don’t believe most of all.” He eyed me. “I think you know what that is.”
I nodded.
“Get your things,” I ordered Arch, who had materialized beside me.
Looking around the room I could see Marla and Trixie in a tete-a-tete. Pomeroy had picked up his mask from beside the table and was heading over toward his net by the jagged mirror. I walked behind him to catch up; there wasn’t any way anyone in that room could have missed the interchange between Schulz and me. But maybe Pom would be willing to ignore it.
Trixie appeared beside us. She said, “This really pisses me off. I mean, again? Honest to God, doctors.”
Marla bounced over.
“Jesus,” she said, “Vonette’s dead. Have you told Arch?”
“Not yet,” I said. “And don’t you tell him either. We’ve got to find out what’s going on with Fritz first. But there’s something else I need you to do. Call your lawyer. Get him started on extracting money from Korman and Korman for Patty Sue’s maternity care. She’s going to need it.”
Marla’s face lit up like all of Vegas. “You mean I get to take John Richard to court again? For money? Ha! I’m in heaven.”
“Arch,” I called, “we’re going with Pom. Lots has happened.”
Arch said, “That sure was a short party.”
I touched Pomeroy’s arm.
“Can you give Arch and me a ride home?” I whispered. “I want to go out the back and avoid all this mess.”
He nodded.
Then when Schulz was leaning over the recumbent Fritz, I hustled Arch out behind Pomeroy.
I did want a ride. But I had absolutely no intention of going home.
CHAPTER 27
Outside, a sudden breeze swept over us. The moon was still climbing.
Pomeroy said, “Why do you need a ride from me? Why don’t you just climb back on the broomstick you rode over here?”
“Because,” I said impatiently, “I don’t feel so good going anywhere in the car loaned to me by my deceased ex-mother-in-law, whose husband I have just been accused by my ex-husband of attempting to poison. Again.”
It was lame, but it would get me started on what it was I wanted to do with Pomeroy.
He smiled and said, “Let’s roll.”
Arch pronounced Pom’s four-wheel-drive vehicle cool when we climbed in. The tires spewed gravel as we wheeled out of the parking lot, and the wind picked up the dust and blew it into a whirlwind.
I put my arm around Arch and hugged him close to me. The sad news could wait.
After a few moments Pom said, “Tell me where you live, Goldy.”
I took a deep breath. “Well actually, Pomeroy, I don’t want to go home just yet.”
He continued to drive, very cool, no emotion. “What did you have in mind? Or should I say, where?”
I said, “I want to go to Laura’s old house. I’ve got an idea of where to look for something. Drive me to her house and I’ll show you.”
Laura Smiley’s garage was dank and cold and smelled faintly of oil. Arch said he wanted to stay in the car and I didn’t blame him. The wind groaned through the garage window jamb and swished the dry leaves outside. I flipped the switch for the single garage light bulb; it threw a dim light. Groping through the odds and ends on the work-table, I found the box I was looking for and pulled it out to show Pom.
I said, “The woman loved puns. She left all the clues for us. She put flour in a box with a flower, sugar behind a picture of Sugar Ray Leonard. She was obsessed with punishing Korman and she knew where to keep that ammunition.”
I took a breath, then went on.
“She wrote letters to students she loved: And they wrote back. I’ll bet she kept every letter. That was the evidence she had, what she never got to use.”
I looked at Pom in the garage’s gray light. I said, “I’ll bet you knew she didn’t drink or take drugs. Someone slipped her a little Valium, enough to calm a person used to drugs, but enough to put a non-drug user, a total abstainer, to sleep. Then that person slashed her wrists with a scalpel blade and put a razor in her hand, except she didn’t shave because she was a radical feminist. She didn’t kill herself, she was murdered for what was in this box. You figure it out.”
“I can’t.”
I read the label on the box. “BB’s. In Laura’s handwriting. I doubt she was out shooting western long-eared squirrels, Pom. I’ll bet she never used her BB gun.”
“You’re way ahead of me.”
Arch creaked open the passenger side door of Pom’s car. He said, “Mom. I’m tired. Why are we here, anyway?”
“Just a few more minutes,” I told him. “Take it easy.”
With hands quivering, I opened the box. Inside was what I expected to find, letters in a large scrawling hand bound with ribbons. I riffled through them. The return addressee was the same on each one: Hollenbeck.
I said, “You see, she even used puns to hide things. Bebe’s stuff is in the BB box.”
Pom looked into the box and shook his head.
I turned to him. “You were looking for it, too, weren’t you?”
He said, “Yes, but…”
“I’m not going to worry about that now,” I said. “Listen. She made an appointment to see Fritz the day she died. Saturday. The day I think he killed her. Knowing about Patty Sue, about him seducing a young girl again, made her decide to confront him, made her threaten to bring out the letters after all these years. She could have ruined his practice, a fact he knew all too well. He escorted her out the back door, brought her over here in his old station wagon, maybe on the pretext of talking things through. I’ll bet he brought her in that car because he didn’t want anyone to recognize his Jeep with its customized plates. Then they had tea or something, in went the Valium, and out came the scalpel that he used and the ladies’ razor that she didn’t use. He left the surgical pack in the wagon, never thinking anybody would drive it. But the nurse screwed up and sent Laura a bill anyway, even though she wasn’t a patient. If she was dead, nobody would think to look here for evidence. I mean, if it looked as if she killed herself.”
I touched the letters, then glanced up at Pom in the darkness.
“I just need one more thing,” I said. “Please take me to Fritz’s office.”
He drove, fast but silent. At the office of Korman and Korman I heaved a rock to break the front window, grateful for the things I had learned from Trixie: I climbed in and went to the file I was looking for. I read it and came back to the car.
“What the hell are you doing?” asked Pom.
“Just take me out to your place,” I begged him, “and we can go through these letters tonight and call Tom Schulz, maybe get him to arrest Fritz instead of me. Arch can stretch out on your bed. I just can’t go home now, wanted for another poisoning and with a crazed John Richard on the loose.”
He sighed. “First my car, now my house. Let me know when you want the bees.”
The four-wheel drive jolted and bounced over the muddy road to the Preserve. In my lap I held the box of correspondence between two women, both now dead. The moon came out from behind a cloud and shone through the pines, which were thickening as we roared deeper into the forest. Maybe coming here hadn’t been such a great idea. Impenetrable woods populated with deer and elk and other wildlife could not attract trick or treaters. I missed the little neighborhood mites with their bags and plastic pumpkins. They brought Halloween down to kid-size level. Out here, the Eve of All Hallows, with its promise of unleashed spirits, loomed as large as the stands of blue spruce that swung in the evening breeze. Branches of evergreen lining the road fingered Pom’s windshield. I reached for Arch’s hand.
“You okay?”
