Authors: Jaqueline Girdner
“Wow, this is the life,” Ace moaned appreciatively from where he sat on my right. I opened my eyes as I turned to gaze at him through the steam. Sweat was trickling down his homely face. But his body wasn’t homely, I’d noticed. It was trim and muscular, even more muscular than Wayne’s. All that weight-lifting, I supposed. “I’ll bet Vessie sure enjoyed this hot tub,” he added.
I shrugged, embarrassed. Vesta had never used the hot tub in the months that she’d lived here, not because she was modest or wouldn’t have enjoyed it, I suspected, but because it was mine and she had hated anything that was mine.
“Vesta wasn’t always so hard,” said Dru quietly, as if in answer to my thought. Her mascara was running a little in the steam, but her eyes still sparkled. “She was a good sister to me when I was little.” Dru straightened up abruptly, causing a small tidal wave to move across the tub and splash next to me. “Remember the fairy costume she made for me the year Ma was sick?” she asked Trent.
“Yes,” Trent answered with a slow nod. “I do remember.” Then he sighed. As I watched him, I realized that he looked pretty damn good in swimming trunks himself, not as muscular as Ace, but more muscular than I would have thought from seeing him fully clothed. And just as trim. If Wayne’s body looked as good as either of his uncles’ when he reached their ages, I was going to be one happy woman.
“Hey, how about the puppet theatre Vesta made for us that summer?” Ace remembered aloud. He laughed and the water reacted, splashing over the side. “Now that was really grand!”
“Old cardboard boxes and tape and paint,” Trent said dismissively. But then a smile gentled his face. “Vesta was an artist, all right. She made it all shine.”
“And the puppets,” Dru put in. “All different animals from socks. I had a gray rabbit—”
“I had a lion,” said Ace.
“What was yours?” Dru asked Trent. “I remember Nola had a cat and Camille’s was a dog, but I can’t remember yours.”
“A horse,” he answered briefly.
“That’s right,” Dru trilled. She leaned back against the tub’s edge with a smile.
I leaned back too and tried to imagine Vesta making cute little puppets out of socks. I wiped the perspiration from my face with a wet hand. No, I decided, I just couldn’t imagine it.
“What happened to Aunt Vesta?” Gail asked from my left. Her tone was softer now, almost dreamy. I turned and saw that her face had softened, too. Her eyes looked large and vulnerable without her glasses. Maybe that was one reason she usually wore them. “Why do you think Aunt Vesta changed?” she pressed.
Trent frowned across the tub at her. Dru looked at him for a moment and then at Ace. Ace shrugged massively. The water rippled and splashed with his movement.
“Well, honey,” Dru said, her voice deeper now than usual, “it was real hard on your Aunt Vesta when Pa… well, when he threw her out of the house.”
“But why did he throw her out?” Gail asked softly.
“She was pregnant, honey,” Dru answered. “And she wasn’t married. That meant a lot more back then.”
“Oh,” said Gail, nodding her head. She didn’t say anything else.
In the silence that followed, I could hear someone from the house laughing. Was that Lori? And the sound of an unseen airplane overhead.
“Hey, remember,” Ace said, filling the silence. “Remember when…”
And then the three siblings were talking again, recalling growing up in Hayward. They’d all had part-time jobs when they were in high school. And they’d worked hard. Ace made everyone laugh telling us how he’d always managed to drop one watermelon from each shipment when he’d worked at a grocery store. That way, the employees had been forced to eat it, since they couldn’t very well sell it cracked open.
“And that was the best watermelon I ever tasted,” he finished up.
“What were my grandparents like?” Gail asked.
The tub went silent again. Gail sure knew how to kill a conversation.
“Well, honey,” Dru answered finally, “they were hardworking people, religious. Your grandfather worked at the local cannery. Your grandmother was a housewife.”
Nobody bothered to restart the conversation after that. We just sat in the tub, soaking and sweating. And thinking our own private thoughts.
I closed my eyes and sank down even deeper into the hot water, listening to the sounds of pinballs from the house and the sounds of dogs and kids and cars from the surrounding neighborhood. This is so peaceful, I thought, I could almost forget about Harmony.
But as soon as I thought it, I found I couldn’t forget Harmony. It was like trying not to think of a white elephant. My mind kept showing me pictures of Harmony both as she had been alive and as she had been that morning, battered and bloody on the floor. A slide show by Stephen King.
I popped my eyes open. Dru was gazing at me, her head tilted to one side, and Trent was frowning down at the tub water as if it had offended him. I tipped my head back to look out over their heads, focusing on my neighbor’s shingled rooftop for a moment and then on Mount Tamalpais in the distance. Still, I shivered, cold even in the hot water of the tub. And then I began to think about Vesta—
“Are you okay?” Gail asked from my left, perceptive as ever, even without her glasses.
“Just a chill,” I answered quickly, then realized how stupid that sounded from someone sitting in a hot tub.
“Maybe we should go in now,” said Dru.
“All right,” I agreed, suddenly tired of both the hot tub and its occupants.
I was even more chilled when we all stood up, wet in the cool October air. I shepherded everyone back into the house quickly and pulled out towels to rub away our goose bumps. Then we took turns changing back into our clothes.
Eric was still playing Hayburners when I made it back to the living room, the last person to have dressed.
“Just one more game, Grampy,” he was begging Ace. I wasn’t surprised. I’d heard the same plea from pinball addicts of all ages.
“Hooboy, you’ve been here playing for long enough already,” grumbled Ace, but he gave in. “One more game,” he said. “Just one.”
But Eric managed to sneak in at least three more games under Ace’s not so watchful eyes. And then, at last, the Skeritts filed out the door, saying their goodbyes.
Lori gave me a departing hug as well, and whispered, “Don’t forget, you’ve got a free massage coming.”
“I won’t,” I assured her uneasily.
And then they were all gone, except for Ace, who stood in the doorway staring back at Wayne.
“Wayne,” he said softly. “I…”
“What?” asked Wayne, his voice deep and brusque.
Ace stared for a moment longer, then shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. Then he put on his goofy clown grin again. “Hey, you’ve got a great house here!” he boomed. “Not to mention a gorgeous woman. I’m happy for you, kid.”
And then he turned and left, clattering noisily across the front deck and down the stairs.
Wayne and I followed Ace out as far as the deck and watched as his Volkswagen van and Trent’s Volvo station wagon pulled out of the driveway, popping gravel.
Wayne turned to me, once they were gone from sight, his face stiff and cold. “Well?” he asked.
“Well, what?” I shot back in annoyance. “Are you asking me if anyone confessed in the hot tub?”
He didn’t answer me, but I saw the flash of hurt that widened his eyes for an instant.
“Oh, I’m sorry, sweetie,” I told him, feeling instantly guilty. “I guess I’m just sick of Skeritts. And I don’t think I know anything more this afternoon than I did this morning.”
“I do,” he said quietly.
“You do?” I asked in surprise.
“Lori wants to marry her acupuncturist, but her father would stop sending her monthly checks if she got married,” he began, holding up one finger. “Gail’s boyfriend just left her,” he continued, raising another finger. “He was a law student. He just passed the bar
and
moved in with his bar review instructor. Uncle Trent wants to retire and Aunt Ingrid wants to go back to work as a teacher, but he doesn’t want her to. Eric’s mother abandoned him when he was four. Now Uncle Ace and Eric’s father, Earl, take care of the boy. And Bill Norton is an alcoholic,” he finished up, raising his thumb.
“Now, that I
had
guessed,” I replied dryly and was rewarded with a hint of a smile on Wayne’s stony face.
“Like to sit down?” he asked.
When I nodded, he pulled up a couple of sagging porch chairs for us and faced them out toward the garden.
So we sat and talked about the Skeritts. I told him all I could remember of the hot-tub conversations. We threw around some character analysis for a while and concluded nothing. But at least we were sitting together and holding hands as we concluded nothing. Then we just sat in silence for a while, looking out at the garden. The summer impatiens were still blooming around the apple tree, and the electric-blue lobelia. Pretty soon I’d be putting in winter primroses—
“Been thinking about the funeral,” Wayne said.
I turned to him, gardening plans abandoned. His face was grave, his brows low enough to cover all but the bottoms of his eyes.
“Uncle Ace is right. Mom wasn’t religious,” he murmured, his voice almost inaudible. “Ceremony shouldn’t be religious either.”
I nodded my understanding.
“Gotta call her friends,” he went on. “Not sure who they are, though.”
Did Vesta even
have
friends? The question was too sad to ask out loud. Harmony was the only friend that I knew of. And Clara had been her nurse. But beyond them—
“Paul Paulson,” Wayne said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Mom’s nosy next-door neighbor,” he clarified. “The one who tried to sell us real estate—”
“Oh yeah,” I said, remembering the obnoxious man with the chubby tan face and booming voice. “I have his business card somewhere. He’ll know who Vesta knew at the condo.” I stood up, glad of a task to do. “I’ll call him.”
I went back indoors to do just that, with Wayne following behind me. But when I got to the phone, I noticed that the light was blinking on the answering machine. Someone had called while we were out on the deck talking.
I rewound the tape and pushed the playback button.
There was a pause and then a whispered message.
“Stop asking questions,” it said. “Don’t make me kill you too.”
- Seventeen -
I stared down at the answering machine, stunned for a moment. Then my heart began to pound.
Don’t make me kill you too.
“This is good,” growled Wayne from behind me. “I’ve spooked Mom’s murderer. Now I know for sure.”
“Just what do you know for sure?” I demanded, whirling around to face him. My mouth felt too dry to speak properly. I swallowed hard before going on. “That the killer wants to kill
me
now? Or
you
? Or both of us?”
Wayne’s face paled as I spoke. “Not you!” he cried, his eyebrows rising to reveal brown irises encircled by the white of panic. “I never thought the murderer was talking to you. Thought it was me.” He reached out for my hand and grasped it hard. “Kate, you have to be careful. Don’t go anywhere alone. Stay here—no, no, not here.” He shook his head frantically. “I know, go on a trip while I settle this thing—”
“Are you kidding!” I snapped. “You want me to leave you alone to face him? How do you think I would feel if you were killed? Better than you would if I was killed?”
“But—”
“We’re together on this, Wayne,” I told him, keeping my voice as deep and steady as I could. He tried to pull his hand back, but now I was the one grasping tightly. “I won’t go anywhere without you. And you won’t go anywhere without me. Not till—”
“But it was
my
mother—”
“I don’t care whose mother it was!” I shouted. And then abruptly, as if I had just awakened from a dream, I thought, Is that me shouting?
Wayne’s face seemed to sober too. His brows settled back down and he pressed his lips into a tight line.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “What’s next?”
I set the answering machine to play back the message. “Stop asking questions,” we heard again. And, “Don’t make me kill you too.” Damn. The caller’s whispers was not only low, but muffled, as if something had been placed over the mouthpiece. And there were long gaps between each uninflected word. Whoever it was, he or she had been very careful.
“Do you recognize the voice?” I asked Wayne, not really hoping for a positive identification. The voice could belong to one of the Skeritts. But it could also belong to Donald Duck. Or Barbara Walters. Or Bullwinkle the Moose, for that matter. Personally, I couldn’t have recognized
any
of their voices, this well-disguised.
Nor could Wayne. He just shook his head and muttered, “Call the police?”
“I doubt if they’ll know who it is either,” I answered unhappily. “But I suppose we’d better call them, just in case.”
The officer at the La Risa Police Department didn’t seem very interested in our threatening call at first. But then I explained that the call might be related to the murders of Vesta Caruso and Harmony Fitch. After a flurry of telephone transfers, Detective Amador came on the line. I told my story again and she promised me that someone would be out for the tape within the next half hour. Then she paused. I had a feeling Detective Sergeant Upton was telling her to tell us something.