Wall-To-Wall Dead (21 page)

The other shook his head. “Shut up and drive the bus, Coleman. Dr. Ellis and I’ve got this.”

Paramedic number one snapped his mouth closed and hopped in the front seat, his cheeks pink.

“I’m not actually Dr. Ellis anymore,” Derek said mildly as the doors shut, and that was the last thing I heard.

As the ambulance headed out of the lot, sirens and lights going, Wayne turned to me. “Explain what happened.”

“I have no idea,” I said. “We came out here this afternoon to talk about what we wanted to do to the condo. I wanted to ask Candy a question, so we knocked on her door. Jamie said she was downstairs doing laundry. When we didn’t find her in the laundry room, we went into the community room and found her lying on the floor. I called nine-one-one while Derek did what he could for her. That’s all I know.”

“What happened to her?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “Whatever it was, it happened before we got here.”

“Did Derek say anything about it? Did he notice any injuries or anything?”

I shook my head. “If he did, he didn’t mention it. He didn’t say much at all. Too busy trying to keep her alive.”

He had mentioned alcohol poisoning, but I found that explanation hard to believe, in the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday. Jamie had mentioned drinking wine the night before, yes, but from everything I knew about alcohol poisoning, it didn’t work like that. People who die from alcohol poison have been drinking pretty steadily for a long time; they didn’t share a bottle of wine at night and suddenly collapse twelve hours later.

“Jamie?” Wayne said.

Jamie looked up. She was wedged between Amelia Easton and William Maurits, who were more or less keeping her upright, and she’d been crying. There were tear tracks on her cheeks, but she made no attempt to reach up and wipe them away. With the tears, and in her extra pale face, her eyes looked a bright emerald green. “Yes?”

“Do you know anything about this?”

Jamie shook her head.

“Can you tell me what Candy did this morning?”

Jamie sniffed. “We slept late,” she said, her voice rasping. “It must have been eleven by the time we got up. Neither of us felt great. We had some wine last night.”

She looked guilty. I couldn’t imagine why, since she and Candy were both into their twenties and legally allowed to get as drunk as they wanted in the privacy of their own apartment. It wasn’t like she’d done anything wrong.

“Candy always does her laundry on Sundays. We have school the rest of the week, and on Saturdays she likes to do other things.” Her eyes brimmed over again, and big, fat tears rolled down her pale cheeks. “She felt awful, and so did I, so I wanted to wait to do laundry until I felt better. But she was out of clean clothes, and she said she could be hungover in the basement as well as upstairs.”

“When did she go down?” Wayne wanted to know.

It had been just after noon, when the laundry room opened. “We put our names on the schedule from week to week,” Jamie explained.

“And then?”

“She stayed downstairs. She had a book. And it’s nice
not to be right on top of each other every minute. I went back to bed until Avery knocked on the door.” She glanced at me.

So that was why it had taken her so long to answer the summons when we knocked.

“You didn’t see Candy again after she went downstairs?”

Jamie shook her head. She seemed a little disoriented, almost as if she wasn’t just hungover, but still a little intoxicated. It must have been quite the celebration, if the alcohol stayed in her system this long.

Wayne must have noticed the same thing, because he asked, “How much did you have to drink last night? Between the two of you.”

“Just a bottle of wine,” Jamie said. “Red.”

“Have you had anything to drink since last night? Hair of the dog to chase the hangover this morning maybe?”

Jamie shook her head, as her pale face took on a green tinge. “No.”

Wayne looked around. “Did anyone else see Candy this morning?”

Nobody answered.

“I want to go to the hospital to see her,” Jamie whispered.

“I’ll take you.” This was Amelia Easton’s contribution. She had her arm around Jamie’s waist, holding her up. “We can go right now.”

“I need to change first.” Jamie glanced down at her duckie pajama pants, and wobbled.

Amelia guided her toward the stairs. “We’ll go upstairs first. Maybe get some food into you. It might help to settle your stomach.”

“I don’t think so…” Jamie muttered, but she allowed herself to be herded up the stairs nonetheless.

William Maurits gave me a polite little nod before he followed, his step springy and his posture ramrod straight, as if to make up for his lack of inches. Last were the Mellons: Bruce with his arm around Robin’s shoulders, Benjamin
clinging to his mother’s hand. With Candy on her way to the hospital, Derek riding with her, and Miss Shaw in the morgue, the group of neighbors was severely diminished.

“Avery?” Wayne said. I turned to look at him. “Everything OK?”

I nodded. “I’m just a little shook up. But I’ll be all right.”

“Do me a favor. I want to go upstairs, to pick up that bottle of wine the girls shared last night. Brandon’s on his way. Will you wait for him and let him in if he arrives while I’m upstairs?”

“Sure,” I said. “You think there was something wrong with the wine?”

“It’s hard to say. A young, healthy girl shouldn’t have this kind of reaction to half a bottle of red wine. I want the bottle and glasses tested, along with anything else the girls ate or drank last night. If Brandon gets here while I’m upstairs, tell him to have a look around the laundry room and the community room for anything unusual.”

I told him I would, and he headed up to the third floor. I sat down on the ground with my back against the building, wondering what the hell had just taken place and how it was that this peaceful, quiet condo complex had turned into such a bloody battlefield.

Brandon pulled into the lot a few minutes later. I was feeling better out in the crisp air and silence, and by the time he’d pulled his forensic kit out of the trunk of the police cruiser and was coming toward the door, I was on my feet and ready to do my duty.

“What happened?” Brandon wanted to know, blue eyes a little wild in his pale face.

“I’m not exactly sure,” I admitted. “She was on the floor of the community room. Unconscious. Barely breathing.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, was she shot? Beaten? Was there something wrong with her?”

“Nothing I could see. Nothing Derek mentioned. She
was hungover, or so her roommate said. They’d had some wine last night and woke up late, feeling sick. Jamie’s in pretty bad shape, too, although nowhere near as bad as Candy.”

Brandon furrowed his brows. “How much wine did they have?”

“Not enough to account for this. Unless there was something wrong with the wine. Wayne is upstairs picking it up, along with anything else they ate or drank. He said to take it to the lab and have it tested when you’re done here.”

Brandon nodded.

“He said to get started in the laundry room and community room, to look for anything unusual.”

Brandon nodded and pushed open the door. No sooner had he stepped through into the hallway than Wayne was there, along with Jamie—looking pale and wan—and Amelia Easton, looking motherly and solicitous with a hand under Jamie’s arm.

“We’ll stop for a cup of coffee along the way,” she told the girl, “and see if that won’t make you feel better.”

Jamie shook her head, her eyes teary. “I just want to get there.”

“There’ll be coffee at the hospital,” Wayne assured Professor Easton at the same time as he passed the bag in his hand off to Brandon. It contained the bottle of wine along with the glasses from last night, I gathered, when I heard them clink together. “Put this in the car, please.”

Brandon nodded and headed back out to the parking lot.

“I’ll be there myself in just a few minutes,” Wayne continued, addressing Jamie and Amelia Easton, “to see what, if anything, the medical team can tell me.”

They both nodded, and Amelia Easton supported Jamie toward the door, held open for them by Brandon. They passed through into the parking lot, and Brandon came back inside the building.

“Anything else?”

Wayne shook his head. “She swore up and down they just drank the one bottle. I’ve got it, empty now, as well as
the glasses and also a box of chocolates. Have a quick look around here, for anything out of the ordinary, and then drive it down to the lab in Portland. I know they won’t get started on it until tomorrow, but at least it’ll be there first thing in the morning.”

Brandon nodded.

“Avery can show you where she and Derek found Candy. I’m going to the hospital.” He headed for the door.

“If you see Derek,” I called after him, “tell him to call me when he’s ready to get picked up.”

Wayne didn’t turn, just waved a hand to signal that he’d heard me.

As soon as he was out of sight, I took Brandon into the laundry room, where he picked up Candy’s paperback romance to add to the bag in the car, and then into the community room, where I pointed to the place on the floor where Candy had lain. Brandon looked around. “Nothing here that I can see.”

I shook my head. “No blood. She wasn’t shot or stabbed. Unless there’s something wrong with the wine, it looks like natural causes.”

“Girls her age don’t die from natural causes,” Brandon said grimly. “Thanks, Avery.”

“Sure.” But I couldn’t quite bring myself to walk out.

Brandon looked at me. “Something on your mind?”

I hesitated. I knew something he didn’t—or at least something I assumed he didn’t. About Mr. Guido and what I thought was Candy’s affair with a married man and what had looked like an argument between them on Friday night…as they got together to discuss something that had to do with Miss Shaw’s death.

If what had happened to Candy wasn’t natural, Mr. Guido was at the top of my suspect list. Or perhaps Mrs. Guido, if she knew her husband was diddling Candy on the side.

Always assuming he
was
diddling Candy on the side, of course. And assuming he and his wife didn’t have one of those “open” relationships where he was allowed to.

It was information I felt like the police should probably know. Except it was all pretty much supposition on my part. I assumed they were having an affair, but they may not be. I assumed they’d had an argument Friday night, but they may not have. And I’d assumed the conversation I’d overheard had had something to do with Miss Shaw—it had sounded like it might—but I hadn’t heard the other side of it, so I couldn’t actually be sure of that, either.

And if I was wrong, and they weren’t having an affair, and Mr. Guido hadn’t done anything to Candy, did I want to be responsible for siccing the police on him? What if he was just a concerned boss wanting to make sure his employee was all right after the sudden death of her neighbor? The police would interrogate him, and maybe interrogate his wife, and upset those two pretty little girls I’d seen—and it would all be for nothing.

Brandon was still looking at me, waiting for my answer. I shook my head. “I’m just a little shook up, that’s all. I think I’ll spend a couple minutes folding the laundry and throw the rest of it in the dryers, and then I’ll head down to the hospital.”

“I’m gonna get the stuff to the lab,” Brandon said.

I nodded and headed back to the laundry room.

I hadn’t been kidding when I told Derek I enjoy doing laundry. There’s something very peaceful, almost hypnotic, about watching clothes agitate through a front loader’s window. And folding clothes is one of those mindless activities, like washing dishes, that keeps your hands busy but leaves your mind free to wander. Great for puzzling over solutions to mysteries. These days I have other activities that serve that same purpose—removing wallpaper and scraping paint come to mind—but as I folded Candy’s tight jeans and cropped tops and silky little bits of underwear, I found myself going back to what had happened.

For a second, when we’d first walked into the community room and had seen her on the floor, I’d been sure she
was dead. She’d been so still, so pale, her back hardly rising or falling at all. And in the ambulance, with all the tubes and machines hooked up to her…not to mention the look in Derek’s eyes. He wasn’t one to worry overmuch, my boyfriend—when Melissa had gotten shot, he’d acted like it was no big deal—so when he did, I tended to take it seriously. Candy was in a bad way.

And Brandon was right: Girls her age didn’t just drop dead—or almost dead—from natural causes. Not unless they had some kind of hidden medical issue. Which she might well have, but if so, no one had mentioned it. People knew that Miss Shaw had had severe allergies, and several of them had said so. But no one—not even Jamie—had said anything about Candy having health problems. Chances were she didn’t, that she was just as healthy as she looked. Or as healthy as she had looked, up until today.

That was something the doctors would figure out anyway, and while I could keep my fingers crossed, mentally, for a simple solution, I was pretty sure this would turn out to be something more sinister than a hidden case of, say, diabetes. Wayne must agree, since he’d determined that the wine and glasses and chocolate needed to go to the lab. To be tested for poison, I assumed.