Sketch a Falling Star (26 page)

“But that first surge of water must have knocked everyone right off their feet,” Rory pointed out.

“Well, yes, I suppose I may have lost track of her for ten, fifteen seconds. Hardly enough time for her to get to Brian and murder him.”

Jessica’s alibi was starting to leak like a sieve.

“Surely in all the confusion, with the water rising so fast, everyone screaming and being thrown against the canyon walls, you must have lost sight of her for longer than that.”

“No, I’ve gone over and over it in my head. Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not looking for sainthood here. I was mainly focused on keeping myself alive—but it happens that I also had her in sight. I know she didn’t kill Brian.”

“Then you also had Brian in view the whole time?” Rory asked to see if she could trip her up.

She gave Rory an odd look. “Of course not, or I’d know for sure if he’d actually been killed and who killed him, now wouldn’t I?”

Rory couldn’t help but smile. “Yes, I imagine you would.”

“I may be the oldest member of the troupe, dear, but I’m no fool.”

“Sorry. It’s my job to throw a few curves and see what you’ll swing at.”

“Apology accepted.”

Rory paused to drink her coffee. “Did Jessica ask you to vouch for her?” she asked casually, as if they were just two women chitchatting with nothing at stake.

“Yes. She was worried that her history with Brian made her a prime suspect. But she didn’t ask me to lie for her,” Dorothy added quickly. “I would never have agreed to that.”

“Would you say the two of you are pretty close?”

Dorothy nodded. “As unlikely as that may seem. She’s young and glamorous, and I’ve got more than twenty years on her. If memory serves, I’ve also never been glamorous. But then we’re not the type of friends who go clubbing together, if that’s the right word. Anyway, I think she sees me as something of a mother figure.” She cut herself another sliver of cake. “You’re definitely going to have to take this home with you. I have no won’t power at all.”

“I’ll be more than happy to help you out,” Rory said with a laugh. “One last question, and then I’ll get out of your way. If you were in a courtroom under oath, would you be willing to state that Jessica could not possibly have murdered Brian?”

Dorothy looked her straight in the eye. “Yes, without reservation.”

A few minutes later, Rory was on her way home with the remainder of the cinnamon cake wrapped in aluminum foil, a promise from Dorothy to e-mail the recipe, and one less suspect on her list.

R
ory was in her backyard raking up the last of the leaves she’d missed in the fall when Zeke popped in to say “hello.” She’d immediately put him to work using his energy to push the leaves from the farthest corners of the yard toward the pile she was creating. A leaf blower without the noise and noxious fumes. If only there was a way to patent the technique and manufacture the product. Hobo was also hard at work chasing squirrels and doing his best to follow them up into the trees. Pure Americana. Rory wondered if Rockwell would have appreciated the scene.

“Do you think Dorothy’s covering for her?” Zeke asked as he worked his way back to her. His voice was loose and easy as if he’d put the bedroom incident behind him. Rory had decided to go that route as well. She’d had her say, and there was nothing to be gained by hanging on to her anger.

“No, I think she believes what she told me. The question is—how reliable are perception and memory when a person is in a life-and-death struggle?”

“I say we drop Jessica to the bottom of the list,” Zeke said, “but we don’t outright eliminate her.”

Rory nodded. The bottom of the list was becoming crowded now that Jessica had joined Adam and Sophia Caspian there. “I was thinking along the same lines as far as Dorothy’s concerned,” she said. The more the merrier. “I mean why would she be so willing to help eliminate one of the suspects unless she had nothing to worry about herself? If she were guilty she’d be thinking, ‘The more suspects to hide among, the better.’ ”

“Plus, she’s got no motive as far as we know, and I’m downright positive she doesn’t have the skills to have broken in here or tried to run you off the road.”

Rory was laughing at the thought of Dorothy sneaking into her house when she saw Hobo barreling toward them at ramming speed. “Incoming,” she yelled seconds before he pounced on the mound of leaves as if he were trying to bring down a lion.

Zeke barely managed to blink away in time to avert a collision. He popped back into view several yards away. “That’s one seriously crazy mutt,” he said with a grin that seemed to stretch his mustache from ear to ear.

As if to support that theory Hobo flipped onto his back to wriggle around in the leaves with his legs dancing in the air.

Chapter 25

R
ory’s eyes flew open. One minute she was sound asleep, and the next she was wide awake, adrenaline kicking her heart into high gear. Zero to sixty in less than three seconds. But she didn’t have a clue as to why. The digital clock on the nightstand read 2:20. The house was silent and dark, the only light coming from the tiny night-light in the hall between her bedroom and the bathroom. She was still trying to puzzle out what had pulled her from her dreams when Hobo started barking somewhere downstairs, providing her with a eureka moment. If this was his encore, his opening act must have awakened her. But having resolved that question, she was faced with a tougher one. What had set him to barking in the middle of the night?

It was possible he had an upset tummy and needed to be let out. He was big on eating grass along with other, more exotic delicacies that could be found in the backyard. Rory was pushing her feet into flip-flops that doubled as slippers when the doorbell rang, reverberating through the house like a gunshot. Hobo took it as a cue to ramp up his own rhetoric. Okay, then, it probably wasn’t a digestive issue after all.

She found him stationed at the front door, his nose pressed to the doorjamb as if he were trying to get a better whiff of whoever was on the other side. She flipped on the light in the entryway as well as the outdoor light and put her eye to the peephole. She jumped back in surprise when she saw another eye staring back at her. Hobo, who appeared to have finished his olfactory assessment of the visitor, was now merrily wagging his tail.

“Who is it?” Rory called out, reassured by his recommendation.

“It’s Eloise,” came the impatient reply.

Rory opened the door, wondering how her elderly neighbor had managed to sneak out of her son’s house again. Eloise stepped inside wearing a Windbreaker over her pajamas and sneakers on her otherwise bare feet.

“What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” Rory asked. “If Doug wakes up and realizes you’re gone, he’ll be frantic.”

Eloise brushed away that concern with a wave of her hand. “I don’t know how I managed to have such a neurotic child.”

“Regardless,” Rory said, in no mood to debate nature versus nurture. “You should be home in bed like everyone else.”

“Yes, well tell that to the powers that be.”

“What does that mean?” She was pretty sure she knew the answer, but she didn’t want to risk planting any new ideas in Eloise’s head.

“It means I can’t get any sleep with all the chatter coming at me from the other side.”

“Is it something they want you to tell me?” Rory asked, thinking that whoever “they” were, they could at least take into account the fact that mortals slept at night.

“Of course. Why else would I be climbing out of windows and ringing your doorbell at such a crazy hour?” In her own bizarre way, Eloise sounded utterly sane.

Rory didn’t have any response to that. She hated to be a tattletale, but she’d have to tell Doug how his mother kept escaping, preferably before she fell and killed herself.

“Abner Jensen doesn’t have much time left,” Eloise announced with all the gravity of a journalist delivering bad news. “It appears to be cancer, though that wasn’t entirely clear.”

Rory had been planning to go back to Tucson to talk to him, but it seemed she might have to make that trip a lot sooner than she’d anticipated. When Abner died, any information he had about the Jensen family would die with him. And although the odds weren’t great, he might just know something that would lead her to the name of Zeke’s killer.

“Did they tell you how much time he has?”

Eloise shook her head, a smile starting to chip away at the tension in her face. “Can I have ice cream now?” she asked brightly.

Rory was about to remind her what time it was, then decided it would just be easier to give her some ice cream before calling Doug to take her home. Hobo followed the women into the kitchen with a jaunty gait as if he sensed a snack in the offing.

Rory settled Eloise at the table and scooped up some cherry vanilla for her. She was giving Hobo a little in his dish when Zeke appeared. There was no warning flicker of lights, no gradual fade-in. One moment he wasn’t there and the next he was, arms crossed and brows inching toward a frown. He hadn’t bothered switching his Western garb for modern clothing, either because Eloise already knew he didn’t come from the here and now or because he’d been in too much of a hurry.

Eloise didn’t seem to care that he’d joined them. She kept right on spooning ice cream into her mouth, her eyes dreamy with pleasure. Hobo had set his big head in her lap hoping to finagle a bit more for himself.

“Well, someone was in such a hurry to get here he forgot his manners,” Rory remarked as she put the ice cream back in the freezer. “Afraid Eloise was going to tell me something you don’t want me to know, Marshal?”

Zeke dialed his expression up to cordial. “It came to my attention we had company,” he said, “so I thought I’d be sociable and stop in.”

“What’s the deal with you two anyway?” The question had been nagging at Rory since he and Eloise had had their little tête-à-tête.

Zeke shrugged. “We just recognized that we have some common interests.”

“Would one of those common interests happen to be me?”

“You are not the center of the universe, my dear Aurora,” he said with a chuckle.

Rory knew the jab was meant to derail her from pursuing the question, so it had little effect on her. But she didn’t know what to make of him calling her Aurora again, unless it was simply another ploy to distract her.

Zeke popped into the chair beside Eloise, who’d just finished her ice cream. She set the bowl on the floor for Hobo to lick, which he did with gusto. “What brings you by tonight, Miss Eloise?” Zeke asked, sounding like Rhett Butler in Wyatt Earp duds.

“There’s nothing better than ice cream,” she said, licking her lips in imitation of the dog.

He tried a different tack. “Did you and Rory have a nice talk?”

“I like Rory. She buys good flavors. Jean only buys chocolate and strawberry.”

“Surely you didn’t come here in the middle of the night just for ice cream.” A hint of irritation had crept into his voice.

Eloise turned to Rory as if the marshal’s words hadn’t even registered. “Would you call Douglas and ask him to come take me home now?” She yawned and rubbed her eyes like a child who was ready for a bedtime story.

“Eloise,” Zeke said sternly, “I asked why you came over here tonight.”

The abrupt change in his tone made Rory wonder how he’d treated suspects and uncooperative witnesses when he’d worn a real badge, back in the days before criminals had more rights than the law-abiding public.

Eloise finally turned to him with a shy smile. “There’s no need to be afraid of what’s coming, Marshal Drummond,” she said softly. “I promise—cross my heart.”

Rory saw Zeke’s face twist into a scowl. So much for their collaborative effort, she thought, happier about its demise than she probably ought to be. In spite of Zeke’s denial, she was sure she’d been the common ground in their short-lived truce. Although their intentions may have been noble, she didn’t need two of them trying to keep her out of harm’s way.

Zeke looked as if he wanted to grab Eloise and shake some sense into her. Before he could attempt any version of that scenario, Rory plucked the phone off the wall and dialed the Bowman household, sorry she was about to disturb their peaceful night too.

R
ory was on her way home from the pet store with a thirty-pound bag of Hobo’s favorite kibble and a red Frisbee. She was looking forward to throwing it for him. With his natural exuberance, she could picture him leaping into the air to catch the toy, his shaggy fur blowing every which way. She was a few blocks from her house, doing the local speed limit of thirty, when a dark green SUV came barreling around a curve at her, hogging the center of the road. She pulled her wheel sharply to the right, barely avoiding a collision with the SUV, and then slammed on her brakes as she headed straight for an up close and personal with one of the stately, old oak trees that lined the road. She brought the car to a screeching stop inches from the tree trunk, memories of her last wild ride flashing through her mind. She was a little shaky and a whole lot of angry. It had happened so fast she didn’t see the SUV’s license plate, but she did catch a decent glimpse of the other driver. The woman behind the wheel had been staring straight ahead as if she had such important matters on her mind that she hadn’t noticed she’d run Rory off the road.

By the time Rory pulled into her driveway, her heart rate and blood pressure had fallen back into the normal range, and she’d given herself a rational pep talk. In spite of the fact that this SUV was the same color as the first one that had chased her and tried to run her off the road, the two incidents couldn’t be related. This driver hadn’t been following her; she’d been going in the opposite direction. It was simply one more case in a growing epidemic of drivers who believed that everyone else on the road should make way for them.

She lugged the bag of kibble, her handbag and the Frisbee to the front door, wondering why Zeke rarely showed up when there was heavy lifting to be done. She set the kibble down on the porch and unlocked the door.

Hobo and the marshal were in the entry waiting for her. Hobo welcomed her with his usual fanfare, but Zeke looked grim. “We’ve had another visit from the dog-toy fairy,” he said holding out his palm. There was a small stuffed pig riding the air above it.