Last Scene Alive

Chapter Ten

  I was changing my clothes when the phone rang. Almost without looking at my caller ID, I was sure my mother was on the other end of the line.

  "Where were you last night?" she said, considerably agitated.

  "I spent the night with a friend," I said with commendable restraint. "Now I have about fifteen minutes to get to work. "

  "A friend? Who?"

  I let the silence hang.

  "Oh," she said slowly. "That kind of friend. "

  More silence.

  "Oh, sorry. Well, that's just. . . I didn't mean to intrude. I just wanted to make sure you're okay. " I could practically hear the questions seething over the line. I was proud of Mother's self-control.

  "I'm fine, thank you. " In fact, more than fine. I was relaxed and mellow to an extent I could hardly believe. Except for the discomfort when I walked. Or sat. Or crouched.

  I picked through my sweaters, looking for a turtleneck. Surely it was cool enough to make a turtleneck not unreasonable? I glanced into the full-length mirror on the closet door. Definitely needed the turtleneck. "Oh, Mom, I need to look for a house in town and put this one on the market. "

  Quite a silence on the other end. "Aren't you rushing into this?"

  "I'm not rushing. I had already decided to move back into town. " The last thing in the world I needed today was to have to defend myself to my mother.

  There may have been a little edge in my tone, because she immediately said she'd list the house that very day. "Who would you like to be your realtor?" she asked, keeping her voice scrupulously neutral. I'd had Eileen Norris the last time I'd been house hunting, but I had a better idea this morning.

  "Why, the head honcho, of course. "

  "Really? You think we can gee and haw together?"

  "Sure. After all, this is your area of expertise. "

  "Well, tell me what you want, and I'll line some things up. "

  "I have no idea. " I tried not to wonder if Robin really meant to stick around in Lawrenceton, if he planned to buy a house or rent, should I be thinking of getting a house that would hold another person - and his books. No, no point in thinking of that. Jumping the gun, for sure. "I guess I want a three-bedroom, but I need a room for a library, and a dining room, and a living room. And you know how I feel about plenty of kitchen counter space. On the other hand, I don't want much yard to take care of. "

  "Your house is ready to show, I'll bet," Mother said.

  "Yes. Isn't that scary? All I'd have to do is pick up the floor of my closet. "

  "I'll list it today," she promised. "I hope this is the start of a new era for you, honey. "

  "I guess it is," I said, after turning that over in my mind. "I think it is. " We discussed the price I should set on my house and what I was willing to spend on my next one. I was once again grateful for my financial health. The independence it afforded me was absolutely blissful.

  "What's your work schedule like the rest of the week?" my mother asked.

  "I work this morning, but I'm free this afternoon. "

  "Let me see what I can line up by then. "

  "Wow. So quickly?"

  "I didn't get where I am by letting my feet drag," she said.

  "Okay. I'll come by Select when I get off work. "

  "Good, I'll see you then. "

  The movie crew had resumed its activity at the courthouse this morning. I could tell from the traffic snarls in the area. Robin had said they would be shooting the scenes that didn't include Celia's character, until the recasting of the role was accomplished. He didn't expect that to take long.

  I glimpsed the Molly's Moveable Feasts van parked a block away from the courthouse, and saw the familiar table set up further down the street. A man was in charge of it today. I wondered where Tracy had gone, and what she had wanted with me the day before. I could feel my cheeks burn as I thought of what had followed the little scene in the library. Just when you think you know yourself. . . well, it had been the most fun I'd had in a long, long year.

  "Patricia," I said, trying not to sound disgustingly cheerful. "How are you today?" She was taking the cover off her computer and making little preliminary movements of things on her desk. Her pencil had to be just so, her little magnetic bowl of paper clips in a specific location, her chair exactly the right height.

  "Just fine, thank you, Ms. Teagarden," Patricia said in a clipped voice. "What do you think the police are up to, with Celia Shaw's death?"

  "I have no idea. I haven't talked to anyone in the police department since the day it happened. "

  She looked disappointed. "Oh," she said. "I understood you were a particular friend of Detective Smith's. "

  "No, that's not correct. " I could do clipped, too. "As far as I know, they could be coming to arrest you any minute. "

  My mildly belligerent comment had an amazing result. Patricia Bledsoe stared at me as though I'd grown a second head. She turned absolutely green.

  "What do you mean?" she said, her voice faltering.

  "I was just, ah, emphasizing how little I know about the investigation," I said, convinced I'd gone over a line somehow. I felt knee-high to a grasshopper. "Patricia! You, of all people . . . I mean, I bet you iron your underwear. "

  Patricia looked at me with loathing. "Go work," she said.

  She'd crossed the boundary into open rudeness in a great rush. What on earth had I done? I felt pretty truculent myself, by now. I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't escalate the hostility in the room, so I spun on my heel and left, my excellent mood stuffed in a sack for at least a little while.

  My boss, Sam derrick, came in the employee door as I was stuffing my purse into my little locker.

  "Good morning, Roe," he said. His heavy glasses reflected the overhead light. He was carrying his briefcase, which was as much a part of Sam as his white shirt and tie. You'd think he carried nuclear warhead firing codes in it instead of library paperwork.

  "Watch out for Patricia today," I said.

  "Something's wrong with Patricia?" Sam was as protective of his prize secretary as if she'd been a pedigreed bitch.

  "She's a mite testy," I said, trying not to sound spiteful.

  "Have you gone and upset her?" Sam sounded calm, but I knew better. A good secretary, one who meshes perfectly with her boss's moods and personality, is worth rubies. Sam would much rather see me quit than lose Patricia.

  "She went and upset herself," I said in my own defense.

  "You obviously didn't know that the day Celia Shaw came in here and checked out some books, I gave Ms. Shaw a brief tour of the library," Sam said.

  Oh, I bet that had just made Celia's day. "I'm sure she enjoyed it," I muttered.

  "And she met Patricia then, shook hands with her," Sam went on. "So naturally Patricia is upset by the news of Ms. Shaw's murder. "

  "I see that I shouldn't have brought it up," I said, and that was the truth.

  Casting me a hostile look, Sam stomped into Patricia's cubicle. I could see him saying soothing things through the clear upper panels.

  So much for senior employee loyalty, I told myself, now just as frazzled as Patricia. I'd been working for the library for ten years or more, and Patricia had been here less than a year.

  I stomped out to the main desk, emotionally loaded for bear. Luckily for my coworkers, about ten minutes after the library opened, the heavier of the two ladies who worked at Flower Fantasies brought in a beautiful flower arrangement and carefully set it on the desk in front of me, as I was beginning to telephone the people who had overdue books. Chrysanthemums, daisies, and other flowers I couldn't identify mixed in a medley of warm colors against their dark green background.

  "It's for me?" How long had it been since anyone had sent me flowers?

  "Yes, ma'am," the woman said, beaming at my pleasure
. "First order of the day. "

  I took the card out of the little plastic prongs and opened the envelope.

  "You are beyond beautiful," the card said. It was signed "Robin. "

  I didn't melt on the spot, but it was a near thing. Tears welled in my eyes, which I kept very wide open.

  "It's lovely," I said. "Thank you. "

  "Enjoy," she said, waving a casual hand, and returned to her van, parked illegally outside the main library doors.

  I held the card to my chest like a schoolgirl, while I beamed at the arrangement. If Robin had planned a blitz attack on my body and heart, he was going about it exactly right. I could only be glad he'd decided to proceed with his campaign.

  After the freezing-cold misery of the last year, I had the feeling I was sitting by a warm fire. That glow lasted all morning, with the exception of the few minutes it took to roust a reporter who came into the library to ask me how it felt to have been murdered by proxy, so to speak. Sam took care of him pretty quickly, and I was grateful.

  The incident did set me to thinking back to that morning at the courthouse. I recalled sitting in the sun, waiting for Angel. I watched Will speak to Celia, shove the door shut with one hand while he carried a cup of coffee in the other. I watched Mark knock at the door in vain. Had Celia been angry with him? Had she already had the drugged coffee, begun feeling drowsy? Had she just been in the bathroom and unable to come to the door? Then the woman - Sarah Feathers, Arthur had told me - just barely opening the trailer door and speaking a few words, shutting it again. Then I'd lost a few minutes of surveillance while I talked to Carolina. Then I'd gone to Tracy's table in front of the Molly's van, watched her change jackets, had the orange juice. All trivial stuff.

  I opened my eyes and focused on my flowers again. I'd been standing there with my eyes shut while I thought, probably a bad habit to get into. For the first time, I wondered if Sarah Feathers had heard a reply from Celia to whatever she had said. I didn't know Sarah Feathers, and I couldn't ask her, but I knew who could.

  Sure enough, Angel had gotten Carolina's cell phone number.

  "Hello!" Carolina said, after two rings. I asked my question, and she said, "I don't know why you want to know, but it's easy enough to find out. I see Sarah all the time. "

  Carolina agreed to call me back that evening. I went back to calling patrons about overdue books.

  At noon, I trotted out of the employee door with my flowers held carefully in front of me. I was so busy planning how to place them in my car so they didn't fall over that I never saw the shadow behind me until it was too late.

  "Roe! Roe! Are you all right?" A silhouette was between me and the bright fall sun, right overhead.

  "What happened?" I asked, my voice weak and shaky.

  "Someone ran up behind you and hit you," Perry Allison said. "Someone in a coat with the hood pulled over his head, so I couldn't see who it was. I called the police on my cell phone. They're coming. "

  "My flowers," I said, and I began to cry. That was why I felt wet. My flowers were all around me on the pavement of the parking lot, and the water in the vase had soaked my pants.

  "I'm sorry," Perry said. "Are you hurt?"

  "I'm okay," I said, trying to convince myself. A patrol car was turning into the library parking lot already, and a patrol officer I didn't know leaped out of it as though the car had an ejector seat. She was a small woman with short, dark hair, and she was already talking over her shoulder-rig thing.

  "Which way did the assailant go?" she asked Perry.

  Perry, trying not to gawk (he is a big fan of authoritative women) pointed in the direction of the heavily planted slope that divided the parking lot from the lower street. "He went in the bushes after he pushed Roe down," Perry called to the officer's back.

  "Wow," Perry said, deeply impressed.

  I sighed, glad I wasn't one of those self-centered people who think getting attacked is all about them. This was my day for people ruining "Aurora" moments.

  Perry looked back down at me, maybe hearing something exasperated in my exhalation. "Can you sit up, Roe?" he asked. He slid an arm underneath me and I was upright. I'd never been this close to Perry before, and it felt funny. I would just as soon he let me handle this on my own, but there was no way I could say "back off" without sounding incredibly rude.

  "This is good," I said, more or less to myself. My head felt fine. After a second or two of thinking about it and getting my breath back, I decided I wasn't really hurt, just astonished.

  The patrol officer came back through the bushes. "I'm afraid the assailant has escaped," she said seriously. "There are other officers patrolling the area right now. " I wondered if she always talked like that, or if she'd acquired the habit since she joined the force.

  "I'd like to stand up if you would give me a hand," I said, giving Perry my right hand and extending my left to her.

  "You sure you're okay for that?" she asked. "Did you hit your head?"

  "No, I took a spill when she shoved me," I said.

  "She? This man," she inclined her head toward Perry, "said your attacker was a 'he. ' "

  "Why did I say that?" I asked myself, while they pulled me to my feet. I thought it over. "Perfume," I said.

  "The person who pushed you had a on a woman's fragrance?"

  "Yes, officer," I said. "But I didn't see her coming at all. She just ran up behind and pushed me down and I dropped my flowers. " Embarrassingly, I began crying again.

  "Who were they from, Roe?" Perry asked, probably hoping I'd stop with the waterworks.

  "Robin," I sobbed.

  "Way to go," he said. "I'm Perry Allison," he added to the patrolwoman.

  "Uh-huh. Susan Crawford. "

  "Pleasure to meet you. "

  "How you doing, Miss?"

  "Thank you, I'm okay. " I was still drizzling tears, but physically I felt all right. "I'm Aurora Teagarden. "

  "You are?" Now she was fully engaged. I looked up into her face, and realized that Patrol Officer Susan Crawford must be the young woman Arthur had told me about, the new officer whose husband had left her. "I've wanted to meet you for ages," she said. "I'm sorry it's under these circumstances. "

  She pulled off her dark glasses, and I saw her eyes were clear and gray. She wasn't wearing a speck of makeup, and she looked just fine. "Thanks for coming so quickly," I said, not really sure how to proceed. "What do we do now?"

  "I'll write up a report," she said. "Mr. Allison, how was the assailant clothed?"

  "What?" he asked, as if he'd been jogged out of a daydream. "Well, this man - or woman - was wearing a hunter green coat with a zipper in the front and one of those hoods you can drawstring shut right around your face. He had on gloves and gray sweat pants, I think. "

  "Thank you. Is this your place of employment?"

  "Yes, ma'am," Perry said. "Any time you need me, I'm right here. "

  "I'll bear that in mind. " She wrote a few lines in a notebook, talked into her radio, and then began to look around the parking lot, which was not very large to start with. Perry and I began picking up the scattered remnants of my arrangement, and I began inwardly gathering myself back together. After all, the flowers could be rearranged. My clothes needed changing, that was all. I wasn't even hurt to any appreciable extent; bruises and scrapes only.

  The attack had been malicious rather than harmful.

  I half-expected Arthur to show up. Any time anything had happened to me in the past few years, he'd been there immediately. A police detective has no great problem keeping tabs on someone. But Arthur was a no-show, and I was really relieved. Sally walked down from the newspaper office (she had a scanner on, full-time) and took the incident as casually as I could have hoped.

  I left in my car after I'd talked to the humorless Officer Crawford again. I stopped by t
he florist, where I explained I'd dropped the arrangement, and could she be an angel and reconstruct it? At my cost, of course.

  She would be an angel, she agreed. And within the hour.

  I ran out to my house and changed, searching out my only other turtleneck. Luckily, it was cream colored and I could wear it with anything. Anything, today, turned out to be forest green pants. I pitched the soiled clothes into the washer. This was no time to abandon my ultraclean habits, considering my mother had left a message on my answering machine to tell me she'd be showing my house at three in the afternoon.

  Quick work, even for Mother.

  My face was bruised, as I discovered when I went to the mirror to brush my hair. Apparently I hadn't quite been able to stop myself from banging the pavement. Well, my hands had been full, and I hadn't thrown them up in time. It could have been much worse. What if my attacker had had a knife?

  A thought skittered across my mind, and returned to take a deeper look out of my eyes.

  Robin's last girlfriend was lying on a slab in Atlanta.

  Robin's current girlfriend - and I guess that would be me - had just been shoved down in a public parking lot in broad daylight.

  The two incidents weren't exactly comparable, were they? Still. . . food for thought.

  Robin called the library before I got off work to ask if he could come out to the house. I appreciated him not assuming he could show up, and I said I'd be glad to see him. Which was true. But I would've been more glad if I could've seen him somewhere else.

  I was still uneasy at having another man out to the house I'd shared with Martin. Surely that was natural? And I could tell my mother was debating whether I was moving because of Robin's reappearance in Lawrenceton. That would be nuts, I knew. Robin said he wasn't leaving town when the movie shoot was finished, but men said a lot of things under the sway of lust. My experience with Arthur had taught me nothing, if not that.

  I wasn't moving because of Robin, I assured myself. I was moving because I was ready to rejoin life. And if that life included Robin right now, so much the better.

  I was carrying the arrangement when I got out of my car, and he came over to me to help.

  "They're beautiful," I said. "Thank you so much. "

  A little awkward, he bent to kiss me, his hands full with the bowl of flowers. The minute his lips met mine, I felt a sort of solar flare. It was unexpected and violent, and I thought the damn flowers would end up on the ground again.

  When we broke for air, I took a deep breath.

  "This seems, I don't know, a little precipitous," I said.

  Robin's eyes were shut behind his glasses. He was breathing raggedly.

  "Feels good, though," he said.

  "You're coming off a relationship and a loss, I'm coming off a relationship and a loss," I pointed out. My relationship, and my loss, had been far greater, but he knew that already. We walked over to the house.

  "What happened to your face?" Robin said. It was dark already, and I'd just disarmed the security and flicked on the kitchen lights.

  "Does it look very bad? I've been dodging mirrors since noon," I said. My fingers anxiously patted the darkened area. I trotted to the downstairs bathroom, Robin at my heels. I leaned across the sink, my glasses folded on the counter, and peered at my right cheek. Not too bad - a dark center and a lighter ring of bruising. It would be gone in a week.

  "You want to tell me what happened?" Robin asked.

  It crossed my mind that Robin had not expected me to call him about this. He was waiting for me to tell him -  not angry at not knowing already. This was a different reaction from the one to which I'd grown accustomed. Robin definitely approached life differently from Martin, and his expectations were different, too. I shook my head at myself. I should not compare.

  "You don't want to tell me?" His voice sounded mildly teasing, nothing more. But I could tell from the way he stood that he was more serious, now.

  "Someone ran up behind me in the library parking lot and pushed me down. The flowers were in my hands, and I couldn't drop them fast enough - I didn't want to drop them - so I kind of hit the pavement hard. "

  "Someone attacked you?" Robin was quite rightly astonished. "In the library parking lot?"

  "Yeah. Strange, huh? Right out in daylight. "

  "The police didn't catch him?"

  "Or her. No, the police didn't. "

  "Why 'her'?" Robin's face was involved in thought, suddenly. I could practically see the lightbulb over his head.

  "I thought I smelled perfume. " I eyed him. "Does this ring some kind of bell with you?"

  Robin looked profoundly embarrassed. "Ah, maybe. " He did everything but look up at the ceiling and whistle. "But I . . . maybe if I went and talked to her. . . . I hate to say anything unless I'm sure. "

  "That's what people in mysteries say right before they get killed. 'Yes, I think I know the killer, but I have to check a few things before I talk to the police. ' Next scene, they're toast. "

  Robin was struck by this observation, which as a mystery writer should have occurred to him first. "That's true," he murmured. We'd drifted from the bathroom into the kitchen, and I'd gotten out a pitcher of tea. He nodded when I lifted it, a question on my face.

  "Okay, well. This is really. . . there's this girl. She. . . " Robin turned a dark red. He took a big swallow of tea. "She has this big thing about me. Like a superfan. She took this job to be. . . " Robin was overwhelmed with chagrin, shook his head speechlessly. Hollywood had not made him completely egocentric, I thought, smiling at him.

  "She's nuts about you?" I suggested.

  He nodded morosely. "You know how I found out about Celia and Barrett spending the night together? I knew already when I came to the trailer. I got an anonymous note. I'm about ninety percent sure it was from her. "

  I began to put two and two together, myself. "Tracy," I said. "Tracy, from the Molly's Moveable Feasts catering company. "

  "Yep. " Robin finished his tea in one long gulp.

  I thought this over. "Did you tell the police about Tracy?" I asked.

  "No," he said, horror written all over his face. "This isn't exactly something I want to talk about, Roe. "

  "Robin, didn't you consider the fact that the woman murdered was your girlfriend?"

  "Former," he corrected. He looked at me almost angrily. "Of course, Roe. What are you. . . ?" His face cleared. "Oh. "

  I saw the tide of realization pour over him. "Oh, no," he said. "Oh, no. "

  "I hope not," I told him. "But you have to say something. "

  He fumed and fussed, but he was just postponing the inevitable. "You think she may have attacked you today, too?" he asked, as he pulled his coat back on to drive to the police station.

  I shrugged. I remembered Tracy's face, after (I now realized) she had seen Robin and me together in the library, obviously close, obviously in lust. I wondered what would have happened if I hadn't pulled out of the parking lot, if I'd waited to talk to her as she'd wanted.

  I was really glad I hadn't stopped to find out.