A Bad Day for Mercy (23 page)

Potter’s Auto would have the Jeep ready by Friday. That was the easy one.

Stella took a deep breath and dialed Goat.

“I don’t know what kind of crazy I musta been to agree to this,” he growled by way of a greeting.

“Well, hello to you, too, Sheriff,” Stella said, trying to keep the Goat-wobble—a strange vocal effect that occurred only when she was talking to him, a circumstance that seemed to rob the air of oxygen—out of her voice. “It’s my birthday.”

There was a pause, and Stella crossed her fingers tightly, then hastily uncrossed them when her loosened grip on the steering wheel caused the little car to drift toward the median.

“Huh.” Into that one syllable were layered so many emotions and hesitations and tempered enthusiasms that Stella couldn’t gauge where she currently stood in Goat’s esteem.

“I’m…” For a moment she thought of lying, of choosing a number on the junior end of fifty, but that wasn’t her style. “Fifty-one.”

“That’s a nice number,” Goat said brusquely, and suddenly it was. “Maybe that oughtta be celebrated, in some way, by us. When you get back. Like we were saying the other day.”

“I guess that would be okay.” Stella ground her nails hard into her leg, to keep her cheerful from showing—she had a feeling it might be evident even across the phone lines.

“Speaking of which.” So much for the sweet. Goat’s voice went all business, the way it did every time Stella managed to bring trouble over to the sheriff’s office. “Dale Savage came by this morning looking to get a permit for the shop.”

“’Bout time.” Tornadoes had swept through Prosper the year before, tearing off the five-foot-tall paint can that had been perched on top of Savage Paint & Wallpaper ever since Stella had been a little girl, reducing it to a pile of crushed fiberglass and plaster, and also gouging the siding and wrecking much of the trim. Stella wouldn’t go so far as to call it an eyesore, but she was happy that Dale was getting ready to spruce up the place.

“He’d got most of the t’s crossed and i’s dotted—Irene seen to that—but there were one or two points that were a little sticky. What with the building codes and all.”

“Oh—that’s too bad.” That was exactly what Stella hated about the law, right there—a focus on the picky details getting in the way of the greater good.

“But we found our way around it,” Goat continued, as though Stella hadn’t said anything. “Seein’ as I sent Luke over there to help ’im out for a few days. He’s gonna get to the shop when Dale does, at eight, and work on through until he goes home at six. Fact, he’s got himself invited to dinner at the Savages’ long as he minds his p’s and q’s, and then Ernice can bring him back when she comes into town at nine to get little Bud from choir practice.”

“Is that right?” Stella had to give him credit—Goat had had Luke all of a few hours and already managed to get him hired out and fed. Which led her to believe that Luke had been mighty careful to be on his best behavior. If even a sliver of his sly bad-boy side had been on display, Goat would have had him chilling in the waiting area under Irene’s watchful eye, or washing down the department vehicles, or even mucking stalls out at Landers Stables.

The paint-shop job was a cushy one, and Stella suspected Goat saw something worthy in the boy, something redeemable and worth the effort and a measure of trust. The thought made her smile.

“’Course Dale’s only payin’ him four bucks an hour,” Goat said.

“Four bucks sounds about right,” Stella concurred, wondering what he’d been pulling down in the playgrounds and school restrooms in Smythe. Whatever he’d been earning, it didn’t much measure up to what she had started to have in mind for him. A plan was taking shape—a shadowy, uncertain, more-hope-than-reason type of plan, but so far so good. “You have any trouble with him, I’ll take full responsibility.”

That got her a snort of derision. “Stella, you’re already into me for more favors and promises and IOU’s than I can count, I don’t know if I’d even notice one more or less.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t you be playin’ the shy lass with me, Dusty. You know damn well—oh, hell. Just get your business done and get your ass back here where you belong, hear?”

“Why, yes, sir,” Stella murmured after she’d hung up, after it was too late for Goat to hear, because she wasn’t sure if she was quite ready for him to know how it stirred her up when he did that growly thing and pushed her around a little.

Stella had been pushed plenty in her life—Ollie’d not only pushed, he’d slapped and punched and belittled and reviled and insulted her practically every day of their three decades together—and she was not about to stand for one more hand raised against her, one more ill-considered outburst meant to shame her, one more joke of which she was the butt. That said, there was something almost magical about being manhandled, when you knew that man was guided by decency and a genuine fondness for the female gender and an all-around respect for the ladies he dated. When there was no fear involved, a remarkable door opened up, one that led to teasing and breathless risk-taking and dipping toes into trust, and wickedness for the sheer joy of the heart-stopping thrill … a smorgasbord of delights Stella had never imagined in her married days.

Stella checked the speed odometer and saw that she’d been going faster and faster. She took her foot off the gas and coasted, grinning, thinking about how happy she’d be to see Wisconsin in her rearview mirror as she headed for home.

But first there was work to do.

Chapter Twenty

She found Benton’s sister’s house with little trouble. The directions Chrissy’d given her were more than adequate, but she could have picked the house out on the cul-de-sac even without them, just thinking about the gawky long-jawed gray-haired woman she’d encountered on Chip’s porch the day before.

The neighborhood, which was several miles from the outer limits of the student-and-professor chaos of the campus fringes, seemed to feature two styles of tract home: a shrimpy little asymmetrical one-story box, and a slightly more spacious trilevel with a lumpy stuck-on porch. Most of these had been landscaped and painted and primped in such a way as to convey a proper embarrassment at their humble roots, with swaths of faux stone trim or composite railing or at the very least Martha Stewart–inspired paint palettes suggesting that the owners, while chagrined at the homely bones of their abodes, had taken pains to rise above them.

But there, lodged like storm-drain flotsam between two much higher-reaching neighbors, was the home that had not aspired to much at all, unless you counted unfettered overtaking on the part of the invasive native grasses that had beaten back the sod, or the splintery original paint job that seemed ashamed of its own sun-faded mauve and blushed a rain-stained deep cherry. A fluttery row of tinkly chimes, hammered from aluminum leavings and sawed-off bamboo, kept up a dispirited cacophony in the background. Stella studied the front door—a dingy alabaster slab decorated with a frowsy plastic wreath—and willed it to open, to regurgitate its neglectful owner, preferably in a chatty and confessional mood.

No dice. Stella finally sighed and shut off the ignition. She gathered her purse and emergency kit, a bare-bones sampler of various restraining and intimidating tools packed into a Clinique gift-with-purchase vinyl cosmetic tote emblazoned with pastel strawberry vines, and got out of the car.

Stella glanced around for onlookers and potential witnesses—not something she wanted to encourage—and came up satisfyingly empty. That was why Stella didn’t expect much as she got out of the car and approached the house. Alana had not given off any housewife vibe that Stella could identify. She probably spent her weekends canvassing for the local green party, or collecting obsolete electronic parts to turn in for recycling fees.

Stella pressed the doorbell while in the middle of her professional once-over. Rent or own, that was not immediately clear; the peeling paint and cracked concrete certainly didn’t speak to an attentive interest, but the neat rows of fresh-planted rudbeckia and Indian paintbrush, the tole-painted mailbox, the pot of geraniums—all of these said “owner” to her.

Before she had time to decide, the door burst open and Alana popped out, wielding a watering can.

“Wait a second.” She squinted, then patted around on top of her head until she was able to disentangle a pair of glasses that Stella hadn’t noticed perched in all that unruly gray hair, and slipped them on.

Stella had heard the phrase “her face fell” but never actually seen a convincing example of it until that moment. Alana, who appeared to be somewhere around Stella’s age, had fairly nice firm skin for someone who didn’t spend a nickel on upkeep, but when she realized who had come to visit, it flattened and drooped. “Oh. It’s
you.
”

Stella stuck out a hand. “Stella Hardesty, in case you don’t remember the name. Natalya’s attorney. Just following up on a few things. May I come in?”

Alana cast about her front yard, apparently finding no excuses there. She set down the watering can and sighed. “Well, I need to get to rehearsal before too long, but I guess I have a few minutes. I got coffee made, but it’s probably cold by now.”

“I’d love some.”

Stella, who’d enjoyed about eleven cups of Natalya’s never-ending brew, needed more coffee like she needed a bandeau bikini top, but she figured on taking advantage of the situation to check out Alana’s place. She tiptoed discreetly into the dinette area, which afforded her a view of the entire first floor. The house was built in that soaring-ceiling fashion builders insisted on where all the heating and cooling kilowatts one purchased hovered high above where they couldn’t do any good, and in a small-footprint dwelling like this one, one got the feeling the house had been set on its end, long ways.

The house smelled strongly of herbs. At least Stella supposed they were herbs, since there was a top note of cinnamon or something like it—maybe tea. Or just layers of dirt: Alana was an indifferent housekeeper, and though she had the blinds shut against nearly all sunlight and hence it was hard to see, Stella was pretty sure she could write her name in the dust that covered every exposed surface. Alana appeared to have a fondness for scarves, or perhaps shawls, or maybe just long lengths of silky fabric, which were draped over tables and looped over the drapes. An enormous set of speakers dominated the living area, along with what Stella, after a moment of confusion, figured out was a music stand. On a bench pulled up next to a chair was a violin case.

“Oh, you play violin?” Stella asked politely as Alana brought her a fussy flowery mug that was, indeed, cold to the touch, and sat down across from her with a glass of water.

Alana sniffed. “That’s a viola. And I don’t just ‘play,’ it’s my vocation. I’m fourth chair in the Madison Symphony Orchestra.”

“Really?” Stella was impressed. She’d been to the Kansas City Philharmonic once, years ago when she was in high school, on a field trip led by the ambitious student teacher who’d taken over the Prosper High Girls’ Chorus that year. They’d gotten first-row seats, which was thrilling until Miss Klein explained that they were cheap on account of the fact that you got a heavy dose of violin and not much else. Stella, however, had been enchanted by the young concertmistress, a woman who never once glanced at her music but gazed, enraptured, at the conductor and swayed as if guided by invisible strings and, at one point, played a solo that had her fingers dancing up the delicate throat of the instrument and impossibly close to the frenzied bow as a melody unwound itself in startling, brilliant crescendo. The entire concert hall had fallen silent as the young woman finished with a fling of her bow and a toss of her hair and then went limp, apparently drained by all that pouring of her soul into the music, and a second later the rest of the orchestra came back and picked up the thread, to the thunderous applause of the audience.

Stella generally preferred fiddle to violin, and never deliberately put on the classical station, but she had never forgotten that day or that performance. Somehow, though, she doubted the glum and musty Alana Parch-Javetz stirred the same kind of passion in her listeners as that long-ago violinist had.

“Now, playing in the symphony—is there a lot of money in that? I mean is it like sports where the top guys get the millions and the rest of the folks sitting on the bench have to scramble? And is a viola like, I don’t know, a lineman or something, where you got your violins being the quarterbacks?”

Alana fixed her with a frosty glare. “We’re all compensated roughly the same.”

Stella nodded. “That a good living? I mean, nice place like this—that’s got to set you back.”

“Nearly all of us give private lessons and perform commercially. I’m booked most of the time.”

“Really? ’Cause I got this friend, he’s always wanted to learn to play the fiddle, he just can’t get over that one riff they do in ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia’—you think you could teach him that?” Stella was deliberately baiting Alana, but it was actually true—her friend Jelloman Nunn always said that when he got his daughter through med school at Mizzou, he was going to take some time for his hobbies, and fiddle ranked right up there with tending to the best homegrown in the county under a bank of grow lights in the basement.

“I think not.” Alana wrinkled her nose as though Stella had asked if she’d teach her how to swing her tits so the tassels spun in opposite directions.

“Well, yeah, anyway. I guess I should get down to business here.”

“That’s probably a good idea. What exactly is it that Natalya’s paying you to do? As I understand it, the law is fairly clear.”

Stella, whose acquaintance with immigration law spanned exactly what she’d been able to pick up in a half hour on Chip’s computer with Natalya hovering anxiously behind her offering fragments of interpretation, felt it was probably best not to focus on specifics. “Well, yes, there are always legal guidelines—but it’s the exceptions that hold our interest. My colleagues and I have been able to do some terrific things for our clients. I mean I can’t go into any detail, given the attorney-client privilege and all, but I think Natalya’s going to really enjoy becoming a full-fledged citizen. To be honest, though, I wanted to talk more about
you
on this visit.”