gone.”
“I’ve already thought of that.”
“In a will, it’s usually the next of kin who inherit.”
“You mean like my ex-husband?”
“Or his mother.”
I said, “Vonette would never have the guts to do the old guy in. Besides. I saw her at that reception. She was as drunk as a skunk.”
“She had a flask.”
“Aren’t you the observant one.”
“Korman was cheating on her.”
I said, “Why, you’re just a fount of information. With whom?”
“I shouldn’t be the one to say.”
“Do it anyway.”
He stopped talking and looked out the window, then he seemed to have an idea.
“Goldy. Didn’t you say you were out of honey?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Why don’t you come out to my place in the Wildlife Preserve and get some. Next week.” He stopped to think. “On Wednesday.”
“Why Wednesday?”
“You come on Wednesday. If the weather’s still warm, you’ll get answers to some of your questions.”
CHAPTER 17
With Pomeroy gone the room was temporarily quiet. Privacy in a hospital, like silence in a library, is what one expects but only rarely gets. I looked out the window, now filled with the gray light of dusk. Had Laura been involved with Pomeroy? What difference would that make, anyway? I shook my head, which felt as if it was filled with the somber light of painkiller. It was hard to make sense of the whole thing.
The note!
When I leaped out of bed my body buckled. Soreness climbed my legs. My arms felt and looked as if they’d been stretched on a rack. The pain pill had apparently only entered my head. I hobbled across the room, reached into my bag, and found the letter.
It was crumpled, leading to the conclusion that Arch had read it before stuffing it in his desk. The beige stationery crackled. Inside were perfect, looping, black letters, the writing of a teacher. It read:
Dear Arch,
Thanks for your latest idea, dungeon master! I do like the idea of being a troll. Does that mean I can cast spells? I can’t wait!
Unfortunately, we won’t be able to play this Saturday as we’d planned. I have something very important I have to do. In a way it’s like the thing you talked about in your last letter. Remember how you said most of the kids in sixth grade didn’t seem to care about Halloween anymore, how they called that and your role-playing and trivia games kids’ stuff? I remember how bad that made you feel. And now you don’t know what to do? I have something like that in my life, too. And Saturday I have to do something about it.
How about next weekend for our game? That’ll give me a whole week to get ready! Let me know on Monday, okay?
Hugs,
Ms. Smiley
But he had not let her know on Monday. Nor had he let me know that he’d had plans with Laura Smiley for Saturday, the day the deputy coroner had indicated she had died.
October the third was beginning to look quite complex.
There was a gnawing in my stomach not brought on by the van accident. I felt uncomfortable with, jealous and suspicious of, the relationship between Arch and Laura Smiley. She had been too close to him. And perhaps to the other student that Schulz had mentioned, the deceased Hollenbeck girl. These relationships smacked of impropriety, somehow. The note brought Arch into a world of adult problems, even if the reference was vague. This in turn might account for his inability to talk about the letter or to deal with Laura’s death in an appropriate way.
I looked at the piece of paper in my hand. On Saturday, October 3, something had gone wrong after Laura had walked into town to do something, and then returned by car. But what? This letter raised more questions than it answered.
Arch. I could imagine him cycling over to her house and ringing the bell. Hearing no answer, he would have come back home. But why had he mentioned none of this to me or to Investigator Schulz? What was he afraid of?
Maybe Laura Smiley hadn’t been all there in the upstairs department, after all. Maybe this desire to help students she liked had flipped her out. The problem was, whatever this drama was we were involved in, it wasn’t over.
“My little Goldy,” Vonette said after she walked in the next morning and gave me a smooch on the cheek. She smelled of Estee instead of gin: a good sign.
I said, “Thanks for coming, Vonette. Another meal of hospital food and I would have taken over the kitchen by force. Patty Sue know you’re here?”
“Oh yes,” Vonette replied as she checked her creamy orange lipstick and curly same-hue-of-orange hair in my bathroom mirror. “Got that arm set and everything. She’s going to be great. Six weeks she’ll be out of that thing, good as new, able to help you with the catering.”
“Cleaning, Vonette,” I corrected, “until we or the police figure out what happened to Fritz.”
Vonette sauntered out of the bathroom. “Let’s not get into that again. Gives me a headache just thinking about it.”
“Tell me,” I said while gingerly pulling my slip over my head, “since I’m still mulling that funeral over in my mind. Did you get to know Laura Smiley well when she was your vacation nanny?”
Vonette sat down in the room’s only chair, brought out a pack of Kools, and inserted one in the newly lipsticked mouth. So much for the hospital’s
“Yes and no,” she said. She paused to light and inhale. “Anyway, I can loan you a car. That old station wagon of ours. Used to use it to pull the boat down to Lake Powell. Before the engine gave out. Boat engine, that is. I don’t know about the wagon, probably been a year or more since it’s been started, might need a jump.”
“Do you know if Laura Smiley had any enemies?”
She laughed quietly and took a deep drag. “More enemy talk.”
“Do you know someone who just plain didn’t like her?”
She said, “Well, there again, yes and no.” She raised one thin penciled eyebrow at me. “I did know her for a long time, though. I mean not that we were close. Nothing like that. You know.”
Dressed by then, I sat down on the bed. “No,” I said, “I don’t.”
“Well,” said Vonette. “Well, well.” She stood up. The cigarette drooped from her mouth. “I’ll tell you all about it sometime.”
“According to Fritz,” I said, “John Richard would inherit the practice if he died. Doesn’t that bother you?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You sure?”
“No.”
“Well, I don’t really know either, I guess. I thought if something happened to old Fritz, like he had a heart attack while he was doing an abortion, God punishing him, y’know…” She raised her eyebrows at me.
“Vonette!”
“Well? That’s still a hot issue in the church, after all.”
“It’s too bad they worry about that more than they do adultery,” I said evenly.
“Now, now,” she said. “Don’t start in on John Richard. Let’s not get into that again, please. I’m beginning to feel a headache coming on. Anyway.” She crushed the cigarette underneath one of her open-toed sandals. So much
