The Last Annual Slugfest (28 page)

“Still,” Harry said, tapping his forefinger on my arm, “suppose one of the other judges had taken that pizza.”

“Then Curry would have to have aborted the whole plan. He could have knocked over the table, or made a spectacle snatching the pizzas and stalking out. There’s a lot of leeway at an event like the Slugfest. People might have found his behavior odd, but they wouldn’t have thought of poison. No one was considering poison then. Turn right here.”

Harry pulled into Rosa’s driveway. Cars and trucks were crowded into every bare spot. It was, if anything, even more jammed than it had been last night. There was nothing to do but back out and leave the Volvo beside North Bank Road.

It didn’t surprise me that the word of Chris’s release had spread so rapidly, and that all his friends and Rosa’s friends—which meant virtually everyone in town—had hurried here to share their relief. The fact that these same people had been here just last night to comfort Rosa would only make today’s celebration more festive.

“But what about Angelina Rudd?” Harry asked as he pulled the car in by the hill at the side of the road.

“Well, she knew the fish were gone. But she wasn’t privy to Curry’s intentions. She might have overlooked a plan to embarrass Edwina; she certainly had no love for her. But she wouldn’t have tolerated his kidnapping Leila. I think we’ll find that her family’s trip to Fort Ross was Curry’s idea. He needed her out of the way for the weekend.”

“Surely she must have suspected something.”

“Not in the way you’re thinking of it. Angelina and I both came upon the same empty room, but we didn’t see the same thing. I saw a place that had been cleared out and I didn’t know what for. Angelina just saw that her fish were gone. She knew that every fisherman in the Russian River area would assume that they died because ranched fish were inferior to begin with. People who considered the fish viable would blame their death on her incompetence—that’s what
she
thought when fish died at other ranches. No one was going to believe her boss tossed them out for some reason she couldn’t come up with. So, she wasn’t thinking about Curry and his possible plans; she was caught up in what to do about this fish.”

“She could have gone over Curry’s head and called the home office.”

“She couldn’t take that chance. James Drayton, the head of Crestwood Industries, is known for his narrow, moralistic views. If she had angered Curry and he’d told Drayton that she had lived in sin before her marriage, she would have been fired—just about the time people were calling her incompetent. She could never have overcome that. There would have always been talk. And fish ranching in the Russian River would have been dead.”

He nodded.

“Angelina had worked for years to get a position like this. Running the fish ranch wasn’t just a job for her, it was a cause. With the fish ranch, she could save lives, she could triumph over the macho fishing culture that she blamed for her father’s death and her childhood poverty. How often do you get an opportunity like that? But if the fish ranch failed, everyone along the river, where she had lived her entire life, would have laughed at her.”

Harry sighed. “I guess that’s the dark side, the price some people have to pay for living in the seclusion of this area.”

Neither of us spoke as we got out of the car. I looked across North Bank Road. One of the two Warriors stood undisturbed, its top branches catching the last wisps of fog drifting in from the Pacific. Where the other Warrior had been for a thousand years, there was a sawed-off stump and the detritus of branches and cones around it. There were no laurels or eucalyptus trees near to mitigate the loss; the redwood branches had shaded the ground too completely for too many years to allow any seedling to survive. In time, Curry Cunningham would be forgotten. But the severed trunk of the downed Warrior would be a bitter loss to the people of the Russian River area. Few of us would look at that naked stump without feeling an innocence departed.

We turned and made our way through the haphazardly parked vehicles to the house. As we climbed the kitchen steps, Chris Fortimiglio poked his head out and grinned. The welcoming aroma of tomato sauce filled the air. From the living room came a roar of conversation, intermingled with flurries of laughter. Chris smiled, shook his head, then shrugged. “How can I thank you?”

“Bring me some salmon when the
Rosa
docks.”

“Some? You’ll have a whole fish every time we come in. Vejay, you can plan on eating salmon three meals a day from now on.”

“Contain yourself, I’m only one person.”

Harry put a hand on my arm. I introduced him to Chris. Chris promised him salmon, too.

“Well, come on into the living room,” he said, leading me through the doorway.

The room was even more crowded than it had been last night. Four and five people squeezed onto the sofas. Three women balanced on the edges of one ottoman and four children on another. And every foot of floor held Rosa and Chris’s friends. Swallowing hard, I realized it was like it had been at the Fortimiglios’ when I moved here, when all the winter people gathered to celebrate their friends’ good fortune.

As I walked into the room, all the talk trailed off. I spotted Rosa by the door to the porch talking to Bert Lucci. With combed hair, a clean plaid shirt, and new jeans, Bert looked like the one who had been “quite a handsome man” in Rosa’s youth. And as he gazed at Rosa he had an expression similar to Edwina Henderson’s the day I’d come upon her sitting under her Warrior. Bert put a hand on Rosa’s arm, then took her wine glass. She turned around smiling, and when she spotted me, her smile widened. Then she rushed over and hugged me, and everyone in the room cheered.

She clasped my hands. “Vejay, I’m so glad, so relieved. And Chris is …”

“I know,” I said.

“And I’m so sorry I didn’t trust you. I’m so embarrassed.”

“It’s okay. Really. I’m just glad to be your friend again.”

“I should never have made you feel you weren’t. You know Chris and I missed you, too. It was a bad time for us. But that’s all over, and you’re back.”

Before she could say anything else, I wrapped my arms around her and gave her a squeeze. I felt a tear on my cheek. I wasn’t sure if it was hers or mine.

Susan Dunlap (b. 1943) is the author of more than twenty mystery novels and a founding member of Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women in the field of crime writing.

Born in New York City, Dunlap entered Bucknell University as a math major, but quickly switched to English. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina, she taught junior high before becoming a social worker. Her jobs took her all over the country, from Baltimore to New York and finally to Northern California, where many of her novels take place.

One night, while reading an Agatha Christie novel, Dunlap told her husband that she thought she could write mysteries. When he asked her to prove it, she accepted the challenge. Dunlap wrote in her spare time, completing six manuscripts before selling her first book,
Karma
(1981), which began a ten-book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.

After selling her second novel, Dunlap quit her job to write fulltime. While penning the Jill Smith mysteries, she also wrote three novels about utility-meter-reading amateur sleuth Vejay Haskell. In 1989, she published
Pious Deception
, the first in a series starring former medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. To research the O’Shaughnessy and Smith series, Dunlap rode along with police officers, attended autopsies, and spent ten weeks studying the daily operations of the Berkeley Police Department.

Dunlap concluded the Smith series with
Cop Out
(1997). In 2006 she published
A Single Eye
, her first mystery featuring Darcy Lott, a Zen Buddhist stuntwoman. Her most recent novel is
No Footprints
(2012), the fifth in the Darcy Lott series.

In addition to writing, Dunlap has taught yoga and worked for a private investigator on death penalty defense cases and as a paralegal. In 1986, she helped found Sisters in Crime, an organization that supports women in the field of mystery writing. She lives and writes near San Francisco.