Bone Valley (8 page)

My head hurt
like a son of a bitch, and then some. I tried not to make noise as I crawled out of my own bed and looked back at the still-sleeping Philip.

I tiptoed to the guest bathroom, hoping to delay waking Philip up by moving the noise down the hallway. Washing my face helped. Seeing that Jimmie had spread his man-thing toiletries about in the second bath didn’t.

Still, morning is an optimistic time, and I wondered: Could Angus still be alive? I had hope. Perhaps he had jumped clear somehow. I said a quick prayer—for his life, or his soul—and left it to God to apply whichever fit the best. Then I slipped quietly into my own kitchen and put on filtered water to heat for the French press and the copious amounts of coffee I knew we’d all want, and I popped three Advil for my head, two capsules of ginger to settle my stomach, and a couple of multivitamins on general principle. While I waited for the water to boil, the anxiety kept at bay last night via better-living-through-chemistry came rolling back over me.

Where was Miguel?

Where was Angus?

And what in the hell was going on?

That line of worry led me to fetch my purse, where I had stuffed the papers and receipts from Miguel’s glove compartment. After riffling through the loose collection of paper, I learned such things as: Miguel bought most of his groceries at Publix on a credit card, but that he’d recently bought some motor oil, a couple of plastic five-gallon fuel cans, a car battery, wire, wood screws, and, of all things, clothespins from Wal-Mart, and for those things he’d paid cash. He had also bought something called potassium sulfate, and, for a man who lived yardless on a sailboat, he had purchased an awful lot of fertilizer from a home-and-garden supply.

The fertilizer receipt definitely caught my eye.

Fertilizer, as Timothy McVeigh had taught us all, made bombs.

If you knew what you were doing.

I looked at the rest of the receipts, not much liking what was beginning to twirl around in my gray matter. Diesel fuel and fertilizer. Okay, okay, maybe he needed some diesel fuel for the auxiliary motor in his sailboat. Maybe he had a large number of houseplants on board.

But he wouldn’t need that much fertilizer.

No, this was fertilizer in amounts for small forests, or at least very large yards.

A nice spike in my anxiety level hit both my head and gut, and, no closer to understanding anything, I smoothed out the receipts and slipped them into my desk drawer to be organized, memorized, copied, and filed later. Then I eased back to my kitchen.

Just as I scooped out my shade-grown, fair-trade, ten-dollars-a-pound coffee into the French press, Jimmie came tiptoeing into the kitchen and gave me a big bear hug. I felt tears start up until I noticed he had helped himself to a pair of Philip’s pajamas, which were about twice too big on him. He looked like a goofy old clown, and I ended up smiling. I hugged him back.

A toilet flushed, I heard the sound of running water, and sighed. Philip was awake. By the time I poured the hot water over the ground coffee in the French press, Philip was in the kitchen, eyeing me, I thought, just a bit tentatively.

“Thought we’d be quiet, let you sleep in,” I said.

He nodded, quietly and possibly guardedly.

The doorbell rang. A bit early for company, I thought. Jimmie and I were still in pajamas. Philip, of course, was dressed, and nattily at that for a Sunday morning after an explosion. “Would you please get that for me?” I asked, keeping my voice carefully neutral.

While he went to the door, I went to get dressed, leaving Jimmie with cursory instructions on the French press. “Push that plunger thing down in another minute.”

By the time I got back to the kitchen, Dolly and Bearess were milling around, with Dolly making herself right at home, and rather pointedly ignoring Jimmie, who was drinking coffee, still wearing too-big pajamas.

“This isn’t a good morning for company,” I said, looking at Dolly. “We had an…an…accident last night.”

“Are you all right, dearie?” Dolly asked as she opened my cabinet, fetched out a china bowl, and poured a smidge of coffee in it, ladled milk into it, and put it on the floor for Bearess, who slurped it up in one bold tongue stroke and wagged for more.

I started to point out that that was my grandmother’s china bowl, but Jimmie was faster on the draw than I was.

“She near got blowed up,” Jimmie said, and poured his second cup of coffee.

“I don’t think we should be discussing this,” Philip said, and poured a cup of coffee.

“The correct statement would be, she was nearly blown up,” Dolly said, and poured herself a cup of coffee and topped off Bearess’s china bowl.

By the time I got to the French press, there was no coffee left and my dull Xanax-and-wine hangover had swelled with the crowd in my kitchen.

“You know, I could pressure-clean that house of yours for you,” Jimmie said to Dolly. “That is, if you was to cook me a homemade meal sometime. Chicken is what I likes the best. Lilly don’t fry chicken.”

Dolly was studying on Jimmie, while I heated water for a second pot of coffee, and then the phone rang. I ducked out of the kitchen to the bedroom, Philip close behind me, and I answered it and somebody I didn’t know asked for Philip. I shoved the phone at him and went back to the kitchen. Right then my primary goal was to consume a large cup of coffee and as soon as possible.

A few minutes later, as finally the caffeine began to seep into my system, Philip beckoned me back to the bedroom.

“I am very sorry to report that Angus John Cartright perished in the explosion last night,” Philip said. “That was, as you no doubt suspected, my informant in the Bradenton Police Department.”

Still clutching my coffee cup, I more or less collapsed on the bed, mourning Angus for real and in earnest now that his death was confirmed.

Philip sat beside me. He took my hand, and held it in both of his own big hands. The pressure was light, the touch reassuring. Perhaps he was done with being mad at me over our broken date. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Really, very sorry.”

“Me too.” I leaned my head against his shoulder. Perhaps I was done being mad at him too.

Then I thought about the living. My head popped off Philip’s shoulder. “What about Miguel?” I asked, wondering where he was and if he was safe.

“There was only the one body. No one has been arrested. No one named Miguel was mentioned by my informant.”

“But…” So, what exactly did that mean? Had Miguel run off too?

“Angus died around eight-fifteen p.m. People from the other boats told the investigators that two men—both tall and dark haired and thin—were seen running from the area of the explosion and escaping in a red pickup.” Philip paused, but I didn’t speak. “Lilly, did you and Miguel run off together? That appears to be what the witnesses are saying.”

“No, I told you. He shoved the keys at me and told me to save myself, and then he dove into the water, looking, I guess, for Angus.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. You don’t think I’d’ve noticed if Miguel had hopped into the truck with me?” I didn’t care for Philip’s tone or his question, either one. Maybe we weren’t 100 percent over being mad at each other.

“They said
two
men ran away in a red pickup. Who would those two men be? Or, in the unlikely event that you were mistakenly identified as a man, who would that second man be?”

“I ran away in his red pickup. There was no second man. I was wearing jeans and a man’s shirt, and my hair was in a ponytail. The streetlights on the pier had blown out. Maybe I looked like a man. Maybe I looked like two men. I don’t know. Nobody was looking at me, anyway,” I said. But I wondered: Did I look like a man in jeans? Whoa, no more ponytails and men’s shirts for me.

“Where did you leave the truck?”

“I told you. At the Southgate Community Center.”

“What are you hiding from me?” Philip asked.

“Nothing.” That is, nothing other than the fact that I had been entertaining serious sexual fantasies about another man. Oh, and there was that fake-panther trespassing thing I hadn’t bothered to mention.

“Did you wipe down that truck? If any of your prints—”

“I wiped down the pickup. I told you.” I heard that shrill tone I don’t much care for kicking into my voice, and I stopped, closed my eyes, and visualized my calming waterfall.

Apparently Philip didn’t know I was trying to visualize inner calm, and he said, “If that truck is linked to Miguel and the explosion, you don’t want your fingerprints on it.”

“I know that,” I snapped. Yep, that shrill tone was definitely there. “I know enough to wipe off my prints in a getaway vehicle after fleeing a homicide, okay? I wasn’t raised in Disneyland by Pollyanna.”

But then I thought—oh, damnation. What difference would wiping off my prints really make? Now in the caffeinated clarity of post-panic, I remembered that Officer Detective Josey knew I had been with Angus and Miguel before the explosion. With Angus dead, the police would surely look for Miguel, as the sailboat’s owner, and Josey would no doubt confer with the city police, putting me smack-dab in the middle of the picture quick enough.

“Now what?” Philip said, apparently reading my expression correctly.

“A homicide detective from the sheriff ’s office, Josey Something Farmer, saw me hanging out with Angus and Miguel after the phosphate meeting. She might have seen me leave with them.”

“Why would she know you?”

“Because she was asking me questions about M. David Moody’s murder.”

“Damn it!” he shouted. “How in the hell do you get into these kinds of messes? Are you a suspect?”

This was the first time Philip had raised his voice to me. I decided to ponder the meaning of this later and to defend my honor in the present. “No. I’m not a suspect.” I hoped that was still true.

“Please, Lilly, back up. And this time tell me everything.”

But Philip’s cross-examination was cut off by Bearess’s early-warning barking, and then, sure enough, the doorbell rang.

Before either of us could react, I heard Jimmie open the door and invite someone in. A woman’s voice, general chatter, dog barking, the sound of something breaking, scramble noises, more female voices. Listening so hard it made my head hurt worse, I finished drinking my coffee. Mostly I wanted to go back to bed very badly, wake up on the previous Friday morning, and tell Olivia, “No thank you, I can’t meet Angus.” He might still be dead, but at least I wouldn’t have pissed him off right before he began his journey in a fiery explosion toward his new incarnation.

Instead, what I said was, “Well, speak of the devil. That’s Josey. The detective. I recognize her voice.”

“Hey, Lilly Belle, you might wanta get yourself out here,” Jimmie shouted in my general direction.

“Please, do not give that woman any information. Not until we have thoroughly discussed all of this,” Philip said.

Though I bristled at his directive, I had to admit that not only was Philip a criminal-defense attorney, but also he was not suffering from the lagging half-life of Xanax, and he hadn’t recently fled the scene of a murder for no apparent reason. Also, early in my life I’d developed the habit of not telling law-enforcement officials much more than good morning.

Given all that, I just nodded and we eased out into the kitchen.

“Guess we’re having a neighborhood brunch,” Dolly said, and helped herself once more to my kitchen and handed Josey a cup of coffee.

“I kinda stepped on that dog bowl,” Jimmie said. “I sure hope you didn’t set great store by it.”

“You really shouldn’t use your good china for the dog,” Dolly said, as if she hadn’t been the one who put it on the floor in the first place.

Bearess was busy waggling and licking Josey as if they had been Timmy and Lassie in a former life together.

Stepping over the busted china, I pushed aside my phobias of crowds and junk and aimed myself at a second cup of coffee, only to discover that Dolly had poured the last of it for Josey. As much as I wanted to do so, snatching the cup from a homicide detective’s hands didn’t seem like the smart thing to do.

Not that doing smart things had lately been my specialty.

I put more water on to heat for the third pot of coffee, then sat down. My new theory was that if I sat still long enough, everyone else would settle themselves into some kind of workable pattern. Or leave.

Acting the host, Jimmie introduced himself to Josey, and then introduced Dolly to Josey, and while everybody was drinking my coffee and shaking hands, he said, “I reckon you know them two lovebirds, over there. That Philip and Lilly, they ain’t been out a the bedroom since they jumped in it last night. I had to turn me up that Garrison Keillor guy loud on the radio, give ’em some privacy. Ain’t love grand?”

I was astonished by how quickly Jimmie had just alibied me. Or had he? I double-checked Jimmie’s math, which is painful without a sufficient level of caffeine—Angus, Miguel, and I had left the phosphate meeting a little after seven. Then we’d gone out of our way, at my insistence, to get organic food, sparking the snit between Angus and me. Philip had said his mole told him the explosion was at eight-fifteen p.m. So if I had really gone straight home from the phosphate meeting, I could have made it to my house before eight. Garrison Keillor’s radio show was over at eight. Therefore, Jimmie had me home and in bed with Philip before the explosion.

Damn, Jimmie was not only sweet, he was handy.

Or, was he just digging the hole deeper?

I kind of thought that fleeing the scene of a felony is itself a felony—or is that a car wreck you cause?—but I couldn’t ask Philip about that in front of Josey without raising questions in her mind I didn’t currently wish to raise, so I tried to look embarrassed by Jimmie’s story. Saying nothing, I took Philip’s hand. He squeezed it and I assumed that meant “Play along,” so I did.

“Shall I make us some eggs and toast?” Dolly asked.

“She ain’t got no bacon,” Jimmie said. “And don’t dare ask her how come, neither, not lests you wants a lecture.”

“Unless you want a lecture,” Dolly corrected.