Gladys dunked buttered toast in her tea and slurped it. “Sorry, but when I don’t feel good this calms my stomach.”
Gladys was the only villager who had ever shown any sign of fear of Charlie. She wasn’t showing any now. Neither were the poodles puddled at their feet watching Gladys, her tea, and her toast with concentrated longing. Had Gladys been the only one to fear Charlie because everyone else had known from the beginning that Charlie had not shot Georgette Glick? Because there was no motive or any sign of a connection between Charlie and the victim? Or because they all knew who did?
“You weren’t as badly burned last night as I thought.”
Gladys pushed her sleeve up to expose a portion of her shoulder. “Skin’s a little tight and scaly feeling up here. Paige, bless her, got there in time or it would have been real bad.” She took her dishes to the sink and hoisted up the lower half of the window over it to let in the air, as if to prove how little damage had been done to her arm. “But I suppose what you really came here to do is ask more questions about Michael.”
Charlie was thinking of asking about Gladys’s husband, Olie, instead, when a series of gunshots split the air and Charlie hit the floor in a sea of poodles.
The dogs darted at her, yapping. One even came up and nipped her chin.
“Here, Philomena, stop that. What’s the matter with you?” Gladys grabbed up the offender with her burned arm. “Did she hurt you? Doesn’t look like the skin is broken. Sorry, but my lovlies aren’t used to someone falling to the floor that way. You have the need to vomit or something?”
“Didn’t you hear the gunshots? Get down,” Charlie ordered.
Another rang out but Gladys sat back in her chair, Philomena still in her arms, and laughed in sharp bursts. “That? That’s a truck backfiring up on the highway. Happens all the time.”
“How can you be sure?” But Charlie rose hesitantly and slipped into her chair, staying slouched down, though, to keep a low profile just in case.
“Because nobody shoots off a gun this close to people’s houses.” Gladys brought her mirth under control but a spreading stain flushed her face and neck at the effort. “Might kill somebody.”
Charlie was about to point out Georgette Glick was shot right here in the village when Paige Magill appeared at the window screen without her smile and dimples. “Gladys, has the sheriff been here yet? He was just over to my place asking about poisonous houseplants and I—”
“Paige, come on in and have some tea. Jack’s agent’s here and she thought those backfires up on one-oh-one were gunshots. Can you believe it?” Gladys continued a steady flow of chatter until she had Paige safely shut up and sitting at the kitchen table.
Charlie refused to cooperate. “Somebody poisoned Michael with a houseplant?”
“Who said that?” Gladys’s flush paled. “The sheriff?”
“Nobody said that.” Paige shot them both an unfathomable look before the almond-shaped eyes regained their placid assuredness. “Sheriff Bennett was just asking me about the aloe treatment I gave your burns last night. He threatened to report me to somebody or other for practicing medicine without a license. That’s not fair. He wouldn’t have said that if I’d smeared some over-the-counter salve on you.”
“He’s full of bluster, Wes Bennett. Don’t let him get to you.” But Gladys had grown as somber as Paige.
Charlie agreed with Gladys about Wes and knew the two women were waiting for her to leave so they could talk. She would get nothing more out of Gladys. But she gave Paige a parting shot. “Have you talked to Jack? He had a ba-ad OOBE last night. And I did too.”
Outside, Charlie stood looking up at Michael’s loft. Had he been poisoned by a houseplant? Paige would certainly know all about them. But why would she poison Michael? Obviously because of something Charlie didn’t know.
Everyone had insinuated to death that Michael had killed himself driving off the cliff, drunk. Or, because he was a creative artist type and moody, had committed suicide just driving off the cliff. But Charlie worked with arty people and they were often embarrassingly normal and rarely so silly as to drive off a cliff to commit suicide—the chances of ending up a human vegetable rather than dead being so obvious. Better and surer ways to achieve that sort of end abounded, and creative people had been known to come up with dillies.
Besides, the only time Charlie saw Michael he was anything but suicidal.
Chapter 27
Charlie had just reached the corner in front of the Earth Spirit, when a car with California license plates backed from in front of Frank Glick’s house into a blacktopped drive behind it and turned around to head up to 101. Charlie was headed in the same direction but stopped suddenly to stare at the street running alongside the Glick trailer home. What did the Glicks drive? Why did it matter? Then again, why not? Charlie had to do something.
So she parked and walked across the street to peer behind Frank’s trailer. At the end of the short drive sat Clara Peterson’s old Ford. This was her off-street parking. A narrow band of weed grass ran between it and the Glicks’. Charlie continued on up past Clara’s where an elderly but spotless Buick rested on a similar parking area. It must belong to Mary and Norma. So where did the Glicks park?
On her way back, Charlie spied a shard of red plastic in the grass verge between Clara’s parking space and Frank’s trailer. It was the kind that had one smooth side and one nubby, the kind that often covers taillights. But those on Clara’s Ford appeared to be intact. Charlie stuck the shard in her pocket.
“Find a clue?” Sheriff Wes said behind her.
Charlie whirled.
“Tell me,” she asked, “how someone the size of a tank with size twenty sneakers can sneak up on people like that? You’re incredible.”
“That’s your answer. I’m incredible.” Wes Bennett held out his hand. “Hand it over.”
“Don’t you have better things to do than follow people around and demand to see what they pick up off the ground?” But she gave him the plastic shard.
“Charlie, I can’t stop you from snooping. You’re a free citizen. So far. But do you have to be so obvious about it? Think a minute. Two people, two seemingly innocent people, are dead. One for sure murdered, the other most likely so. Charlie, I don’t want you to be number three.”
“You think the murderer is here in the village, don’t you?”
“Yeah. And if you’re as obvious to me as you are to him, I’m going to worry.” He glanced at the red plastic in his hand and then over at Clara’s Ford.
And Charlie caught sight of the parted drape closing on the bird lady’s picture window. “Are you sure it’s a he?”
“Seems to me some female feminist from LA pointed out to me just the other day the odds of murder being done by a member of the male half of the species.” The welts on his face looked like white streaks now.
“Do you happen to know where Frank Glick parks his car?”
“There you go again. I just begin to think I can communicate with you and you start off on some irrelevant, useless piece of—Charlie, who the shit cares where old Frank parks his car? I’m worrying about your luscious neck.”
“I care,” Charlie told him and stalked off to the Earth Spirit.
“They didn’t have a car,” Jack said. “Charlie, I don’t think I can write this book.”
“Of course you can write the damn book. What happened last night was a nightmare. Writers have those too. Everybody does. Even agents. I had the same dream you did, remember?”
“You think my OOBE’s are just dreams, don’t you? How can you be my agent if you don’t believe?” His voice snapped and every one of the customers browsing among the weird merchandise looked over at them. One woman approached hesitantly and Jack put on his best retail manner. “Can I help you find something?”
He left the cash register to show her how to use the earphones to sample the audio tape of dolphins trying to communicate with humans, and Charlie slipped behind the curtain, through the ba
throom, and out the back side door. There was a surfaced pad for Jack’s absent and ailing pickup here. But the Glicks didn’t even have an off-street parking area. When she returned the way she’d come Jack stood inside the curtain, legs spread, hands on hips.
“Two people don’t have the same dream, Charlie.”
“Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say we both had the same OOBE instead. So what?”
“So I can’t go through many trips like the one last night but I need to to do research to write the book. That’s what.”
“Look, OOBE’s were only a small part of the proposal. As far as I’m concerned the weakest. We don’t know what Susan Talbot and Morton and Fish are going to want included for sure. Some of the things in the proposal they may want thrown out, others expanded—they may not even want to go into the OOBE thing. So there’s no reason to get all excited about that now. It’s no big deal.”
“You mean they want to write my book for me?”
“No, Frank, they want you to write your book for them.”
He stared at her unblinking, accusing like Charlie the cat. Finally he whispered, “I don’t think I’ll ever understand publishing, Charlie.”
“Nobody does, that’s why so many people make a living trying to explain it. The real question here is how did the Glicks get along without a car, clear out here in never-never land?”
“Georgette had some kind of vision problem and Frank—”
“A seventy-eight-year-old woman with vision problems rides a Schwinn without lights in dense fog at night? Give me a break.”
“She didn’t seem all that bothered by it, got around all right. But they’d taken her license away years ago. And I guess Frank never did drive but I don’t know the story behind that. I don’t see why you keep harping on the Glicks.”
“Well, one of them is dead, you’ll notice. As in murdered. How did they do their shopping?”
“I don’t know … if you want to go into Chinook all day there’s a bus. There’s a van service into Portland, always someone going to the food markets Georgette could ride along with. They ate take-out from Rose’s a lot. She offers a senior citizen discount plus a menu that’s usually half vegetarian. Local fruit and vegetable growers come around and sell out of their trucks right at your door. I don’t think they hurt that much not having a car.”
A voice “ahemed” behind him and Jack turned. “Can I help you?” he said before he’d even fully parted the curtains.
“Yeah, can I buy this?” a pimply young man in a My Consciousness has Risen T-shirt asked, holding up a miniature Buddha with the same spaced-out smile as the one on the giant Buddha on the floor behind him.
“Of course, and I am sorry,” Jack gestured magnanimously while shrugging apologetically, “but I’m a writer and I was just talking business with my agent.”
“Really?” The young man looked enormously impressed, mostly with Charlie.
She waved bye to both of them and headed for the door, not yet sure if Jack Monroe was a writer, but confident he was a retailer. Which fact was reassuring. These days writing was not a long-lived career. How many times had she cautioned, “Don’t give up your day job”?
Charlie’s foot was reaching for the bottom step when a voice hissed in her ear, “I didn’t kill her.”
“Excuse me?” But Charlie missed the step and would have sprawled ignominiously at almost the spot where Georgette Glick and the Toyota’d had their fateful meeting, if the Mary and Norma sisters hadn’t intervened, one on each arm, to gather her up like a sack of their roadside litter before she had time to hit the ground.
“I saw you and the sheriff talking. I saw you pick up something in the grass. And I think I know what it was.” Clara the bird lady wrung her hands, literally, and so hard her fingertips were turning white. Her two birdlike neighbors fussed with the inevitable coffee pot and sliced nutty/fruity bread, nodding, clucking in support of their friend, drawing their curtains against witnesses.
“She didn’t kill her,” Mary said.
“Oh, my, no,” Norma agreed.
Mary had a minor case of the trembles, and a long neck. She reminded Charlie of the blue herons along the estuary leading to the restaurant decorated in garlic and serving those sublime steamer clams.
“She didn’t kill Georgie? I don’t remember anyone saying she did.”
“Oh, but the sheriff suspects she did, you see.” Norma fluttered paper napkins and blinked at all the slices of bread as if realizing nobody might want them.
“That’s why we came to you, of course.” Mary craned her neck and reached for something above the cupboards.
“What’s why you came to me?”
Clara’s magnified eyes had filled with magnified tears behind her trifocals. “Because you found a piece of Georgie’s bicycle, didn’t you? I was so sure we’d picked it all up. But it was dark and the next day I couldn’t bring myself to look.”
Clara and Charlie sat at the little table in the kitchen while the sisters stood together behind Clara, nodding and trembling in sympathetic fervor. Six pairs of eyes pleaded with Charlie. Clara stretched her hands across the table, having to reach around the sides of the cutting board full of sliced nutty/fruity bread, and Charlie clutched them to comfort the poor woman. They were icy. “You ran over the Schwinn?”
“I didn’t know it was there,” Clara said, dissolving. “She always parked it in front before.”
The sisters clutched the sobbing woman’s shoulders.
“We figure she was hiding it from Frank because they’d had a strong disagreement and she wanted him to worry about her being out in the fog,” Norma said and released one hand from her neighbor’s shoulder to move the butter out of harm’s way.
“And he,” Mary said, disapproval sharpening her face, “he insisted poor Clara drive him into Chinook to a motel because he wanted to pay her back—Georgie that is. Those two could be so silly and disgusting.”
“And you know I don’t see well, driving in the dark. I backed off the pavement a bit. But it never mattered before because there was nothing there to run over.”
Charlie looked from one to the next and waited.
All three looked back at Charlie expectantly.
“We did think you might understand, where the sheriff might not,” Mary prompted and turned her face sideways to glare down at Charlie with one eye.
“Right,” Charlie said in her best take-charge manner, feeling at a total loss. This was not the first time she’d had to combine the two. “But first,” she said playing for time and reaching for the butter, “Norma, pour the coffee. Mary, pull up two more chairs.”
The coffee was weak after Rose’s fresh-ground but the bread was much tastier than it looked, more like cake. “All right now, let’s see if I have this straight. You all think that Georgette and Frank Glick had a disagreement that night, and one serious enough to send Georgette off in the fog supposedly on her bike just to worry him, and to send him to a motel in Chinook to worry her. I have at least one problem with this. He didn’t go anywhere that night. He was here.” Charlie would not soon forget the distraught man in the swirling yellow slicker rushing into the Earth Spirit, nor the clutch of his elderly but strong hand on her left bun.
“That’s because she was on the picnic table.” Clara crushed her bread in her hand and dropped it back on the plate petulantly. “She was always doing unexpected things like that.”
“When poor Clara realized she’d hit the bicycle in the dark, she rushed around to the front of the house,” Norma explained. “Frank had planned to run around the house when he saw her back her car out to the street and hop in, but—”
“But he was just standing there,” Clara said, smearing tears across her cheeks, “looking down at the picnic table with his little overnight bag in his band.”
“Clara tried to tell him about the bicycle, but by that time Georgette had made that into something of a moot point,” Norma said and stifled a giggle. Even poor Clara blinked at
her in surprise. Charlie grinned—how was it the name fit this place so well?
Clara said, “I didn’t know Georgie had been murdered, that she’d been shot with a gun and a bullet. I thought, and Frank did too, that it was just her time had come.”
“On a picnic table?”
“At your age,” Mary said down the length of a long nose, “you don’t realize what little choice we all have in the matter.”
“All I could think of was that I’d run over her bicycle,” Clara continued, “and the sheriff and his people would think she was on it when I did … all I knew for sure at the time was that she was dead … there wasn’t much time to make decisions and then—”
“And then out of the fog, I drove up?”
“Well, we had to do something,” Clara said. “We had a mangled bike and a dead Georgie. And the fog was so thick no one could see what we were doing. It was a spur of the moment thing.”
Charlie couldn’t help but think it so unlikely a story it might be true, but also that part of it was missing, even aside from the gaping hole that it didn’t explain who shot Georgette. “Both you and Frank will have to talk to the sheriff,” she said. “There’s no other way.”
“Frank won’t even talk to you. He’s furious that I am.”
“Of course we don’t know,” Mary spread butter on her bread, “that Frank Glick really found his wife on the picnic table like he said, do we?”
“But I saw her there.”
“He might have shot her and put her there, Clara,” Mary said, and the sisters nodded their suspicions in unison while Clara Peterson’s eyes widened in a sort of soap opera shock, like you’d expect before a fade-out for a commercial.
Chapter 28
Charlie sat on the front step of Frank Glick’s porch, staring at the picnic table and fighting with her conscience. Who was she to insist Frank and Clara tell all to the sheriff and trust to the law to see they got a fair and honest judgment? Charlie had done everything she could think of to independently search for information to clear herself of suspicion for the very same murder, because she didn’t trust the law to do it for her.