Murder at Moot Point (19 page)

“His brother's a contractor who's done a lot of work on the institute's main building and I didn't know we were discussing the case and I'm sure Olsen didn't either. We were just talking about Brother Dennis.”

It wasn't so cold that they saw their breaths, but dampness on the chill wind insinuated itself through their clothes. It was hard to believe they'd worked up a light sweat walking the other direction the day before.

“The institute sells all those books and tapes, charges the earth for its seminars. The town's packed with searchers today and cars and—” Linda shrugged, “—sure seemed like a going concern.”

“And the village lives off it, has grown very used to the extra, and sometimes the only, money other than social security and pension checks coming in. And most of the money from them is spent elsewhere, where there's services like groceries, drug and clothing stores, that kind of thing.” Charlie thought of trying to raise Libby here and shuddered. And she tried to figure how this puzzle piece could possibly fit into the one about a seventy-eight-year-old woman getting shot off her Schwinn on a foggy night.

“Well, there're tourists.”

“Who come in the summer months mostly, right? Just like the searchers. This is June and Moot Point doesn't seem that full of tourists. June is when an awful lot of people travel in this hemisphere.”

“It's a long coast,” Linda said defensively.

“And the long, rainy, stormy winters attract only a select tourist trade.”

The trail with its chopped-off bushes on either side reminded Charlie of the arbitrarily contoured bushes of a maze in the garden of a mansion in Beverly Hills. It had once belonged to a silent screen star and was now the residence of kids little older than Libby who'd made it big in the video biz.

Long strong thorns and pale pink roses decorated much of the thick growth behind the fence—the bushes droned with bees.

The deputy turned away from the lighthouse when they reached the Porta Pottis and headed up another paved trail running along the headland. Here tall grasses and wildflowers threatened the trail—swaths of purple lupine, yellow daisies, and a large clump of white lace on a tall stalk.

Ahead, a line of bicycles zigzagged down 101, and behind them a solid wall of rain forest, pine and deciduous with bushy undergrowth choking the trunks, rose up the mountainside to be lost in cloud. Charlie could see how the bigfoot phenomenon started in such forests. If you saw something suspicious, you couldn't chase it down without a machete. And it would be a lot harder to shoot than an old lady on a bicycle in the fog.

Deputy Linda and the trail turned suddenly and swooped down off the headland toward the road that led to the Hide-a-bye. When they reached it Linda turned toward the sea and the cabins, but Charlie crossed it and picked up the path again on the other side. The deputy swore behind her but turned back to follow Charlie.

What was it Richard Morse often said? (The man overflowed with his own peculiar brand of homily.) “Your trouble, Charlie, is you keep thinking the system works. While thinking people work the system.”

“What's so damn funny now?” Linda asked behind her.

This trail continued down to a small inlet and left them. Charlie's only recourse was to follow the trickle of water emanating from the rain forest through a sewer pipe under 101 as it headed for the sea.

Once she reached the beach she turned north and averted her eyes toward the bank of sand and clump grass on her right when she passed the rusty ribs of the skeleton ship on her left.

“Look, you said a walk, not a marathon,” Linda complained.

The sea mist left the taste of salt on Charlie's lips and was so thick it looked like rain up ahead. But when they reached “up head” it looked like rain where they had been. Another headland stopped her finally. Sudsy breakers exploded against and over rocks, sprayed into bushes and shore pines that grew right down to the water wherever they found foothold. “Must be high tide.”

“High enough.” Linda Tortle squinted into the wind, her permed hair escaping the comb clasp in frizzy, gyrating streamers. “Time to go back.”

She looked dangerous again, still, steely. They had a staring match. Charlie was angry too. She wouldn't have gotten this far if the Moot County Sheriff's Department had any right at all to keep her under surveillance without charging her with anything. She was about to say just that when a siren wailed in the distance and the deputy's radio went off up close.

“What the hell are you doing down there?” Wes Bennett's voice crackled from the box Linda had taken from the hook on her belt. The official Bronco crested a dune about forty yards back the way they'd come and hurtled down a sand road Charlie hadn't noticed, siren and lights at maximum flash and octaves.

Charlie sat in back this time, chain mesh separating her from the officers so she couldn't attack them from behind. The sheriff had been on an emergency run from Chinook when he spied them on the beach below.

“We'll drop her off,” Wes interrupted his deputy's attempt to explain the walk on the beach. “You follow me in your car.”

“She won't stay put. You'll have to lock her in somehow.”

Charlie could remember watching her parents' heads from the back of the family car when she was a kid as they discussed her in the third person this way.

The sheriff made frustrated noises in the back of his nose and ended up taking Charlie with him. He made unintelligible sounds in answer to the unintelligible sounds coming in over the radio as they careened down off Highway 101 into the village of Moot Point, siren screaming, and Deputy Linda not far behind.

Charlie was startled at the number of cars and people on the streets. Frank and Randolph Glick in suits and ties stepped off the road to let them pass, peering in at her with surprise. Clara Peterson stood with Mary and Norma in their front yard, all in dresses and hose, white shoes and matching handbags. They must have just returned from Georgie's memorial service. But the town was crowded with informally dressed visitors, too. Several people stood on the porch of Jack's store, their hands cupped around their eyes to peer inside.

Out at the point in the parking lot below the lighthouse a third sheriff's department car parked crosswise and empty, its pulsers still flicking, its door hanging open. Several couples in windbreakers segmented by camera-bag straps stood looking over the edge of the parking lot to the beach below.

Next to them was a gaping hole in the guardrail.

Chapter 21

Wind scooted sand grains along the surface of the beach, just a tiny few off the top layer as it dried them. They made a whispering sound Charlie could barely hear over the roar of the surf. Foam from a wave that crept up on the red Ferrari left patches of suds in Michael Cermack's dark hair. He wasn't handsome anymore.

“I told you to stay in the car,” Wes said as she walked up beside him, but he sounded defeated. And he hadn't locked her in.

The Ferrari wasn't pretty anymore either. It had bounced and flipped when it hit and lay crumpled on its top with Michael sprawled half out of it. Most of the breakers didn't reach farther than a few inches up the length of the car and, as she had come down the path, Charlie heard Wes order everybody away from it. He sent Linda back to the village to question everyone she could find about Michael's movements today.

“I want nothing touched and I want a full crime scene crew on the double,” he'd told the other deputy. “Then I want statements from the witnesses in the lot and whoever is in the lighthouse.” After missing Georgette's bullet wound a few days ago, he was taking no chances that this was more than just an accident. His minions scampered, giving Charlie hard looks as they passed her.

Swallows with narrow pointy wings swooped and soared and darted among invisible hordes of insects. Their shadows winked across Michael's death scene without compassion.

“At least I can't be blamed for this,” Charlie said and swallowed back unpleasant tastes. “I've been so well chaperoned lately.”

She didn't realize she was leaning against Wes until he turned her around. “Keep looking at him and your nightmares are really going to get squirrelly. I can't spare anyone to keep you out of trouble right now. Charlie, I need to be able to trust you.”

“And I need a drink.”

“Go back to Rose's and stay there. Don't wander around town, promise me. I'll pick you up or send somebody.”

“I don't have any money. I thought I was just going for a walk.”

He fished out a ten and added a handful of change. “Here, have one for me too.” He gave her a very unsherifflike swat on the tush. “Now get out of here.”

With the low backless padded stools you could swivel, Rose's bar was also the breakfast counter. The plastic pastry displays held pie now instead of cinnamon rolls, and on top of them plastic signs displayed pictures of cocktails sporting exotic fruit and names. In the slit in the center of the liquor bottles, where most bars had mirrors, the heads of kitchen people doing kitchen things darted about like the swallows. Rose served as bartender and handled the cash register at one end of the counter. But she kept peeking into the slit as if she'd rather be in the kitchen.

Charlie took the stool next to Gladys Bergkvist and ordered a vodka tonic. They were the only two at the breakfast-and-booze bar. She could have chosen one of the other stools. But the sheriff had said don't wander around the town. He hadn't said don't sit next to Gladys Bergkvist, the employer and landlord of the recently deceased artist who had probably owned the gun that killed Georgette Glick. The gun that had sprouted Charlie's fingerprints all by itself.

Charlie smiled. Rose and Gladys exchanged hooded looks. This was the only bar and commercial eatery in the village. In fact, Charlie hadn't noticed anyplace else that even sold groceries. She said, “I'm sorry about Michael.”

Rose and Gladys put fingers to their lips and shook their heads in sync. Rose signaled with her eyes to the darting heads in the slit and mouthed, “Wait.”

“For what?”

Gladys leaned into her ear, smelling like scotch. “Wait till the van's loaded. If they hear about the accident now they'll have to stop and discuss it. Food'll get cold.”

Charlie answered her conspiratorial wink with a nod. Rose slipped back into the kitchen, where the darting picked up speed and the harried clang and clatter increased. “Van?”

“Takes dinner to the institute. They put it in containers to keep it warm and serve it buffet style up there.” She flicked her wrist and clicked her bracelets uphill. “When it's over, everything's packed back here. No fuss, no muss.”

Gladys's outfit today was a cranberry-and-beige flowered skirt with a cranberry-colored blouse, and the stones in her earrings, necklace, and bracelets were a deep expensive blue, mounted in the dull gleam of real gold. Charlie wondered why anyone bothered to murder old ladies on Schwinns or perhaps even artists in Ferraris when Gladys Bergkvist walked around offering a fortune for a simple mugging.

“So, what are the searchers having for dinner tonight?”

“Dill, spinach, tomato, and sprout quiche Dijon, asparagus artichoke vinegarette, fresh garlic-onion bread, and lemon honey yogurt Grape-Nut parfait, with a choice of fresh-ground Kona coffee or Celestial Seasonings herb teas. Same as the special on the board up there.”

“Grape-Nut?”

“Gives it crunch,” Gladys assured her. “Tomorrow, by six-thirty, Rose'll have scrambled eggs, fresh cinnamon rolls, fresh-squeezed orange juice, fresh-baked herb and bran buns with all-fruit sweetenings, hot bagels with cream cheese—the works—in that van ready to go. She and the help don't sleep much this time of year.”

“No meat it sounds like.”

“Not at the institute. Not allowed. But a lot of the guys, especially, crawl out the windows at night and hit here for cheeseburgers and fries. And before that, the searchers staying at the bed-and-breakfasts or the tourist cabins have come in for dinner.”

“Bet you sell a lot of paintings at the Scandia when all the searchers are in town, huh?”

Gladys winked again. “And prints. Especially the seascapes. People want to take home a piece of the point after an emotionally satisfying and consciousness-titillating experience at the institute. There's usually four or five rich widows in each bunch that want the originals. Stuff's not art, it's photographs in oil paint, but they eat it up. And Michael's slightly spooky stuff just knocks 'em out.” Gladys pondered that a moment, sprouted fresh tears for Michael, and went behind the bar to refill her drink.

Gladys's face-lift had not been successful. That had never been more apparent.

“Will Olie be able to find a replacement for Michael?” Charlie asked.

Wet mascara zigzagged down Gladys's pudgy cheeks and she shook her head, gulped scotch. Rose came around the partition from the kitchen, her face greasy with sweat and stress. The van must have left successfully loaded because the kitchen had quieted. Rose put an arm around Gladys's shoulders and squeezed. The dyed-black and bleached-beige heads leaned close together and looked back at Charlie with identical expressions.

“Sisters?” Charlie ventured.

“Half.” Rose led her half sister back to her stool and fixed Charlie another drink on the house. “Were you out there? Did you see Michael?” When Charlie nodded, Rose asked, “Was he really dead? For sure?”

Charlie nodded again, finished her old drink, and started the new, trying to push away the mind shot of Michael Cermack half out of the red Ferrari with surf suds sticking in his hair.

Gladys choked off a sob. “He must have been drunk.”

It was the sheriff of Moot County who came to pick up Charlie. He looked the color of abused aluminum again and glanced pointedly from Charlie to Gladys to Rose.