Grab & Go (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 2) Page 12

  “Emmie might be my — my niece,” I blurted.

  Walt’s gaze flicked to the Polaroid of Skip then back to me. I watched his eyes change as the realization penetrated — he knew both Skip and I had been only children in our respective families, raised without siblings.

  Suddenly he’d pulled me out of my chair and against his chest, his arms strong around me. “You did the right thing,” he murmured into my hair.

  I walked with Walt out onto the patio and lingered while he jogged through the rain to Bertha. He had a month’s worth of groceries to unload and a bunkhouse full of boys to tend to tonight, minus the two who were under my roof.

  Bertha’s single functioning taillight winked through the dripping dusk as Walt eased her across puddled ruts. I leaned against the mansion’s rough brick wall long after Walt had disappeared around the bend, listening to the rain patter, inhaling cleansing damp air.

  Sorting. There were too many loose ends, too many trails which led to possibilities that scared me.

  By their very nature, the other participants in my multi-faceted problems had to be reactive. If I stayed busy, I might be able to keep both the FBI and my husband’s revenge-seeking clients on their toes. It meant a lot of running, a lot of zigzagging, a lot of forced unpredictableness. All this for a girl who loved her minutely detailed daily planner. Foreign territory.

  What worried me most was that in the middle of all this scrambling, maybe what I was really doing was trying to outwit my husband. Steal his own stolen money. Disrupt his illegal business channels. Why?

  The idea roiled around in the black pit of my stomach, ricocheted off the inside of my skull.

  Because I had to know. The truth, no matter how unsavory. I’d make sense of it when I had it in my hands. I had to. The alternative was unbearable.

  And because Skip — and by default, I — had dependents now. A boys’ camp; a poor farm; an injured moonshiner; Skip’s lush of a mother who was, I hoped, still on her detox spa retreat; Clarice; the Gonzales family; and now Emmie.

  Especially Emmie.

  She’d recognized him. Called him Uncle Skip. Her first words when she’d finally trusted me enough to speak.

  Was ‘uncle’ just his euphemistic designation since Emmie’s mother couldn’t acknowledge him as the father of her child? Or was he more of a benefactor, the way he had been for the boys’ camp, and not really, biologically, related at all?

  I pushed off the wall and retreated to the kitchen. Spinning on the hamster wheel of my thoughts wasn’t going to solve anything. Sometimes you have to step off in a direction — any direction — to find out where you are.

  CHAPTER 16

  My only direction that night, though, was to bed. I mentioned my appointment — date and time undetermined, but urgent — with Tarquin Roe. But Clarice growled, “Not tonight you aren’t,” and hustled me toward my bedroom with a couple of hot water bottles and a second comforter.

  I heard her heavy tread on the wood planks in the hallway, shuttling back and forth for what seemed like hours, as she cared for her other resting patients and put the girls to bed. But my awareness of her activity must have been in my dreams because I awoke still in my clothes, swaddled in blankets but not actually between the sheets, my neck crooked uncomfortably against the clammy, rubber bulge of an expired hot water bottle. I’d only managed to pull my feet up and tip over before succumbing.

  The mansion was quiet when I rose, but heavier somehow with the breathing of slumbering people. I wondered what the place had felt like when every room was occupied by destitute residents who labored on the farm for their room and board. Family quarters with children and parents, segregated dormitories for single men and women — the men had outnumbered the women probably six or seven to one, attic coves for staff. It was as though their histories were palpable, ghostly, and followed me down the hall and into the kitchen.

  My body was sluggish with a depth of fatigue I’d never experienced before, as though my muscles were mired in sludge and I couldn’t break them free. My movements were stiff and jerky, with an invisible half-speed governor on my internal motor. The aftereffects of hypothermia? Or the compound interest on a sleep-deprivation annuity?

  I left a note for Clarice, swiped the keys to the Subaru, and stepped into the swirling mist with a flashlight. A thin layer of feather-crackled ice covered the car. I had to lie on my back, scooching through crunchy frost with my head under the bumper to get the right angle to remove the original GPS tracking device. Matt’s second addition from yesterday was only visible because it was still clean, but it was tinier, and he’d attached it to the side of a strut much higher in the car’s undercarriage. Clever.

  I rolled out from under the car with the bugs in my hand. They couldn’t go far. They needed to give the impression that the Subaru was permanently parked near the kitchen door. I stood on tiptoe and tucked them into the crook of the downspout where it curved in from the gutter on the patio overhang.

  I had three choices for locating Tarquin Roe’s house — call the owner, call Des again or stop by the general store for a chat with Etherea. I chose the latter as the least obtrusive.

  Etherea was just unlocking the door when I climbed the creaking steps to the store’s covered porch. A streak of dawn peeked through a narrow slit under the heavy-hanging clouds, the angled light gilding the frost on the handrail and shooting sparkles across the gravel parking lot. It hardly seemed the same setting of a drive-by shooting a few days ago.

  “You’re up early,” Etherea said as I followed her into the warmth of the store. “Everything all right out at Mayfield?” Her shaggy salt and pepper brows shadowed the quick glance she cast at me over her shoulder. “Walt sure left in a hurry yesterday. I had to holler after him to remember your grapefruit basket.”

  I didn’t want to get into details with her. And I didn’t want to test her knowledge of Dwayne and his distilling activities even though she was the local repository of information, accurate or otherwise. So I quickly sidestepped down an aisle toward the bank of coolers in the back of the store.

  “Can you give me directions to Tarquin Roe’s house?” I called, snagging a bottle of orange juice. The cooler door slapped closed behind me. I grabbed a box of glazed doughnuts from the Entenmann’s display and headed for the cash register. Get me out from under Clarice’s nose, and this was my kind of balanced diet.

  “Tarq?” Etherea repeated. “You headed there? Then you could do me a favor.” She pounded keys, and the cash drawer dinged open. “Got his monthly grocery order here. Just give me a minute to fill in the refrigerated stuff. It’d save him a trip if you could take it to him. He really shouldn’t be driving.”

  “That bad?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “It was that bad back when his only problem was the bottle. Now the shakes he gets from the cancer drugs are even worse than the effects of his drinking. What do you want with Tarq, anyway?”

  I shrugged. “I need a lawyer.”

  Etherea snorted but refrained from comment — quite possibly a first for her. She hustled into the backroom.

  Etherea’s reticence wrapped another layer of worry to the veneer that was already weighing me down. But when she returned with a loaded cardboard apple box, I still hadn’t figured out how to ask for more information about Tarq without offering too much of my own.

  Armed with Etherea’s deft descriptions of the landmarks I should pass if I made the correct turns, I set out. Fog fingered through the massive tree trucks crowding the shoulders of the backroads. All roads around here are backroads, but these were even more so. They were certainly not designed for rapid thoroughfare or easy access. They meandered past homesteads and skirted natural impediments, dotted only occasionally by mailboxes on sturdy posts indicating houses buried deep in the forest.

  I passed a mailbox labeled ‘Forbes’ next to a gravel track that took off to the right. Smoke pooled in a hollow as the road curved, probably from a woodstove at Des’s place. Sunlight
had yet to — and might not ever — penetrate through the dense roof of needled boughs. I slowed even more and flipped the high beams on, watching for three blue reflectors nailed to a stump. Etherea had warned me that Tarq kept a post office box with Gus and so didn’t have a mailbox.

  Tarq’s driveway almost matched Mayfield’s for subtlety. Mud slicked up onto the station wagon’s fenders as I slid more than motored into a shallow dip off the road. The engine ground low and ineffectually for a moment, then chugged as the tires gained traction on firmer ground, and I bounced up over a small ridge.

  The wall of skyscraper fir trees opened into a small clearing, with a cabin nestled against the far side where the trees took over again. A doe and her almost full-grown fawn watched me roll past, their huge ears pivoting like satellite dishes to my trajectory, their bodies alert, springy, but not afraid. In my rearview mirror, I saw them flick their tails and drop their heads to continue grazing.

  An ancient Datsun pickup with an algae-coated canopy homemade from plywood was parked under a carport attached to the side of the cabin. The carport’s support posts had rotted at uneven rates, and the whole contraption tilted at a dizzying angle. But it appeared that Tarq was at home.

  I parked a safe distance from the precarious carport and lugged my tote bag crammed with pertinent paperwork from the passenger seat. I hefted Tarq’s groceries out of the back and climbed the cinderblock steps to his narrow front porch.

  I dropped the box next to a two-person swing hanging from the roof on chains and knocked, scraping my knuckles on the door’s rough, peeling surface. A lone bird high in the treetops released a sweet, fluting trill. His notes dipped and swirled, soaring into pure pleasure. When he finished, the silence sounded like jackhammers.

  I held my breath, enthralled, and scanned the raggedy points of the tall evergreens, searching in vain for a tiny brown body, a swooping flight.

  When it became clear the winged performer wasn’t going to provide an encore, I reluctantly turned back to the door and banged on it with my fist. I hoped Tarq hadn’t changed his mind. Maybe he was still asleep.

  Under my third volley of pounding, the door swung open.

  I gasped and staggered backwards. My heel caught the lip of a step, and I started windmilling, teetering on the edge of balance. A sinewy hand shot out and grabbed my flailing arm and yanked so that I pitched forward. I latched onto the doorjamb, my fingernails biting into the soft wood, desperate not to come into additional contact with him.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Tarq growled.

  At my open-mouthed stare, he glanced down at his tank-style t-shirt which was smeared with blood from the armpits to the hem. Bits of silvery skin and gelatinous flesh glistened from amid the thick hair on his forearms. His fingernails were crusted red. I almost gagged.

  “Gutting fish,” he muttered. “Should have known a city girl couldn’t handle it.” He spun and stomped into the dim cabin. I heard a door creak on rusty hinges then slam closed.

  Since he’d left the front door wide open, I assumed that meant I could enter. Which I did.

  Tarquin Roe had not earned the lavish amount of money you’d expect of a lawyer. Or if he had, then he kept it in a tube sock stuffed under a mattress or something, because it certainly had never been spent on home improvements. Maybe this was his second house — the rustic cabin in the rugged wilderness that urbanites who fancy themselves sportsmen brag about to conjure up a sense of manliness and adventure compared to the domesticities of a comfortable pad close to the courthouse.

  Then I remembered the drinking. Maybe Tarquin had spent all his earnings on booze. Maybe he wasn’t that good of a lawyer, even though Des had mentioned his varied areas of practice. Most likely May County wasn’t a lucrative place to practice law. Or maybe I was jaded from my past experience with lawyers.

  Freddy Whelan, of the polished brass and mahogany law firm of Wiley, Jones & Parch in San Francisco and the attorney on retainer with Turbo-Tidy Clean, LLC, my husband’s front company, and an illustrious member of Lee Gomes’s contact list, had yet to return any of my many phone calls. I guessed having green-shaded banker’s lamps on all their beautifully inlaid desks didn’t make dealing with certain clients any more savory — or give their lawyers additional backbone. He was either a coward or a criminal — or both. Freddy obviously wasn’t going to go out of his way to help me. Although when it came time for me to declare the company bankrupt, he’d have to because he’d accepted plenty of Turbo-Tidy’s money over the years.

  In the meantime, I needed Tarquin Roe — for better or for worse.

  It was a central shotgun-style cabin — doorways straight through from front to back. I lugged the groceries through the living room, across a narrow hallway that branched both directions — to a bedroom on the left and a bathroom on the right — and into a kitchen resplendent in 1970’s goldenrod and burnt orange.

  I don’t think the place had been cleaned since the 1970s either. A thick, sticky coating of cooking grease — the kind that becomes airborne in steam at the stove, condenses near the ceiling and precipitates in amber droplets — covered everything.

  The countertops were littered with remnants — empty or partially-empty food packages, dirty dishes, unidentifiable mechanical parts, newspapers, a few books creased open on their spines, fishing tackle. Tarquin Roe was definitely living without female companionship. I made a place for the grocery box by pulling out a kitchen chair and swiping the seat free of a bread crust and dry peach pit. The crust was so hard it clattered when it hit the floor.

  A white-muzzled chocolate Labrador slowly lurched up from a nest of old blankets in the corner, his front and back halves requiring separate and painful concentration to engage. He shuffled over and waited patiently for me to acknowledge his presence. His labored breath was edged with a high-pitched wheeze, and his lower eyelids drooped.

  I knelt and took his jowly jaw between my hands. “Hey, old fella.” I was rewarded with a low sway of his tired tail and a blast of gum-rotted breath.

  Frigid air flowed through the open back door. Schlucky noises and thumps sounded from beyond the holey screen door that covered the opening.

  “Mr. Roe?” I called.

  “Unless you want your sensibilities further offended, stay in there,” he replied, his voice surprisingly close and stronger than I expected for a cancer patient.

  The dog ambled back to his bed, and I surveyed the kitchen wondering if I could do a little quick tidying without offending the owner. Probably not.

  A weekly pill organizer and a dozen translucent orange prescription bottles sat on the kitchen table. It took a minute for me to recognize the mix-up in dates. I hadn’t been keeping very good track of which day of the week it was myself, now that I didn’t have a Monday through Friday job to go to or any kind of social calendar. I ticked days backwards on my fingers and came to the conclusion that it was a Friday.

  The pill organizer was empty for Sunday and Monday but full of little tablets and gel caps like jewels in a treasure box the rest of the week. I assumed that refilling the organizer would be similar to dealing cards — all the slots open and one type of pill distributed at a time, then moving on to the next type, etc. To have two completely empty compartments meant Tarq hadn’t been taking his pills every day, and had quite possibly missed two or three days in the past week.

  Seeing Tarq’s living conditions put a framework around Des’s concerns for his neighbor. What was it about old bachelor men and not taking care of themselves? Dwayne and Tarq, while at opposite ends of the law, were cast from the same mold.

  I pushed the screen door open and stuck my head out.

  From the side, I could see just how droopy Tarq’s clothes were. The back pockets of his jeans hung down almost to his knees. Up under the stained t-shirt, he must have applied some means of attaching them at his waist so they didn’t fall down. He’d been a fat man before the cancer struck.

  He stood in black rubber boots, leaning over a dr
ainboard attached at counter height to the back of the house. He slipped a long, curved knife blade into a limp fish just behind the gills and, with a sickening cracking sound, cut through the length of rib bones and lifted a fillet off the carcass. He tossed it into a dented aluminum cake pan which already contained several other wet pink and silver fillets and grabbed another fish from a bucket at his feet.

  Maybe it was the insufficient morning light, but Tarq’s skin color looked off — dull, yellowed and grainy like old newspaper. But while his head was completely bald, the rest of his body sprouted an exuberance of fuzzy white hair — ears, nose, the tops of his shoulders, forearms, and even chest where wiry hairs sprang above the neckline of his t-shirt. So whatever cancer treatment he was getting wasn’t making his hair fall out.

  Watching him work was almost like studying a graphic illustration out of Gray’s Anatomy. Ropy muscles stretched taut along the bones in his arms, in no way disguised by the slack folds of leathery skin which overlaid them and jiggled back and forth with his movements.

  “Eaten yet?” Tarq asked without taking his eyes off the action of his slick knife. “I never discuss business before breakfast. Besides, I have a hunch that unraveling your problems is going to require exceptional sustenance.”

  “I’ll start the coffee,” I muttered and backed into the squalid kitchen.

  I cleared off the seats of two more chairs and consolidated Tarq’s pharmaceutical spread on the tabletop to make room for place settings. Then I ran a sinkful of hot, sudsy water because there was no way I was eating off a plate in this kitchen that I hadn’t washed myself.

  It turned out Tarq’s idea of breakfast was steelhead pan fried in two inches of crackling-infused rancid grease which he scooped out of an old margarine container that lived on the back of the stove. He flicked on the blue flame under the burner, and the room filled with the smell of hot oil, moldy bacon, singed shoe leather, old hairbrushes and other nasty, oppressive odors I couldn’t place. I’ve smelled better things in the sewage-infested slums of third-world countries. I inhaled through my mouth while my eyes watered.