investigation.
I looked at my watch and tried not to sigh. It seemed likely that I would be late for Camille Emerson’s.
When she’d finished preparing herself mentally, Marta made a gesture like ones I’d seen on TV in old westerns, where the head of the cavalry troop is ready to move out. You know, he raises his gloved hand and motions forward, without looking back. That was exactly the gesture Marta used, and the deputy obeyed it silently. I expected her to toss him a Milk Bone.
I was grabbing at any mental straw to avoid thinking of the body in the car, but I knew that I’d have to face it sooner or later. No matter what Deedra’s life had been, or how I’d felt about her choices in that life, I discovered I was genuinely sorry that she was dead. And her mother! I winced when I thought of Lacey Dean Knopp’s reaction to her only child’s death. Lacey had always seemed oblivious of her daughter’s activities, and I’d never known if that was self-protective or Deedra-protective. Either way, I kind of admired it.
My calm time ended when a third vehicle pulled over to the shoulder, this one a battered Subaru. A young man, blond and blocky, leapt from the driver’s seat and looked around wildly. His eyes passed over me as if I were one of the trees. When the young man spotted the opening into the woods, he threw himself along the narrow shoulder like a novice skier hurls himself down a slope, apparently intending to dash down the road to the scene of Deedra’s demise.
He was in civilian clothes, and I didn’t know him. I was betting he had no business at the crime scene. But I wasn’t the law. I let him pass, though I’d stopped leaning against the sheriff’s car and uncrossed my arms.
At that moment Marta Schuster came back into sight and yelled, “No, Marlon!” The big deputy dogging her stepped around her neatly, grabbed the smaller man’s shoulders, and held him fast. I’d seen the smaller man around the apartments, I recalled, and I realized for the first time that this boy was Marlon Schuster, Marta’s brother. My stomach clenched at this bombshell of a complication.
“Marlon,” the sheriff said in a harsh voice. It would’ve stopped me. “Marlon, get ahold of yourself.”
“Is it true? Is it her?”
From only five feet away, I could hardly avoid hearing this conversation.
Marta took a deep breath. “Yes, it’s Deedra,” she said, quite gently, and motioned to the deputy, who let go of the boy’s arm.
To my amazement, the young man drew back that arm to swing at his sister. The deputy had turned to walk to his car, and Marta Schuster seemed too astounded to defend herself, so I covered the ground and seized his cocked right arm. The ungrateful fool swung around and went for me with his left. Well, I too had a free hand, and I struck him-
He made a sound like “oof” as the air left him, and then went down on his knees. I released him and stepped away. He wouldn’t be bothering anyone for a few minutes.
“Idiot,” the sheriff said, crouching down by him. The deputy was right by me, suddenly, his hand playing nervously around his gun. I wondered which of us he’d draw on. After a second his hand relaxed, and I did too.
“Where’d you learn that?” asked the deputy. I looked up at him. He had bitter-chocolate brown eyes.
“Karate class,” I said, throwing it away, not wanting to talk about it. Marshall Sedaka, my
“You’re that woman,” the deputy said.
All of a sudden, I felt real tired. “I’m Lily Bard,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. “And if you all are through with me, I need to be getting to my next job.”
“Just tell me again how you happened to find her,” Marta Schuster said, leaving her brother to fend for himself. She looked sideways at her deputy. He nodded. They seemed to be good at nonverbal communication. She addressed me again. “Then you can go, long as we know where to reach you.”
I gave her the Joe-Friday facts: Mrs. Rossiter’s phone number, my cell phone number, my home phone number, and where I’d be working this afternoon if I ever got to leave this stretch of road.
“And you knew the deceased how?” she asked again, as if that was a point she hadn’t quite gotten straight in her head.
“I cleaned her place. I live next to her apartment building,” I said.
“How long had you worked for Deedra?”
The tall deputy had gone down the path with a camera after making sure that Marlon was off his tear. The sheriff’s brother had recovered enough to haul himself up to the hood of his Subaru. He was sprawled over it, weeping, his head buried in his hands. His sister completely ignored him, though he was making a considerable amount of noise.
Two more deputies arrived in another squad car and emerged with rolls of crime-scene tape, and Marta Schuster interrupted me to give them directions.
“I worked for Deedra-though I’m sure her mother subsidized her-for over three years,” I said, when the sheriff turned her attention back to me. “I cleaned Deedra’s apartment once a week.”
“So, you were friendly with her?”
“No.” That didn’t require any thought.
“Yet you knew her for more than three years,” Marta Schuster observed, pretending to be surprised.
I shrugged. “She was most often gone to work while I was at her place.” Though sometimes she was still there; and sometimes the men would still be there, but the sheriff hadn’t asked me about the men. She would, though.
While the sheriff gave more directions to her deputies, I had a little time to think. The pictures! I closed my eyes to contain my dismay.
One of the least explicable things about Deedra was her fondness for nude pictures of herself. She’d kept a little pile of them in her lingerie drawer for years. Every time I’d put her clean clothes away, I’d felt an uncomfortable stab of disapproval. Of all the things Deedra did to parade her vulnerability, this was the thing I found most distasteful.
I thought of those pictures lying out on a desk in the sheriff’s office, being viewed by all and sundry. I felt a wave of regret, an almost overwhelming impulse to rush to Deedra’s apartment ahead of the law, remove the pictures, and burn them.
Marlon Schuster slammed his hand against the hood of his car, and his sister, who was watching my face rather than his, jumped. I carefully avoided her eyes. Marlon needed to take his display of grief to another, more discreet, location.
“So, you have a key to the apartment?” Marty Schuster asked.
“I do,” I said promptly. “And I’m going to give it to you now.” I abandoned any quixotic notion of shielding Deedra’s true nature from the men and women examining her death. I was sure almost everyone in town had heard that Deedra was free with herself. But would they look for her killer as hard, once they’d seen those pictures? Would they keep their mouths shut, so rumors didn’t reach Deedra’s mother?
I pressed my lips together firmly. There was nothing I could do, I told myself sternly. Deedra was on her own. I’d set the investigation of her death in motion, but beyond that, I couldn’t help her. The cost to myself would be too high.
So thinking, I worked her key off the ring and dropped it in the open palm of Sheriff Marta Schuster. A vague memory stirred, and I wondered if I knew of another key. Yes, I recalled, Deedra kept an emergency key in her stall in the apartment carport. As I opened my mouth to tell the sheriff about this key, she made a chopping gesture to cut off my comment. I shrugged. But I told myself that this was truly my only key, and that because I’d turned over this key, Deedra Dean was out of my life.
“I’ll need a list of the people you’ve seen there,” Sheriff Schuster said sharply. She was aching to return to the crime scene, her face turning often to the woods.
I’d already begun to go back to my car. I didn’t like being hushed with that chopping hand, it wasn’t like I chattered. And I didn’t like being ordered.
“I never saw anyone there,” I said, my back to the sheriff.
“You… in the years you cleaned her apartment, you never saw anyone else there?” Marta Schuster’s tone let me know she was well aware of Deedra’s reputation.
“Her stepfather was there one morning when Deedra was having car trouble.”
“And that’s all?” Marta Schuster asked, openly disbelieving.
“That’s all.” Marlon, of course, had been creeping out of there three or four days ago, but she knew about him
