Murder at Moot Point (5 page)

Although everything was pretty dusty there was something homey about the clutter. Bumper stickers, T-shirts, coffee mugs, pot holders, outdoor cooking aprons, trivets with messages ranging from one word to crowded paragraphs.
WHOLENESS
or
HOLNESS
or
HOLENESS
—three different spellings on three different mugs.
MIND
,
BODY
,
SPIRIT
instead of God, Son, and Holy Ghost,
ALTERNATIVE REALITIES
instead of Jesus loves you—still the place did remind Charlie of a religious novelty shop.

There were tapes and books and videos. If you just wanted a lazy browse you could read the quotes on the sample T-shirts stapled to corkboard high on one wall—

“It is necessary; therefore it is possible.”—Borgese.

“We are living at a time when history is holding its breath.”—Arthur Clarke.

“What we are looking for is what is looking.”—Saint Francis of Assisi.

“We have to move into the unknown; the known has failed us too completely.”—Marilyn Ferguson.

“Marilyn Ferguson?” Charlie was asking the air when footsteps sounded on the wooden porch outside.

A woman entered the Earth Spirit, smiling dimples into plump cheeks when she saw Charlie. She tucked waist-length hair behind her ears and introduced herself as Paige Magill. “Jack told me he'd left his agent in charge of the store and asked me to stop by to see how things were going.”

“I haven't had any customers. Jack said he'd be back an hour ago.”

“The celebration for Georgie's getting out of hand. I think you and I better close up shop. I doubt Jack'll be back any time soon.” Paige's cheeks were plump because of youth, her thighs plump in tight jeans because of just plain plump. Still, she was the type Frank Glick would cop a feel on every chance he got. Charlie couldn't fit her into the guideline of resident types set down by Sheriff Wes.

Paige produced a key from behind the
To the blind all things are sudden
sign above the door and locked it as they stepped out onto the porch. She hid it in a carved slot under the top stair. All signs of Georgette Glick had been rinsed from the road. But her calico cat sat on the hood of the station wagon that had replaced Wes's Bronco. It had suitcases strapped to its top. Two boys of late grade school age sat morosely on a bench swing on the patio. Georgette's family was arriving.

“I just came up here to see Jack and get away from home and now I feel guilty about some tragic crime that happened to somebody I'd never heard of yesterday at this time,” Charlie confided. “Pretty soon that guilt will convince me I did have something to do with it. It's depressing.” But having said that, she felt better for it and could almost see the empathy radiating from the warm features of the girl beside her.

“Come on up to my place for a cup of tea. Must be awful having no one to talk to.” Paige reached for an expensive mountain bike leaning against the porch and wheeled it along as they walked. “I can imagine how you must feel, but don't be too hard on us. It's easier to suspect a stranger. And it's scary to think it might have been one of us. We'll all get ourselves sorted out once we get over the shock.”

Paige Magill lived on the second terrace. Her little flower shop and greenhouse was called the Dream Emporium and was really more of a glass-wrap addition built around three sides of a small house. She lived in three gloomy rooms and a bath at the back. But a deck had been jerry-built onto one end of the greenhouse and it was here they brought their tea.

“Dream Emporium is a funny name for a florist shop,” Charlie thought aloud and then hoped she hadn't been rude. She wanted more than sympathy from this woman, she wanted information.

“I do dream counseling too.” Paige shrugged, rolled her eyes, grimaced. “And I keep Jack's books for the Earth Spirit.” She pulled her knees up to hug them, setting her heels into the metal mesh of her rusting deck chair. “And I help Brother Dennis with his seminars and workshops. And I get a small monthly allotment from my grandmother's estate.” She offered up her financial status without embarrassment. “Anything to survive and be able to stay here at the point.”

Under an endless expanse of clean sky the Pacific broke in four or five hypnotic foam lines before rolling up onto the beach. Sea gulls skipped in and out harvesting what the waves left behind.

“It is a beautiful place to live,” Charlie agreed.

“And I believe in the work going on here.”

“What exactly is the work going on here?”

“Defining reality. The reality of the spirit as well as the mind. Learning to experience the whole world instead of just the narrow slice allowed us by science and the tunnel vision of society and religion. Freeing the spirit to learn … awareness … becoming …” Paige shook her head helplessly. “It's impossible to define it to someone who's … not awake yet.”

Charlie could come up with no reasonable comment on all that, so they sat in companionable silence, sipping tea, squinting in the sunlight at the verdant greens and creamy blues of land and sea and sky, the whitewashed lighthouse and its several buildings with their red roofs looking “storybook” out on the point. The tea had a smoky, earthy flavor that melded with the odors of the greenhouse. A chicken clucked contentment somewhere behind the house and the warning buoy still warned ships off the rocks out to sea.

Charlie turned to find her hostess's smile so beguiling and unaffected she didn't hesitate to speak her thoughts. “Did Georgette embroider those signs with the New Age messages for Jack's store?”

Paige nodded. “She was wonderful with a needle and thread, did sewing and mending for everyone.”

“She was apparently quite an old lady otherwise too—able to ride a bike at her age.”

Paige explained that Georgette Glick and her husband had moved to the point about fourteen years ago after Georgette had come to a weekend seminar on transcendence.

“Isn't that a pretty big topic for one weekend?”

“It was just an introductory course, but it took hold of Georgie and she's … she was studying with Brother Dennis ever since. He put her on a diet, exercise, and meditation program.”

Charlie could see Jack's store and the short line of retirement trailer homes along the road below. Another car pulled into the spot in front of the station wagon. A teenage girl slid out from behind the wheel and an older man got out from the passenger side.

“Georgie had four children, nine grandchildren, and some great grandchildren,” Paige said, following Charlie's look. “And she'd been married only once and to Frank Glick all that time. Can you believe it?”

“I suppose everyone loved her. Everyone in Moot Point. I mean in the New Age community.”

“I'm not sure it's a community—more a bunch of unorganizable individuals—but we are all striving to love everyone. Ourselves included. Because we are all inherently one. Even you. It's just that our biocomputers were programmed wrong at an early age.”

“So not everyone found it that easy to love Georgette?”

“Well, she was sort of a busybody and that got on some people's nerves a lot.”

“How about you? Did she get on your nerves a lot?”

Paige smiled that serene smile again and the dimples made her appear younger than she was. A cute little giggle went with it. “You're beginning to sound like Sheriff Bennett. How about some more tea?” When Paige Magill returned with the teapot, the conversation changed purposefully to dreams. “Almost everybody dreamed more than usual last night. Fog does that—and then hearing about Georgie. I'll bet you had a few after all you went through.”

“I had one at least,” Charlie obliged her. “And it must have been something. Woke me up screaming this morning—well, not out loud.”

Paige sat forward. “What happened to you in your dream?”

“Can't remember a thing,” Charlie answered and watched relief and something else Charlie couldn't identify reshape the contours of the dream counselor's face.

As Charlie left the Dream Emporium a man in a lumberjack shirt pirouetted through the intricate balances and momentums of t'ai chi on the vacant lot next door. On the next property an old woman in a housedress and head scarf, tied under her chin peasant fashion, bent to her garden ignoring him. But she looked up to give Charlie a sharp scrutiny.

So Georgette Glick wasn't necessarily the beloved and harmless little old lady Charlie had assumed. She was a busybody who got on people's nerves. Maybe the busybody saw something that got her shot.

What could she see in Moot Point in the fog? How could she even see to ride her bike in Moot Point in the fog? How could a seventy-eight year old woman ride a bike at all? Why didn't this seem to surprise anyone but Charlie?

Charlie dawdled along the tiny shopping district on the first terrace, unsure what to do next. She had so much to do back in the office and at home she resented having to misuse an afternoon this way. It was too early for dinner at Rose's. It didn't look like Jack would be available to drive her back to the Hide-a-bye. Perhaps she should start now in case the tide was coming in and would trap her here. But there was nothing to do there either. God, she wished she'd never come to Oregon.

She glanced in the window of the Scandia Art Gallery. There was, of course, a seascape. Charlie stepped inside to find more of the same with a few renditions of the lighthouse for balance. Unlike the greenhouse, the gallery was strangely sterile of odors. The carpeting was thick and dark and deadened any sound but the quiet ticking of an old-fashioned wall clock. The rest of the colors were neutral to heighten the contrast of the paintings.

Only one oil really drew Charlie in. It depicted the skeleton of a ship wrecked long ago sitting on the shore with fog fingers threading through naked ribs. It was titled “Wreck of the
Peter Iredale,
” was priced at two thousand dollars, and was signed simply, “Michael.”

Charlie had studied it for several seconds before she identified discomfort as the source of her fascination. She imagined she could feel her pulse speed up in her ears. It was as she turned away from it that she saw several of the fog fingers take the shape of human bodies, one hanging over a railing of fog somewhere in the bowels of the ship and another on the floor of a fog cabin no longer there. When she turned back they were gone.

“I see you found them,” a woman said, slipping through an interesting slit in the wall formed by panels tilted out to display each painting in its own attention space. “Most people don't. Isn't Michael something? Almost like a hologram the way he does that.”

“Found what?”

“The dead sailors.” She was a comfortably middle-aged woman with bleached hair, and a magenta jumpsuit to match her fingernails. Charlie counted three gold chains, five gold rings, and an unbelievable number of bracelets. The woman clanked like machinery when she moved. “There are supposed to be five. How many did you pick out?”

“Just two. Is this a real shipwreck?”

“Well, yes, but I don't believe there were any men lost. It just went aground. Michael has to add his little touches, macabre sense of humor. Is there anything in particular you're looking for today?”

“Does he live here in Moot Point?”

“Oh, yes, he has a studio up on the hill.” She gestured vaguely behind them and all the bracelets tried to clank down to her elbow.

“He's probably at Georgie's celebration this afternoon,” Charlie led.

“Not Michael. He hated her—” the woman followed and then blinked. “Did you know Georgie Glick? Isn't it awful what's happened? Oh, goodness, you're not one of the family?”

“No, I just—why did Michael hate Georgie?”

The bracelets all clanked back to her wrist. “I'm Gladys Bergkvist. I don't believe I caught your name.”

“Greene. Charlie Greene. I'm visiting Jack Monroe.”

Gladys Bergkvist's pallor paled. “You're the one who murdered Georgie Glick.”

“No, haven't you heard? She wasn't run over. I didn't run over her in my car.”

“What is this world coming to that you can just be walking around like this, free to do it again to anyone?”

“I didn't do anything to her. Please let me explain.” But Charlie backed toward the door as the woman's outrage turned to visible fear.

“Everyone's saying you shot the poor woman.”

Chapter 6

Charlie's face stung as if she'd been slapped. She stomped down the street, afraid to look in any of the other shops. If the word was out she was the murderer, no one was going to answer her questions about Georgette Glick. The last time Charlie had felt quite this way she'd just learned the rabbit died. Then she'd stomped through Crossroads Mall in Boulder sure that every stranger there had heard the news before she had, sure that every detached smile she met was a personal leer. She'd trudged for hours considering abortion and suicide and running away to some fantasy world that welcomed imperfect teenagers. Someplace they didn't have to admit they'd screwed up.

A third car had parked in front of Frank's trailer and the porch and patio were crowded with people, plastic glasses in hand. It looked like yet another celebration. Charlie turned abruptly before anyone noticed her and headed up the road toward the lighthouse. If there was no way off the point to the Hide-a-bye, if the tide was up and she couldn't follow the route she'd come, she'd slip back to Jack's store after dark. If he wasn't home she knew where the key was.

Tides were still a mystery to Charlie, despite having lived on both coasts. They were always coming in or going out and the time changed by night and day and by day of the month and by month of the year and by flip of the coin for all she knew. Charlie stayed away from places she was likely to get caught in at high tide. The beach below the lighthouse looked to be just such a place.