A Lie for a Lie (26 page)

“It’s odd you’d bring that up.”

“Why?”

“Because Caprice Zimboni is here today. Did you know?”

“Here? In Emerald Springs?”

He looked relieved. “Here on the grounds. You didn’t hear it from somebody else? It’s a coincidence you’re bringing it up now? Because none of us wanted her presence to become a news item.”

My mind was whirling again. “It’s hardly a coincidence her name would come up. Caprice is one of the links between Grady and Nora. I heard she was the reason they divorced.”

“More that Grady turned her into a link. She was young, innocent, tired of being sequestered by her family, and completely snowed by everything he said to her. That’s what Nora’s always said. And I imagine if you talk to Caprice, she’ll tell you the same thing.”

I couldn’t believe he hadn’t brought this up right at the beginning of the conversation. “When did she get here? How long has she been in town?”

“Just since this morning. Of course she heard what happened to Grady, and she heard Nora was arrested for it. She came to see what she could do to help. It’s pretty clear she feels like she’s at least partly to blame, even though Nora and Grady have been divorced for decades.”

“
Umm
. . . Did she happen to mention if this is her first trip to Emerald Springs?”

“You mean, did she happen to stop by the night Barber was killed?”

“Something like that.”

“She didn’t kill him.”

“And you’d know this how?”

“She’s not a killer.”

I crossed Yank off my helpful-witness list. He sounded much too sure of himself. I wondered if he, like Nora, thought he was getting special-delivery messages straight from above. Maybe the messages had brought them together. Kind of a divine dating service.

“Can you tell me where I can find her?” I asked when we’d reached a parting of the ways. I saw Junie in the distance talking to a couple of people, and thought I’d better find out what she was doing.

“No problem. She and her daughter are probably in the cookhouse—”

“Daughter?”

“Yes, Felice is here, too, and she’s as unlikely a killer as her mother. You’ll see what I mean. Caprice feels awful that she hasn’t asked Nora for forgiveness face-to-face, and now she may not have the chance. She’ll do whatever she can to help.”

I thought my luck was extraordinary, although if Caprice really did want to make up for past wrongs against Nora, it made sense she would come to see what she could do. Still, a lot of people don’t operate quite that way. They prefer the annoyance of feeling guilty to the humiliation of making amends. I was anxious to see where Caprice fit on this scale. Maybe she was here for other reasons. Destroying evidence? Planting seeds of distrust? Gloating? Although gloating seemed unlikely, given their history. She’d had plenty to gloat about when she destroyed Nora’s marriage. Unless for some reason, she just needed another round.

Junie saw me, and I pointed to the cookhouse. She nodded and continued her conversation with a long-haired man in cutoffs and tattoos. I’d seen her with two men, but the second one was gone now. I debated whether I should drag her away, but the man was laughing, and they looked happy enough that I suspected Junie was just making a friend and not learning the ins and outs of fire-eating.

The cookhouse was across a stretch of open ground. I could hear the hum as people went about their normal activities. Children ran in and out of the RVs parked neatly on the grass. Two women cradling a pair of dachshund puppies strolled by and greeted me as they passed. To my right and just ahead, a trio of elephants was being bathed at the edge of a diminishing pond, and to my left, a man riding a camel was talking on a cell phone. As I passed them I saw that beyond the camel four teenagers were doing what looked like advanced acrobatics. I hoped Deena, alias Sporty Price, didn’t get wind of this and abandon the parsonage to find more compatible parents and lodging.

The clearing past the pond was new. I vaguely remembered patches of woods here, but now what trees there had been were neatly sawed into eight-foot logs and lying in piles beside the road. I stopped to investigate, and when I heard someone behind me, I saw Junie not far away. The road behind her was now empty. I waited until she joined me.

“Biosphere?” I asked. “Or housing. Which do you think?”

“Ajax says this is where the biosphere will be.”

“Ajax?”

“The young man I was talking to. The biosphere’s going to be huge. They’ve only just begun. It’s all so exciting. Imagine having something like this right here in Emerald Springs.”

I honestly couldn’t. I didn’t know exactly how rich Henry Cinch might be, but the kind of project they were envisioning would cost the moon. A few more billionaire converts were probably in order.

We turned to head across the road on a diagonal path to the cookhouse when I heard three loud pops, then the roar of thunder. For a moment I forgot that the sun was blistering everything in sight, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I actually thought we were about to have rain at last. Then a cloud of dust appeared not far from where we were standing, and began to sweep closer and closer. I heard a wild trumpeting, and the shouts of people in the distance. Another moment passed before I realized exactly what was in the center of the cloud.

“Elephants!” I grabbed Junie’s arm and looked for a place to run. But the elephants were nearly upon us now, stampeding wildly and coming right for us.

With only seconds, I saw one chance. I shoved Junie toward the side of the road and a concrete culvert in a narrow drainage ditch just behind us that ran beneath it. Unfortunately it wasn’t big enough for both of us.

She resisted, but only long enough to figure out there was no time to argue. She sprang down to the culvert, and I leaped forward, frantically searching for another solution, this time for me. Now the cloud had begun to envelop me, and I could swear I smelled elephant breath and hide. With the trumpeting growing loud enough to make me think I was nearing the pearly gates, I dove for what seemed like inches of space between two of the logs along the roadside, praying the gap would be wide enough to shelter me. I clawed my way in and down.

Just as the elephants arrived.

“He’s gone.” Yank draped a damp towel around my neck before he dropped to the log beside me. He took my hand and rubbed it hard between his to restore circulation. I was delighted to have circulation to restore. I’d come too close to perishing by pachyderm to take any bodily function for granted.

“We’ve got men looking for him, but he took off right after he stampeded the herd,” Yank said.

“He” was Danny, one of the two young men that Yank had expressed concerns about earlier. The other, Ajax, who had regaled Junie with tales of the biosphere, had nearly been overtaken by the elephant storm, too, swinging up into the branches of one of the few remaining trees as the elephants roared by. Ajax was as shaken as I was, but he’d been perfectly clear about one thing. He had been looking in the direction of the elephants when Danny raised a flare gun and fired three shots toward the sky. Maybe Danny had been trying to move the elephants out of the pond after their baths; maybe he’d felt he was in danger by the way they were behaving and had fired to scare them away. Whatever had happened, we might never know, because right after the elephants took off down the road, Danny took off, too.

Junie hadn’t been harmed. Now she was up at Nora’s house getting a scraped hand washed and treated. As it roared by, an elephant had kicked one of the two logs that cradled me, sending it rolling toward the other and squeezing me even tighter between them. Consequently I was bruised, and the wind had been knocked out of me, but I was lucky, I thought, to be alive and merely reviewing the memory.

“Why was Danny alone with the elephants?” I asked. My voice was nearly back to normal. For minutes after I’d pried myself from between the logs and gone in search of my mother, my vocal cords hadn’t worked worth a darn, still knotted to suppress a scream, I guess. “If he’s new here, why was he in charge of three elephants?”

“Normally he wouldn’t be. But Levin, he’s their trainer, said things were quiet and Danny had shown real aptitude, so when Danny said he’d be fine for a few minutes if Levin wanted to get out of the sun, he took him up on it. He was just going to get something cool to drink and come right back.” Yank paused, and I could tell he wasn’t finished by the way he dropped my hand, got to his feet, and began to pace.

“Thing is,” he said, walking back and forth in front of me, “when Levin got just far enough away that he couldn’t do anything to make a difference, he heard Danny shouting, then the shots.”

“Maybe it’s all a coincidence.”

“Or maybe Danny wanted Levin to leave him alone with the elephants so he could wreak a little havoc. Maybe Danny had something to do with leaving the tiger’s cage unlatched, too, the night I left the house without locking the door behind me.”

This had occurred to me, as I’d sat here trying to remember how to breathe. “How often is a cage left unlatched?”

“Rarely to never.”

I’d asked myself the next question, too, about twenty times. Now I asked it out loud. “We know what happened when the cage was unlocked. What was supposed to happen today? Three elephants got loose, but your folks will round them up, right? Before they get to town?”

“Here’s hoping. They have one already.”

“Danny must have known they’d be captured quickly.”

“One would think.”

“So what was this about?”

Yank didn’t answer.

“There were three people directly in their path,” I said. “What’s the relationship between Ajax and Danny?”

“Apparently not much of one. Levin says they joined us about the same time, but he doesn’t think they knew each other before that. They bunk together, and that’s about it.”

“No bad blood?”

“Not that Levin knows about. Of course I’ll be asking the others. But you can imagine we don’t encourage feuds. Our mission’s to get along, not to engage in petty differences when there’s vital work to do. Anyone who’s having problems is helped, if possible. If not, they’re asked to move on.”

“So it’s not likely Danny was trying to get even with Ajax?”

“We’ll be questioning him.”

I nodded slowly. “I doubt anybody was trying to scare or kill my mother.”

“You would know better than I would.”

“I don’t think she has a real enemy in the world.”

Yank cut to the chase. “That would leave you.”

I’d already come to that conclusion. But why me? Yes, I was snooping around, refusing to accept that Nora was Grady Barber’s murderer. But I was so far from answers it seemed inconceivable someone would try to stop me like this. I felt just a flicker of pride at the possibility before I squashed it like, well, a woman hiding from a stampede between two felled tree trunks. No, it
wasn’t
good that somebody might be taking me seriously. Not if it meant they had sent three elephants to finish me off.

“It’s so hot today,” I said. “Maybe Danny was just trying to hurry the elephants along because they were sluggish.”

“He wouldn’t have learned that here. We don’t treat animals that way. We would never use fear to move them along.”

“God’s creatures.”

“Exactly.”

The elephants hadn’t exactly been sluggish when they charged out of nowhere, so I knew I was reaching for an explanation that didn’t include me. “Maybe you’ll find Danny and we can question him.”

“He disappeared so fast, I have to think he had an escape route planned. But we’ll see, I guess.”

I saw Junie walking in our direction with two tall, graceful women beside her. My mother looked relatively unruffled. Once she had caught her breath and received assurances I was fine, she had fairly bubbled over at the excitement. Really, I don’t think Junie’s in any hurry to test her longstanding belief in reincarnation, but I do think that when the time comes, she’s secretly hoping this life will end with a flourish. Elephants would have done the trick.

“You’re about to get your wish,” Yank said. “That’s Caprice and Felice Zimboni with your mother.”

I got to my feet, pleased to see my soles and heels remembered what to do. “Suspicious at all that this happened right after they got here?”

“Not one bit.”

And why was I? What would have been the point? Hire Danny from afar, then arrive just in time to watch somebody they’d never met get stomped into the ground?

Junie was chatting with the women as if she’d known them forever—she has that gift. I examined the Zimbonis as they drew closer. Caprice was probably in her forties, but she looked younger. She carried herself like a queen, and her dark hair was wound like a coronet at the back of her head. She was slender and graceful, perfectly proportioned. Her features were less perfect but even more interesting. She wouldn’t win beauty contests, but any artist would want to sketch her.

Felice was tall and slender, too. Her hair was lighter, her complexion more rosy than olive. She shared Caprice’s long bones and natural grace, and anyone paying attention would see they were mother and daughter, even though Felice’s features held more than a trace of Grady Barber.

Junie made the introductions. Both women expressed what seemed like genuine concern about my health, and I assured them that except for some interesting bruises in the next weeks, I was going to be fine.

“When I was a girl I saw an elephant kill a man,” Caprice said. “I’ve never been afraid of them, but I’ve never taken them for granted, either.”

Life in Italy hadn’t affected her accent. She had the absence of accent I’d noted in Nora’s speech. Felice’s Italian roots were more audible, although her English was perfect.

“I always wished I could ride on one,” she said. “Maybe not so much after today.”