moment, I felt absurdly childlike and protected. Then she removed her arm.

Neither Wayne nor I said anything more about the murder until we had dropped Clara off at her apartment and were cruising back down the highway.

“Remember Harmony’s baseball bat?” I asked then.

Wayne nodded.

“Shouldn’t it have been—” I began.

“By the door with the water gun,” he finished for me. So, he
had
thought of it, too.

“Do you think it was gone because the murderer used it to…” I took a breath. “Because it was the weapon?” I finished.

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “But maybe it’s just somewhere else in the condo.”

“Do we talk to the police about it?” I asked aloud. Not that I really wanted to be grilled by Detective Sergeant Upton another time if I could possibly avoid it.

“Not yet,” Wayne answered softly. Then he turned toward me. I wished he’d keep his eyes on the road. The speedometer was pushing eighty. “We have to figure this thing out soon, Kate. Everyone’s coming to the funeral tomorrow. But after that, I don’t know how we can keep them here.” Then, to my relief, he turned his eyes forward again.