Authors: Charlaine Harris
Dead Over Heels (8 page)
Dryden, his mouth flattened in anger—at least, I thought it was anger—was putting away his pencil and notebook.
“I hope it won’t be necessary to disturb you again,” he said, quite calmly. He looked over my shoulder, through the archway to the dining room. “Pretty flowers,” he said, still without inflection.
“Thanks for coming,” I said, with, I hoped, firm civility.
Angel looked down at me, shaking her head, when he’d left.
“What?” I asked indignantly.
“When you do that, it’s just like being bitten by a dachshund,” she said, and drifted to the kitchen door. “Don’t forget to set the alarm after me,” she called over her shoulder. I watched her through the kitchen window, loping across the covered sidewalk to the garage, bounding up the wooden steps and unlocking her door. I obediently punched in the right numbers on the panel set in the wall, and I prayed for her and Shelby and the baby.
T
hat evening I got another one of those annoying phone calls. I’d been getting quite a few lately, the wrong numbers that don’t say anything when an unfamiliar voice answers the phone. The least the caller could do is say, “Excuse me, wrong number,” or “I’m sorry to bother you.” Finally I let it ring until the answering machine picked up. So of course, my next caller was Martin. I just let him assume I’d been too far from the phone to pick it up on the first three rings; no point in telling him about the hang-ups. He’d just worry, maybe call the Youngbloods and get them to worry, too.
hat evening I got another one of those annoying phone calls. I’d been getting quite a few lately, the wrong numbers that don’t say anything when an unfamiliar voice answers the phone. The least the caller could do is say, “Excuse me, wrong number,” or “I’m sorry to bother you.” Finally I let it ring until the answering machine picked up. So of course, my next caller was Martin. I just let him assume I’d been too far from the phone to pick it up on the first three rings; no point in telling him about the hang-ups. He’d just worry, maybe call the Youngbloods and get them to worry, too.
I didn’t tell him about the flowers, either.
I didn’t tell him about Angel’s pregnancy.
I did tell him about my interview with Dryden. When Martin realized Dryden had come alone, he did one of the things that made me love him; he didn’t say one word about his foresight in insisting Angel be present. But I could hear the difference in his voice as we talked; there was the steel there, the hardness and the edge, that I seldom heard. Maybe that was how he was at work all day, and didn’t bring it home; or maybe only danger brought it out, some perceived threat to him and those people or things he held dear.
And you couldn’t accuse him of paranoia, of being too cautious; not with the things I heard on the news every day, not with the horrors he’d seen in Vietnam and Central America. It would be insane egocentrism for me to believe none of these horrors could happen to me.
From far away in Chicago, a city I’d never visited, Martin told me to use my common sense, and for God’s sake to remember to set the security system.
Chapter Four
M
adeleine had jumped on the bed in the middle of the night. She was there, curled in a large golden ball, when I woke up. Madeleine was an older cat now; she’d been at least six when I’d inherited her, and Jane Engle, her first owner, had now been dead for about three years. Madeleine still managed to catch the occasional mouse or bird, but she sometimes missed her jumps, and her facial fur seemed whiter to me. The vet gave her high marks on her annual checkups, and since everyone at his office would have loved to find an excuse to put Madeleine to sleep, I had to accept his verdict.
adeleine had jumped on the bed in the middle of the night. She was there, curled in a large golden ball, when I woke up. Madeleine was an older cat now; she’d been at least six when I’d inherited her, and Jane Engle, her first owner, had now been dead for about three years. Madeleine still managed to catch the occasional mouse or bird, but she sometimes missed her jumps, and her facial fur seemed whiter to me. The vet gave her high marks on her annual checkups, and since everyone at his office would have loved to find an excuse to put Madeleine to sleep, I had to accept his verdict.
Now she purred in a rusty way as I scratched behind her ears. Martin hated Madeleine getting on the bed, so she only got to stay there when he was gone; I vacuumed or washed the bedspread before he came home. As my fingers tickled lower on her neck, they encountered something unfamiliar.
I sat up and really looked at Madeleine for the first time. In addition to her brown leather collar to which were attached her rabies disc and her name-and-address tag, something else had been tied around the cat’s neck. It was a ribbon, a fresh-looking pink satin ribbon, tied in a precise, perky bow.
I tried to come up with a reasonable explanation for the bow. It was ludicrous that something as pretty as a pink bow could frighten me.
I looked at the clock. The Youngbloods would be up. I punched in their number on the bed-table phone.
“Yep,” said Shelby flatly.
“I’m sorry to call you this early in the morning. But unless you or Angel did this, and frankly I can’t see how or why you would, someone caught Madeleine and got her to hold still while he tied a ribbon around her neck.”
“Run that by again.”
“A man or woman. Got hold of Madeleine the cat. And tied a pink ribbon. Around Madeleine’s neck.”
“Why the hell would anyone do that? That cat would as soon dismember you as look at you.”
“Did Angel tell you about the flowers?”
“No.”
Then I remembered they’d had more important things to talk about the night before.
“Someone ordered flowers delivered to this address yesterday. The card was unsigned.” I told Shelby what the card had said. “Either your wife or I have an unknown admirer. This is unsettling.”
“I’ll be over there soon.”
“To do what? Look at the ribbon? What good would that do?”
Shelby was silent for a minute.
“I’ll take the cat to the vet this morning,” he said. “He needs to draw some blood to find out if she was drugged. And I do want a look at the ribbon. We need to keep it, in case we have to call the police.”
“Okay. I’ll cut it off with scissors.”
“Then I’ll come to get her in about ten minutes.” Very casually, so as not to alert Madeleine, I got my fingernail scissors from my vanity table. I began scratching her gently behind the ears again, and she stretched her neck and purred. Then I scratched her forehead, so she’d shut her eyes. Gently, gently, I slid the thin blade of the scissors under the pink band, and just as gently I closed the blades together. Of course, the little snick of the scissors and the feeling of release brought Madeleine’s head up with a snap and she bit the hell out of me. I’d expected it; Madeleine had never been a cat who’d known tolerance or temperance, and most often she was a sorry pet indeed.
After I’d sworn a little and put antiseptic on my wound, I wrapped my robe around me and retrieved the cat carrier from its storage in a downstairs closet. Right on time, Shelby knocked on the kitchen door.
I punched in the code to deactivate the alarm and let Shelby in. Shelby, so tall and pockmarked and grim, can be intimidating. I had come to be at ease with Angel, but Shelby still made me a little anxious.
This morning was different.
“Roe, you got time to talk?” he asked quietly.
I glanced at the clock. I didn’t have to be at the library for an hour.
“Sure,” I said. “Want some coffee?”
He shook his head. “Roe,” he said directly while I poured a cup of my own, “have you ever seen anyone out here when I was gone?”
I set my coffee down with a thunk, walked over to Shelby Youngblood, and slapped the tar out of him. I was so mad I couldn’t talk for a second.
“Don’t you ever ever imply that your wife has been unfaithful to you!” I told him. “If you had been there in that doctor’s office yesterday and seen how upset she was, if you had seen how scared she was you wouldn’t believe her, you would
never
say a stupid thing like that.”
never
say a stupid thing like that.”
And then I realized Shelby wasn’t the only one saying and doing stupid things. I had just slapped someone who could snap my neck quicker than I could picture him doing it.
“So you believe what this doctor says?” Shelby asked in a controlled, reasonable voice.
“Sure I do. You know Angel. You and she are just like male and female halves of the same thing.”
“But that female half is pregnant and that male half had a vasectomy.”
“So go get tested,” I challenged him. “Would you rather go”—and here I was stuck for a moment over how to put it—“put a specimen in a jar at the doctor’s, or would you rather believe your wife cheated on you?”
“Put that way . . .” he said, and to my amazement he hugged me.
It was then that I learned a lesson about the vagaries of chemistry. I loved Martin, and Shelby loved Angel. But for a moment, something crackled in my quiet morning kitchen, and I was very conscious that my breasts were not tucked in a bra. I looked up at Shelby and saw his eyes darken, before the current of electricity reversed and we flew apart.
If we didn’t acknowledge it, it would be even worse.
“We’d better not do that again,” I said weakly, and found I needed to clear my throat. I turned away and took a swallow of coffee.
Shelby was silent. I peeked at him and saw he was still in the same spot, his arms still out a little. “Shelby?” I said anxiously.
He jumped. “Right,” he said, doing a little swallowing of his own. “Martin would kill you and Angel would sure kill me, and we’d deserve it.”
I drew my cloak of niceness back around me. I had never wanted to be one of those people I’d secretly scorned, people who could not keep their promises.
“We’d better hurry,” I said briskly. “I’ve got to get to work and you know how long it can take to catch Madeleine.”
T
he decoration of Madeleine proved to be a strange start to a strange day. Every staff member at the library had gotten out of bed on the wrong side, even Sam Clerrick. As Sam hopped all over Lillian Schmidt for speaking sharply to a patron the day before—we could hear his voice in his office as we put our things away in the lockers—I raised my eyebrows significantly at Perry Allison. He rolled his eyes in the direction of the office, in a what-are-you-gonna-do gesture.
he decoration of Madeleine proved to be a strange start to a strange day. Every staff member at the library had gotten out of bed on the wrong side, even Sam Clerrick. As Sam hopped all over Lillian Schmidt for speaking sharply to a patron the day before—we could hear his voice in his office as we put our things away in the lockers—I raised my eyebrows significantly at Perry Allison. He rolled his eyes in the direction of the office, in a what-are-you-gonna-do gesture.
Perry, the only child of Sally Allison, had worked at the library before, about three years ago. Overwhelming emotional problems and some substance abuse had put him in a hospital and then an outpatient home in Atlanta, where he’d flourished. After long thought and much negotiation, Sam had agreed to rehire Perry on a provisional basis.
Perry had terrified me before, but now I tended to think his time in the hospital and in the home had been time well spent. Perry, who was my age, seemed to be on an even keel and well in control of himself. Perry had dark hair, which he wore in a fashionable brush cut on top and rather longer on the sides and back. He had brown eyes, like his mother, and they were magnified by the aviator-style wire-rims he affected. Though he was weedy in build, Perry always looked good in the starched shirts and bright silk ties he regarded as his work uniform.
As we both shut our lockers and tried not to listen too obviously to Sam’s high voice, I realized that I’d accepted Perry with few reservations. At first it’d been hard, working with someone I used to be frightened of; I’d been tense every day. Now, I almost took him for granted.
“Who’d Lillian offend?” I whispered.
“Cile Vernon. You didn’t hear?”
I shook my head, pouring myself a cup of coffee from the staff pot. It had been Lillian’s morning to make it, and whatever her other faults, she made good coffee.
“Cile wanted to check out one of Anne Rice’s witch books, and Lillian told her she wouldn’t like them, they were full of witchcraft and sex, and Cile said she was sixty-two, she ought to be able to read whatever the hell she wanted.”
“She did not!”
“Yep, she did. And then she marched into Sam’s office and said for a librarian to comment on what a reader checked out was tantamount to censorship.”
“Sam waited all this time to talk to Lillian about it?”
“He had to go yesterday afternoon, after you got off work. He and Marva went to help Bess Burns pick out Jack’s coffin.”
“The kids haven’t gotten in yet?”
“They’d just gotten in, they were wiped out. I hear they’re furious someone killed Jack, but not exactly devastated with grief that he’s gone. I hear he’d been drinking a lot.”
I thought about the mooshy feelings I’d been having over Angel’s pregnancy, and I realized I was seeing the flip side of the coin. Children and parents didn’t always have close and loving relationships. Like marriages, the pairing of parents and offspring sometimes didn’t work out.
As I went to my desk in the children’s area, I reminded myself forcefully that bearing a healthy child didn’t mean you lived happily ever after.
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