A Line To Murder (A Puget Sound Mystery) (8 page)

Andy coughed on that and a smile twitched his lips.

“--but he started talking about being born again. She thought that by being a vicar, maybe he’d get the right kind of help.”

“What’s to say he really was a minister?”

“I don’t know. I just know Isca never seemed to question it.” My coffee was long gone. I twirled the Styrofoam cup between my hands.

Andy leaned to the side and checked on Dominic. A little muscle pulsed in his cheek. It was quite a nice cheek, too. Clean shaven, with a little razor nick near a cleft in his chin.

“She called me the Saturday before she was killed. The police took my answering machine tape, but I remember she said something about maybe knowing who the vicar was, that he was local. She was going to check it out. I called her back several times. She was never home. She just didn’t answer or her phone was out of service.”

Andy turned his gaze from Dominic to me. “What are the odds of working a dial-a-sex phone line and then finding out the guy you’ve been doing regularly on the phone lives in the same city as you and you’ve discovered who he is?”

Suddenly I was tired. Tired of his anger and confusion. Tired of the unnecessary death of a friend. Tired of ugly yellow and blue plastic furniture with legs that looked like enlarged colons. I wanted to go home and look at the old-fashioned streetlight outside my window and escape into a book.

“It’s late.” I reached for my purse. “We both know Dominic will wake up early tomorrow. He’ll be cranky and hyper all day. On top of everything else, you don’t want to have to deal with that. Let’s go home. That is, let me take you home.”

“Merc, I’m sorry.” His voice was soft, his expression compassionate. “I’m sorry. Dominic’s told me about the things the three of you used to do. I know they were your ideas because Isca didn’t think that way.” He smiled and little crow’s-feet fanned out from his eyes.

“I can’t believe you got Isca to go to the art museum, sit on the floor and watch an Indian marionette performance or go to the Nature Center and let Dom pretend to be a caterpillar in a cocoon. Dom loved those things.”

Andy had a nice smile. I’d never noticed it before because I’d rarely seen it. He had a nice jaw, too. Not too Arnold Schwartzenager-ish but not weak, either. Of course, none of these things made him innocent. Maybe they just made me a sucker, but he just seemed like a decent, regular guy. I looked at him and smiled. “The Armed Forces Day at Fort Lewis was more up her alley.”

We laughed and my eyes filled for a moment. The majority of the soldiers had been young, personable men from the south. Isca teased them by imitating their accents, and they seemed to love it. I was beginning to learn just how empty my life was and how much worse it would be without Isca.

Andy and I got up. He piled the napkins and cups on a tray and emptied them into the gaping jaws of a yellow and blue plastic dinosaur garbage can. Dominic saw us and left the play area.

Meridian’s traffic had thinned down. Dominic fell asleep before we left the parking lot. Andy and I were silent. I was lost in thought. Andy sat with one arm across the back of the seat and the other propped on the window edge. He’d withdrawn. I had no desire to disturb him.

At their house, I pulled up on the wrong side of the street so he could more easily deal with his sleeping son.

Before he got out of the car, Andy looked at me. “Thanks for letting me come. I appreciate it.”

“I’m glad you wanted to come. I think it made things seem more normal for Dominic.”

“I know what you mean.” He paused and I think we were both uncomfortable.

“Keep me posted, will you, about the police and everything? Unless something is in the paper, and you know our paper, I won’t hear anything. I want to know what’s going on.”

“Yeah, I will.” He opened the door.

“Do you need help with the key?”

“No, we’re okay.” He stopped again. “Dominic thinks you’re pre
tty swell, you know. I think he’s right.”

Andy went around the car, wrestled the sleeping boy out of the backseat and carried him up the walk. Slight puffing sounded as he climbed the steps.

Pretty swell
. That was something you said to a sister. It was like a kiss on the forehead. It wasn’t better than nothing. Nothing would have been better.

“Women are cursed, and men are the proof,” Roseanne Barr said.
I can kiss Andy good-bye.

The choice of words made me laugh
. Jeez. I love it when I crack myself up.
However, I followed up with a sigh as I made a U-turn and headed home.

I was wrong. Within thirty-six hours, Andy was back in my life. He called the office early Monday morning

“Can you meet me for lunch?”

“Sure. That would be nice. Where?”

“Let’s go to Creative Condiments. I need to talk to you. I think I’m about to be charged.”

Chapter 7

As it turned out, we never made it to lunch. I spent nearly an hour entering orders for a client who wanted to do some profit taking. When I called Andy’s office, he’d gone into a staff meeting. He called back, sometime around three, when I was leaving for the day. We eventually agreed to meet at his house after dinner. His idea, not mine. To meet the police’s prime suspect at his home in the evening wasn’t the smartest idea. I wrote down where I was going and slid the paper under my neighbor Dave’s door just to be safe.

When I pulled up to the curb, Andy stood in the open front doorway, leaning against the jamb, arms crossed, staring. He wore jeans and a dark T-shirt. The light behind him cast his figure in a dark shadow. His stillness was chilling. If Dominic wasn’t around it would be the first time since we’d found Isca we would be alone, and I wasn’t a happy camper.

Dominic liked brownies and I’d whipped up a batch after work. Their warmth seeped through the box as I went up the walk. Andy disengaged himself and watched me.

“I thought you guys might like some brownies.” I handed him the box.

“Thanks.” He opened it and the air filled with the aroma of chocolate. “Homemade?”

“Home baked.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Yup.”

Maybe it was the dark clothes and unsmiling face that gave Andy the foreboding air. Whatever it was, I was a little nervous.

“I love your house,” I babbled. “What all have you done to it?”

He stepped aside and gestured me into a small foyer. On the right, stairs went to a second floor. Halfway up, on the outside wall, was a stained glass window. On the foyer’s left, a single step down led to the living room. An arched wall separated it from the dining room beyond.

“Looks like you have good bones here to work with.”

“I did it backwards. Sanded and painted the outside first. Dominic and I used sleeping bags on air mattresses while I worked, but I got the outside done before the rain started.”

“I don’t know if that’s backwards as much as practical.” I looked at the refinished floors. “Especially in Tacoma. Look how nice it’s been this spring and yet I have some vivid memories of July camping trips in the rain when I was a kid—in tents, too. My mother was one heck of a good sport.”

Andy’s living room was sparsely furnished but comfortable
looking. There were built-in bookcases on each side of a fireplace. In front of the fireplace was a large area rug on a wood floor. A couple of easy chairs flanked the hearth. Each of them had a handy end table with a reading light. Except for an old stereo and a tape player, that was it. No wall art, plants or any kind of bric-a-brac. The music equipment sat on the floor near the dining room. Piles of records surrounded it. Old 78s juxtaposed with 45s plus some 33 1/3s and new albums. Tapes filled two boxes. A fifty-year history of the music world.

“What a great room.” I followed him through an empty dining room and into a kitchen with refurbished cupboards and old appliances.

The far end of the kitchen had another set of stairs that servants would have used. He gestured me toward them, and I climbed with reluctance, conscious of how close he was behind me. Dominic’s room was thoroughly modern with bright colors and lots of shelves. Model airplanes hung from the ceiling on fishing line. They reminded me of the plants in Isca’s room.

A miniature basketball hoop hung over a wastepaper basket. Next to that was a poster of some player in a Seattle Sonic’s uniform. There were a lot of books, both paperback and comic. An old copy of Gene Stratton Porter’s
Freckles
lay on a desk.

“It sucks that no one reads her books anymore.” I thumbed idly through the pages, stopping at an occasional picture. “When I was a kid, my folks couldn’t afford a lot of new books for my brother and me, so we read their old ones.”

“Melody gave it to me. Her mother gave it to her.”

“Melody?”

“My mother. It’s an old book, but Dominic likes bugs so I thought he’d find the stuff about the Limberlost interesting. For a school project we researched what happened to the area in the twentieth century and how people are trying to resurrect the land. Teaching conservation is big in school right now.”

The book was old both in the sense of its publication date and its condition. Before I put it down, an inscription on the flyleaf caught my attention. “To Pacifist Andrew Clay, With Love From Mother.” Melody had used a fountain pen and written in swirling copperplate; the ink was smudged on the date. I looked up. Andy stared so intently at the spidery writing I felt a twinge of unease again. The upstairs was very quiet. Old homes were built so noises didn’t carry—either in or out.

“Where’s Dominic?” I put the book down and moved toward the door and into the hall.

“At the neighbor’s.” Andy bit the words off, stepped in front of me and opened the door to a newly remodeled bathroom. I looked in. He’d done a great job of keeping its nineteenth century look but updating it at the same time. A door in one wall door opened into Dominic’s bedroom. We continued down the hall. Andy hadn’t done any work in his own room yet. Faded old wallpaper covered the walls. The floor was unfinished.

“Your room shows how much work the others must have been.” I was beginning to fidget. The paper had water stains and spots where pictures had been removed. The woodwork was scuffed. A large desk in one corner of the room held a computer. I hoped someday, when computers had been around a while, I’d be able to afford one. Photographs of Dominic, taken at various times over the years, sat on the nightstand and dresser.

Dominic doesn’t resemble either of his parents
. The comments of the two elderly ladies at the funeral came unbidden into my mind. “Andy was never really sure if he was the father or not.”

“Coffee?” Andy put his hand lightly on my arm.

I gave a start and jerked it away.

Immediately, he dropped his hand and stepped back. His face turned red then white and his expression went blank.

“Gosh, I was lost in thought. If it’s decaf, sure.” I hurried down to the first floor with the unhappy memory from my favorite
noir
movie,
Kiss of Death
, where Richard Widmark pushed Mildred Dunnock down the stairs.

Using a two-tiered glass pot, Andy put water into the bottom section and coffee into the top. “Have you seen these? The water gets sucked up to the top, mixes with the grounds and goes back down as coffee.”

“No. Clever.” I took a couple of mugs off a mug tree and put them on the table. Trees and overgrown shrubs chocked the yard. Dusk was coming and I didn’t know how to casually get the heck out of there.

“I think it’s Swedish.”

I sat at the table while Andy opened the box of brownies, put them on a plate and set the plate near the mugs.

“Can you make bail?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it. First degree murder? It’s got to be thousands. If they’ll even set bail.” He looked terror stricken.

“What about Dominic?”

“He doesn’t have enough money.”

“Ha ha.”

“I’m taking him to my folks tomorrow for spring break. He should be okay.”

“Should?” I searched for the right words. “Is there a problem? Doesn’t he like them?”

“No. I—he doesn’t know them well. They live up north on a farm near Chimacum.”

“You don’t seem very excited about taking him there.”

“The thing is, my folks, they live in a kind of commune.” Andy paused. “They have their own house, but there are a couple of other families living on the property.”

“A commune? Jeez. Just like in the sixties. I thought all that disappeared ages ago.”

“Mostly, I suppose it has. Like I said, they have their own house, away from the others, but there’s a communal dairy farm they all work together. Melody makes cheese and sells it at a farmer’s market. She also raises llamas and rents them to backcountry hikers.”

“Was that your home? I mean, did you grow up there?”

“I was born there, yeah. I lived there ‘til I got to junior high.”

“What was it like? Like a huge extended family or something? Was it a good childhood?”