Dark Tort

gate at about a quarter to five. Didn’t park in the garage. Ran up the steps of Charlie’s house and came out less than five minutes later. She was carrying a tube.”

“A tube like a tube of toothpaste?” Julian again.

“No, no, no,” corrected Meg. “A tube like the kind you send through the mail.”

Right, I thought, a tube like the kind you send through the mail. Or like the kind you use for a rolled-up painting.

Dusty was doing the inventory. I may not have learned much of what they did at H&J, but I certainly remembered the lawyers’ joke about the “race to the house.” That was why you had locks changed right after someone died. Dusty had told me she had received the new locks to Charlie’s house from Richard himself, who was Charlie’s executor. She’d also told me that no one was allowed to take anything out of Charlie’s house until the estate was settled, and that wasn’t going to happen until she had completed the inventory, which was extensive.

Would she have dared to take a painting? Why? If she had stolen a work of Charlie’s, how could she possibly have thought she would get away with it? I felt more confused than ever.

And what was this with the closed garage doors on her lunch hour?

“Wait,” I said, thinking of the “New O.” from Dusty’s journal. “Do you have any idea what was going on in Dusty’s life at the time? Like maybe she had a boyfriend or something?”

Meg’s face wrinkled in disgust. “She never discussed her social life with me, Goldy.”

“Okay.” Now I felt embarrassed, and covered it by taking another sip of tea. “Let’s go back to the tube. Did she say Charlie had given her something?” I pressed. “That he had left her something? A painting, maybe?”

“No,” Meg said. “And I have no idea what Dusty was doing over there on her lunch hour every day. Working on the inventory? Then why not stay longer? And working on what?” Meg paused. “I never found out any of those things because two days after Dusty came out with the tube, you found her in the law firm. Dead.”

CHAPTER 13

So: Two days before Dusty was killed, she had carried a tube—maybe the kind used to store paintings—out of Charlie Baker’s house. She’d been in love with a boyfriend nobody, not even her mother, seemed to know anything about. What else? Let’s see: When the weather had been blizzardlike, Dusty had parked her Honda in front of Charlie Baker’s house, and walked inside to do his legal work. Once Charlie had passed away, Dusty had received new keys to Charlie’s house, been assigned to inventory Charlie’s estate, and do other odd jobs such as pick up his mail every day. But by the time she’d been assigned to do all that, the weather had turned pleasant. Nevertheless, she’d driven her Civic into Charlie’s garage when she arrived…and closed the door behind her.

Goodness me, I thought grimly as Julian piloted the Rover back down to the main road that ran through Flicker Ridge, all this info was not helping to clear up anything. I sighed. Dusty Routt had been dead for over twenty-four hours, and all I’d picked up was information that seemed, at best, disconnected. Worse, I’d made no progress trying to figure out what had been going on in her life that had prompted someone to kill her.

I didn’t even want to contemplate the inevitable meeting with Sally Routt.

Once Julian was on Flicker Ridge Road, he headed the Rover toward the western edge of the development. Donald and Nora Ellis lived by Flicker Ridge’s border, on a dead end that overlooked hundreds of acres of pine forest, all part of Furman County Open Space. It was prime real estate that kids could have run and played in, but the Ellises had no children. If anything, they were a typical example of the housing reversal that had become part of the demography of Aspen Meadow, and perhaps the rest of the country. To wit: the fewer kids and the more money you had, the bigger house and yard you demanded. On our lower-middle-class street, the lots were tiny and the houses small. Yet after school every day, kids spilled out of the driveways and onto the sidewalks to kick soccer balls, throw baseballs, and toss Frisbees to their dogs. When a blizzard moved through and school was canceled, the kiddos would grab their big toboggans and slide merrily down our road, yelling “Yahoo!” all the way, until they made a sharp right turn into the last driveway before Main Street.

Then again, Nora and Donald Ellis weren’t entirely without family, as Bishop Sutherland, Nora’s father, had been living with them for almost ten months. What I had picked up from Nora was not an isn’t-this-fun-Dad’s-come-to-stay-with-us attitude. When I’d booked the party, Nora had tossed her blond hair and announced, “Yes, my father will be at Donald’s party, because he will still be living with us. That’s why I had to invite Marla, so we’d be an even number at the table. God! The sooner my father’s out of here—” She’d stopped. Then she’d laughed, as if it were all a joke. “Maybe he’ll hook up with Marla, get married, and have all kinds of money to spend on medical treatment for that damn arrhythmia! Not to mention unlimited funds for clothing, cars, trips, and anything his big old diseased heart desires.”

Well, I definitely didn’t want somebody with medical problems to hook up with my best friend, who’d already had a heart attack, thank you very much. On impulse, I put in a cell call to Wink Calhoun. Luckily, she was at home.

“Wink,” I asked casually after I’d identified myself, “do you know anything about Bishop Uriah Sutherland? I’m just wondering, because he’s my closest friend’s sort-of date for the party today, and I don’t know anything about him, apart from the fact that he’s been helping out at our parish for a while.”

Wink was uncharacteristically silent for a few minutes, and as Julian drove past the For Sale sign outside Richard and K.D. Chenault’s big stucco house, I thought we’d been disconnected. “Wink? You there?”

“Yeah,” she said tentatively. “I know a little bit about him. You mean Donald’s father-in-law, right?”

“That’s right,” I said, immediately on guard myself. She’d been forthcoming before. Why was she hesitant now? “Something wrong?”

“No. Well, not exactly. Bishop Uriah just gives me the creeps when he comes sprinting over to the office from their house, supposedly to say hi to Donald. And he’s always all covered with sweat, like he’s been in a race. Sometimes I’m afraid he’s going to collapse on our floor, and I’m going to have to do CPR.”

“You’re saying he runs over to H&J?” I’d seen Uriah running, too, along the Upper Cottonwood before the snow had moved in. But I’d learned in Med Wives 101 that folks with arrhythmia were supposed to walk. Walk slowly. Maybe it had been too many years since I’d been a med wife to know the latest thinking in the cardio department.

“Yeah,” Wink went on. “I thought one time that he was trying to get there before anyone else arrived. Once? I caught him going through our trash in back of the law firm. He said he’d lost something.”

“How could Uriah Sutherland have lost something in the firm’s garbage?”

“I don’t know. Plus, when he comes in? Even though he says he’s there to see Donald, I just always get the feeling that that’s not what he’s there for. I mean, it just feels weird. He likes to poke around, ask questions. He’s nice and all, but just…” She left the sentence unfinished.

“What kind of questions does he ask when he pokes around? Does he have legal problems?”

“If he did have legal problems, Goldy, he sure wasn’t going to tell me, the lowly receptionist. But the questions he has asked me are all stupid stuff, like, ‘How long does it take to get a will through probate, anyway?’ That kind of thing. Dusty and I would always tell him just to ask his son-in-law. We didn’t know whether he ever did. So Dusty and I used to wonder if Donald charged him.” She laughed.

“But, Wink,” I protested as Julian gave me a questioning look, “if the bishop has legal problems in addition to his medical issues, why doesn’t he pay for advice someplace else? He must be able to afford it. I mean, he doesn’t have rent to worry about, and he should be eligible for payments from the church’s pension fund.”

Wink sighed hugely, then seemed to think for a moment. “I don’t think the bishop necessarily has a lot of money. At our staff Christmas party last year, Donald Ellis got a little drunk and complained about his father-in-law. He said Bishop Sutherland had champagne tastes, but Kool-Aid income. Want to hear the dirty details?”

“I specialize in dirty details,” I replied, then put my hand over the receiver and asked Julian to pull over. He groaned, but acquiesced.

According to Wink, who’d gotten her info from the half-inebriated Donald, Bishop Uriah Sutherland had not endeared himself to his daughter any more than he had to his ex-wife, Nora’s mother, Renata. According to Wink via Donald, Renata Sutherland, a transplanted-to-Denver Connecticut socialite, had been smart—or wily, or cruel, depending on your point of view—enough to construct an elaborate prenuptial agreement before tying the knot with