Destroying Angels (Leigh Girard Book 1) Page 19

  There was no other vehicle in the drive. I reached into the back of my truck and grabbed the bow and arrows, feeling foolish as I did it. I moved slowly back around the side of the house to the back door. Ready or not, I said to myself, drew the arrow, then swung open the door and walked inside.

  Quickly I switched on the lights. Salinger jumped in front of me and started to growl. “I’ve got a weapon!” I shouted. “Show yourself and you won’t get hurt.”

  Silence. Salinger growled again. I went into the living room, flipped on those lights. No one. I was definitely feeling foolish. I threw the bow and arrow on the floor, walked into the bedroom and turned on the bedside lamp.

  There on the dresser mirror written with lipstick were the words: freek bitch.

  I ran to check the bathroom. Then I opened every closet door in the house. But whoever had left the message was gone. He must have sneaked into my house while I had been sitting by the water. I immediately ran to the back door and locked it. This coward had apparently watched me leave the house, and then slipped in to scrawl the message.

  I looked around the room again. One of the dresser drawers was open slightly and askew. Had I left it that way? I opened the drawer. Everything looked in place. I pushed aside my silk panties and slips. There, still neatly hidden at the bottom of the drawer, were my breast prostheses. I readjusted the drawer and closed it.

  I stared at the scrawled words again: freek bitch.

  “Illiterate loser,” I said aloud. “It will take more than words to scare me.”

  In the kitchen, I mixed up a cleaning solution strong enough to melt road tar. It consisted of ammonia and pine-scented floor cleaner. I scrubbed back and forth on the mirror over and over until the letters smeared, faded and finally disappeared into my pail of pinkish water. I kept scrubbing, even after the mirror was clean. There was a taint in the room that had to be obliterated. Finally, when the ache in my arm became insistent, I threw the sponge in the pail, and dumped the water.

  My scouring completed, I burrowed into the green velvet chair and enjoyed the crisp, cool taste of a glass of chardonnay. One went down easy, and I had a refill, thank you. I hate cowards, and this had been a cowardly thing. If Sarah Peck hadn't been so recently in the hospital and Rob Martin for the most part sitting at her side, I might have figured this for her post-suicide-attempt acting out. So I could think of only one other person who would do this: Renn Woulff.

  For a brief moment, I considered calling the cops. Then rejected the idea, since I wasn’t sure that they’d believe me—and since I'd destroyed the evidence. He could always claim he hadn’t really broken in, because my back door was unlocked.

  I poured my third glass of wine and took a generous gulp, feeling the wine’s warmth spread through my body, relaxing me, making me feel less scared and vulnerable. What would I say when the cops asked? What would I say when they wanted to know if anything was out of place? And then there was that word. The word that I couldn’t make go away: freek. No matter how he spelled it, I knew what he meant.

  I stayed in the velvet chair all night and didn’t fall asleep until early morning light forced its way under the door.

  24

  Friday, November 17, Present day

  The rest of the week had been long, tedious and uneventful. Whoever had written that message on my mirror had backed off. I made myself sleep in the bedroom—if you could call it sleep. I kept dreaming about the cancer surgery: the pain and the waking realization that they had cut off my left breast, that I would never be whole again.

  Stevens had successfully avoided me by communicating through notes and Marge. The one time I had walked by his office, his door was closed. It was going to be a long winter.

  He had assigned me a story on two fish poachers that kept me tied up in court until late Thursday afternoon, when they were sentenced to eighteen months in prison. They had sold about 120,000 pounds of illegally caught perch and made about $350,000. So much for protecting the environment. But at least I was finally off obits.

  During several court recesses, I sacrificed lunch to sit in the Sturgeon Bay Library’s microfiche room looking for the ads Joyce Oleander had placed in the Chicago Tribune and Milwaukee Journal. The ads were small and hard to read, and scanning microfiche on an empty stomach made me nauseous. But I persisted. What kept me going was the belief that if Joyce’s daughter was somewhere out there alive, I would find her. I needed a happy ending to match that fairy tale bedroom in her condo. I now believed Joyce had prepared that room for a daughter who never came home.

  After all the searching, the ads turned out to be another dead end. Except for the adoption search site, they were identical. “Birth mother desperately seeking daughter given up for adoption twenty years ago in Chicago area. Birth name Oleander.”

  I also left several voice messages for Barry Snyder, the private detective Joyce had hired to find her daughter. But so far he hadn’t returned my calls.

  By Thursday night, I was having extended conversations with Salinger. The dinner party was starting to look like a better alternative than another night alone. Besides, it would give me an opportunity to observe Sarah and Rob in a social situation. I left a message on Lydia’s machine that I'd be coming to her soiree, and that I’d bring wine. By Friday, I was actually looking forward to it.

  I chose my dress carefully, selecting a combination of velvet and silk. After a long soak in a bubble bath made with freesia, honey and sweet almond, I slipped into a purple high-necked silk blouse, long black velvet skirt, and a midnight blue velvet cape lined in blue silk. My spiked heels were black suede. Before the mastectomy, I had taken great pride in my body. I always thought of myself as being built like a Vegas showgirl: five-foot-seven, 130 lbs., with long slender legs, a flat stomach, and full breasts. I had studied dance when I was younger, and had briefly been a member of the Ruth Page Dance Company in Chicago. Until I was thirty-four, until the cancer, I was still taking ballet and jazz classes. I could have kept at it, even with the damage done by the mastectomy, but I lost my motivation.

  I had left the house early so that I could stop by the Door Market and buy some decent wine. I headed toward the wine section at the back of the store and choose a gold medal winning California merlot called French Hill that only set me back twenty-eight dollars. I was coming back down the aisle, when I saw Eva Peck. She had her back to me, but there was no mistaking that hairdo. She was in rapt conversation with a black man who was dressed entirely in white, including a white baseball cap turned backwards on his head. As I neared them, it occurred to me that he was the only black man I had ever seen on the entire peninsula.

  Eva was pointing to a plastic wrapped package. “Do these muffins have real butter in them?” she asked the man.

  “No butter. Margarine. I baked them this morning.” He grinned at her, and I could see that he had a large gap between his two front teeth.

  “You’re sure, there’s no butter. I can’t have butter.”

  He grinned again at Eva. “Mrs. Peck, I didn’t use any butter.”

  She looked again at the package in her hand. The black man must have thought that the conversation was over, because he walked past me toward the front of the store. When he was out of sight, she put the muffins back on the shelf. As she turned, she saw me.

  “I usually bake. But with just me now, it’s too much,” she said, glancing vaguely back toward the muffins.

  “I can’t remember the last time I baked,” I responded.

  “Oh, that’s right, you live alone too.” She looked at the bottle of wine I was carrying.

  I wasn’t going to tell Eva Peck that the wine was for a dinner party. If she thought that I was going home to drink alone, all the better. Maybe I could use it to my advantage.

  “Are you in a hurry to get home?” I glanced stealthily into her basket. There were two cans of salt-free soup, a quart of low fat milk, and bran cereal.

  “Well, not in a big hurry.”

  “Would you
like to go to the Olde Stagecoach and have a drink?”

  Eva’s expression registered something between judgment and surprise. “I don’t drink. But I suppose I could have a cup of tea.”

  The Olde Stagecoach was a few doors down from the Market. We stowed our respective purchases in our vehicles and met inside. I secured a table in the back of the bar. It was around 6:45 PM. A few men dressed in Lions Club jackets were bellied up to the bar. It wouldn’t be long before the rest of the group showed up, and then it would be impossible to hear each other talk in there.

  “Is this okay?” I asked Eva, as she gracefully positioned her bulky body on the tall, narrow bar stool.

  She smiled without showing her teeth. “I suppose if we’re only having a drink.”

  The waitress, who looked about fifteen, took our drink orders. I ordered a glass of pinot grigio and Eva, to my surprise, ordered a grasshopper.

  “When in Rome,” she shrugged.

  There was a sudden looseness to Eva that made her seem almost as girlish as the waitress. We made the usual small talk about the weather until the drinks arrived. Eva sipped delicately from her foamy drink, and for some reason, I thought of Lana Turner.

  “I haven’t had a grasshopper since . . .” She crinkled her forehead. “Since when Carl and I had Saturday night card parties at our house. In the winter, we’d take turns at each others’ houses. Sometimes we’d have a theme, like German night.” She had that faraway look people get when they go down memory lane. I always figure they’re making up half of what they remember.

  “Sounds like a lot of fun. Do you still get together with the same people?”

  “Oh, you know how it is. People drift apart for one reason or another. But I do try and stay active in my church.”

  A man who smelled like he had already made a dent in a gin bottle stumbled to the rear of the bar. “Hi, Eva,” he said, as he sat down near the Lions Club boys.

  Eva merely nodded her prim head in his direction. “That’s Floyd,” she sniffed. “He’s always had a crush on me. Now that I’m a widow, I don’t want to encourage him.”

  “I can understand that.” Not really, especially since the only interest Floyd seemed to have was getting another drink. The waitress made her rounds to our table. I ordered another drink, hoping Eva would too. The atmosphere of the bar and the alcohol were beginning to melt away her reserve. I had some difficult questions I wanted to ask her. To my relief, she did indeed order another grasshopper.

  “Did you hear that Sarah’s out of the hospital?” she asked.

  “As a matter of fact, I went out to her place on Monday to see how she was doing.”

  “I hate the way she lives.” Eva siphoned the foam from the bottom of her glass with her straw. “Smoking, drinking, those crazy paintings. You know, she never sells any. Who would buy them?”

  Eva didn’t sound much like a mother grateful that her only daughter had escaped a suicide attempt.

  “Has she talked to you about why she tried to kill herself?”

  “No, and I have no idea. Doc Porter said she has amnesia about it, like it happened in a blackout. He says she’s probably upset about her father’s death.”

  That’s putting it mildly, I thought. The waitress returned with our second round of drinks. “I’m sure that you’re very upset yourself.”

  “You’re right, I am, but you don’t see me trying to kill myself.”

  “You’re a stronger person. You can face things. I mean, right from the beginning, you were suspicious about your husband’s death. And you insisted on an autopsy.” I was shamelessly appealing to her vanity, but I suspected it was her Achilles’ heel.

  “I was suspicious. And I still am.” She removed the straw from her drink and drank from the glass. “Carl knew his mushrooms. I don’t think he’d make a mistake, even if he had been drinking. But that’s what everybody else believes happened."

  “Do you remember him eating any mushrooms before he became sick?”

  She thought for a moment. “Yes, I remembered that later when the results came from Indianapolis. But nobody even asked me about it. About five days before he became sick, he brought home a bag full of white mushrooms. He liked to fry them in garlic and butter. Always looked like fried slime to me.” She shook her shoulders and took another drink. She'd given up sipping by now.

  I recalled that the mushrooms didn’t react in the body immediately. But I was certain that the latency period was more like six to twenty-four hours. “Do you remember what he ate the day before he became sick?”

  “What would that matter? It was the mushrooms that he picked that poisoned him.”

  “Not necessarily, Mrs. Peck. Usually the toxins react in the body about twenty-four hours after.”

  “That can’t be right. Everybody’s system is different.” She shifted her bulk on the stool.

  “That’s true. Still, I’m curious, what did he eat the day before?”

  She rubbed her forehead. “I think that was the night we had stew.”

  “We?”

  “I mean, he had the stew. I didn’t eat it. It was rabbit stew. I can’t even stand the smell of it.”

  “But you cooked it for him?”

  “No, I didn’t make it. Sarah made it. She said they had some leftover from the restaurant.”

  “Were there mushrooms in the stew?”

  “Why, yes. Sarah always used mushrooms in her stew."

  I twirled my wine glass. Eva frowned, and I could see the suggestion about the stew mushrooms beginning to form in her thinking.

  “I need to ask you something else, Mrs. Peck. Something about your husband and your daughter.”

  In the smoky light of the bar, I could see her eyes widen. Then she blinked them quickly, as if there was something in them.

  “Sarah seems to harbor a great deal of hatred toward her father. In fact, she told me she’s glad he’s dead. And that his death put a lot of people out of their misery. Do you know what she meant by that?”

  Mrs. Peck looked around quickly to see if anyone had overheard me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. How dare you say that to me? Sarah loved her father. Carl was a, was a wonderful man.”

  “I’m only telling you what Sarah told me. And Rob Martin says Carl called her a slut and a failure. He says they were always at each other.”

  “Sarah’s making that up.”

  “Rob said he was there when it happened.”

  “That’s not right.” Eva took another substantial drink, followed by dabbing nervously at her mouth with the cocktail napkin.

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I wouldn’t allow such a thing. You think I’d allow anyone to talk to my daughter like that?”

  “Then why is Rob Martin contending this?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he thinks he’ll get on Sarah’s good side. You know, he still wants her back. Anyone can see it, the way he looks at her.”

  I couldn’t argue with Martin’s obsessive devotion, but Eva still hadn’t answered my question. “But why would Sarah say these things about her father in the first place?”

  “Sarah likes to blame her problems on other people. She doesn’t take disappointments very well. She thinks life owes her something. Ever since she went to Chicago, she changed. That place changed her. Don’t you believe what she says about my husband.”

  I didn’t buy Eva’s explanation. From experience, I’d learned that the truth was usually somewhere in the middle. I took a sip of my wine and considered my next question. “Mrs. Peck,” I began. “I might do a follow-up story on Joyce Oleander because of her volunteer work at the hospital. Did you know Joyce very well?”

  “Everyone knew Joyce. She worked at the library for years. But are you sure you should be doing another story on her?” She lowered her voice. “Considering what happened.”

  “So you didn’t know Joyce very well?” I asked, trying to clarify her vague answer.

  “No, not well. She kept to herself a lot.
”

  I placed the photo of Joyce and Sarah down on the round table. “Do you know who this girl is with Joyce?”

  Eva bent forward for a closer look at the photo.

  “That’s Sarah. Sarah and Joyce used to play together as girls.” She pushed the photo back toward me.

  “So they were friends in high school?”

  “Why are you asking me this? What does it have to do with your story and her volunteer work?”

  “Joyce had a baby when she was in high school. I thought maybe Sarah knew something about it.”

  “Who told you that?” Eva gulped the rest of her drink.

  “I can’t say.” I was protecting myself as much as Ida Reeves.

  “Well, I never heard such a vicious rumor. Sarah never said anything to me.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  I caught the strong smell of mint from her drinks.

  “You know, young woman, it’s not a good idea to spread gossip. Especially about the dead.”

  “It’s not gossip, Mrs. Peck. I happen to know that Joyce was searching for her child before she died. She’d given the baby girl up for adoption.”

  Eva’s mouth pinched with disgust. “I don’t know where you got that from, but it can’t be right. And even if it was, people in a small town don’t like other people, especially outsiders, sticking their noses where they don’t belong. Or making up things just to write about them.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was a warning or merely small town paranoia. Either way, I wasn’t going to drop it. “So you don’t know anything about Joyce having a baby.”

  “No, of course not. Isn’t that what I just said?” She clutched her purse to her like a life jacket. “I thought you were different. I thought you were a nice girl who understood about etiquette and good manners like Sarah used to understand.”