Wall-To-Wall Dead (29 page)

“Can we come in? There’s something we’d like to talk about.” I smiled.

Bruce hesitated for a second, but eventually he stepped back. I stepped forward, across the threshold and into a condo that was the exact replica of my own, except for the decor. Behind me, Jamie moved across the threshold, followed by Josh and Derek.

Either Bruce or Robin must like color, because the hallway was a bright burnt orange. The kitchen was sunny yellow, and the bathroom was bright blue. I could see a shower curtain with colorful tropical fish through the half-open door, as well as a little red stepstool that must be there to help Benjamin reach the sink. I thought I’d heard somewhere that primary colors are good for the development of babies’ brains, so maybe that was why Bruce and Robin had painted everything in such bright colors: to stimulate Benjamin’s brain activity. Or perhaps it was just because the little boy enjoyed it.

“This way.” Bruce walked to the door into the living room and gestured us through. I put some hustle in my step and headed that way.

Again, the room was an exact match to our own, but while ours was a mess of tools and materials right now, Bruce and Robin’s was a mess of toys and other stuff. Parenting magazines were spread across the surface of the coffee table, Benjamin’s toys littered the floor, and there were colorful balls of yarn everywhere, as well as what looked like a half-finished sweater on knitting needles in a corner of the sofa. The sofa itself had seen better days: It was a big, black leather couch that looked something like
the front seat in an old truck, and it was cracked and faded in places. It looked like Bruce might have owned it since before Robin moved in and attempted to put her feminine touches on the place.

She was sitting at the dining room table, a cheap pressed wood and white laminate construction, doing some sort of craft. When we walked through the door, she looked up, and the smile turned to a puzzled sort of look when she recognized me. When the others came in behind me, and she recognized Josh and Jamie, the puzzlement changed to fear.

I opened my mouth, but before I got the first word out, she’d gotten to her feet.

“Why don’t you go watch TV in Mommy and Daddy’s room, Benjamin?”

Benjamin looked obstinate—he was already watching TV here, and besides, he probably didn’t want to miss out on any of the adult fun—and Robin added temptingly, “I’ll get you a special snack.”

The special snack did the trick. Benjamin trotted off to the bedroom door, dragging a stuffed giraffe behind him by the neck. His own neck was twisted so he could keep his eyes glued to the television screen in the living room, where Barney the Purple Dinosaur and his friends were singing about popcorn.
Pop-pop-pop-popcorn is really neat; fun to make and fun to eat…

Welcome, earworm.

“That stuff’s like crack,” Bruce muttered, as if he’d read my mind.

“Popcorn?”

He shook his head. “Barney. I swear, there’s subliminal messages all over that show.”

Robin hid a smile. She went to the kitchen and came back a minute later with one of those kiddie cups with a spout, filled with fluorescent green liquid, and a plate with a few chocolate chip cookies.

“Not too many,” Bruce warned, “or he’ll throw up.”

Robin nodded. “I know.” She ducked into the bedroom—
I caught a glimpse of dark blue walls and a striped duvet before she pulled the door shut behind her—and after a moment, the TV kicked on in there and Barney continued to drill a hole in my head.

A few seconds later Robin was back out, and shut the door gently. “Now we have a chance at a little bit of privacy for a few minutes. Have a seat.” She gestured to the living room. Bruce and I perched awkwardly on the leather sofa with Jamie, while Derek leaned behind me. Until Bruce carried two chairs over from the dining room table and nodded to one. “Have a seat. So what’s going on?”

Robin brought the last chair over and placed it next to Bruce’s, as close as she could get to him without actually touching, before sitting down. She twined her skinny legs around the chair legs, pretzel-like.

Josh glanced at me. I looked back at him. They were his neighbors; he knew them better than I did. This news shouldn’t come from me.

“Candy’s dead,” Jamie said.

Robin shot the bedroom door a wide-eyed look, probably afraid that Benjamin had overheard. “What?”

“It’s true,” I said. “She died about an hour ago. Still in the hospital. Complications from whatever was wrong this afternoon.”

Bruce leaned back, and the cheap chair complained. “What was wrong this afternoon?”

When nobody answered, he looked at Derek. “You’re a doctor, right?”

“I used to be. Retired my license six or seven years ago. Ben Ellis is my dad.”

Bruce nodded. “What was wrong with her?”

“It looked like some kind of poisoning. Ethylene glycol maybe.”

“Shit,” Bruce said, and shot a guilty look at the bedroom door.

I turned to Derek. “What’s ethylene glycol?”

He glanced at me. “Antifreeze. Highly poisonous, easy to come by, for sale in gas stations everywhere. Tastes
sweet and mimics the effects of alcohol. It’s often used in suicide attempts, less frequently in murders, but it’s been known to happen.”

“You’ve seen it before?”

“Once,” Derek said. “I was still in medical school. The police had hauled this guy in for intoxication. When he went into cardiac arrest in the back of the police car, they drove him to the ER instead of the drunk tank.”

“What happened to him?”

“It was too late by the time they got there,” Derek said. “We couldn’t get him back.” His expression lightened. “They got the wife, though.”

“She’d ingested antifreeze, too?”

He shook his head. “She’d given it to him. In his orange juice. She’s serving twenty-five to life in some prison somewhere now.”

“So she was trying to kill him?”

“Oh, yeah. Ethylene glycol is colorless, odorless, sweet-tasting, and extremely easy to come by. It’s the perfect murder weapon, as long as you’re able to administer a big enough dose. Mix it with something sweet, and people won’t even notice they’re drinking it. Most of us have a bottle of it sitting around at home or in the car, and if we don’t, we can go to the auto parts store or a gas station and pick up a bottle.”

“Yow.” Who’d have thought something so toxic was so easy to acquire?

“I know,” Derek said.

We sat in silence for a few seconds.

“We also wanted to talk to you about something else,” Josh said eventually. “Although I wonder…”

He glanced at me. It didn’t take special powers to read his mind. I’d wondered, too, and now I wished we’d planned this a little better. Bruce’s wild youth wasn’t a secret to the people of Waterfield, many of whom had watched him in action, but Robin wasn’t from here, and it was possible he hadn’t seen the need to tell her. And although I would certainly have made sure to tell my second husband about my
first one, if I’d had one, we couldn’t be sure that Bruce knew about Robin’s previous marriage, either.

“Robin,” I said, getting to my feet, “would you mind showing me your kitchen?”

“My kitchen?” Robin repeated with a glance at Bruce. He scowled at me.

“What’s this about?”

Josh cleared his throat and drew their attention. “Before she died, Miss Shaw had gathered some information about her neighbors. All of us. Even Derek and Avery.”

Bruce and Robin exchanged a glance. “OK,” Bruce said.

“The night after she died, Jamie and I”—Josh shot a look at her—“went through her apartment. And found it.”

“It?”

“An envelope. Full of dirt she’d dug up on everyone in the building.”

Nobody said anything. In the silence, Bruce wrapped his thick fingers around Robin’s slender ones and held on. It must have been a signal of some sort, or maybe Robin just decided to stop pretending. When she looked up and across the table at us, her eyes were steady. “If this is about Guy, Bruce knows all about him.”

Ah. Well, that made things easier. I don’t think I was the only one who breathed a sigh of relief. In fact, I’m pretty sure I could see Josh become visibly less tense.

“I have no idea why she’d care,” he said apologetically. “It’s nobody’s business if you’ve been married once, or twice, or even three times…”

“Once.”

“But with everything that’s going on, we need to…what?”

Robin’s eyes were still steady, even as a wave of hot color crept into her pale cheeks. “I’ve only been married once.”

“But…” We all looked at Bruce. Unless he’d changed his name from Guy, something wasn’t right.

“I’m still married to Guy,” Robin added.

Bruce rolled his eyes. “Way to go, Roberta.”

“But…I thought the two of you were married.”

So much for our impression that the information in the envelope was harmless. Robin having a previous marriage to Guy, and a new one to Bruce, was way different from Robin being married to both of them at the same time. Divorce isn’t a crime, no, but bigamy sure is.

Robin shook her head. “I can’t divorce Guy. If I file for divorce, he’ll figure out where I am. I might even have to go back to Mobile.” The way she pronounced the name of the town, returning there sounded like a fate worse than death.

“Bad marriage?”

“You have no idea,” Bruce said grimly. He was still holding Robin’s hand, the gentle way he stroked the back of it in harsh contrast to his voice and the expression on his face.

“Did you know that Miss Shaw knew about it?”

They both nodded. “She liked to let people know that she knew things about them,” Robin whispered, echoing John Nickerson.

“It wasn’t any of her damn business—” Bruce began. But his voice broke, and his other hand, the one that wasn’t holding Robin’s, clenched into a fist on his thigh. “Somehow she got it in her head that Benjamin would be better off with his proper father. Like Guy gave a damn!”

Robin nodded. “I got pregnant out of wedlock,” she explained. “His mother made Guy ‘do the right thing—’” Her soft voice twisted as she said the words. “But his heart wasn’t in it. He’d just wanted to have some fun, he hadn’t expected me to get pregnant, and being tied down didn’t suit him at all. It wasn’t long before he started taking his frustrations out on me.”

“You mean he hit you?”

She nodded, and Bruce’s expression darkened further.

“It wasn’t so bad while I was pregnant,” Robin continued. “His mother would have killed him if he did anything to hurt the baby. But after Benjamin was born, and I
was tired all the time, and Jamin had colic and cried all night, and Guy had to stay home instead of going out with his friends…that’s when it got bad. I stood it as long as I could, and then I left.”

“Why didn’t you report him to the police and have him arrested?” That’s what I would have done. Not taken my baby and fled.

“I was afraid,” Robin said simply. Bruce patted her hand. “The Quinns are an important family, while I was some little upstart from the wrong side of the tracks who everyone thought had gotten myself in the family way so Guy would marry me.” She made a face. “The mayor was Guy’s uncle. The chief of police used to bounce him on his knee when he was little. I knew nothing would happen to Guy in Mobile.”

“How did you end up in Maine?”

“I drove to New Orleans,” Robin said, “and sold the car at a used car lot. I thought it would make Guy lose the trail. If he bothered to look for me at all, that is.”

I nodded. Around me, Josh, Jamie, and Derek were also listening intently.

“From there, I took a train to Chicago, and another train to Boston. I didn’t want to fly because there would be a record of my name if I did.”

“Why Boston?”

“It was where the train stopped,” Robin said. “And it was as far away from Mobile as I could get without going out West.”

“And Maine?”

Robin blushed and shot a glance at Bruce. He picked up the story.

“Robin and I met in Boston. She was looking for a car, and a friend of mine has a used car lot. I happened to be there when she came in.”

“I freaked out a little when I realized I had to fill out paperwork,” Robin said softly. “I didn’t want my name recorded anywhere, just in case Guy came looking for me. For Benjamin.” She looked over at the closed bedroom
door. Behind it, I could hear Winnie the Pooh singing about being short and fat and proud of that.

“We got to talking,” Bruce said, “and Robin put up the money while I put my name on the registration. I gave her my phone number and told her to call if she needed anything. Two days later she did.”

Robin was still blushing, and the look she slanted at Bruce was almost shy. “He was so nice. And he’d already been so helpful. I felt bad about imposing any more than I already had, but I didn’t know what else to do. I needed a job, but I was afraid to apply anywhere, since I thought they’d want to check references, and—”

“You didn’t want Guy to find out.”

She nodded. “So I called Bruce and asked him if he knew of something I could do, maybe under the table. I ended up telling him the whole story. He told me to drive up to Waterfield and we’d figure something out.”

“She spent a couple of months living in the spare bedroom with Benjamin,” Bruce said. “I have a job, enough to pay the bills, and she doesn’t eat much.”

He grinned at Robin, who smiled back, a little tremulously.

“Eventually we decided to try to make something more of it. That’s when we bought the rings and started telling people we were married. Robin needed a new name, just in case Guy was still looking for her.”

Robin nodded. “Guy couldn’t care less about me, or for that matter about Benjamin, but he’s still Jamin’s biological father, and he and his mother have a lot more money and power than we do. If they want Benjamin back, they can cause a lot of trouble for us.”

“And Miss Shaw figured that out?”

Bruce nodded. “I don’t know how, but she stopped me going upstairs one day, waving that damn paper in my face and asking if I knew that my ‘wife’ was already married to another man. Guess she thought Robin hadn’t told me.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

His face darkened. “Threatened to rip her tongue out if she caused any more trouble.”