He went deliberately back across the room and stopped in front of her desk.
“I won’t tell you what to think, Brenda,” he said. “But I want to make it very, very clear that it would be a good idea if you kept your opinions of Miss Lancaster and the subject of coincidence to yourself.”
Brenda went rigid. “Yes, sir.”
He left, heading for the parking lot. He wondered what Brenda would have had to say if she knew that her tidy little condo was one of the many residences he had searched during his short stay in Stone Canyon. Unfortunately, he hadn’t turned up evidence of anything other than a life devoted to work and office gossip.
. . .
Jake’s phone rang just as he got out of the BMW and started toward the lobby of the Desert Dawn Motel. He recognized the number.
“Hello, Archer,” he said.
“Where the hell are you? I just talked to Brenda. She said you left for the day and that it had something to do with Clare.”
“As usual, Brenda is on top of the situation.” Jake paused at the door. He did not want to have this conversation in front of the desk clerk. “I’m at Clare’s motel.”
“You’re already at the airport?” Archer sounded startled. “You made damn good time, especially in Friday rush-hour traffic.”
“Got lucky,” Jake said. “Traffic wasn’t as bad as usual.”
“You heard what happened?” Archer demanded.
“Yes. Where are you?”
“I’m on my way to the Shipley house. This is not a good situation, Jake. Not after what happened six months ago. I’ve already had calls from the local reporters.”
“Don’t give them anything,” Jake said.
“You think I’m stupid? Of course I’m not taking the damned calls. What’s worrying me is that I haven’t been able to get in touch with Clare. She’s not answering her cell phone.”
“I’ll let her know you want to talk to her,” Jake said.
“What’s the name of her motel? I’ll try her there.”
“You’re breaking up, Archer. I can’t hear you. I’ll get back to you later.”
“Hold on, damn it—”
Jake ended the call and walked into the lobby. The desk clerk looked up.
“Another night, huh?” he asked.
“No,” Jake said. “Miss Lancaster won’t be staying tonight, either. Get her bill ready. She’ll be checking out shortly.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jake loped up the stairs to the second floor.
Elizabeth opened the door to 210.
“Jake.” Relief lit her eyes. “Thank goodness you’re here. Talk about a bad day at Black Rock.”
The sliding glass door at the far end of the room was open, letting in the last of the late afternoon heat. The window-box air conditioner hummed mightily but it was a losing battle. The room was close and stifling.
He could see Clare out on the tiny balcony, gripping the railing with both hands. She appeared to be riveted by whatever was going on in the pool area below.
“How is she?” he asked quietly.
“Exhausted,” Elizabeth said softly.
Clare straightened abruptly and turned her head to glare at Elizabeth and Jake through the dark shield of her sunglasses.
“For Pete’s sake,” she said briskly. “There’s no need to act like this is an intensive care unit. You don’t have to discuss my condition in hushed tones. I’m fine.”
“Tough as nails, isn’t she?” he observed to Elizabeth.
“They breed them hardy up there in San Francisco.”
Clare made a rude noise.
“Don’t let the attitude fool you.” Elizabeth closed the door. “She puts on a great act but the truth is, she’s been through a lot today.”
“Finding a dead body can have that effect on a person,” he agreed.
Elizabeth gave him a long, considering look. He got the feeling that she had come to some momentous decision.
“Especially when the dead body in question is that of the woman who tried to brain you with an eight-pound dumbbell a couple of hours earlier,” Elizabeth said.
“I think,” Jake said, “that the three of us need to talk.”
Chapter Eighteen
“I won’t lie to you, Archer. I can’t. We’ve been friends for too long.” Owen leaned forward in the white leather chair and rested his elbows on his spread knees. He gazed through the wall of windows, contemplating the sparks of sunlight on the swimming pool. “It’s a terrible thing to say but part of me felt a sense of relief when they told me what had happened. My first thought was, at least there won’t be any more scenes.”
“She was in a bad way.” Archer carried the glass of whiskey he had just poured across the white carpet and put it into Owen’s hand.
Owen looked down at the drink as if surprised to see it there. “She was my wife. I failed her. I should have got her into rehab.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over this.” Archer sat down across from him. “You did your best. Myra said Valerie refused to even consider rehab.”
Owen swallowed some of the whiskey and cradled the glass in both hands. “She got so upset whenever I tried to talk about it. I suggested she see a therapist, someone from the Society who would understand the sensitive side of her nature and help her process her grief.”
Archer wasn’t sure what to say so he sat quietly, just trying to be there for the man who had been his partner and friend for so many years.
Owen drank his whiskey. After a while he put down the glass.
“It was suicide,” he said. “Not an accident.”
Archer looked at him. “You’re sure?”
“Yes. She talked about it the night she pushed Clare into the pool. She said she could not stand the sight of her son’s killer. Said knowing that Clare was right here in Stone Canyon, acting as if nothing had happened, was too much to bear.”
“Clare did not murder Brad.”
Owen sighed. “You and I know that, Archer. But Valerie was obsessed, and I think starting to become delusional. To tell you the truth, I was about to warn you that Clare might be in danger from her.”
Archer frowned. “You think she was becoming dangerous?”
“I believe so. Yes.”
A tiny chime sounded. They both looked at Owen’s high-tech watch.
Owen got to his feet. “It’s time for my shot. I’ll be right back.”
He walked across the great room and went down the hall toward the kitchen.
Archer rose and went to stand at the wall of windows overlooking the pool. The strategist side of his nature quickly calculated the odds against Clare walking in on not one but two dead bodies within six months.
He didn’t like the math. But the thing about accidental drowning deaths was that it was very hard to prove murder. The water washed away most of the evidence.
Chapter Nineteen
They went downstairs to the Desert Dawn’s minuscule pool and commandeered the single rickety plastic table and three of the four moldy plastic chairs. It was five-thirty. The late afternoon sun was setting on the far side of the hotel, leaving the pool in the shade. It wasn’t what anyone would call cool yet but there was a light breeze and it seemed more comfortable to Jake than the close confines of the cheap motel room.
He shoved some money into the vending machine next to the stairwell and extracted three bottles of chilled water. He carried the plastic bottles back to the table and put them down.
Clare unscrewed the cap on one of the bottles and swallowed some water. She hadn’t said a word since they had left her room.
“All right, let’s have it,” he said to both women. “I want the whole story.”
Clare sat back in her chair and raised her brows at Elizabeth. “You started this. You tell him.”
Elizabeth put both hands on the table, making a triangle with her fingers around the base of her bottle of water. She faced Jake, earnest and determined.
“We all know that Valerie
had a drinking problem,” she said. “And there were rumors that she had found a doctor who was pretty loose with the prescription meds.”
Jake nodded and drank some water. He had discovered long ago that people tended to chat more freely if you left them plenty of conversational space to fill. And in this instance Elizabeth seemed to want to talk.
Unlike Clare, he thought, studying her stony expression out of the corner of his eye. He got the feeling that if he’d had to depend on her to tell him the story, he would have had to pry the information out of her bit by bit.
“At Mom and Dad’s party the other night you saw for yourself that Valerie was obsessed with the idea that Clare murdered Brad,” Elizabeth continued.
“Yes,” Jake said.
Elizabeth took a deep breath. “I know you’re going to find this hard to believe, but this afternoon at the spa, Valerie tried to kill Clare.”
It was as if he had just walked off the rim of a canyon in the middle of the night. There was nothing but a whole lot of darkness under his feet.
Slowly he lowered the plastic bottle and looked at Clare. She was gazing out at the pool, stoic, impassive. Waiting for him to tell her that she was nuts, he thought. Waiting for him to inform her that no one tried to kill her that afternoon, that things like that didn’t happen in high-end spas.
“Explain,” he said quietly.
Clare rested one arm on the table and drummed her fingers. “She tried to brain me.”
He waited.
“Clare was in one of the treatment rooms,” Elizabeth said quickly. “Alone. Sitting in a pool. Someone dressed in a white robe and a turban with a mudpack plastered over her face entered the room, rushed up behind Clare and tried to hit her with the dumbbell.”
“Shit,” Jake said. He was still falling through darkness. He tried to think. “You’re sure it was Valerie Shipley?”
Clare shrugged. “As sure as I can be under the circumstances. I couldn’t see her features because of the goop on her face but she was about Valerie’s size. Thin. Frail-looking.”
“Don’t forget the turban,” Elizabeth said quickly.
“What turban?” Jake asked.
“The person who tried to clobber me with the dumbbell wore a towel turban around her head,” Clare said. “When I went out to the Shipley house this afternoon I found a turban just like it in the front seat of Valerie’s Jaguar. She must have tossed it there when she was driving away from the spa.”
“Take me through it, step by step,” Jake said.
She looked at him. He saw barely veiled surprise and uncertainty in her eyes. She hadn’t expected him to believe her, he thought.
“It was just like Elizabeth said.” She tightened her grip on the bottle of water. “I was alone in the grotto tub. I heard the door open behind me. I thought the attendant had come to tell me my time was up. But I heard the person’s shoe on the tiles.”
“Her shoe?” Jake repeated.
“It was a street shoe. You know, one with leather soles. Everyone in the spa wore soft-soled shoes or slippers. But this person was wearing regular shoes. My first thought was that someone had walked in on me by mistake and there I was, stark naked in the hot tub. And then I got a panicky feeling, like something terrible was about to happen.”
“Your intuition kicked in,” Elizabeth said wisely.
“That and the fact that the street shoe just sounded so wrong,” Clare agreed.
“Go on,” Jake said.
“I leaped for the middle of the pool. Valerie was already swinging the dumbbell. She had it clutched in both hands. It crashed into the pillow and fell into the pool.”
“Clare came that close to having her skull crushed,” Elizabeth said tightly. “She would have been dead or horribly injured by now if she hadn’t moved when she did.”
“What did you do next?” Jake asked Clare, careful to keep his voice neutral.
“Leaped out of the tub, of course,” Clare said. “But Valerie was already off and running before I could grab my robe. By the time I got to the door, she had disappeared.”
“You reported this, I assume,” Jake said.
Clare and Elizabeth exchanged glances.
“We did tell the assistant manager,” Clare said carefully.
“He called the cops?” Jake pressed.
“She,” Elizabeth corrected. “Her name is Karen Trent. And no, she did not call the police. She didn’t believe us when we told her what had happened. Claimed we misinterpreted events.”
“The dumbbell,” Jake said, thinking.
“Was still in the spa pool.” Clare nodded. “But Ms. Trent seemed to think that it had been accidentally dropped by whoever mistakenly opened the door of the treatment room.”
“Did you two call the police?” Jake asked.
Clare said nothing.
Elizabeth pressed her lips together.
Jake exhaled slowly. “You didn’t call the cops.”
“I have some issues with the Stone Canyon Police Department,” Clare said.
“Because of what happened to Brad,” Elizabeth explained hurriedly. “And no one would have taken me seriously without some hard evidence because everyone believes I had a nervous breakdown a while back.”
Clare lowered her bottle and looked at Elizabeth. “There’s also the little fact that you didn’t actually see anything. You were in another therapy room at the time. It would have been my word against Valerie’s.”
“True,” Elizabeth said. She turned back to Jake. “The Stone Canyon cops would have gone through the motions because of Dad but they wouldn’t have turned up anything. The bottom line is that what evidence there was got washed off the dumbbell when it went into the water.”
Maybe not all the evidence, Jake thought. He slouched back in his chair, stretched out his feet and drank some water.
“The SUV that tried to run you down in the mall yesterday,” he said after a while. “Think that was Valerie?”
“There was an SUV parked in the Shipleys’ garage this afternoon that looked identical,” Clare said.
“Let me clarify,” Jake said softly. “You went out to the Shipley house this afternoon all by yourself to confront this obsessed, crazy woman.”
Clare blinked and then flushed a dull, angry pink. She did not take criticism well, he noted.
“I thought I might be able to talk to her,” she said coldly. “Get her to see reason.”
“Clare didn’t tell me what she was planning to do,” Elizabeth put in quickly, “or I would have gone with her.”
Clare slumped deeper into her chair. “Okay, in hindsight going to see Valerie alone was probably not the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”
He let that go. Snarling at her now probably wasn’t going to accomplish much. Besides, the main reason he wanted to read her the riot act was because he couldn’t think of any other way to work off some of the tension chewing up his insides. Nothing he said was going to change what had happened that afternoon, he reminded himself. It was time to focus on a plan of action.
“Where, exactly, do you stand with the Stone Canyon police on this thing?” he asked.
“I’m not an official suspect, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “But I was asked not to leave the Phoenix area for a while.”
“Just until the medical examiner makes an official determination of accidental drowning or suicide,” Elizabeth explained. “That shouldn’t take long. After all, Valerie Shipley’s death is a very high-profile case for the Stone Canyon police. I’m sure the authorities will rush the autopsy.”
“Meanwhile, it looks like I’m going to have to do a little hand laundry in my bathroom sink tonight,” Clare said wearily. “I’m out of clean clothes.”
Elizabeth frowned. “I can take some of your things back to the house and have the housekeeper do them for you.”
“That’s okay. Thanks, anyway. I’m sure the management of the Desert Dawn Motel won’t mind me hanging a few hand-washables out to dry on the balcony.”
Jake glanced up at her room. “The sight of your lingerie hanging from the railing would probably add a certain colorful charm to this establishment. But I think there is a better solution.”
“I know. Go shopping again.” She made a face. “It may come to that if the Stone Canyon police won’t let me leave town soon. But I’d like to avoid running up any additional expenses, if possible. This trip has already cost me a lot more than I intended to spend.”
“Send the bills to Dad,” Elizabeth said. “He’s the one who asked you to come down here.”
“I know, but I have this policy,” Clare said softly.
“‘Never take money from Archer Glazebrook,’” Elizabeth quoted, irritated. “Yes, I am well aware of your dumb policy. But if you won’t let Dad help you out, you’ll have to take the money from me.”
Clare sighed. “I’ll keep the offer in mind. With luck it won’t come to that. I’m still hoping to be on my way back to San Francisco in a couple of days.”
Jake set his water bottle aside, sat forward and folded his arms on the table. “One thing’s for sure, you’re not spending the next few nights here at the Desert Dawn.”
Clare gave him a quelling look.
Elizabeth brightened. “I agree with you, Jake. This place is the pits.”
“It’s clean,” Clare insisted.
“So is my place,” Jake said.
Both women looked at him, lips parted in surprise.
“I’ve got plenty of room,” he added. “And here’s the clincher. I’ve got a washer and dryer.”
Something that might have been relief lit Elizabeth’s eyes. “It’s not a bad idea, Clare.”
Clare pulled herself together, straightening abruptly in her chair. “I really don’t think—”
“It’s settled,” Jake said.
“This is ridiculous,” Clare said heatedly.
“What’s ridiculous is both of us camping out here at the Desert Dawn Motel when I’ve got a perfectly good house with a private pool and a decent kitchen,” he said.
Clare bristled. “Nobody said you had to stay here, too.”
“No, but that’s what I’m going to do if you stay locked down in stubborn mode over this,” he said mildly. “Let’s try for some common sense here, shall we? You’ve had a hell of a day. You’re exhausted. Elizabeth and I agree that you should not be alone tonight. I’m offering you a reasonable alternative to this third-rate motel.”