Charlie was startled at the number of cars and people on the streets. Frank and Randolph Glick in suits and ties stepped off the road to let them pass, peering in at her with surprise. Clara Peterson stood with Mary and Norma in their front yard, all in dresses and hose, white shoes and matching handbags. They must have just returned from Georgie’s memorial service. But the town was crowded with informally dressed visitors, too. Several people stood on the porch of Jack’s store, their hands cupped around their eyes to peer inside.
Out at the point in the parking lot below the lighthouse a third sheriff’s department car parked crosswise and empty, its pulsers still flicking, its door hanging open. Several couples in windbreakers segmented by camera-bag straps stood looking over the edge of the parking lot to the beach below.
Next to them was a gaping hole in the guardrail.
Chapter 21
Wind scooted sand grains along the surface of the beach, just a tiny few off the top layer as it dried them. They made a whispering sound Charlie could barely hear over the roar of the surf. Foam from a wave that crept up on the red Ferrari left patches of suds in Michael Cermack’s dark hair. He wasn’t handsome anymore.
“I told you to stay in the car,” Wes said as she walked up beside him, but he sounded defeated. And he hadn’t locked her in.
The Ferrari wasn’t pretty anymore either. It had bounced and flipped when it hit and lay crumpled on its top with Michael sprawled half out of it. Most of the breakers didn’t reach farther than a few inches up the length of the car and, as she had come down the path, Charlie heard Wes order everybody away from it. He sent Linda back to the village to question everyone she could find about Michael’s movements today.
“I want nothing touched and I want a full crime scene crew on the double,” he’d told the other deputy. “Then I want statements from the witnesses in the lot and whoever is in the lighthouse.” After missing Georgette’s bullet wound a few days ago, he was taking no chances that this was more than just an accident. His minions scampered, giving Charlie hard looks as they passed her.
Swallows with narrow pointy wings swooped and soared and darted among invisible hordes of insects. Their shadows winked across Michael’s death scene without compassion.
“At least I can’t be blamed for this,” Charlie said and swallowed back unpleasant tastes. “I’ve been so well chaperoned lately.”
She didn’t realize she was leaning against Wes until he turned her around. “Keep looking at him and your nightmares are really going to get squirrelly. I can’t spare anyone to keep you out of trouble right now. Charlie, I need to be able to trust you.”
“And I need a drink.”
“Go back to Rose’s and stay there. Don’t wander around town, promise me. I’ll pick you up or send somebody.”
“I don’t have any money. I thought I was just going for a walk.”
He fished out a ten and added a handful of change. “Here, have one for me too.” He gave her a very unsherifflike swat on the tush. “Now get out of here.”
With the low backless padded stools you could swivel, Rose’s bar was also the breakfast counter. The plastic pastry displays held pie now instead of cinnamon rolls, and on top of them plastic signs displayed pictures of cocktails sporting exotic fruit and names. In the slit in the center of the liquor bottles, where most bars had mirrors, the heads of kitchen people doing kitchen things darted about like the swallows. Rose served as bartender and handled the cash register at one end of the counter. But she kept peeking into the slit as if she’d rather be in the kitchen.
Charlie took the stool next to Gladys Bergkvist and ordered a vodka tonic. They were the only two at the breakfast-and-booze bar. She could have chosen one of the other stools. But the sheriff had said don’t wander around the town. He hadn’t said don’t sit next to Gladys Bergkvist, the employer and landlord of the recently deceased artist who had probably owned the gun that killed Georgette Glick. The gun that had sprouted Charlie’s fingerprints all by itself.
Charlie smiled. Rose and Gladys exchanged hooded looks. This was the only bar and commercial eatery in the village. In fact, Charlie hadn’t noticed anyplace else that even sold groceries. She said, “I’m sorry about Michael.”
Rose and Gladys put fingers to their lips and shook their heads in sync. Rose signaled with her eyes to the darting heads in the slit and mouthed, “Wait.”
“For what?”
Gladys leaned into her ear, smelling like scotch. “Wait till the van’s loaded. If they hear about the accident now they’ll have to stop and discuss it. Food’ll get cold.”
Charlie answered her conspiratorial wink with a nod. Rose slipped back into the kitchen, where the darting picked up speed and the harried clang and clatter increased. “Van?”
“Takes dinner to the institute. They put it in containers to keep it warm and serve it buffet style up there.” She flicked her wrist and clicked her bracelets uphill. “When it’s over, everything’s packed back here. No fuss, no muss.”
Gladys’s outfit today was a cranberry-and-beige flowered skirt with a cranberry-colored blouse, and the stones in her earrings, necklace, and bracelets were a deep expensive blue, mounted in the dull gleam of real gold. Charlie wondered why anyone bothered to murder old ladies on Schwinns or perhaps even artists in Ferraris when Gladys Bergkvist walked around offering a fortune for a simple mugging.
“So, what are the searchers having for dinner tonight?”
“Dill, spinach, tomato, and sprout quiche Dijon, asparagus artichoke vinegarette, fresh garlic-onion bread, and lemon honey yogurt Grape-Nut parfait, with a choice of fresh-ground Kona coffee or Celestial Seasonings herb teas. Same as the special on the board up there.”
“Grape-Nut?”
“Gives it crunch,” Gladys assured her. “Tomorrow, by six-thirty, Rose’ll have scrambled eggs, fresh cinnamon rolls, fresh-squeezed orange juice, fresh-baked herb and bran buns with all-fruit sweetenings, hot bagels with cream cheese—the works—in that van ready to go. She and the help don’t sleep much this time of year.”
“No meat it sounds like.”
“Not at the institute. Not allowed. But a lot of the guys, especially, crawl out the windows at night and hit here for cheeseburgers and fries. And before that, the searchers staying at the bed-and-breakfasts or the tourist cabins have come in for dinner.”
“Bet you sell a lot of paintings at the Scandia when all the searchers are in town, huh?”
Gladys winked again. “And prints. Especially the seascapes. People want to take home a piece of the point after an emotionally satisfying and consciousness-titillating experience at the institute. There’s usually four or five rich widows in each bunch that want the originals. Stuff’s not art, it’s photographs in oil paint, but they eat it up. And Michael’s slightly spooky stuff just knocks ’em out.” Gladys pondered that a moment, sprouted fresh tears for Michael, and went behind the bar to refill her drink.
Gladys’s face-lift had not been successful. That had never been more apparent.
“Will Olie be able to find a replacement for Michael?” Charlie asked.
Wet mascara zigzagged down Gladys’s pudgy cheeks and she shook her head, gulped scotch. Rose came around the partition from the kitchen, her face greasy with sweat and stress. The van must have left successfully loaded because the kitchen had quieted. Rose put an arm around Gladys’s shoulders and squeezed. The dyed-black and bleached-beige heads leaned close together and looked back at Charlie with identical expressions.
“Sisters?” Charlie ventured.
“Half.” Rose led her half sister back to her stool and fixed Charlie another drink on the house. “Were you out there? Did you see Michael?” When Charlie nodded, Rose asked, “Was he really dead? For sure?”
Charlie nodded again, finished her old drink, and started the new, trying to push away the mind shot of Michael Cermack half out of the red Ferrari with surf suds sticking in his hair.
Gladys choked off a sob. “He mus
t have been drunk.”
It was the sheriff of Moot County who came to pick up Charlie. He looked the color of abused aluminum again and glanced pointedly from Charlie to Gladys to Rose.
“Hungry? We got a great special tonight, Sheriff.” Rose pointed to the chalkboard behind her.
“It’s got Grape-Nuts in it,” Charlie offered. She thought it sounded pretty good. But Wes motioned her off her stool and led her to his car. “Well, anything sounds good if it means putting off going back to that friggin’ cabin.”
But to her relief the official Bronco roared past the turnoff to the Hide-a-bye.
“Was Michael an accident or a murder?” she asked.
“Don’t know yet.”
Charlie hoped she wasn’t being taken straight to jail without passing go where, according to Paige Magill, she was due for some horrible abuse. Maybe she was just being lured back to the bachelor eyrie for some of the best-seller attempts at incredible humping featured in Chapter Two of Death of a Grandmother. Somehow that didn’t sound so bad right now either.
But the Bronco zipped past the turnoff to Wes’s house too. Just before reaching Chinook it left 101 and headed inland along a wide river cutting through the Coast Range.
“Mrs. Bergkvist looked drunk as a skunk,” he ventured finally. “She say anything?”
“Did you know that Rose and Gladys were half sisters? That Rose caters all the food for the institute? That Olie Bergkvist is late in coming back this summer? That—”
“Frank Glick says Georgette swore she’d seen Gladys bringing Olie back in their car from Portland like she always did about this time of year. But when she went by the house to speak to Olie the next day, Gladys claimed he wasn’t back yet and Georgette must have been seeing things. That pissed Georgette royally.”
“What did she want to talk to Olie about?” Charlie asked.
“Frank didn’t know, but he said his wife was forever sticking her nose where it wasn’t wanted.”
“Sounds like she did it once too often.” Maybe the murdered woman had wanted to tell Olie about his wife and the animal doctor.
“We’re checking the airlines for a record of Olie’s travels. According to Gladys, the last she heard from him was Buenos Aires. He didn’t take a bus home. I personally do not believe he’s missing or that Georgette saw him going by in the car or that he had anything to do with Georgette being shot. But since you insist upon raising so goddamned many questions I’ll just go about following all the false leads you can find. If I didn’t feel pretty confident you weren’t the murderer, I’d think you were just trying to fuzz up the case.”
They were driving along an estuary where a lowering sun turned the water a faint pink, where blue herons stalked about on stilt legs searching for dinner. The Bronco turned off onto a road leading out to a spit of land where a shabby-looking building of weathered wood hunkered at its end, surrounded by still, shallow water on three sides. It passed a diamond-shaped yellow sign with GARLIC XING written in black lettering just before pulling into a small parking lot, already half full.
Another sign, Warning: Garlic in Use, graced the door. Inside, strings of raw garlic bulbs hung from open rafters and draped the mirror over the bar in ropes like Christmas tinsel.
They made a meal of steamer clams and beer on the deck outside, coleslaw and great hunks of toasty garlic bread. They watched the pink on the water turn to red and whole herds of ducks take off and land just for the hell of it. The mountains in the background grew purple, then gray. They sat at crude picnic tables and the people around them spoke barely above whispers, if at all. The odors of pungent garlic, reedy water, and hearty mud melded pleasantly.
Charlie wiped grease from her chin with an oversized paper napkin and sighed. This was sure a long way from murder and the Hide-a-bye. “It’s perfect here. Thanks.”
Wes looked away from the water where something flapped and splashed and started perfect rings growing. A slow smile lifted one corner of his face and wrinkled up the corners of his eyes. “Beats sprouts and Grape-Nuts, right?”
“Right.” Charlie sighed again.
The smile stayed pasted on his lips as it faded from his eyes. “Jesus Charlie, don’t look at me like that, okay?”
“What do you expect, bringing a woman to a place like this, a knee in the groin?”
But this was just an interlude for a county sheriff with two recent deaths on his hands. After coffee in the bar he hurried her back to her cabin, refusing to say exactly when the Toyota would be returned to her. He did divulge that a preliminary on-the-spot check didn’t show any damage to the brake system of Michael’s car. “No skid marks on the parking lot. It’s like he just stomped the gas pedal and flew off the cliff.”
“Gladys thought he might have been drunk.”
“We’ll know soon. Watch some TV and get some sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”
There was no baby-sitter deputy at the Hide-a-bye. Wes just watched her unlock the door before he drove off. Charlie got on the phone to Jack and was back in the village of Moot Point in twenty minutes.
Chapter 22
Jack persuaded Clara Peterson to rush over to the Hide-a-bye to pick up Charlie. Searchers wandered the village and business hours would extend until the streets emptied. Jack was happily ringing up sales when they arrived at the Earth Spirit, so Charlie promised to stop by later.
Once the skies cleared, night took a long time to settle in on the Oregon coast in June. The sunset had faded but it was by no means dark yet. Couples strolled the beach as well as the main street where electric streetlights were disguised to look like old-fashioned gas lamps. House windows lit the hillside in erratic polka dots.
The air was cool but soft, the ocean breeze gentle. Rose’s was lit like a Christmas tree and the lights from its windows splayed across the beach below. The horizon formed a glow line on the edge of the sea, the lighthouse a phallic shadow against it. Charlie cut off a sigh. If the sheriff had work to do, so did she.
“Isn’t it awful about what happened to Michael?” Clara said now, and Charlie realized the older woman had stopped beside her to take in the night. She’d spoken little on the way over, explaining that she rarely drove at night and had to concentrate on it when she did. Clara said she saw so poorly in the dark she really shouldn’t be driving at all then. After riding the short distance with her, Charlie had to agree.
Clara had just happened to be standing by the cash register when the call came through, and that’s how Jack had come to send her for Charlie. “I never liked the boy much but it’s so sad when a young promising life is snuffed out that way. And on the same day as Georgette’s memorial service. Things like that just don’t happen in this little place. I understand he’d been drinking … Michael.”
“As far as I know that’s only rumor. Deputy Olsen told me you’re an avid mystery fan besides being a bird-watcher.” And Charlie soon found herself inside Clara’s trailer home to see for herself. Deputy Olsen had not exaggerated. Bookshelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling with time out for heating ducts and windows. They were hard packed with paperbacks, spines out and where possible stacked three deep in horizontal piles on top.
It was a more colorful and diversified decor than wallpaper or paneling would have been. Certainly an improvement over Libby’s bedroom walls which were covered with shelves that held a mass of once-colorful stuffed animals congealing, with the help of dust and smog, into a depressing gray.
“Mrs. Peterson, you even have them alphabetized by author. I’m so impressed.”
Clara flashed her gold-filled smile and looked years younger. “I’m afraid I have two vices, mysteries and caffeine. And do you know what? I sleep like a baby. Most people my age don’t.”
“You even have one of my authors.” Charlie had followed the alphabet around a corner and into the bathroom. It was not the location Charlie would have chosen, above and behind the john rather than in front of it, but there would always be a certain excitement a
bout finding a book you’d sold just lying around someone’s home. “You’ve got them all.”
“Who is that? Oh, Lennard Shipton, yes. I do enjoy his Sheriff Tomlin books. Do you know if he’ll publish another one soon?”
“I don’t think there’ll be anymore Sheriff Tomlin books. Len has had some sticky problems and gone into real estate to make a living. But we are marketing a new series proposal.” Which didn’t have a chance in hell, but this didn’t seem the time to tell the bird lady that.
Charlie used the bathroom, and when she emerged, Clara was making coffee. “Then Sheriff Bennett doesn’t think Michael had his accident because he’d been drinking?”
“He won’t know until he gets lab reports or whatever. But he sure can’t blame this one on me. I’ve been under lock and key for two days.”
“Then it’s possible his death was more than an accident?” Clara asked without taking her eyes from the stained Mr. Coffee pot, sucking and flushing, excreting dark fluid in a steady drip into its glass pot.
“He does seem a little young to have a heart attack and drive off a cliff. I expect they’ll check his blood and his brakes pretty carefully.”
“Artists are temperamental people. They often commit suicide.” Clara handed Charlie a cup of coffee she didn’t want, the cup and saucer a delicate china with a rose pattern—remnants of better days perhaps. “It’s possible he shot Georgette and when his gun was found he decided to end it all.”
“That would tidy up everything nicely, wouldn’t it? But Michael didn’t seem the type to kill himself. His self-esteem was way up there.” It was pretty obvious Clara had heard rumors about Charlie’s relationship with Wes Bennett and was not too skillfully trying to pump Charlie for information. “And you don’t seem the type to shop at the Earth Spirit. Why were you there tonight when I called Jack? Or does he keep mysteries under the counter?”
“Oh, no.” Clara smiled wistfully and gazed about her multicolored walls. “I was unofficially observing, and looking over the stock. He’s going to hire me part-time in the evenings this summer so he can work on his book. I can use the money, and I don’t fall asleep at nine o’clock like most people my age and then wake up at four in the morning when the world’s not ready to start up yet. I begin work officially tomorrow night.”