Again with feeling, p.4
Again with Feeling, page 4
part #6 of The Last Picks Series
I almost—but not quite—said, Not everybody.
“See, Viv’s only ever cared about one thing: herself. As long as she’s been alive, she’s been focused on taking care of number one, and she never cared who got hurt in the process.” She played with the vape. “Look at Neil.”
“Who’s Neil?” Bobby asked.
Bobby got a dose of Candy’s look too before she said, “Neil Carver. Her ex-husband.”
I mean, part of me had understood that, at some point, Vivienne had been married—she’d been Mrs. Vivienne Carver, after all. But I’d always assumed that Mr. Carver had gone wherever husbands who were inconvenient to the plot go. (Heaven, presumably?)
“Neil’s just the sweetest man on two legs,” Candy continued, “and Viv couldn’t even hang on to him. It’s because she’s so cold. Some girls are like that, you know? They don’t know how to have fun.” At that point, Bobby got a very different kind of look from Candy, and she took a lot of time uncrossing her legs and crossing them again. “It’s a shame, too, because Neil’s a catch, too. He and Dad still go fishing. Can you believe that?”
“You still see Mr. Carver?” I said.
“Yeah, of course.” And then, in a tone meant to suggest it was no big deal, she added, “He takes me to lunch, too. I think that’s pretty sweet, don’t you?”
I thought about how I’d feel if Hugo still wanted to go hunting with my dad or take my mom out to lunch. The politest phrase was probably blow a gasket.
“Very sweet,” I said. “Did he—”
“He could have done much better for himself,” Candy said. “He was very popular in high school, and nobody can figure out why he stuck with Viv.”
“So, they were—” I tried.
“It’s because he and Richard were best friends, of course,” Candy said over me. “And Neil’s such a sweetheart. Once he realized what a cold fish Viv was, he was in too deep. He stuck it out as long as he could, I guess.”
“Neil and Richard were best friends?” Bobby asked.
“They were all friends, the four of them, ever since they were in high school. Richard and Jane, and Neil and Viv. They were going together the whole time. They even wanted to get married on the same day, only Jane got cold feet, and that’s why Richard and Jane got married later.” Candy took another puff, and the sickly sweet vapor rolled over me. “Don’t get me started on her,” she said, which was apparently preamble for, well, getting started. “Jane never knows when she has a good thing. She and Richard were always fighting. I mean, I don’t think that’s right, do you? It’s the woman’s job to make her husband happy.” She leaned forward and laid her hand over Bobby’s. Red nails scratched lightly at his knuckles. “Don’t you think?”
Bobby pulled his hand away—politely—and said, “So, Jane is Richard’s widow?”
This time, annoyance flickered in Candy’s expression. “That’s right.” And then, as though Bobby had somehow missed something obvious, she added, “I’m divorced, you know. He left me.”
Somehow—barely—I managed to turn my laugh into a cough.
Bobby’s sneaker connected with my ankle, and my cough turned into a yelp. His voice was as untroubled as a baby’s bathwater (is that an expression?) when he said, “You mentioned arguments. Do you know what Richard and Jane were fighting about?”
“Sex. It’s always sex. Or money, I guess, but they didn’t have to worry about that. Richard had a good job at the cannery.”
As any number of mystery novels or true crime TV shows (hello, Dateline) will tell you, a good job and a healthy income have never been obstacles to arguments about money. But I decided to follow up on Candy’s obvious bait. “Was Richard having an affair?”
“What? God, no. Richard never even looked at another woman. He loved Jane. It was Jane. She was having an affair.”
The whisper of a footfall made me glance at the hall that led off from the kitchen, but I couldn’t see anyone. I hadn’t imagined the sound, though, and when I caught Bobby’s eye, I could tell he’d heard it too.
“Do you know that for a fact?” Bobby asked.
“Of course.”
“Who was Jane having an affair with?”
Candy opened her mouth to fire off the answer. Then color rushed into her cheeks, and she faltered. “I don’t know. Not exactly. But she was.”
“That sounds like a motive,” I said.
“God, no,” Candy said. “She never would have hurt Richard. Besides, she wasn’t even home that night. See, they had a big fight, and she left.” As Candy spoke, her tone changed—the gossipy thrill became more subdued, and her account began to sound formulaic. Either rehearsed, I thought, or memorized. “When she came home the next day, Richard was gone. The money, too.”
“The money?” Bobby asked.
“They always kept some money in the house. A few thousand dollars, you know. Richard said it was for emergencies. Anyway, the money was gone. So, Jane came over here—”
“She checked the money first?” I asked. “Before coming over here?”
The question interrupted Candy’s flow, and she seemed off balance for a moment before saying, “I don’t know.” She picked up the thread before I could interrupt again. “She came over here, but none of us had seen him—”
“Were you home that night?” I asked.
“Daddy was taking care of Mommy. She was super sick by then, so by the time she fell asleep, he was exhausted.”
“Right, but were you home?”
“I just said none of us had seen him!”
It was the first time her annoyance had bled through the story, and the bright edge of it made me sit up a little straighter. Something at the back of my head stirred, and I studied Candy more closely.
Bobby seemed to be considering her more carefully too. “And what happened then?”
The rote nature of Candy’s answers changed again, and what sounded like genuine emotion filtered into the words. “It was horrible. Nobody knew what had happened. He was gone, that’s all. His friends didn’t know where he was. We called the police, and they weren’t any help. They thought he’d run away and taken the money with him. By the time they really started looking, we all knew it was too late. They finally said it might have been a robbery. Might.” She laughed, and the sound had an old, jaded quality that was the first honest thing I thought I’d heard from her. “They weren’t wrong about that.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Viv,” she said, and her tone suggested that—to borrow Fox’s phrase—my cheese done slid off my cracker. “I mean, she wanted to move to Portland. That’s all she’d talk about, how she had to get away from here. But Daddy wouldn’t give her any money, and she’d already divorced Neil, and she and Richard were at it like cats and dogs all the time.”
“Vivienne and Richard fought a lot?”
“And then one day Richard’s gone, and the money’s gone, and a couple of weeks later, Viv’s gone too. Took herself off to Portland. Where’d she get that money from, that’s what I wanted to know at the time. Guess we know now.”
I tried to wrap my head around that, but Bobby was the one who spoke first. “You think Vivienne killed Richard and took his money because he wouldn’t give her enough to move to Portland?”
Candy stared at the vape pen as though she’d forgotten what it was. And then she said, “You know what she did with all that money she made? All those books? The TV show, all of it?” It was a rhetorical question because Candy answered it herself. “She spent it on herself. All of it. She never sent a dime back. You could call her up and tell her you didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and she wouldn’t give you a cent. She changed her number—did you know that? So we couldn’t bother her. Oh, sure, when Daddy got sick—”
Heavy footsteps came from the hall. Candy’s father appeared in the opening, his face dark. On my second look at him, I took in the man’s big frame. He was tall, and at some point in his life, he had been strong, but now that strength had wasted away, and he had that too-thin look some men age into. “All right, that’s enough. Get out of my house.”
Bobby only said, “Hello, sir. Who are you?”
“I’m the son of a gun—” (My words, not his.) “—who owns this house, and I want you out. Right now.”
“That would make you Arlen Lundgren, then?”
“Daddy,” Candy said, “this is Dash Dane.”
“I know who he is,” Arlen said, “and I want him out of here.”
“Mr. Lundgren—” I tried.
“They want to talk to us about Richard,” Candy said.
“Talk?” Arlen said. “Nobody wants to talk to you. If men wanted to sit around all day listening to you yap, you’d still have a husband, and I’d have some gosh darn peace and quiet.”
(Again, I’m paraphrasing.)
Tears rushed into Candy’s eyes, and her doughy cheeks filled with color. “I can talk to whoever I want. Go back to your room—”
“This is my house,” Arlen shouted and slapped the wall. The crack of the blow rang out in the tiny house, and Candy jumped out of her chair. She raced past Arlen, and a moment later, a door slammed shut. Then Arlen turned his gaze on me and Bobby.
“Mr. Lundgren,” I said, “Vivienne asked us to help—”
“That woman hasn’t been part of this family for thirty years. She’s no daughter of mine, and I don’t care what she wants or how much she told you she’d pay you.”
“No,” I said, “that’s not—”
“You get out of here. And don’t come back.”
At a nod from Bobby, I got to my feet. We’d barely made it out the door when he slammed it behind us, and as the crash faded, I thought I could hear Candy crying in the distance.
Bobby and I made our way around front, and we got in the Jeep. I started it up. And then I said, “That could have gone better.”
“Drive to the end of the street,” Bobby said.
“What?”
“Drive to the end of the street,” Bobby said again. “And park where he won’t be able to see us.”
“Wait, what—”
“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “Let’s see.”
I drove to the end of the street, turned around, and parked at the curb. The houses here all had their curtains pulled, and while I was sure that some nosy neighbor would notice us—or had already noticed us—it wasn’t like we were running a professional stakeout. This was more of the bargain bin variety—
The front door to Arlen Lundgren’s house flew open, and Candy lurched outside. She looked like a mess—even from a distance, I could tell she was crying, and although she’d changed into jeans and some sort of sparkly top, her clothes looked like they’d been thrown on. She was carrying a purse that could have doubled as a shipping container, as well as several other plastic shopping bags that—I guessed—contained whatever she could grab close at hand. One of them appeared to hold a lamp.
Arlen appeared in the doorway a moment later, steadying himself with one hand on the jamb, and he said something. Candy whirled around and screamed back at him. She was loud enough that I might have been able to make out the words, but they were distorted by her rage. Arlen snapped something back at her, but before she could reply, he went back inside and slammed the door. Candy screamed at him again. Nobody came out to check on them, and I had the feeling this wasn’t anything new. It had all the pathetic weariness of two people playing parts they’d played for years—parts they should have aged out of a long time ago.
Candy stumbled around the side of the house, in the direction of the garage and workshop I’d noticed when we’d been, uh, exploring. I waited, but a car didn’t appear. After a few minutes, Bobby nodded, and I started the Jeep again.
We were halfway to the Lundgren house when a truck turned onto the street ahead of us. It barreled down the street, well above the speed limit, and then turned sharply into the Lundgrens’ driveway. I waffled for a moment between stopping the Jeep or continuing, but I decided to continue. Stopping would have looked even more suspicious. We passed the truck as the driver got out, and he stopped, hand on top of the cab, and looked over at us.
He had a dark, refined complexion that was too different from the Lundgrens’ Scandinavian coloring for him to be a blood relation: dark hair that was thinning on top, and dark eyes. A pleasant-looking guy who wasn’t exactly handsome but probably didn’t give himself grief when he looked in the mirror. A bracelet with what I was fairly sure was a small saint medallion glittered on his wrist in the stark June sunlight, and I thought I remembered seeing it before. Then he threw the door shut and headed toward the garage. On the back of the truck, a bumper sticker said, WE AIN’T QUAINT.
I pulled to the curb again to watch.
“Someone called him,” Bobby said.
I nodded. “Want to bet that’s Neil Carver?”
“And he got here fast.”
“Did you see the bracelet?”
Bobby glanced over at me.
I thought about being mature. I thought about acting like an adult. Instead, in my too-cool voice, I said, “You know, little gold thing on his wrist.”
“I know what a bracelet is.”
“Oh. Okay.” I waited just long enough before adding, “Then you noticed it looks a lot like the one Richard Lundgren’s wearing in the picture Vivienne gave us.”
Bobby’s face doesn’t usually give a lot away.
But it was enough to make me grin.
Before I could follow up on that mixture of exasperation and what I wanted to call pique, movement behind us drew my attention. A woman stood on the stoop of the house next to Arlen Lundgren’s—the house where Richard Lundgren had been living when he’d been killed. She was White, and she was tall and wiry, with her long gray hair in a braid that fell almost to her waist. She was looking at the truck, taking nervous steps back and forth as though unsure of what to do.
The decision was taken out of her hands when the man I suspected was Neil Carver came down the drive again. He looked once in our direction, and there’s no way he could have missed the Jeep, but he didn’t storm down the street to confront us. Instead, he headed toward the house that had belonged to Richard Lundgren. The woman said something to Neil, and he shook his head and made a shooing gesture and followed her inside. He shut the door behind them without giving us another glance.
“What in the world is going on?” I asked.
Bobby shook his head, but his gaze stayed fixed on the house. “No clue. But if we’re still making bets, how much would you wager that woman is Richard Lundgren’s widow?”
Chapter 5
The Otter Slide was busy that night. Under the green-and-gold pendants, the booths were full, and every table had bodies crammed around it. More people packed the bar—along with pretty much every other square inch of floor space.
For the most part, those people were locals—the Otter Slide didn’t have the quaint, seaside-dollhouse aesthetic that so many tourists were looking for. But some of these people were out-of-towners, if only because the Otter Slide was the closest thing to a gay bar in Hastings Rock. Voices competed with the music (Seely, the bar’s owner, had declared tonight to be country night, and “Jolene” was playing at full volume over the bar’s speakers), and men and women laughed and shouted and called out drink orders and, in one case, screamed (a busty young lady who had gotten particularly excited over her latest round at the pinball machine). The air smelled like the nectar of the gods (marinara sauce, fried cheese, and of course, Seely’s hamburgers, which somehow the cook managed to do just perfectly, smashed thin on the griddle, with extra crispy edges), and I was enjoying a surprisingly delicious summer highball—some sort of variation with a hint of peach, courtesy of Bobby.
Bobby was also the reason we had managed to snag a booth—he’d been watching the other patrons like a hawk, which was one of his God-given talents, and as soon as a group of them got up, Bobby swooped in. It was a tight fit, with Bobby and Fox and me on one side, and Keme, Millie, and Indira on the other. But, if I was being honest, Keme didn’t look like the close quarters were bothering him too much.
“They’re DEFINITELY hiding something,” Millie announced.
I managed not to roll my eyes, but only because Keme was giving me a death ray-level warning look. “Right, of course they’re hiding something. The question is: what?”
Millie perked right up. She was practically vibrating with excitement. “A SECRET!”
The tourists in the next booth turned around. A guy with a wispy attempt at a mustache stared, his mouth hanging open.
I gave the group a little wave, and slowly, they turned back to their drinks.
That was when Keme kicked me.
“Ow! What did I do?”
But he just scowled at me.
“It’s all very strange,” Fox said as though nothing had happened. “And the case against Vivienne certainly seems thin. Any defense lawyer worth their salt should be able to create reasonable doubt. I mean, Richard’s relationship with his wife should be enough all on its own—the ongoing arguments, their fight the night of the murder, the fact that she was having an affair.”
“Was she having the affair with Neil?” Indira asked.
I blinked. “That possibility hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Maybe that’s why they’re married,” Millie said.
I blinked again. In the background, Dolly was begging Jolene not to steal her man. “Neil and—what’s her name? Jane?”
Millie nodded.
“They’re not married,” I said. “Neil and Vivienne were married, but they got divorced. And Richard and Jane were married, but Richard died.”
“No, Neil and Jane are married NOW.” She held up her phone. “They’re old, so they put everything on Facebook.”
I snatched the phone from her—which, I noted in my peripheral vision, earned me another dark look from Keme—and studied the screen. It was Neil Carver’s Facebook page, and sure enough, it showed that he’d married Jane Lundgren Carver in 1990.
