A Most Curious Murder (4 page)

The dark beyond her window moved, long shadows reaching across the lawn. There were no streetlights here at the back of the house, only starlight and moonlight filtering through the pines. The smell of pine pitch feathered the edge of a warm breeze. Jenny sat on the wide window seat in her old bedroom and thought about the last eight years of her life—all of it destroyed, like one of the ruined books, by Ronald Korman.

There were good things to show for the Chicago years: training as a paralegal in Ronald’s law office, living a different life from anything she’d known in Bear Falls, and now money from Ronald to keep her for a while, until she figured out where and how she wanted to live next.

And the down side? There were plenty of those: The cheating, low-down creep made her feel as loveable as a tick attack; she no longer had a home of her own; and she was left with one more crappy life experience with a man, a man like her first love, Johnny Arlen, who left her for a bimbo named Angel.

She sure knew how to pick ’em.

She leaned against the wall, hoping she didn’t have to tell Mom about the divorce—at least not until Mom noticed that
Ronald never called and never visited and that she never talked about him. She’d told her this was a vacation. That she was tired. That she wanted to spend some time with her.

Maybe Mom was just too polite to ask.

Maybe Lisa’d already spilled the beans and Mom was pretending.

“The man’s a turd.” Lisa, older by two years and by a hundred years in wisdom, had been sympathetic.

From there her suggestion had been to get out of Chicago. Then she played on Jenny’s guilt for not going home in five years.

So it was Lisa’s fault that she was here in Bear Falls, in the old house, trying to fall asleep in her old bed under the polyester quilt she’d picked out when she was nine. Sleep eluded her, and she turned on the bedside lamp covered by a frilly yellow lampshade that was dried and cracked. Everything in the room was so . . . used.

She lay under her Bon Jovi poster and felt the same life-ending gloom she’d known when Johnny had married pregnant Angel Cornish and the town’s unctuous sympathy poured over her, his leftover, like thick molasses. She had left for college—a little early—and then went to Chicago with only a few days at home in between. She always invited her mother and sister to come visit her in Chicago and loved when they agreed.

Now Jenny was home—full circle.

That was the thought that drove her to the window seat to pass the night, where she could jump out and run if she couldn’t stand another minute in the house.

She was half awake at a little before four when she heard Zoe’s voice calling softly between their houses. “Fida.” And then again, more demanding: “Fida, where are you?”

When she next heard Zoe calling her dog, it was farther away—toward her backyard. “Fida. You come here, you hear me?”

The voice faded. Jenny spent the rest of the night nodding on the window seat, sleeping from time to time, jerking awake only when morning sun lit the dark places behind her eyes.

“Did you hear Zoe calling Fida in the middle of the night?” Dora came from her bedroom, yawning and stretching, pulling her robe tight around her body.

“Uh-huh.”

“Seemed like it was about three or four. What was the dog doing out at that hour?”

“I don’t know. Had to pee, I suppose.” Jenny set the table for breakfast while her mother brought eggs from the refrigerator and pointedly held on to the carton.

“How about a poached egg?” Mom asked.

Jenny gave a slight laugh. “Guess you didn’t like how I scrambled them last night.”

“A little dry, dear.”

“I swear I’ll go to the market today, soon as I can.”

“That would be nice.” Dora smiled. “You’ve got the list. Maybe add some bagels. I’ve been longing for a good bagel.”

“You won’t get one in Bear Falls.”

“Oh, I know. But even a pack of frozen would do. Just something different for a change.”

Jenny toasted the hard bread while her mother put a pan on the stove to poach the eggs.

“You think she found her?” Dora asked as she set the table with bright-yellow dishes.

“You mean Fida?”

Dora nodded.

“No idea.”

“I’ll call and ask,” Dora said. “Zoe is such a fun person—all that fairy tale business of hers. She really is a dear. I feel so lucky to have her as a neighbor. After all, she’s a lot like me, loves books of all kinds. Though she won’t read Priscilla’s town history. I suppose I can’t fault her. Priscilla still tries to corner her, holding out the book as if it was a French postcard or something.”

Dora innocently kept cracking eggs on the side of the pan to drop them in the boiling water. “I just thought it would be nice for her to be up on what the people of Bear Falls have done in the past.” Dora sighed. “Guess you can lead a horse to water, you know, Jenny? But you can’t make her read.”

Dora went to the wall phone when the table was set to her satisfaction. She dialed, then talked a while. After she hung up, she turned worried eyes to her daughter.

“Fida’s gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?” Jenny stuck the butter back in the refrigerator.

“Said she didn’t know. Oh dear, Jenny. She sounds awful. Said she’s been surrounded by awful smells all night. I think she’s afraid something’s happened to the poor dog. She has that handicap, you know.”

“Zoe?” Jenny shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like a handicap to me. Just a little shorter than the rest of us.”

“Not Zoe. I meant Fida. Got that one blind eye.”

“You think I should go over and see if there’s anything I can do?”

Dora’s face relaxed. “That would be nice. She helped us almost all day yesterday. It seems the least
we
can do.”

We
turned out to be
Jenny
, alone, making her way through the pines into Zoe’s backyard after breakfast and into a garden like none Jenny had visited before and wasn’t sure she ever would again.

She knocked at the back door, then turned to look at Zoe’s garden.

It was huge, stretching from beds at the back of the house to rows of dying tulips and daffodils. Flowering vines grew thick on Zoe’s side of a tall fence hiding Adam Cane’s yard from view. There were long beds of near-blooming peonies in all colors running down the center of the yard, running toward what Jenny imagined was the back of the yard, up a slight hill and out of sight. Jenny couldn’t see all of the garden because of tall rhododendrons in bud. The rhodos curved into lilac bushes in full blooms of deep purple, white, pink, and pale blue stretching around, and almost completely hiding, a yellow shed. Through all the color and all the green, a flagstone walk meandered from bed to bed.

Jenny knocked again and waited, turning back to look hard at what she recalled Zoe calling fairy houses standing in every flowerbed.

Some, she could make out, were made of wood, painted with flowers. Some were made of tiny stones. A few of tiny bricks. The houses stood between dying tulips or were hidden behind budding roses. In one bed there was a two-foot-tall castle, complete with turret. In another daffodils bobbed around a miniature opening to a cave. There were other houses hidden
under tall plants and what looked like tiny statues throughout the gardens.

Jenny pulled away from the astonishing sight to knock again—hard this time.

Zoe’s pretty face, when the door opened, was almost unrecognizable—her skin mottled, eyes nearly swollen shut. Her hair was uncombed and stood up like a fright wig.

“She didn’t come back?”

Zoe shook her head. “I looked most of the night. I put her out about three thirty because she had to pee, but when I called her back in, she didn’t come.”

Zoe wore a pair of mismatched pajamas with tin soldiers printed on the top and Humpty Dumptys patterned on the bottoms. She looked like an ad for a mixed-up cartoon.

“Get dressed and we’ll go looking,” Jenny said. “I’m sure she’s somewhere nearby. With one eye—well, I can only imagine the poor thing trying to find her way home last night.”

“I’ll bet anything he did something to her.” Zoe gave a quick nod of her head and a sniff of her nose toward Adam Cane’s yard.

Jenny thought a minute.
What would Lisa the Good say in this predicament? Something soothing
.

“I don’t think he’d ever really . . .”

Zoe narrowed her eyes. “Don’t treat me like a child. We both know what the man’s capable of doing. You saw what he did to something your mother loved.”

“Why don’t we go ask him?”

“He’d never tell the truth.”

“What about going to the police?”

“How would that get me Fida back? Adam would lie, and you could see the chief doesn’t like me much. Not about to set his pants on fire looking for my dog.”

Jenny was out of ideas with nothing more to offer. “Get dressed.” She couldn’t help the impatience in her voice. “We’ll keep looking until we find her.”

“You want to come in?” Zoe pushed the door wider but with little enthusiasm.

“No. I’ll walk around your yard.”

Zoe didn’t perk up. “Suit yourself,” she said, closed the door, then opened it again to call after Jenny. “It’s a fairy garden. They might be sleeping. Don’t bother ’em.”

With a roll of her eyes, Jenny walked down the steps to take a tour.

Between two pumpkin-shaped houses, she found a tutued fairy standing on one toe. Jenny smiled and fought the urge to yell “Boo” at the tour jeté-ing statue.

From inside a building with a waterwheel on one side, a fairy with pointed ears peeped out.

Jenny laughed as she made her way past the beds—as creative as any garden she’d ever visited.

A worried fairy face peeked out one small, four-paned window. At the castle, a tiny Rapunzel sat in the tower, her long, blonde hair hanging out a narrow window. One house after another, fairies old and young watched her. What fun! In this garden she could be a carefree little girl again, the way she and Lisa once pretended that they would grow up to be princesses and live in faraway castles and marry doting princes and have nothing but beautiful children.

She worked her way past the rhodos, searching out the scent of lilacs over by the yellow shed.

At first she mistook the pile of rags, lying on the stone walk between the lilac bushes and the shed, as part of a construction site—a new fairy bed in progress. Or clothes for a scarecrow Zoe was putting together. She smiled as she got closer, wondering
what would come next in this enchanted garden, then was struck by an awful thought—that the discarded bundle could be Fida, dead and wrapped in an old quilt and dropped there for Zoe to find.

She stopped, took another step, and almost tripped on pieces of ceramic scattered over the walk. She bent to see what she could see. Much too large a bundle to be a little dog.

Blue. And red plaid. And colorless sandals on a pair of dirty feet sticking out from beneath the ragged bundle. A blackthorn stick lay near the shed.

She pulled the rags away and stared down into the face of a dead man.

“Mr. Cane!” Jenny yelled at the sprawled figure. “Mr. Cane!”

She bent over the man, shaking him until she saw the pool of blood beneath his head. She fell to her knees and caught her breath. Not only a pool of blood, but a deep gash in the long, gray hair wrapped by a blue headband. She waved a hand at the gathering flies and then laid a hand on his chest, feeling for movement, for breath going in and out.

Nothing.

She felt for a pulse at his wrist.

Again nothing. She called his name then held her breath, hoping for the slightest sound.

Adam Cane was dead. A broken fairy house lay in pieces beside his head. In the first minutes of her confusion, she told herself he’d had an accident. It appeared that he’d fallen over the fairy house, or maybe he’d tripped on his cane and fell.

She looked beyond the body to where a pointed hoe lay tangled among the branches of a broken lilac bush. Without understanding why, Jenny got up to move the hoe as if that lethal point, so close to his head, could do more damage.

She touched the wooden handle, meaning to push the hoe off to one side. It seemed important to make things better. Caught in the broken bush, the hoe didn’t move when she pushed it. She pulled at the handle and then, when it caught, she pulled again. She put both hands on the metal end itself and pulled.

When it wouldn’t budge, snagged too deeply in broken branches, she decided to leave it where it was and go for help. As she got up, she noticed that she’d left behind a shiny handprint on the stone where she’d been leaning.

She turned her hand up to check it. Her palm and fingers were stained red. No cuts. Nothing hurt. She looked at her other hand. More dark red stains.

Horror struck her hard when she glanced at the pointed head of the hoe. A single drop of viscous liquid dripped. The drop fell slowly to the dark stone beneath. On the stone, a puddle of coagulating blood spread out to blackened edges.

“You see?” Zoe said, in a hushed voice. “You still don’t smell the trouble all around us?”

Jenny and Zoe stood over the body.

Jenny held herself still. The dead man lay as if sleeping—except for the blood. She wondered if she was in shock. She didn’t feel that any of this was real.

She’d run back to the house to get Zoe, dressed and ready for the Fida hunt. Zoe’d called the police and then they’d come out together to watch over Adam’s body. Something they had to do for the man, whether they liked him or not.

Zoe’s hands covered her mouth. Her eyes were huge.

“I can’t believe he died here,” she whispered from behind protective hands.

“Somebody killed him.” Jenny pointed toward the hoe.

Zoe shuddered and mumbled, “Do you think he took Fida?”

“Why would he do that? And where did he put her?”

“He could’ve killed her. Maybe buried her.”

“Oh, Zoe. Don’t we have enough misery for one day without imagining more?”

Ed Warner, head bobbing nervously, with a deputy trailing in his wake, finally arrived. The deputy herded them back up the lawn to Zoe’s house, leaving them there with the stricture to stay put. “I’ll be back to talk to you both as soon as I can.”

“Could you check inside Adam’s house for me?” Zoe put a tentative hand on the deputy’s arm.

The deputy frowned down at the hand. “What for? The man’s dead in your yard, Ms. Zola, not at his house.”

“My dog is gone. I think he took her . . .”

He leaned away from Zoe. “If I were you, I’d worry more about the man murdered in your yard than about your dog.”

“Of course. It’s just that . . .” Her eyes blurred with tears.

He saw the sheen in her eyes. “I’ll talk to the chief. Figure that dog’s pretty important to you.”

The young deputy was gone before Zoe could thank him.

They sat in Zoe’s living room and listened to the voices outside—in the garden and then between the houses. They didn’t say a word until Jenny’s cell rang.

Dora was on the other end. “What on earth’s going on over there? I just got home and there are police cars everywhere. I thought something happened to one of you. Can’t be the dog. It isn’t, is it? Anything happen to Fida?”

Jenny broke the news as easily as she could, saving some of the more lurid details for when she saw her face to face.

“Oh no. Poor man,” Dora said. “That family’s cursed, Jenny. Someday I’ll tell you.”

Dora wished them luck and hung up. Jenny tried to make small talk with Zoe to ease their tension, but nothing helped as they waited for one of the policemen to tell them what happened.

From time to time, they talked about the shock of Adam’s death and then worried about Fida. After that, there was little to say. They sat on Zoe’s low, curved sofa and waited.

***

Zoe’s house wasn’t at all what Jenny expected. No fairies or trolls or magic dolls. The living room was neat and orderly. Maybe more flowers—on the drapes and cushions and set about in vases—than Jenny would have liked. Everything else was low key and functional: two small chairs done in a soft green, end tables low to the floor, lamps much too short for a full-grown person to read by. All very nice except for Jenny’s bizarre feeling that she’d nibbled one of Alice’s cookies and grown way too large.

Zoe paced from time to time, stopping at the front window to pull the gauzy sheers aside. “Oh my,” she said. “People are gathering. Maybe I should go out and talk to them. I mean, it was only yesterday the police were at your mom’s house. They’re going to think there’s a crime wave in Bear Falls, all centered around us. Drawing a crowd is never a good thing.”

“Stay where you are. You don’t want more trouble with Ed.”

The room was quiet again. The women stared at the floor for the next hour. When the phone rang this time, Zoe ran to get it.

“My editor, Christopher Morley,” Zoe said, disgruntled, when she came back a few minutes later. “He’s hoping to see the new manuscript soon. As if I can write with everything going on around here. It’s Armageddon, I told him. I’ve landed in the place of bad dreams. I knew it would happen. Walk along happily, mind your own business, then boom, it’s the rabbit hole, for sure. And then you’re big and then you’re small and then you’re falling and then you’re playing croquet with a mean queen, and your world turns and everything’s different. And then you’re doomed. That’s what I told Christopher Morley. I’m doomed. Now he’s worried about me.”

“Doomed for what, Zoe? What are you talking about?”

“I see it now.” Her hand went to her forehead. “There I am, stuck in quicksand. Going down and down until no one sees me anymore. And there’s Fida. And Mr. Cane. It’s only the beginning, Jenny. If I were you, I’d go home, pack your clothes, and head back to Chicago. And, by the way, take your mother with you. Keep Dora safe.”

“Crazy talk.”

“You don’t know as much as I do. There are dark places and dark clouds and dark people. When they settle together, good people are doomed. Absolutely doomed.”

“You’re full of . . .”

Zoe fell into a chair, little legs stretched straight out in front of her. Her scowl was enormous. Jenny wasn’t happy with this trip through Zoe’s dark, imaginary cave. Zoe’s escape to Wonderland was a little too convenient for her. A lot of what Zoe Zola did seemed a little too convenient.

“I didn’t kill him, you know,” Zoe said, as if reading Jenny’s mind.

“Neither did I,” Jenny snapped back.

“Really?” Zoe sniffed. “All I know is that this place was quiet until a certain person moved in next door.”

“By that, you must mean me.”

“I’m not saying who. It’s just odd—you’re here barely twenty-four hours and all hell breaks loose.”

Jenny’s ears turned bright red.
The nerve of the little pest!
“I’ll tell you something, Zoe,” she said when she could talk again. “I’m no more thrilled with you than you are with me. In fact . . .”

A deputy Jenny vaguely remembered from a lower class in high school walked in to say Ed Warner would talk to them soon.

“Did he send somebody over to Adam’s to see if my dog was there?” Zoe begged.

The man nodded. “I think so. I’ll find out and let you know.”

Another half hour passed until Ed walked in, worked his tall body into one of the small chairs, and tried to settle back. He looked from woman to woman, shook his head, and clasped his hands together.

“You need something to drink?” Zoe offered, half out of her chair, craving something to do.

He shook his head. “Like to get this over with.”

“My dog?”

Ed shook his head. “Nothing in there. No sign of a dog. Sorry to tell you that. Maybe she just ran away, ma’am.”

Zoe shook her head. “She wouldn’t. And she didn’t. He did something . . .”

“You were here last night, right?” he interrupted.

“All night. Most of it hunting for my dog.”

“Until about what time?”

“I was out until about four thirty.”

“In the morning?”

She nodded.

“You didn’t see Adam Cane?”

She shook her head.

“You two weren’t exactly friends.”

“I didn’t kill the man,” Zoe said. “Look at me, Chief. Do I look like I could hit anybody in the head with a hoe?”

He gave Zoe a long, speculative look. “Thing is,” he said, “you wouldn’t have to be big to kill him.”

“Wield a hoe and crack in his head? You’ve got to be kidding.”

He shook his head. “Found a trip wire. Side to side over your path. Adam Cane was on the ground when somebody struck him. One blow to his head and one to the middle of his chest. Could’ve been anybody. Somebody set a trap. That makes this a premeditated murder.”

“Can’t be,” Zoe protested. “I saw my fairy house. He fell over that. Very sad . . . but . . . a trip wire?”

He shrugged. “We’ll be checking for fingerprints on the stakes that held the wire and on the hoe. Maybe that’s all it will take. Sure hope you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“It’s my hoe,” Zoe protested as the chief got out of his chair. “My fingerprints will be all over it.”

“And I touched it,” Jenny spoke up. “I was trying to move it away from Adam.”

Ed Warner stood, hitched up his pants, and scratched at the back of his neck. “We’ll see what’s what when I get the report back from Traverse City. Know anybody else who might have wanted Adam dead? I mean, besides you, Ms. Zola? Him hating your dog so bad and now your dog’s gone . . . seems like a good reason to me.”

Zoe said nothing.

Ed had a few questions for Jenny. Not much, and then he was gone.