noticed that somehow he’d managed to make two cookies vanish, without my ever seeing him chew.
“He didn’t say.” Marie Hofstettler shook her head regretfully. “He was kind of cheerful about it, though. You know, Pardon was-I don’t know how to say it, now that he’s gone-he liked to know things,” she finished delicately, with a tiny contraction of her brows and a little bob of her head.
He had called it “taking a neighborly interest.”
That wasn’t what I had called it.
“Now, yesterday, did you see any of your neighbors here?” Friedrich asked Mrs. Hofstettler.
She thought, her lips pursed.
“I thought once I heard Alvah and T. L. next door, but they weren’t due to come in until late last night, so I must have been mistaken. And I heard people knocking on Mrs. Albee’s door-to pay their rent, you know-several times during the morning and afternoon. But I’m almost always watching the TV or playing the radio, and I don’t hear quite as well as I used to.”
“When you thought you heard the Yorks, do you mean you heard their voices, enough to identify them, or do you mean that you just heard someone next door?”
Again, Mrs. Hofstettler thought carefully. “I believe I just heard movement next door.”
“It might have been me,” I said. “I bought some groceries for them and put them in the kitchen and was supposed to water the plant.”
“Well, I heard this sound about three in the afternoon. I’d just gotten up from my nap.”
“That was probably me.”
Friedrich made a note in a little hot-pink spiral-bound notebook that suddenly appeared in his hands.
I glanced at my watch. I had to leave in thirty minutes to get to my next cleaning job, and I had yet to put away Marie’s clean laundry.
“Excuse me,” I murmured, and took the tray back to the kitchen, feeling Friedrich’s bright gaze on my back. I quickly washed and dried the dishes, then dodged out of the kitchen and into the guest bedroom. Nothing I’d washed needed ironing, so I was able to get everything put away in a few minutes. I went down a mental checklist; I’d done everything for Marie I usually do on Tuesday mornings, and I’d be coming back again on Saturday. Marie was almost out of Glass Plus. In the kitchen, I left a note affixed to the refrigerator with an “I Heart Grandma” magnet. Marie gets money from Chuck to pay me, too; she’d write me a check on Saturday.
The police chief was gone when I emerged from the kitchen. I’d been waiting to hear the front door close behind him.
“Good-bye, Mrs. Hofstettler,” I said. Marie was staring into space, her hands quiet in her lap. She seemed startled that I was still there.
“Good-bye, Lily,” the old woman said wearily. “I’m so glad you came in today. This would have been hard to cope with on my own.”
“Maybe you should give your son a call today.”
“I hate to bother Chuck,” Marie protested.
“This is a very awful thing that’s happened.” I remembered just how awful it had been in the narrow glow of my flashlight, in the dark, in the trees, in the middle of the night. But with a mental exercise as familiar as my bicep curls, I blocked it out. It would surface at another time and place, but by then I would be alone.
Tuesdays are always busy for me. Today was rougher than usual because I hadn’t had enough sleep the night before and had endured great stress.
I ran in my house to grab some fruit to eat in the car on the way to my next job.
The garbage hadn’t been picked up yet; Tuesday is also garbage day for my part of town. My cart was out in front, the garbage cans sitting in it correctly. No one could know or suspect that the garbage within those cans was double-bagged, that one set contained the traces of human remains. I had lifted the cans quickly that morning to see if any vestige of Pardon Albee’s last ride was visible on the cart. To the naked eye, the metal looked quite clean.
As I went out the kitchen door to my carport, I could hear the rumble of the garbage truck coming. I couldn’t resist standing there, one foot in the car and one arm propped on the open door, watching the truck approach. A middle-aged black man wearing a blue jumpsuit with “City of Shakespeare” stitched on the back hoisted out the garbage cans, one after another, dumped the bags into the back of the truck, and returned the garbage cans to the cart.
I closed my eyes in relief as the garbage truck moved up the street to the apartments. The clumsy vehicle turned cautiously to navigate the staple-shaped driveway. But it didn’t idle long enough behind that building; I heard it moving again much sooner than it should have. I found myself wishing I could see through the privacy fence.
I was willing to bet that on the other side of it, policemen wearing rubber gloves were going through the apartment garbage cans.
It struck me as a sophisticated concept for the Shakespeare police force.
Though I had no way of finding out for sure, my guess was that the idea had originated with Chief Claude Friedrich.
I stood in the doorway of Bobo Winthrop’s room and eyed it grimly. Bobo is a husky seventeen-year-old, full of hormones in overdrive, as I’d discovered last summer. He was at school today, but his room was evidence that Bobo had been home at least to sleep and change clothes often during the past week. There was furniture in the room, somewhere, under all the mess, and I remembered it was good furniture, just as Bobo, I had a gut feeling, was a good kid- under all the mess.
In other words, he didn’t leave his room like this to spite me after I’d thumped him in the guts for putting his hand on my bottom. It’s just that Bobo has been accustomed all his life to having someone clean up after him.
Days like this, I feel like I’m following an elephant in a parade, armed only with a puppy’s pooper-scooper.
But since I am well paid by Beanie Winthrop to clean her house, I shouldn’t grumble, I reminded myself sternly. Faced with Bobo’s room, it was hard to remember why I’d chosen housecleaning as my means of support.
I was a National Merit Scholar, I reminded myself, dragging the plastic wash basket behind me as I worked my way across the room, tossing in soiled clothes as I went. I was top of my high school class. I finished college. My grade point average was 3.9.
On Tuesdays, that is my mantra.
Bobo had also ordered pizza one evening while his parents were out, I discovered. Probably-I evaluated by the layers of clothing over the cardboard box-about three days ago.
“Yoohoo!” came a light sweet voice from the kitchen, accompanied by the slam of the door leading into the garage. “Lily! I’m just stopping by on my way to my tennis lesson!”
“Good afternoon,” I called back, knowing my voice was (at best) grim. I much preferred seeing none of the Winthrops-not Beanie; her husband, Howell Junior; her oldest son, Bobo; or his younger siblings, Amber-Jean and Howell Three.
Beanie’s maiden name had been, incredibly, Bobo:
Beatrice (“Beanie”) Bobo. The Bobos were sixth-generation Arkansas aristocrats, and I suspected Beanie had a slave-owning gene still in her DNA.
“Here I am, Lily!” Beanie cried with exaggerated joy, as though I had been on tenterhooks waiting for her appearance. And Beanie always makes appearances; she never just walks into a room. She popped into the doorway now like she was appearing in an English comedy: Attractive Lady Beatrice, on her way to play tennis, stops to speak to the parlor maid.
Beanie is undeniably attractive. She’s in her middle forties, but her body doesn’t know it. Though her face is not actually pretty, Beanie is a past mistress at maximizing what she has. Her long, thick hair is colored a discreet chestnut brown, her contacts make her brown eyes darker, and her tan is always touched up in the winter with a sun-bed session or two a week.
“Listen, Lily, wasn’t that awful about Pardon?” Beanie was in her chatty mode. “I went to high school with his little sister! Of course, even then Pardon wasn’t the easiest person to get along with, but still… to be killed like that! Isn’t it awful?”
“Yes.”
“Ah… well, Lily, if you find Bobo’s checkbook, please leave it on my desk. He hasn’t balanced it in six months,
