Murder Among Friends Page 6

  How long it lasted, I'm not sure. A minute, perhaps, although it felt like an hour. When I didn't hear anything for a few minutes, I peered out from beneath my arm.

  Army and Frank ran out of their house, power walking over to me. They both helped me stand, which was a good thing. I was trembling so hard I needed help.

  "What was that?" Army asked.

  "I think it was Paul's studio," I said, my voice shaking.

  Was Mrs. Maldonado skulking in the bushes? I hoped she was calling the fire department.

  The black cloud fell like fog, tinting the air and coating the inside of my nose and throat.

  My forearms were abraded and bleeding. My cheek was tender where I’d slammed into the street.

  All around us was a scene of horrible beauty. Ground glass dusted the neighborhood like the remnants of a sandstorm, glittering on the leaves, embedded in the bark. The steps of my house, the roof, the street were all coated with multicolored crystals sparkling in the sunlight like treasure. Larger triangular shards littered the lawn, some spiked into the grass as if they'd been thrown there by some mythical figure.

  "You were very lucky," Army said, demonstrating an affinity for understatement.

  I nodded.

  Maude came out of my house and stood on the front steps,. She looked at us and then in the direction of Evelyn's house, for once silent. She shook her head as if the three of us were responsible for the destruction before going back into the house without a word.

  The peculiar whoop-whoop sound of the fire engines merged with another noise - police sirens. A yellow and white fire truck pulled into the street, followed immediately by a second engine. We scurried to the curb to get out of the way, then cautiously approached the alley.

  The heat hit me.

  Evelyn's back fence was burning. Army and Frank stopped abruptly behind me. All of us were speechless at the scene.

  What had once been a cottage as old as Evelyn’s house was now nothing more than a depression in the ground. Twisted metal lay inside what was left of the structure. Roofing shingles were scattered through the alley. A few shingles had fallen into my yard, and something had punctured a pane of glass in the ceiling of the sunroom.

  “Maybe he wasn't inside,” Frank said, as we watched the firemen scramble into position, unrolling the hoses, and connecting them to the hydrant.

  Dear God, I hadn’t even thought of Paul.

  A few minutes later, the firemen had town the back fence down. The tree was being sprayed with a jet of water, but it was too late to save it. It would stand, a stark black reminder of the explosion.

  Evelyn's house, however, was intact.

  We moved out of the alley and onto my front steps. I could see Mrs. Maldonado peering over the top of her hedges, but didn't see a sign of Dorothy or Linda. Everyone else on our block worked at an office and wouldn't be home during the day.

  “It's Talbot,” Army said as a patrol car, blue and red lights flashing, pulled into the street. We watched silently as Talbot got out of the car, frowned in our direction, then began speaking to the fire captain.

  During the next half hour, an additional fire truck arrived, parking behind the other two until they stretched in front of my house. Hoses lay like spaghetti across the wet street. The glass was being sluiced away by another fireman.

  In our spot on the front steps we were close enough we could see everything and yet be out of the way. I'd talked my heart into resuming a less frenetic beat, and I'd finally stopped shaking.

  “That was an odd explosion,” Frank said. “A hot one.”

  Army glanced at me. “Frank was an insurance adjuster."

  “What do you think caused it?” I asked.

  “Acetylene tanks,” he said, nodding. “He had a couple of them over there. Lay those suckers on their sides, without flowback protection, and you've got a real problem. I'll bet they went off like Roman candles.”

  A news van from a local station, accompanied by two more patrol cars, was pulling into the side street. Just the kind of attention I didn’t want to attract. I didn't want be interviewed and I certainly didn't want to be photographed. Mostly, I didn't want anyone to match my picture to the news footage from eight months ago, and come up with some maudlin teaser.

  Tragedy strikes San Antonio woman twice in one year.

  The reporter, a young woman I vaguely recognized, emerged from the passenger side of the van. She spotted Mrs. Maldonado lurking behind a tree and headed toward her, but the other woman had years of practice and avoided her adroitly. I'm beginning to think there's a secret door behind Mrs. Maldonado's hedges.

  Her quarry gone, the reporter bounced over to one of the firemen. Any moment now and she'd see us. Worse, Talbot was looking in my direction. After deserting my companions with a few words, I backed up the steps, sliding behind my front door, and entering the house.

  Mrs. Maldonado wasn't the only one who could disappear in a flash.

  9

  That night Tom forgot we weren't talking to each other, but that’s because his property value was at stake.

  We had to have an appraisal done on our house before the bathrooms were added. The dollar amount had so stunned Tom that he’d taken to policing the neighborhood with a watchful eye. Whenever someone parked an old car on the street or put a piece of furniture out for trash day Tom remarked on it, along with adding a price tag to what that behavior had cost us. My husband wasn't the cheapest man alive, but he was in the running for the most anal.

  "What happened, Jennifer?" he asked, entering the Great Room a little after seven.

  I was so tempted to be bitchy at that point, become Jennifer Roberts, Real Housewife of the King Lion District. I restrained myself, barely, choosing instead to send a very polite and vacuous smile in my husband's direction.

  Tom just stood there, briefcase in hand, as perfectly attired as he'd been this morning.

  "Paul's studio blew up."

  Tom set down his briefcase beside the chair opposite the sofa where I sat, folded his arms and waited. I gave him a chronological rendering of the facts.

  When I was done, he sat. Another man might have loosened his tie. Tom didn't. He merely sat there, hands on his knees, his gaze on the big screen TV mounted above the fireplace.

  I'd turned it to the cable news, a station Tom didn't like. Perhaps it was an indication of his shock that he didn't ask me to change it. Or maybe he knew I wasn't feeling disposed to doing anything for him lately. He could damn well watch what I wanted to watch.

  "Why didn't you call me?" he finally asked.

  “I did but Claire said you were at lunch.” For two and a half hours. Unlike him but I didn't utter that comment.

  “A business thing,” he said, waving his hand in the air. He had a habit of doing that. As if he were wiping the air clean of any words or questions I might have. Over the years it had become, like most habits, increasingly irritating.

  “What kind of business thing?”

  He looked at me, quietly remonstrative. “What’s the sudden interest in my lunch habits, Jennifer?”

  “I'm just curious. Can't a wife be curious about her husband's whereabouts?”

  His law firm employed lots of good looking young women, all of whom were quick to assure me that they thought my husband was the most wonderful man alive.

  At Partner's dinners, Christmas parties, and the rare occasion when I went to his office, I was dressed to the teeth and looked pretty damn good. Like most women, however, I fought gravity from my neck to my breasts to my derriere – which somehow seems to find its way closer to the ground every year. However attractive I might look, I feel as if I'm cinching everything up and, at any moment, things are bound to fall.

  Tom, like other men, were used to things hanging down.

  Young women have no experience with gravity, so they're bouncy and nubile and nothing sags.

  I didn't mind if Tom looked. I just didn't want him to touch.

  “What was the channel?�
� Tom asked.

  “Channel Four,” I said. “They don’t have the story. And even if they did," I added, "I'm not in the mood to see it."

  "Why don't they have it?" he asked.

  He hadn't asked if I was hurt. Or if I'd been scared. All he was concerned about was our fence, the damage to the sunroom's glass roof, and any threat of continuing fire.

  Maybe he did remember we were sleeping apart.

  “I’m not the News Director, Tom. Maybe there was something more interesting to report.”

  “I was at lunch with our newest associate,” he said. Very calm and very Tom-like.

  No further explanation was forthcoming. I was supposed to be satisfied with that?

  “Was your associate a he or a she?” There, my voice could be as bland as Tom's.

  “It happened to be a she on this occasion.” He stood, came to my side. Not for an embrace but for the remote. I gave it to him and watched as he returned to his chair.

  “What's her name?”

  A bit of information I truly didn't need to know. In fact, I didn't even want to know. But I found myself perversely pressing the issue. Some deep flaw of my nature recognized Tom's irritation and wanted to feed on it.

  “Mary Lynn Thomas.”

  When we were first married, before Tom had become somber and distinguished looking, he and I used to joke about the names of those partners in the firm where he was now senior. Never trust a man whose first name was an initial, as in J. Robert Stevens or P. Martin Weiss. I had the same instinctual awareness about women with two names - Sarah Jane, Dora Sue, and Mary Lynn.

  I didn't say anything further. Suddenly, the game didn't seem worth playing. Or maybe it had become too dangerous to play.

  “So you don’t know if he was inside?”

  It took me a moment to realize what Tom was talking about.

  “Paul? No.” I didn’t tell him I left at the sight of the news crew. But if Army had found out anything he would tell me.

  “It could've spread to our house,” he said, glancing at me. I wasn't responsible, but somehow that look managed to imply I was.

  He and Maude should get together. They could have a grand old time discussing all my flaws and foibles.

  I stood, making my way through the room and up the stairs. He could have easily overtaken me. I wasn't surprised when I got to my temporary bedroom and there was no sign of my husband.

  I've loved Tom for years, but the last two years had been difficult for us. His avoidance of the unpleasant had clashed with my motherly instincts. Or maybe his love for Barbara had simply been stronger than his love for me.

  Going to the window, I looked toward Evelyn’s house. The tree once blocking my view was gone. The smell of burned wood, curiously pleasant and reminding me of autumn, would probably linger for days. The house looked forlorn and alone, stripped of life. Not one light shone in its darkened windows.

  Where was Paul? Gone? Or dead?

  A sign of the times, and my own screwed up life, that I'd rather concentrate on murder than my marriage.

  10

  A few days later, the doorbell rang, conveniently after my swim. The bell sounded like a gong, commanding, stentorian, and a bit much. Tom had picked it out and I rolled my eyes every time I heard it, which wasn't often. Evelyn had always come to the back of the house, and Tom and Barbara had always used the side door.

  I opened the door, attired as I was in my neck to ankle floral caftan, hoping it was a deliveryman and not Reverend Hollister. The good reverend made a quarterly appearance to usher me back into the fold. My Presbyterian upbringing had abruptly collapsed on my daughter's death, and although I welcomed the Reverend with as much grace as I could muster, offering him tea, cookies, and an hour of my time, I had no intention of returning to First Presbyterian Church.

  It wasn’t Reverend Hollister. Instead, it was Talbot.

  I was unprepared for the surge of fear.

  I remembered the first time I saw him, standing beside Barbara at the front door. She’d been sullen; he’d been stiffly official.

  “She was driving under the influence, Mrs. Roberts. I’m bringing her home this time. Next time I’ll have to arrest her.”

  True to his word, Barbara had been arrested the next time, but had been cunning enough not to be caught with drugs in her possession. Texas law was pitiless in drug cases. That didn't stop her, however, from trying to get them.

  The day she'd been picked up for prostitution in San Antonio, Tom and I had the biggest fight of our marriage.

  "She wouldn't have been arrested if you'd given her the money she needed," Tom had said.

  "She wouldn't have been arrested if she hadn't been soliciting." My sixteen year old daughter should have been a virgin, not selling her body for money to buy heroin.

  At least Tom and I had screamed at each other back then. Now we didn't talk. Were we afraid of the words we might say?

  How many times had Talbot been at my front door? Too many to count.

  Once, he'd pressed a card into my hand with the phone numbers of several drug treatment clinics printed on it. We were on our way to one of them when the accident happened.

  Had I ever told Talbot that? Probably not.

  Now, I stepped back and invited him inside by the gesture, if not the words.

  Barbara wasn't with him, but I almost wanted to look again. I wanted her to be in the patrol car. I wanted her to be pouty and angry, her hair an odd, defiant cut of angles, one side shorter than the other. I wanted to hear her sarcastic singsong tone as she ridiculed both Talbot and me.

  I wanted her to get past this time, to shun drugs, to go to college, to appreciate the love we felt for her. I wanted her to hug me, laugh with me, tease me as she had when she was younger.

  Life brings possibilities. Death takes them all away.

  I wanted her to be alive so badly my pores almost bled with it.

  She would never be older than sixteen. Never graduate college, become her own woman, be a wife, a mother. She'd never be filled with joy, anticipation, excitement. Never – a word I loathed as much as I loathed the sight of Talbot.

  I turned away, walking into the Great Room. I heard him follow me, the farthest he'd ever come into my home. He always stood, resolute and motionless in our foyer, waiting for me to speak, or calm down or, like the last few times, for me to get my purse and follow him to the station.

  The walls of the Great Room were a pale gold, the curtains the same color. The furniture was upholstered in a leafy pattern with a touch of red and yellow. The room was warm and welcoming, but Talbot made it colder by his appearance.

  I turned and faced him, wondering just how high my tolerance was for bad news.

  “Tell me. Is it Tom? Has something happened to him?"

  His face changed and if I hadn't been watching so closely I would have missed the softening into compassion. “No, it's not your husband, Mrs. Roberts. I came to tell you about Paul Norton."

  “He was in the studio,” I said, sitting abruptly on the edge of the sofa closest to the fireplace.

  He nodded. “We found his …remains.” A curious pause, one that made me wonder exactly how much of Paul they’d found.

  Behind him, Maude wandered into view. She wiped her hands on her apron and surveyed Talbot calmly. “Would you like me to bring some coffee, Jennifer?”

  I looked up Talbot, half expecting him to decline but, to my surprise, he nodded and turned to her.

  “I'd appreciate that.”

  Maude smiled at Talbot, then disappeared through the door with one last sweeping glance. I’ve never seen Maude preen, but then I never had a strange man in the house, either.

  He was good looking, if you could forget he was a cop. I couldn't.

  I waved him into a chair. “Do you ever get tired of being a harbinger of bad news?” I asked.

  He sent me a quick look. “It’s part of the job.”

  “That wasn't a fair question, was it?"

  He didn't a
nswer.

  Something about him brought out the worst in me. Maybe it was because he knew all my deepest, darkest secrets. He'd been my boogy man, the worst sight I could possibly imagine, and he'd showed up at my front door too damn often.

  “Was it murder?” I asked, wanting to think of anything but Barbara.

  He smiled, which surprised me. I expected to startle him with my question. Maybe Talbot was never startled.

  “What makes you think that, Mrs. Roberts?”

  Being called Mrs. Roberts reminded me of too many of Talbot's previous visits.

  For whatever reason, I looked him straight in the eye and said, "My name is Jennifer."

  He nodded. "I'm Bill."

  His name personalized him, gave me something to call him that wasn’t inscribed on a silver nametag on his chest. But I'd opened that box, so I smiled, and nodded like a bobblehead doll, and wished I could think of something profound to say.

  Unfortunately, nothing came to mind.

  I should have told him what I suspected. I should have said that I felt something wasn't right about Evelyn's death. For a myriad of reasons, none of them sterling, I kept silent. Maybe I wanted to have the upper hand for once.

  God knows I was due.

  “What caused the explosion?”

  Maude entered the room, complete with a tray I haven't seen since the last time we both polished silver six months ago. Maude was a great believer in work solving all wounds, even mine.

  She placed the tray on the table not far from me, so I could play lady of the manor if I so wished. I didn't, and was grateful when Talbot stood to pour his own coffee from the silver pot into one of my best cups and saucers.

  Evidently, when Maude entertained, she did it well.

  In addition to the coffee, she'd added one piece of chocolate cake. One. I frowned at her, but her attention was directed toward Talbot. She smiled, tossed her head a little, and left the room.

  Once Maude was gone, Talbot spoke again, his gaze on the chocolate cake. I handed it to him, feeling a little chocolate cake lust of my own.