But then I noticed that the clay-red mud was fresh and wet, and that it clung to the car’s grille as well as the tires. I reached out to touch the hood.
It was warm.
Well, well. I clenched my teeth. Catering was safer than this, and sometimes you couldn’t be sure about catering. I needed to be quiet, I knew that. In fact, I needed to skedaddle.
But my feet stayed cemented to the cold garage floor. I had come here. I was going to go into Laura’s house, and in two days I was going to go through Laura’s locker. Kathleen had left me at the top of the driveway; if there was someone in the house, that someone probably would be unaware of my arrival. I was going in. And if I saw somebody I would scream bloody murder and apologize later. I could even arm myself, the way they did on TV Unfortunately there was no .22 slung across my chest, and I was at least fifteen steps from the kitchen and the nearest meat cleaver.
I looked around the garage. There was a large workbench. Maybe the woman who claimed to be a leader had bought herself a nice heavy hammer or wrench or even a drill. My feet made gritty echoes as I tiptoed over.
The bench was large and long and had two shelves above it and one below. Paint thinner, caulking, and a tool box rested on the first shelf. The tool box yielded a small wrench. I was about to enter the house with it when I saw the edge of something else on the top shelf. I reached up.
It was a BB gun. I recognized this type of firearm from the time I had volunteered as a counselor at Arch’s Cub Scout day camp. Many local people used them to shoot bothersome blue jays or rabid squirrels. I ducked down to check the shelf underneath, but there was only a large cardboard box marked BB’s.
I was not going to load the gun. For one thing I couldn’t exactly remember how to do it. It looked menacing enough, a lot like a rifle really, and I would just have to do a good impersonation of Annie Oakley if the need arose.
I crept through the unlocked door to the kitchen but stopped short before heading through to the living room. In that room, someone was rustling papers.
My body went numb. The unloaded BB gun felt cold and inadequate. I backed up noiselessly, grabbed a long knife off a wall mount above the counter, and turned back toward the garage.
The blue Volvo was still there. I locked its doors, jammed the knife into the edge of the window and pushed down with all one hundred twenty pounds.
The alarm split the air. I jerked the knife out and ran back around to the front of the house.
The door between the kitchen and the garage banged open. After a moment the alarm stopped. Whoever was down there had the keys to the car, and wanted the alarm off so as not to attract attention.
From the top of the driveway came an unexpected female voice, followed by a robe and a head of hair neatly rolled in cylinders.
“Hoohoo! Kathleen, is that you, dear?”
The Volvo engine started and revved. From where I was crouched behind a thicket of chokecherry bushes I could not see who was driving. Worse, the driver appeared to be wearing a ski mask.
“Hey!” yelled the robed woman to the car.
The driver ignored her and gunned the Volvo back up the driveway. I wanted to stand to get a better look, but I didn’t want the driver to see that I was the one who had set off the alarm.
“Kathleen!” the woman in the driveway was calling again, now that the Volvo had gone. “Are you in there?”
“Excuse me,” I said in a loud voice over the chokecherry bushes. “Hello!”
When I had pushed my way through the underbrush and up to her, I learned the caller was Laura’s neighbor, Betsy Goldsmith. She had come out because of the noise, but did not know who could be driving Laura’s car, or why. Her husband was a pilot, she added, and since they had no children they traveled frequently and didn’t really know too much about what was going on in the neighborhood. She did know, however, that her neighbor had died, although she had missed the funeral.
“Do you know who was in that car?” she asked me. “It looked like Laura’s. Why would someone be over here with it now?”
“I really don’t know,” I said, then added, “and I sure do wish I did.”
“Well, it certainly is strange—” she said, then gave me a quizzical look.
“I’m here to see the house,” I told her, before introducing myself.
“The caterer!” she said. An embarrassed smile flooded her face, as if she had met a famous person at the Laundromat. “Well, I certainly hope you buy that house. Most people would be spooked, you know. Don’t want to live in a house where there’s been a death.”
“Did you know Laura?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said vaguely, “we waved to each other. In winter my husband would help her shovel out, sometimes give her a lift into town when that car of hers wasn’t working, which was a lot.” She paused. “Maybe that’s who it was, her new mechanic. I knew she had someone new working on the car, maybe that person was looking for her.”
By looking through her papers?
“Laura and I gave each other cookies at Christmas,” Betsy added bleakly.
“She was my son’s teacher,” I put in.
“Uh-huh, well,” she said, starting back up to her house, “nice meeting you.” She turned back almost as an afterthought. “You don’t know who the new mechanic was, do you?”
“No, sure don’t. Say,” I began as if it had just occurred to me, “you didn’t see Laura right before she died, did you? I’m, just, wondering how she was.”
“We were gone that Monday the teacher came over and found her,” she said plaintively. “That last time I saw her was—” she thought for a moment “—the Saturday before.”
“But that—” I stopped. If Betsy did not know that Saturday was when the deputy coroner had said Laura was supposed to have died, I was not going to remind her and chance getting her spooked.
“I remember,” Betsy went on, “because I was out planting bulbs that day, trying to get them in before the cold weather. Laura walked out of her garage.” She stopped to point. “She waved to me as she came up the driveway. ‘Car broken again?’ I called down to her, and she said, ‘You bet.’ And that was the last time I saw her.”
“Did you know where she was going?”
“No,” said Betsy. “Errands, probably, since she taught during the week. Then later I heard a car and I figured she’d walked to the new repair place and picked it up. But I guess not if someone’s trying to return it now.”
I shook my head.
Betsy said, “Oh, well. When I was out planting the bulbs was the last time I saw her. I don’t know who her friends were,” she added and turned away again.
I tried to think of how to put the next question before she was out of earshot.
“Kind of odd,” I said to her back. “You know. You’d think that the cops would have been interested in you hearing a car on Saturday, huh?”
Betsy turned her rollered head and robed body so she could give me a long look. “How come you’re so curious? You’re more interested than the cops were. Anyway,” she said with a final sigh, “I don’t think I told them about hearing her come back later in her car. It doesn’t matter now, does it? You don’t kill yourself because you have a car that’s always quitting.” And off she trudged to her house, a two-story affair with several decks and a wide expanse of glass.
I walked quickly into Laura’s house, through the kitchen and into the living room. There was an opened box sitting on the blue rug. Its flaps stuck out at angles, as if someone had tried to close it in haste.
The box contained bundles of letters and postcards to Laura. I tried to read through at least one in each bundle, skimming because I knew Kathleen would be back soon. Some were from vacationing teachers whose names I recognized. Some were from Illinois, from people whose names were unfamiliar. I pulled out a pad from my purse and wrote down the names, Singleton and Carey and Ludmiller and Druckman. There was even a bundle from the aunt who had paid the funeral expenses. The first letter was full of news of nephews traveling and a house
