Chapter Fourteen
I was too steeped in my own misery to sleep. But I must have, because the last I remembered my room was dark. Now it wasn't.
I squeezed my eyes shut against the light and groaned. I was woozy, and someone was sticking a knife into my skull above my right eyebrow. That had to be it. Nothing else could hurt as bad. When I sat up it got worse. Dull knives pounded into my face below my eyes. I considered lying down again, but my stomach was awake and threatening. I went into the bathroom, leaned against the sink and waited for something to happen. While I waited I glared at myself in the mirror. I looked even worse than the night before. My eyelids were nearly swollen shut, and my face beyond colorless -- except for the bruises that had turned green and yellow on the edges, blacker toward the middle. My lips were swollen, too. I still wore my clothes.
Surely I suffered more than Paul. He hated me. I deserved it. And Jonathan hated me. Good cause there, too. I was the poster child for poor judgment and indiscretion. I was never going to recover from this. It would haunt me the rest of my life and for punishment I would probably live to be one hundred. I soaked a wash cloth in cold water and held it, dripping, over my face.
When I could stand upright without my head threatening to split down the middle I went to the kitchen and made coffee. Somewhere through my first cup, as I tortured myself with a mental picture of Paul entertaining a Valerie look-alike in his apartment and laughing over how stupidly I'd behaved, reality gave me a thump on the head. My turn to do stalls. I dashed to the phone and called Uncle Henry to apologize. Aunt Vi answered. I told her I'd overslept and wasn't feeling well, all true -- if incomplete.
"Don't worry, dear. Henry's taken care of them. It's no trouble," she said over my protest. Then with the accuracy of a laser guided Patriot missile she zeroed in on exactly what I hoped to hide. "You haven't seen Paul, have you? He didn't come home last night."
I choked up. In a small voice I said. "No." followed by a tiny sniff. That's all it took for Aunt Vi to confirm her hit.
"Oh, no." Did you two have a fight?"
"Yes," I squeaked.
"I'll be over straightaway. I'll make you a nice cup of tea and you can tell me what happened."
It should have taken her ten minutes to get to my house, but it seemed she knocked on my door almost before I had time to hang up the phone. Time flies when you're feeling sorry for yourself.
"Who's that in the fancy black car out front?" she asked when I opened the front door.
She took off her damp coat and folded it inside out over her arm. It was raining. Figures. I looked past her and saw Frederick Parsons's black Mercedes. The big guy with the dark glasses sat behind the wheel, looking intently at me. A picture flashed in my mind and for a moment the floor under me shifted. I caught my balance on the door jam. Holy crap. I wasn't sure if I'd just been diverted from my latest misery or added to it. Either way, there was no doubt. Frederick Parsons's chauffeur was the driver of the silver Honda I'd nearly flattened with Delores's truck on Carpenter Road. He must have made the first 9-1-1 call -- the one Thurman had mentioned. But why had he taken off?
"Never seen him before," I lied, shutting the door and locking it. "Aunt Vi --"
"Now you hush and come sit down." She propelled me toward the kitchen. "What you need is a nice cup of tea and a little something in your belly. Where're you slippers? You'll catch your death running around barefoot." She went to my bedroom and came back with the pink bunnies. Even the one that still had its tongue, whose crooked eyes made it appear demented, couldn't cheer me up.
After I downed two slices of toast and a cup of strong tea, she pried the previous evening's sorry tale out of me, piece by embarrassing piece. Then she spun it with her own perspective. It was not quite the flavor of sympathy I had in mind. I hoped for a good dose of men-are-scum (except for Uncle Henry and Dad), and a sample of you're better-off-without-the-Neanderthals. Instead I got something completely different.
"Give Paul time. He's unhappy right now and feeling a little foolish. It doesn't hurt a man to feel foolish every once in a while." She patted my hand and winked. "Keeps 'em humble. That's what my mum always used to say."
"He should feel foolish. He certainly acted that way. And I'm not interested in 'giving him time.' I made a huge mistake agreeing to go out with him, thinking it would just be a friendly little get-together instead of, of --" I waved my hands in the air.
"Well, your timing wasn't the best."
"My timing?"
She nodded and patted my hand. "Well, no help for that now, is there? Still some things have their own schedules and there's nothing you can do about it. Like Eric and your sis."
"I'm not Juliet. I don't jump into things. I take my time and evaluate." I shifted in my chair and sat up a little straighter. Maybe I sounded righteous, but I was in real pain here.
"Oh, now, there was no jumping going on there with those two. I always thought they should have gotten together sooner. They've been friends for quite some time. Probably a good two years, and they've been dating for a good three months now."
"Huh. Three months? That's a record for her." And not quite what she told me. I sniffed. "Well, I need to be on my own, anyway …."
"Thea, love, you've been on your own for a lot longer than most women your age."
"No I haven't. I've always depended on you and Uncle Henry, and Juliet and --"
"You've always made your own way. And what's wrong with having people around who love and support you? Do you think that makes you weak?"
"Well, no, but …."
"It does open you up to pain, and it takes a strong person to risk being vulnerable." Without so much as a pause for breath, she adjusted her sights. "Don't push him away because the timing doesn't seem right."
"I didn't push him away. He left under his own steam."
"I know, dear."
"Well, it's true. You didn't see his face or hear what he said. He said hateful things."
More patting. "I know, dear."
"Then I said hateful things, too."
This time I got a shoulder squeeze. "I know, dear."
"He thinks I'm scheming and duplicitous. God," I groaned, covering my face with my hands, "I don't want to feel like this."
She sighed and poured me another cup of tea. "You know, your uncle and I have been together forty-six years."
"Great. I can't sustain even a date for two hours. I'm so far off the bell curve of success and failure in relationships I could be classified an anomaly."
She looked over the top of her glasses at me. I shut my mouth.
"As I was saying, forty-six years. Most people would think he and I have a perfectly compatible relationship."
I nodded. It was true. They seemed more content with each other than most couples I knew -- most of the time.
"Well, it hasn't always been like that, but we both knew it was possible. It was something each of us needed and wanted with our hearts and souls."
I thought about my grandmother, Aunt Vi's older sister, and remembered the stories she used to tell about the upheavals in their young lives. These had always sounded like adventures to me. Now I saw uncertainty and unhappiness -- more than two young girls deserved. How they must have longed for a life of predictability where the people you loved would always be there for you.
"The point is, Henry and I had to work at it. There were times when, despite two wonderful children of our own and the success Henry was achieving, I though one or the other of us would pack up and walk out."
That bit of history I would never have guessed.
"Thea, if you want something enough, you don't give up when things go wrong. If it's right and good, you have patience. Sometimes you have to trust, and not get so involved in the moment you forget there's a tomorrow that wants looking after."
"You sound like the riding lesson I had yesterday," I observed in a rueful flash of insight.
She held my gaze and nodded. "It's much the same, isn't it? Peo
ple and horses. When they're good, you don't give up on them, even when there's a problem."
"It's too late. He's given up on me," I said, making a last stab at pathos.
She smiled gently. "You don't know what is or isn't in his heart right now. You have nothing to lose by biding your time, and maybe much to gain."
She was wrong, and though I was calmer than when she'd arrived I knew this was one horse that wasn't going to jump. Paul did not strike me as someone you could coerce or cajole without his permission. Sometimes you had to know when to walk away.
"You need to talk to Jonathan," she added after a few sips of tea.
"I know."
"He's basically a good man, but you're not right for each other. Neither of you brings out the best in the other. You both need something the other can't give, and you have to be the one to end things. He won't do it. The sooner the better."
"Yes, I know. I thought you liked him."
She smiled at me. "I like the man who makes you happy, and neither one of you has been happy for some time. He needs you to be someone you're not, and he constantly worries that you won't support him emotionally. You resent him for trying to change you. You need someone who thinks you're grand just the way you are, even if you're not a carbon copy of him. Even when you disagree."
I nodded and hugged her. Juliet had found someone -- obviously. Would I ever find my someone? It surely wasn't Paul. I clamped down on my lower lip to hide the tremble.
A deep breath later I asked, "How did you come to be so wise?"
She laughed and wiped a little tear from the corner of her eye. "If you're really, really lucky, life knocks it into you." She stood and gave me a hug. I was so lucky to have her. "Time for me to go and time for you to get to work." She smoothed her dress and picked up her coat and purse.
The phone rang and my warm, fuzzy feeling turned cold and clammy. She squeezed my hand.
"Remember what I said, and be strong."
She nearly reached the front door when I discovered my phone call was from one of the other men in my life, Detective Thurman.
I covered the mouthpiece and called to my aunt to wait. After listening to the detective's terse order, I hung up. "He wants me to come in today with my attorney."
"Better give Mr. Green a call right away."
Aunt Vi stayed until I completed the call.
"This afternoon at three," I told her. "His office will call and arrange it."
"You let Mr. Green do his job, dear. You have nothing to worry about."
But worry I did. And I had work to do. Masses of work. I went to my office and turned on the computer. Order and predictability were what I needed and I dug into the stack of client folders sitting on my desk.
I had no sooner opened the first file when I heard a loud knock on my front door. Reluctantly, I left my desk. My hand on the knob, I asked, "Who is it?"
"It's Sarah Fuller. I want to talk to you."
Sarah? What would she be doing here? I didn't know she knew where I lived. Then again, with the number of people who were showing up on my doorstep lately, there was probably a big green sign on the freeway with an arrow pointing to my house.
Cautiously, I opened the front door. It was Sarah, all right, and boy, was she not happy. Her face was splotched purple with rage. Her fine, blond hair, wet from the rain, stuck together in clumps, giving her the appearance of a very angry, soaked cat. Did every irate person in the county have me on their To-Do List? Her mouth worked for several seconds, making me wonder if she had dentures that weren't fitting quite right.
Then the recriminations erupted.
"You bitch!" she spat. "You sicced the cops on me! They goddamn came to my goddamn office to question me about goddamn Valerie! What'd you tell them? 'Get Sarah, she hated Valerie more than anyone else'? You damn near cost me my goddamn job! Greg's about to fire my goddamn ass and it's all your goddamn fault! I'm gonna sue your goddamn ass!"
I blinked at her, utterly dumbstruck. She raised both fists, and I jumped back out of reach.
"ARRGGH!" she yowled at me, did an abrupt about-face and fled from my front porch. I stood in the doorway and watched her car peel out down the street, feeling I'd just watched an anime cartoon in the original Japanese of a very noir Hello Kitty.
"Well, god damn. Wonder if the guy in the black Mercedes caught all that." I made my way, somewhat shaky, back to my office via the kitchen.
Two cups of coffee and six chocolate chip cookies later, I easily finished the files for three clients. A touch too easy? Maybe someone, somewhere, was taking pity on me and giving me a breather. As I congratulated myself on my near super-human ability to power accurately through stacks of paper, I came upon a stumbling block. Donna Orr-Block to be precise. Generally meticulous in her record keeping and conservative in her spending and investing, she had a rather large loss about mid year. Sure it must be a mistake, I poured myself another cup of coffee, grabbed another handful of cookies, and telephoned her to check. I expected to leave a message. Instead, Donna's life-partner Peggy answered, and I explained the problem to her. She was a client as well.
"Oh girlfriend, that's not a mistake," Peggy said.
"It's not?" I had the sinking feeling this was going to be complicated.
"Uh huh, and Donna's still mad about it. Darn good thing you got me instead of her. She'd still be on the phone with you tomorrow morning having herself a good rant about Valerie."
"Valerie? What happened?"
"Last year Donna and I had some, um, differences of opinion about how that roll-over from her retirement fund from her last job should be reinvested -- you remember? Greg made some suggestions, and while he was waiting for us to reach some kind of decision Valerie came along and just stuck herself right between us, know what I'm saying? Told Donna she shouldn't let me tell her how to invest her money, and ought to make the decision by herself. Only Valerie was right there with this supposed great idea. Some super high-yield investment. I said no, and she told Donna I didn't know what I was talking about, and I was going to cost her money." The laugh that reached my ear was not humorous. "That effin' bitch. You're not going to believe this, since you're familiar with how, uh, fiscally conservative our Donna is, but Valerie actually got her to go along with it. Probably because Donna and I were so mad at each other at the time. She threw the whole amount into that fund. And there's been no return on it. Nothing. Not one stinking penny. Just like I said in the first place."
"Oh, no. I had no idea. That's not good."
"Aren't you the queen of understatement. Donna keeps hoping to see some money come back, but personally, I know it's gone forever."
"I expect you're right."
"Damn straight. But I'm not going to keep shoving it in Donna's face. She feels like a first-class fool as it is. Valerie played her -- got between us and messed in something that was none of her business. It was deliberate. Both of us can see it now, and Donna still gets spitting mad about it."
From the tone of her voice it was apparent Peggy was not in a forgiving mood, either. "Isn't she kind of upset with Greg, too, because he let her make the investment?"
"Not really. It was Valerie's fault."
"But I'd think Greg would be looking out for his clients' best interest."
"Greg isn't aggressive, which is why Donna chose to do business with him in the first place. He didn't know Valerie was pitting us against each other, so when Donna insisted, I guess he figured he'd just do what she asked."
I didn't say what I was thinking -- that Greg was a financial advisor, and was supposed to be keeping his clients from making mistakes like throwing their entire retirement fund into something that was high risk. I made sympathetic noises and eased Peggy into taking about her plans to go back to school in the fall, and about Donna's softball team. She was her team's power hitter, and was getting ready for an away game in Mount Vernon the next evening. I told her I would finish their taxes and have them submitted electronically by the end of the day.
> I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes. Valerie wasn't leaving me alone. She was interfering in my work and with my clients. The police were lining up a case against me, her father was poised to wreak his own special havoc, and I was getting visits at home from people who had an ax to grind. Valerie was more distressing to me dead than she'd been alive. To simply defend myself was no longer enough. That was getting me nowhere. Mr. Green suggested I sit back and wait. Wait for what?
I had far better ways to spend my time. I was in a position to look into a part of Valerie's life the police had no expertise in: the habits of a dressage rider. There was a chance I could unearth something to pass along to Thurman. This investigation needed to end. I shut down the computer and went to my bedroom to change out of yesterday's clothes.
I was certain Blackie had been horse-napped by mistake, despite the drive-through holes in my theory. If Valerie had been expecting Nachtfeder to be delivered to her farm, not Blackie, maybe something existed that would prove my hunch. But I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why Valerie would move her own horse to her farm, much less Blackie. That would mean deliberately putting hoof prints in her perfect pastures, and I'd seen how she reacted to a dog trotting through the field at the dressage club's pasture-management meeting.
It was conceivable the police wouldn't know if the barn was ready to house her horse. But I would. I had plenty of time before my appointment with Detective Thurman. It would be easy to check out Valerie's barn. With luck I'd have something useful to tell him. I grabbed my purse and headed for my car.
I spent the fifteen minutes it took me to get to Carpenter Road to do some heavy thinking. Could she have gotten a last minute invitation to a clinic? Was there some event going on she had decided to attend? There might be information of that sort in the barn or in her house. The most useful course of action would be to look through her mail and e-mail to see if something had come up. Crap. That meant I'd have to search her house. I would probably find a house key in the tack room. Everyone kept a house key in their tack room. Everyone I knew, anyway.
I made my way up the long twisting driveway, past the big Victorian house, and parked at the barn. It wasn't pouring rain like it had been earlier, but it was cold and misting and unpleasant. At least I'd be inside. I hurried to the barn and slid the door open enough to walk through. After groping around I found the light switches and flipped them on. I was most definitely intruding, and the guilt made me cautious, even though no one else was there.
I'd never been inside Valerie's barn. Although the outside was fussy and silly for its purpose, I figured the interior would show more attention to functionality. I was wrong. The six oversized stalls, although nice, had expensive black enamel and brass grill-work on the doors and fronts. The aisle was set with cobblestone, like what you'd find in the driveways of some expensive homes. Pretty, but impractical unless you liked to spend your time sweeping and cleaning. Nachtfeder's name, in flowing script, was on a thick brass plate on a stall door. The stall should have been bedded if Valerie was expecting him, but except for the pristine stall mats, it was empty.
I checked the other stalls. Nothing. I could tell which one Blackie had occupied on Sunday, courtesy of Delores, because dirty hoof prints marred the surface of the otherwise unused black mats. I saw no buckets for grain or water in any of the stalls.
I tried the door knob on what I assumed was the tack room, although it was at the other end of the barn from the narrow grooming stall. The door swung open to an empty room. There were paneled walls, a slate floor, and a crystal chandelier, but not a single hook to hang a halter on, much less keys.
I shook my head in disgust at the décor. Maybe I'd have better luck in the feed room. There had to be supplies and special supplements Valerie used for her horse, like glucosamine and MSM. I recalled she used those and something with biotin in it, too, for Nachtfeder's feet. She wouldn't have skipped his supplements. She was too obsessive about them.
A smaller room across the aisle, although more practically finished, was similarly vacant. It contained no shelves, feed bins, or feed of any kind. There wasn't even a sign of mice. A ladder led up to the hay loft and I climbed up far enough to poke my head through the access door. I could see we had a theme going here. Not only was there no hay, but there never had been. In the loft everything looked as though the carpenters had just left.
Okay, I could safely say she was not expecting to house a horse in her barn. It wasn't necessary to have a horse inside when you had lush pastures. I went outside in the drizzle. I knew she had groundskeepers who regularly mowed the pastures. And because she had no resident livestock, the grass grew evenly throughout, including in front of the gates.
There were water troughs positioned near the gates in each of the three pastures, but none had water in them. I doubted they ever had. The plugs had been removed from the bottoms, standard practice to keep rainwater from collecting and creating a mosquito-friendly environment. The knowledge Blackie had spent an entire night and half the morning there without access to water angered me. He could have easily colicked. As particular as I knew Valerie was about her own horse, water was certainly not something she would have overlooked. She was famous, or at least supremely annoying, for her penchant of pitching a fit when her exact instructions weren't followed—and she always double checked.
I needed to look around some more. I'd whittled my mental list down to the bare essentials, and it wasn't looking good for any of the remaining items. If I found anything, no matter how small, I'd have to be careful how I got the information to Thurman so I didn't get myself into more trouble. Just thinking about it made my hands sweat.
I found the water spigots near the barn. There were no hoses attached. I went back to the feed room and rechecked. No buckets, no hoses. Unless Valerie stored her equipment elsewhere, she definitely had not been planning to house a horse here. What the hell was going on? I had to curb my impatience, take this one item at a time, gather information and then piece it together. But it didn't make the number of unanswered questions any less frustrating.
The mist turned to rain again, so I hurried to the other outbuildings (also built to complement the house, but not as elaborate as the barn) to avoid getting soaked. I had about as much luck with keeping dry as finding any horse-keeping supplies. One building held the tractor and mowing equipment as well as the horse trailer and truck. The other held miscellaneous gardening paraphernalia. With water dripping off my hair and into my eyes, I searched the garden shed. No horse stuff. Then, as I reached for the switch to turn off the lights a glint of metal caught my eye. A ring with a handful of keys hung on a nail in a recess by the door. One of them had to be for the house. I no longer had an excuse not to search there. Before I could talk myself out of it, I grabbed the whole set and jogged, head down, through the rain-turned-to-downpour to the back door of the three story Victorian.
Luckily for me the porch off the back door was covered. The rain pelted on the roof like lead shot as I huddled, wet and shivering, over the wad of keys, trying to decide which might fit. The keys to the tractor and trailer were obvious, but the others, and there were quite a few, all looked as if they might belong to the house.
The third key I tried met with unexpected results -- a hand on my shoulder.
I screamed and spun. Frederick Parsons's driver loomed over me. He was dressed in black and, despite the rain, wore dark glasses on a face as expressionless as when I encountered him on my own front porch. I thought I was going to pass out.
"Keys." He held out his hand.
I swallowed a mouthful of dry nothing and dropped them into his upturned palm without a word.
"Why are you here?" It didn't sound like a question, but it must have been.
A gagging noise came out before any words. "Nothing, no reason. Just, uh, looking for clues."
He regarded me for a long moment from behind the dark glasses. I held my breath, waiting.
"There's nothing here," he said.
"Oh."
He stared at me. At least I think he was staring. He might have been napping for all I could tell. Only my own terrified reflection looked back at me from the shiny black lenses. Maybe I could leave.
"I think I'll go now." I edged past him and almost made it. He turned his head toward me and took hold of my arm. The blood fled from my face.
"I'm watching you," he said.
"Oh, uh, okay," I said in a small voice.
He released my arm abruptly. I scurried to my car, my heart rate at near stroke level, somehow got the key in the ignition, and took off not daring to look back.
By the time I got home I'd marshaled my wits and gotten a grip on my initial desire to continue driving until I reached my parents' house in San Francisco. I hustled up the walk to the porch but stopped, house key in hand, when I saw a page from a newspaper taped to my front door. Odd. The page was from the Everett Times. I removed it and glanced at both sides. Last week's edition. None of the articles looked even mildly interesting.
Then I saw the red circles. Someone had used red ink to mark individual words in different articles. Why? As I hung up my jacket, it hit me.
A message!
Duh.
I grabbed the paper and searched. Five words, or parts of words, were circled. I read, more or less left to right: "stop," "ing", "ions." "ask," "quest."
"Stoping ions ask quest? Doesn't make any sense. And "stoping" is spelled wrong."
I looked again and this time I read from top to bottom. "Stop asking questions."
Molar-grinding aggravation outmaneuvered my initial spike of fear. Dammit, I'd been assaulted, yelled at, interrogated and insulted--and that was the short list. Now some jerk was leaving me a stupid note right out of a bad movie. I had freaking had enough.
I locked the front door behind me and strode to the kitchen. Yanking open the freezer door, I pulled out a half gallon of triple chocolate fudge ice cream and grabbed a soup spoon from the silverware drawer. Cup of Aunt Vi's tea, my ass. I dug in.