19
Three days after Miles Lovell was admitted to ICU, Dr. Diane Bourne walked into her Admiral Hill town house and found Angie, Bubba, and me cooking a very early Thanksgiving dinner in her kitchen.
I was in charge of the thirteen-pound turkey because I was the only one of us who liked to cook. Angie lived in restaurants and Bubba was strictly takeout, but I’d been cooking since I was twelve. Nothing spectacular, mind you-after all, there’s a reason you rarely hear “Irish” and “cuisine” mentioned in the same sentence-but I can handle most fowl, beef, and pasta dishes, and I can blacken hell out of any fish known to man.
So I cleaned and roasted and basted and spiced the turkey, then prepared the mashed potatoes with diced onions, while Angie assigned herself to the preparation of the Stove Top stuffing and this green-beans-and-garlic recipe she’d found on the inside of a soup can label. Bubba had no official duties, but he’d brought plenty of beer and several bags of chips for us and a bottle of vodka for himself, and when he came upon Diane Bourne’s blue Persian cat, he was nice enough not to kill it.
Roasting a turkey takes a while, with very little to do during the downtime, so Angie and I availed ourselves of the upstairs quarters and ransacked Diane Bourne’s house until we found one thing of particular interest.
Miles Lovell had gone into shock not long after we called the ambulance. He’d been rushed to Jordan Hospital in Plymouth, where he was stabilized and airlifted to Mass General. After they’d worked on him there for nine hours, he’d been placed in ICU. They’d been unable to reattach his hands, but they would have had a shot at reattaching his tongue if the blond man hadn’t either taken it with him or tossed it into the bog.
My gut feeling was that the blond man had taken it with him. I didn’t know much about him-not his name or even what he looked like-but I was getting a sense for him. He was, I was sure, the man Warren Martens had seen at the motel and described as the man in charge. He had destroyed Karen Nichols, and now he’d destroyed Miles Lovell. Merely killing his victims seemed to bore him-instead, he preferred to leave them wishing they were dead.
Angie and I returned downstairs with the treat we’d found in Dr. Bourne’s bedroom, and the plastic thermometer popped up from the turkey just as Diane Bourne let herself into the town house.
“Talk about your timing,” I said.
“Sure,” Angie said, “we do all the work, she reaps the rewards.”
Diane Bourne turned into the dining room, separated from the kitchen by nothing but an open portico, and Bubba gave her a big three-finger wave with the same hand that held his bottle of Absolut.
Bubba said, “What’s shaking, sister?”
Diane Bourne dropped her leather bag and opened her mouth as if about to scream.
Angie said, “Now, now. There, there.” She crouched on the kitchen floor and slid the videocassette we’d found in the master bedroom into the dining room, where it came to rest at Diane Bourne’s feet.
She looked down at the videocassette and closed her mouth.
Angie hoisted herself up onto the counter and lit a cigarette. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor, but isn’t it unethical to have sex with a client?”
I would have raised my eyebrows at Dr. Bourne, but I was busy pulling the roasting pan from the oven.
“Damn,” Bubba said. “Smells good.”
“Shit,” I said.
“What?”
“Anyone remember cranberry sauce?”
Angie snapped her fingers and shook her head.
“Not that I particularly care for the stuff. Ange?”
“Never liked the cranberry sauce,” she said, her eyes on Diane Bourne.
“Bubba?”
He belched. “Gets in the way of the booze.”
I turned my head. Diane Bourne was frozen in the dining room over her dropped bag and the videocassette.
“Dr. Bourne?” I said and her eyes snapped my way. “You a fan of the cranberry?”
She took a long, deep breath and closed her eyes as she let it back out. “What are you people doing here?”
I held up the roasting pan. “Cooking.”
“Stirring,” Angie said.
“Drinking,” Bubba said, and pointed the bottle in Dr. Bourne’s direction. “Taste?”
Diane Bourne gave us all a tight shake of the head and closed her eyes again as if we’d disappear by the time she reopened them.
“You,” she said, “are breaking and entering. That’s a felony.”
“Actually,” I said, “the breaking on its own is just misdemeanor vandalism.”
“But, yeah,” Angie said, “the entering part is definitely wrong.”
“Bad,” Bubba agreed, and swiped one index finger off the other several times. “Bad, bad, bad.”
I placed the bird on top of the stove. “We brought food, though.”
“And chips,” Bubba said.
“Yeah.” I nodded at him. “The chips alone should balance out the B and E thing.”
Diane Bourne looked at the videocassette between her feet and held up a silencing hand. “What do we do now?”
I looked at Bubba. He shot a confused look at Angie. Angie passed it on to Diane Bourne. Diane Bourne looked at me.
“We eat,” I said.
Diane Bourne actually helped carve the turkey with me and showed us the locations of all the ceramic bowls and serving dishes we’d have probably busted the place up looking for.
By the time we all sat down at her hammered-copper dining room table, the color had returned to her face and she’d helped herself to a glass of white wine and brought the bottle to the table with her.
Bubba had called dibs on both legs and a wing, so the rest of us ate white meat, politely passed around the bowls of green beans and spuds, and buttered our rolls with pinkies extended.
“So,” I said over the volume of Bubba’s teeth tearing a Hyundai’s worth of meat off the bone, “I hear you’re short a part-time secretary, Doctor.”
She took a sip of wine. “Unfortunate, yes.” She took a miserly bite of turkey and then another sip of wine.
“Police talk to you?” Angie asked.
She nodded. “I understand they got my name from you.”
“Did you tell them anything?”
“I told them Miles was a valued employee, but I knew little of his private life.”
“Uh-huh,” Angie said, and drank some of the beer she’d poured into one of Diane Bourne’s wine goblets. “Did you mention the phone call Lovell placed to you about an hour before he was attacked?”
Diane Bourne didn’t miss a beat. She smiled around her wineglass, took a delicate sip. “No, I’m afraid that slipped my mind.”
Bubba poured a gallon of gravy over his plate, added half a shaker of salt, and said, “You’re a drunk.”
Diane Bourne’s pale face turned the color of a cue ball. “What did you just say?”
Bubba used his fork to point at her wine bottle. “You’re a drunk. Sister, you’re taking tiny sips, but you’re taking a lot of them.”
“I’m nervous.”
Bubba gave her the grin of one shark to another. “Right, sister. Right. You’re a drunk. I can see it in you.” He took a pull from his Absolut bottle, looked at me. “Lock her in a room, buddy. Thirty-six hours tops, she’ll be screaming for it. She’d blow an orangutan, he’d give her a drink.”
I watched Diane Bourne while Bubba spoke. The videocassette hadn’t rattled her. Our knowledge of the phone call hadn’t rattled her. Even our being here, in her home, hadn’t shocked her too much. But Bubba’s words sent tremors up her fine throat, tiny spasms through her fingers.
