Unforced Error (6 page)

“This doesn't sound like regurgitation material so far,” Melissa said.

“That came when we stopped to catch our breath. He held me at arms' length, and looked at me, and then he just lit up like a six-year old seeing the tree on Christmas morning. His face was like
I got it! I got it!
And he said he could tell I thought I was pregnant but I wouldn't come out and say it yet because I was worried about getting his hopes up too soon.”

“And you started to cry?” Melissa guessed.

“No, I was already crying. I started to feel everything come back up. I knew I wasn't just going vomit but hurl big time, like an outtake from
Animal House
. I mean, the nervous tension and everything, and then the somewhat unfortunate irony on top of it—”

“I understand,” Melissa said.

“So I made a mad dash for the restroom. I thought a Johnny Walker encore might calm me down, but it had the opposite effect. I mean, dumb, yeah, I know. Totally. Except for New Year's Eve and friends getting shucked by their husbands, I don't do hard liquor at all. Anyway, I lost lunch, tea, and salad, and it seemed to go on and on. Thank God you came in.”

“All right, trooper,” Melissa said jauntily, climbing to her feet and pulling Linda after her. “A rough patch, but no harm done. Time to show the flag. I think we'll stick with fruit punch for the rest of the night.”

By the time they reached the hallway Linda was walking on her own, and when they approached the head of the stairs her gait had gotten downright steady. That's when they saw Rep coming up.

“Where's Peter?” Melissa asked sharply.

“Halfway to I-29 would be my guess,” Rep said. He then quickly described Peter's exit and relayed his message.

“Oh God,” Linda panted, a frantic desperation straining her voice. “No, oh please God, no.”

“Steady,” Melissa said.

“What's up?” Rep asked.

“Honey,” Melissa said to him, “this is one of those yours-not-to-reason-why situations, okay? I want you to go down to the bottom of the stairs, and if anyone starts to come up before Linda and I get back down, I want to know about it before they reach the second step.”

“Yas'm,” Rep said, clicking his heels and saluting. He headed for his post as Melissa stuck her tongue out at him.

“All right,” Melissa said then to Linda, “into the office. We need to find out if Peter could possibly have seen anything in there that would have tipped him off to your fling.”
Like Chelsea Tuttle's
note, she thought but saw no point in mentioning. Yet.

Linda showed Melissa into the large, open office space that Quinlan shared with Linda and other freelance editors when they worked on-site. Melissa was feverishly running through a set of rationalizations to justify opening and reading Tuttle's note, but her scruples were wasted. No envelope sheltered the missive. No folds concealed its message.

A letter-opener savagely pinned a typewritten page to the head-high top cushion on Quinlan's leather desk chair. Even from ten feet away Melissa could read the words hand-printed in scarlet lipstick across the typescript: “NICE TRY,” followed by a suggestion of the twelve-letter word for
incestuous
son
. (A suggestion only, rather than the word itself, for asterisks had replaced all but the M, the F, and the Rs.) “CT” served for a signature.

“The bowdlerization seems anomalous in context,” Melissa murmured.

“Chelsea always has been fastidious about indecent language,” Linda explained earnestly. “She knows her demographic.”

“Isn't the letter opener a bit over the top?”

“Not for Chelsea. Anything short of an Italian dagger with a jewel-encrusted hilt would strike her as the epitome of restraint.”

Melissa leaned close enough to the letter to read its typewritten text aloud to Linda. “Dear Chelsea: I am delighted to confirm that Jackrabbit Press is prepared to make an offer for first-publication rights to your novel,
An Inescapable Courtesy
. Enclosed is a contract providing for an advance and royalties twenty percent better than our standard arrangement. As you will appreciate, a surrealistic, experimental novel involving intersecting narrative vectors linking the occupation of Japan after World War II with the birth of disco and the election of the first woman pope will represent a major departure for both you and Jackrabbit Press. Finding just the right marketing approach will be essential. I can only hope that you are as excited by this challenge as I am. I look forward to working together with you on this exhilarating project.”

“Incredible,” Linda said.

“It seems to have aggravated Chelsea,” Melissa said, “but I don't see anything in there that could have alerted Peter.”

“Then it must have been something else,” Linda said despairingly as she sank into a chair and contributed a few gasping whimpers.

Melissa chanced a sidelong glance to make sure Linda was in fact moving away from Quinlan's desk. Something dull and metallic near the top of Quinlan's desk blotter had caught her eye. She wanted to look more closely at it without drawing Linda's attention to it. The five-second examination that she managed left her hollow-bellied. She saw a knuckle-sized chunk of bolt with the threads worn smooth. Three strands of chestnut hair tied around the object in a delicate bow served as decoration.

As Melissa turned back to Linda and gazed at the rich chestnut mane that Melissa had always envied she remembered Jesse Davidovich's throwaway comment about the newel capital—
threads stripped and the bolt's sheared.
She didn't have any trouble imagining a fragment of broken bolt flying unnoticed into Quinlan's pant-cuff as he caught his keys. And she could easily picture his prurient delight later on as he tied stray locks of Linda's hair around the thing to turn it into a love trophy.

Had Peter seen this while Linda was blowing lunch and figured out what it meant? She didn't know.

Should she tell Linda about it? Not yet.

“Snap out of it,” Melissa said to Linda instead, with a tough-love sharpness. “You're jumping to conclusions. We don't know what sent Peter hurrying away. His comments to Rep certainly didn't sound like a jealous husband furious over infidelity.”

“You're right,” Linda said, shaking her head with spunky determination. “You're doing everything you can to help, and I'm acting like a sniveling wimp. You must feel like slapping me silly.”

“Of course not,” Melissa said.
Not silly
. “Now, let's get going.”

“Where?”

“Wherever we think Peter is.”

Chapter 10

You wake up earlier when you're sleeping in a bedroll under a tent than you do on a soft bed under a roof, Rep reflected, a little after five-thirty on Wednesday morning. You hear morning sounds that you don't hear indoors. Metal cups clanging against metal plates. Canvas rustling. Predatory songbirds warbling in melodic triumph over lesser fauna that they've turned into breakfast. Rain dripping on the forage cap you'd put over your face.

Right
, Rep thought.
Now I remember. The Port-A-Potties
.

He pulled himself stiffly from his bedroll and found his boots stowed upside down on sticks stuck in the spongy earth. Peter's bedroll a few feet away lay snugly tied and clearly unused. Had Peter shown up, Rep's instructions were not to let him out of his sight pending contact with Melissa or Linda.
So much for that
, Rep thought—with relief rather than anxiety, for he didn't share the wives' edginess about Peter's exit. He viewed it, in fact, as gender-specific overreaction. Stuff happens, for crying out loud.

Rep hesitated about wearing his saber to the john, then decided that he felt less ridiculous with it than without it. Ducking under the tent flap into a fine mist, he gratefully accepted a cup of coffee offered by a trooper next to a bravely flickering campfire. Nothing in urban life matches the taste of coffee boiled in a covered pan over a campfire.
And if anything did
, Rep thought as he choked the stuff down,
it would be a Class B misdemeanor to sell it.

He made his way toward the target range and the modern conveniences that Peter had said lay beyond it. He glanced in the general direction of Jackrabbit Press, shaking his head at the remnants of a dark gray ash-cloud that hung languidly in the air over an outbuilding chimney.
Who would have had an indoor fire last night in this heat?
he wondered.

As he walked through the pale, post-dawn light, he realized with some surprise that he didn't really have any enthusiasm for the legal project Lawrence had dangled in front of him. He didn't want Lawrence's shiny, spiffed up, video-game, Power Ranger Union soldiers wandering around a camp like this in their custom-designed, operetta-pretty, combed cotton uniforms. He didn't want Lawrence to sell a few more bodice-rippers by co-opting the reverence to memory and history that the re-enactors were offering here. He didn't blame Lawrence, who had a mass-market business to run. But Rep couldn't generate much excitement about contributing to it. It would be like helping someone use a classic rock anthem to sell laxatives.
No, wait a minute,
Rep thought,
I DID that. This would be worse.

Rep's pace quickened as he came within sight of his objective.

“Looks like we're headed for the same place.”

Startled, Rep glanced over at the man who'd come out of nowhere to fall in beside him. Jedidiah Whatsisname—Trevelyan, the sutler whose sharp practice with a widow had won him an antique Barlow knife and an enemy.

“Good morning,” Rep said.

“Mornin'. Mind those roots. Hard to see in this light, an' they'll just reach out an' grab you.”

Rep snapped his head to look down, and in the next instant felt himself sailing inelegantly through the air. As he completed a pratfall on mud and sodden grass, he felt the sutler falling beside and on top of him.

“Whoa, hoss, that's one now!” Trevelyan said, already scrambling to his knees. “Here, let's get you up an' brushed off.”

In his startled confusion, Rep had the bizarre notion for a split second that the man had designs on stealing his saber. He clamped both hands clumsily to it. Then, back on his feet, he came to his senses as clumps of mud gave way to Trevelyan's vigorous hand swipes.

“There. Good as new.”

“Thanks,” Rep said. “I don't know how that happened.”

“Walkin' around outside before full light is something you have to get used to, that's all,” Trevelyan said. “Which stall you favor?”

Rep chose the nearest of the five Port-A-Potties available. With a couple of tugs he worked the balky door open and started to step inside. He stepped back fast. Very fast.

R. Thomas Quinlan—as he would later be identified to Rep—sat hunched on the toilet. His chin was much too low, and drenching his upper torso was a still viscous liquid that looked dark brown but glinted damply with hints enough of bright red to stamp it unmistakably as blood.

“Whoa, hoss,” Trevelyan said with a long, low whistle. “Whatcha got there? Yankee woke up with his hat in his lap, eh? Not the first time that ever happened around these parts, but even so.”

“Okay,” Rep stammered, telling himself to get a grip. “Okay. Um, look. Uh, first, please don't say, ‘Whoa, hoss,' again for a few minutes, okay? And second, we need a cop, and we need one in a hurry.”

“You don't watch where you're pointin' you're gonna piss on one,” a booming voice responded from ten feet away.

Rep's preparations hadn't actually advanced nearly so far, but the hyperbolic comment got his attention. The source of the voice was taller than Lawrence and broader through the chest than Trevelyan was through the belly, which was saying something. His butternut gray slouch hat contrasted with a bushy, rust-colored beard and heroic sideburns. He wore red-trimmed gray trousers and suspenders over a long-sleeved, off-white undershirt. If he worried about treacherous roots reaching out and grabbing his feet as he strode forward, his confident gait didn't show it.

“Good morning, Jedidiah,” the new arrival said after he had closed the distance, which didn't take long. “Got yourself some fresh meat here?”

“Now it's not like that, Red, there's a body—”

“I saw that trip,” Red commented. He turned an appraising eye in Rep's direction. Then, swinging his gaze back to Trevelyan, he held out his hand.

“Red,” Trevelyan protested, “I'm tellin' you there's a body—”

“Last chance,” Red said.

“Oh!” Trevelyan said. “You mean this young feller's button that came off in the fall and that I found while I was helping him up. Here it is. I was just about to give it back to him.”

Trevelyan unfolded his right hand and dropped a dull, tarnished metal button perhaps a half-inch in diameter into Red's palm. Red immediately offered it to Rep.

“I believe this is your property, sir,” he said.

Rep accepted the trinket with his left hand while with his right he felt the empty space on his shell jacket where it belonged.

“Thanks very much,” he said. “This uniform belongs to somebody else, and I'd like to give it back to him intact.”

“You know,” Red said, “during the War for Southern Independence soldiers with sticky fingers could get bucked and gagged. Tied in a sitting position with a stick holding their elbows under their knees. Leave 'em that way for twelve hours or so. Sutlers, though, they just horsewhipped.”

“Now, Red,” Trevelyan whined, “I told you already—”

“You mean he went through that whole thing to steal a button?” Rep asked. “Tracked me down, managed to run into me, tripped me? I saw buttons like this at the sutlers' tent being sold for a quarter apiece.”

“You saw replicas,” Red said. “I'm betting that what you're holding there is the thing itself, actually worn by a pony soldier during the late, lamented Struggle. Maybe rode with Little Phil Sheridan himself, for all we know. Collector might pay three-hundred-fifty dollars for it.”

Rep remembered Trevelyan's searching, close-up inspection the day before, while he was ostensibly touting the virtues of different revolvers to Rep.

“Now, dammit, I'm not gonna stand here and have my good name blackened,” Trevelyan said. “I'm gonna—”

“I'll tell you what you're gonna do, and right fast,” Red said. “You're gonna hop over to the Confederate side of the encampment. You're gonna say that Sergeant Pendleton of the Missouri Partisan Rangers would be much obliged if a buncha boys from the General Order Number 11 Club would hot-foot it over here. And if I see twelve of them within fifteen minutes, I might pretend to swallow that hogswill you've been peddling ever since I got here.”

Trevelyan made tracks without further commentary.
Who would have imagined he could move so fast?
Rep thought.

“So it's Sergeant Red Pendleton,” Rep said. “I'm Private Rep Pennyworth. I'm new at this.”

“We were all new at it once. Anyhoo, I'm now gonna start acting like a sergeant in the Missouri Highway Patrol, which I also happen to be, ' cause I don't think that fella in the can there died of natural causes. Don't tell anybody about this. It's against the rules, but duty is duty.”

Pendleton pulled a cell phone from his trouser pocket as he carefully stepped away from the Port-a-Potty, gesturing to Rep to follow him. With an emphatic sweeping motion of his left arm, he waved three approaching re-enactors away from the area.

“Hey, Smitty, that you?” he said into the phone. “This is Red Pendleton. Listen, we got ourselves a homicide up at the Civil War encampment south of Liberty, down by the johns.…This is Clay County, but I'm betting the closest CSI van is probably the Jackson County Sheriff's Department.…Yeah, call Jackson County, tell them maybe it's a Metro Squad thing, get that van up here. We need to get that baby to work, ' cause it's gonna take a miracle to keep this crime scene secure for more than half-an-hour.”

He put the phone away, took his hat off, and swiped his right sleeve across his forehead.

“You know who that fella is?” he asked Rep, nodding toward the body.

“No,” Rep said. He'd never met Quinlan, or heard him described.

“Quite a blade you've got there.”

“I bought it yesterday,” Rep said.

“Mind if I take a look at it?” Pendleton asked.

“Actually,” Rep said, “I'm inclined to insist on it.” He started to reach for a handkerchief, but Pendleton waved that nicety aside.

“We know your fingerprints are on there, and no one's gonna try to pin this on me,” he said.

Rep unhooked the scabbard and tendered the saber hilt-first to Pendleton. Pendleton drew the weapon, examined the blade for perhaps a minute, then passed it under his nose an inch at a time and sniffed deeply.

“Well,” he said, “they'll wanna do a spectrographic analysis because you were the one that found the body, but I'll guarantee you there hasn't been any blood or human tissue on that blade in the last twenty-four hours.”

“That's a relief.”

“Lemme just try somethin' before I give this back to you. Throw one of those twigs up in the air, would ya?”

Rep complied, tossing up a stick about two feet long. Pendleton slashed with the saber, which knocked the stick several feet but didn't sever it. Rep retrieved the twig and showed Pendleton a gash perhaps a quarter-inch deep in the surface.

“On a good day,” Pendleton said after examining it, “this saber of yours could just about cut hot butter.”

“I hadn't even thought of sharpening it.”

“Don't think about it. At re-enactments we want the metal to clang so the tourists get a show, but we don't actually wanna slice anybody up. If there's a saber out here that could do the kinda cuttin' our quiet friend over there experienced, somebody had to take some extra effort with it.”

The sound of hurrying feet drew Rep's attention to a stand of trees off to his left. Nine men in gray came out on the double, carrying muskets.

“Morning, sergeant,” the one in front called. “What's the drill?”

“Morning,” Pendleton bawled. “It would oblige me if you would form a perimeter around these fancy latrines here. Gimme twelve paces if you can.”

After a brief look of puzzlement, the guy in front snapped a salute—a pretty good salute, too, if Rep was in any judge—and hustled off with his buddies to comply.

“So,” Rep said as he took his saber back, “what do we do now?”

“We wait,” Pendleton said. “And hope someone brings us breakfast.”