The Readaholics and the Gothic Gala (15 page)

His admission relaxed me. “I hummed show tunes all day. Al thought I was losing my mind.”

“‘There's a bright golden haze on the meadow,'” he sang in a light baritone.

I joined in and we finished out the chorus with silly flourishes.

“Exactly.” I laughed and it was okay. After a little more banter, I brought up Trent Van Allen. “Any chance you could give me a few more details about him?” I asked, wriggling out of my jeans. I sniffed them and draped them across my footboard, a graceful arc of white-painted iron, decorated with porcelain knobs. It, like most of my bedroom furniture, had come from my folks' attic. The mattress and the box spring were new, but the off-white matelassé bedspread had been in the attic, as had the blond maple dresser, which listed oh-so-slightly. One bedside lamp, pottery with raised daffodils on the swelling base, had come from a garage sale, along with the old steamer trunk I used as a nightstand. Once I'd cleaned it good and spray-painted it white, it made a dandy nightstand that I could store my out-of-season clothes in. The ceramic lamp on the other table had been made by my college roommate, who had wisely decided to give up ceramics in favor of becoming an accountant.

“I can do better than that—I'll make you a copy of his file. I might have to redact a few bits, but most of it's public record. I'll consider this a FOIA request. We've put out an APB on Sharla Winegard—she was listed as a known associate of Van Allen's on his rap sheet. There's a New Jersey warrant on her for shoplifting and grand theft auto.”

I wasn't surprised to hear that, not after the way Sharla had reacted to the idea of going to the police. “Were either of them mixed up with drugs, that you know of?” Shrugging one arm out of my shirt, I switched
the phone to my other ear so I could take it off over my head.

“Not that I recall. Why?”

I explained about how we were trying to find a point of intersection between the victim and the possible suspects. Hart was interested to hear that Allyson might have a record in California. “I'll make a call to the Sacramento police tomorrow,” he said. “Even if her record's sealed, someone might remember what she was arrested for.”

We talked for a few more minutes and then said good-bye. I hung up smiling, and padded naked into the bathroom for a shower.

L
ola drove and I ran vases of flowers or pots of flowering shrubs up to the doorsteps or offices where she was delivering Friday morning. The chilly temps forced me to wear a light jacket, but it was a fun job, since everyone greeted my appearance with a gasp of appreciation or a big smile. I kept my eyes peeled for a tan station wagon as we traversed the town and its outskirts. I spotted a tannish station wagon in the City Market parking lot and got all excited, but it was a Ford Taurus, not a Volkswagen. The young mother approaching it with a basket of groceries, a baby in a sling, and a toddler eyed us warily when she spotted us parked behind her ride. We drove off quickly, giving her a friendly wave. Our last delivery was to a funeral parlor and it took a good fifteen minutes with both Lola and me working to off-load all the arrangements.

“I'd forgotten how much faster it is with two people,” Lola said, getting back into the commercial van painted yellow with “Bloomin' Wonderful” in pink script. “Axie goes with me in the summer, but when she's in school . . . well, it takes a lot longer when I have to find a parking space and make the delivery myself.”

“Glad I could help. I've got an event tonight that will
probably have me out until past midnight, so I don't feel too guilty about playing hooky this morning. Al's on top of things.” I'd already spoken to him twice.

As I slammed my door shut, Lola pulled out her notebook computer. “Look. I did some calculations last night. This”—she pointed to a square on the screen—“is the Club. I drew a circle around it out to two miles, because I figure Van Allen was most likely to park within that area. A two-mile walk would probably take him half an hour, maybe a bit longer in the dark. I don't think he's likely to have parked farther away than that, even if he was paranoid about not having the car spotted near the Club.” She lifted her brows, asking if I agreed.

“That sounds reasonable to me,” I said.

“Okay. Now, this”—she swept a finger across the area west of the Club—“is the golf course. There's nowhere there to park a car—at least, nowhere that wouldn't have been discovered and reported by now. This area farther west, though, is possible. He could park in this housing development or one of the shops along here, cut across the golf course, and be at the Club in twenty minutes or so.” She zoomed in to show me the area she was looking at. I knew it. Jubilee Mansions was an upscale gated community. I thought a decrepit station wagon would stand out among the gleaming Jags, Audis, and Mercedes-Benzes. When I mentioned that to Lola, she agreed, but said, “There's the employee lot, though, where the yardmen and housecleaning staff park. I suspect the Volkswagen might blend in fine there.”

She was right; I'd forgotten about that. “Let's check it out.”

With a flash of white teeth, she swung the van into traffic and headed toward Jubilee Mansions. “I think we're going to get lucky,” she said. “I feel it in my bones. My grandma said my horoscope said I was going to discover a pearl of great price today.”

“Your grandma believes in horoscopes?” I asked, surprised that the devout woman, who always seemed to be in church or at a Bible study or serving dinner to the poor at a soup kitchen, believed in astrology.

“Not really,” Lola said, making a turn, “but she reads them every morning.”

We were laughing when I spotted a woman who looked familiar getting into a car. “Stop!” I told Lola, craning my head for a better look.

“What—?”

“Eloise Hufnagle. I'm almost sure of it. Back there—she was getting into a red car in that little lot behind the printing shop.”

Lola flipped a U-ey at the next intersection, earning an indignant honk from an offended driver. She hunched forward over the steering wheel, eyes scanning the road ahead. I peered down each side street. “There!” I pointed to the left. “She's getting on Paradise Boulevard.”

“You should call Hart,” Lola said.

I shook my head. “Not until I'm sure it's her. Just follow her until she stops. Don't get too close.”

“I don't want to lose her.” Lola kept her attention on
the road while I kept my eyes pinned on the red car. Our higher vantage point in the van made it easier for me to keep her in sight, even when there were three or four cars between us. Once, it looked like she'd lose us at a red light, but Lola floored it and squeaked through the intersection on the yellow. Well, mostly the yellow. Law-abiding Lola looked stressed, her shoulders rigid and her jaw clenched, by the time Eloise turned into the parking lot of the Rocky Mountain Motel, one of a cluster of small hotels just off the I-70 exit.

The Rocky Mountain Motel was older than its neighbors, the Hampton Inn, the Holiday Inn Express, and La Quinta. It was a U-shaped two-story building built around a central parking lot, with rooms opening to the outdoors. An Indian couple owned it and had spiffed it up with a new coat of turquoise paint, a resurfaced parking lot, and window air-conditioning units. They had also recently opened a coffee shop adjacent to the motel, which sold, somewhat incongruously, the best Greek food near Heaven, including baklava to die—or diet—for.

“Park at the coffee shop,” I suggested to Lola as the red car pulled into a slot on the left-hand side of the U, directly in front of a room. A maid's cart waited under the window, and the room's door was slightly open. A woman got out of the car, hefted a box, and slipped through the open door.

“I couldn't tell if that was Eloise,” Lola said, a worry line between her brows. She idled the van in a spot in front of the busy coffee shop.

“Me neither,” I admitted. “She seems about the right height and build, but the only time I ever saw her, she was wearing a nun's outfit.”

“I saw enough photos of her online—I think I'll recognize her if I can just get a good look.” Lola opened the door and leaned through the open window, trying to get a better view. Her glasses slipped and she pushed them up impatiently. As she did, the woman emerged from the hotel room across the way. She paused and seemed to be staring right at us, eyes squinting. I had to admit that the Bloomin' Wonderful van was not the most inconspicuous of vehicles.

“It's her,” Lola said, her voice pitched a notch higher than usual. She had the presence of mind to drop down and pretend to look for something on the asphalt. “Call Hart.”

I was already dialing, trying to keep track of Eloise from the corner of my eye. Before Hart answered, she threw herself into the red car, revved the engine, and peeled out. Lola scrambled back into the driver's seat, and threw the van into reverse. A horn honked a warning before she had backed up more than half a van length. We both looked over our shoulders to see a semitruck blocking us in as it tried to maneuver out of the small lot. The trucker was working one-handed, eating a gooey fistful of baklava as he drove. He gave us a cheery wave with a sticky hand as he pulled out of the lot. It was too late. Eloise's red car was out of sight.

I became aware of noises coming from my phone and lifted it to my ear to tell Hart we'd found and lost
Eloise Hufnagle. “She's driving a red Nissan Sentra,” I told him, “but I never got the plate. She's got a room at the Rocky Mountain Motel off I-70.”

“I know where it is. I'll be there in ten.” He hung up.

Lola and I looked at each other and then at Eloise's room, its door still cracked open as the maid fetched small-sized toiletries from her cart and disappeared back into the room. “Are you thinking what I'm thinking?” I asked.

“No. Yes,” she admitted sheepishly. “Probably. I'd love a peek at her room. What did Hart say?”

“Just that he was on his way over and would be here in ten minutes.”

“We'd better hurry, then,” Lola said, her mouth thinning into a determined line. We hopped out of the van, crossed the thin verge between the coffee shop and the motel, and hustled across the lot until we reached the slot where Eloise's car had been parked. Lola hesitated, but I gave her a gentle shove and she almost collided with the maid, a nineteen- or twenty-year-old girl who might have been the owners' daughter. She already looked worn-out, even though it wasn't yet noon.

“Oh,” she said.

“My, uh, sister, Eloise, forgot her, uh, gum,” I stuttered. Improvisation had never been my strong suit. “I told her I'd come back for it.”

The maid shrugged a shoulder and stepped out of my way, checking a cell phone she pulled from her pocket. She sent a text or two and then wheeled the cart down another couple of doors.

“Don't touch anything,” I reminded Lola. “Hands in your pockets like they do in all the police procedurals.” I tucked my hands in the pockets of my khakis and nudged the door a bit wider with my elbow.

Lola peered over my shoulder. “It looks like the command center for D-day,” she breathed.

I nodded, taking it all in. The room's furnishings could have been ordered from a catalog entitled “Bare-Bones Motel Rooms,” but the place was spotlessly clean—kudos to the teen we'd met outside—and the colors were cheerful shades of rust and tan and pale green. The scent of a pine cleaner hung in the room. There were no clothes or shoes or books strewn about the room to indicate that anyone was in residence. However, Eloise Hufnagle had a series of corkboards propped against the walls, all of them covered with maps and charts and lists. We edged cautiously into the room. The largest bulletin board was held upright at eye level by the television; I guessed Eloise didn't feel the need to keep up with
The Voice
or
Rizzoli & Isles
. The pages tacked to the board had a series of connected circles with photographs pinned inside of them. In the center was a photo of Eloise herself, looking markedly less rabid than at the costume ball, wearing a white lab coat and black-rimmed glasses. Trim, professional, serious—not a bottle of faux blood in sight. At the far edge of the board was a photo of Mary Stewart, mouth ajar and chin tucked at an awkward angle. I wondered how long it had taken Eloise to find such an unflattering photo. Between the two main circles were smaller circles connected with lines that had handwritten notes inked above them. I didn't
recognize any of the people, mostly women, in those circles. None of the lines went all the way from Eloise to Mary.

“She's doing a vector search,” Lola said admiringly. “As if she were working with a disease and trying to track Patient Zero. See how she's working out from herself, and trying to find a connection that could have conveyed the disease—the manuscript, in this case—from her to Mary. So interesting!”

I left Lola to study the scientific precision of Eloise's work and wandered over to look at the corkboard propped against the wall by the bed. This one was full of dozens of photos of Mary Stewart—getting into her car, walking out of the grocery store, glad-handing fans at a book event, eating dinner at a restaurant with two other women. They were candid snaps taken by a mediocre photographer, many of them blurred, and some obviously taken with a long zoom lens. This evidence of Eloise's obsession with Stewart was a bit creepy. “Uh, Lola,” I said. “Look at this.”

She came over to study the new board. “Hm. I'm no lawyer, but I think this is going to constitute evidence of stalking when the police get a look at it. Looks like Mary Stewart was smart to get the restraining order.”

A car door slammed and we jumped. Looking guiltily at each other, we scurried toward the door, moving awkwardly with our hands still dug into our pockets. I was afraid it was Hart, but when we looked outside, we saw a heavyset Indian man unloading boxes of toilet paper from a pickup truck near the small office. As we watched, he hefted two of the boxes and disappeared through the office door, presumably headed for
a storage area. Ten seconds of watching him made me decide that running a mom-and-pop motel operation was not the way I wanted to make a living. I did my share of hauling stuff around as an event organizer, but I'd never had to stockpile toilet paper. Lola and I stepped onto the sidewalk in front of Eloise's room not four seconds before Hart's Chevy Tahoe came around the corner. I waved, as if we'd been standing there merely to help him find the right room.

He gave us a speculative look as he got out of the SUV. “I'm not even going to ask you if you've been inside. I see you were at least smart enough not to touch anything.”

Lola and I jerked our hands out of our pockets. I felt mildly foolish.

“Wait here.”

Even though the room's door was open, he approached the Indian man and had a short conversation with him. The man paused in his toilet-paper unloading, nodding several times, and Hart returned to us. I enjoyed watching his long stride, the way the sun sparked chestnut highlights off his brown hair, and the way his brown eyes crinkled at the corners against the glare. “Tell me how you found Hufnagle.”

I explained about spotting her at the copy shop and following her back to the motel. I emphasized the fact that we hadn't approached her, that she'd spotted the Bloomin' Wonderful van parked at the coffee shop, and bolted. “We called you as soon as we were able to confirm it was her,” I said virtuously.

“I'll nominate you for Citizen of the Year,” he said
drily, and ducked into Eloise's room. Lola and I hovered in the doorway while he checked out the place, trying to gauge his reaction to the corkboard displays. He came out after five minutes, poker-faced, and made a call from the radio in his Tahoe. When he was done, he returned to us.

“Good work,” Hart finally said. He smiled and I let go the breath I'd been holding with a loud whoosh. I hadn't wanted him to be pissed off at us. “We'll keep an eye on the place as manpower allows. The owner says he'll call me when Hufnagle returns. I can't see her abandoning all of her research and photos, so she'll probably sneak back at some point. When she does, we'll ask her a few questions.”