Claws and effect, p.6
Claws and Effect, page 6
“I don’t know what to say.” She dropped next to him, which made his cushion rise up a little bit.
“Who just called to tell you?”
“Oh, Debbie, Jordan Ivanic’s secretary. I guess we’re all being called one by one. She said Sheriff Shaw or Deputy Cooper would be questioning us and—” She bit her lip.
“Not the most hospitable man but still.” He put his arm around her again. “I’m sorry.”
“You know, I was just in the post office with him and he was bitching and moaning about working a late shift because someone was sick or whatever. Half the time I tuned him out.” She breathed in sharply. “Now I feel guilty as hell about it.”
Randy patted her shoulder. “Everybody did that. He was boring.”
A log popped in the stove.
Tussie flinched. “You never know. How trite.” She rocked herself. “How utterly trite but it’s true. Here I work in a hospital with these desperately sick children. I mean, Randy, we know most of them haven’t a prayer but this shakes me.”
“Working with terminally ill children is your profession. Having an associate or whatever you call Hank is quite another matter . . . having him murdered, I mean. Sometimes I open my mouth and I can’t keep my tongue on track,” he apologized.
“Start one sentence and bop into the second before you’ve finished the first.” She smiled sadly. “Randy, I have to go back and work in that hospital and there’s a killer loose.” She shuddered.
“Now you don’t know that. It could have been a random thing.”
“A homicidal maniac goes to the hospital and selects Hank.”
“Well,” his voice lightened. “You know what I mean. It’s got nothing to do with you.”
“God, I hope not.” She shuddered again and he kept patting her shoulder, keeping his arm around her.
“You’ll be fine.”
“Randy, I’m scared.”
* * *
9
Once a human being reaches a certain age, death, while not a friend, is an acquaintance. Sudden death, though, always catches people off guard.
Lisa Brevard, in her early fifties, was stunned by her husband’s murder. To lose him was bad enough, but to have him murdered was doubly upsetting. She knew his faults but loved him anyway. Perhaps the same could have been said of him for her.
After Harry left the Brevards’ she, Susan, Miranda Hogendobber, and Coop had lunch at Miranda’s, she being the best cook in Crozet.
“When does Tracy get back?” Coop asked Miranda about her high-school boyfriend, who had struck up a courtship with her at their reunion last year.
“As soon as he sells the house.” She placed the last dish on the table—mashed potatoes—sat down, and held Harry’s and Coop’s hands. Coop held Susan’s hand so the circle was complete. “Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for Thy bounty to us both in food and in friendship. We ask that Thou sustain and comfort Lisa and the family in their time of sorrow. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”
“Amen,” the others echoed, as did the animals, who quickly pounced upon their dishes on the floor.
“You look wonderful, Miranda.” Susan was proud of Miranda, who had lost forty pounds.
“Men fall in love with their eyes, women with their ears.” Miranda smiled.
Coop glanced up, fork poised in midair. “I never thought of that.”
“The Good Lord made us differently. There’s no point complaining about it. We have to accept it, besides”—Miranda handed the bowl to her left—“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Wh-o-o-o.” Harry raised her eyebrows.
“Don’t start, Harry.” Miranda shot her a glance, mock fierce.
“I hope Tracy sells that house in Hawaii fast.” Harry heaped salad into her bowl.
“I do, too. I feel like a girl again.” Miranda beamed.
They talked about Tracy and others in the town but the conversation kept slipping back to Hank Brevard.
“Cooper, are you holding back?” Harry asked.
“No. It takes us time to piece together someone’s life and that’s what we have to do with Hank. Whatever he was, whatever he did, someone wanted him dead. Big time.”
“He couldn’t have, say, surprised someone doing—” Susan didn’t finish her sentence as Harry jumped in.
“In the boiler room of the hospital?”
“Harry, someone could have been throwing evidence into the boiler,” Susan defended herself.
“Most likely the incinerator.” Cooper then described the bowels of the hospital building to them. “So you see, given the corridors, whoever did this knew their way around.”
“Someone who works there,” Miranda said.
“Or someone who services equipment there. We have to run down every single contractor, repairman, delivery boy who goes in and out of that place.”
“What a lot of work,” Miranda exclaimed. “Like that old TV show, Dragnet. You do throw a net over everything, don’t you?”
Cooper nodded. “And sooner or later, Miranda, something turns up.”
And so it did, but not at all where they thought it would.
* * *
10
“Oh boy.” Harry closed the post office door behind her just as Rob Collier pulled up to the front door. She hurried through and opened the front door. “Monday, Monday.”
“I’ve got stuff for you,” he sang out as he hauled canvas bags stuffed with mail.
“Valentine’s Day. I forgot.” She grimaced as he tossed two extra bags onto the mailroom floor.
“Just think of all the love in those bags,” he joked.
“You’re in a good mood.”
“I already got my Valentine’s Day present this morning.”
“No sex talk, Rob, I’m too delicate.”
He grinned at her, hopped back in the big mail truck, and took off in the direction of White Hall, where a small post office awaited him.
“Think Mom got any love letters?” Tucker tugged at one of the bags.
“I don’t think she cares. She has to sort her mail the same as everybody else’s,” Murphy replied.
“Saint Valentine. There ought to be a Saint Catnip or how about a Saint Tuna?” Pewter, having eaten a large breakfast, was already thinking about lunch at seven-thirty in the morning. “I bet there wasn’t even a real person called Valentine.”
“Yes, there was. He was a third-century martyr killed in Rome on the Flaminian Way under the reign of Claudius. There are conflicting stories but I stick to this one,” Mrs. Murphy informed her gray friend.
“How do you know all that?” Pewter irritatedly asked.
“Whatever Harry reads I read over her shoulder.”
“Reading bores me,” Pewter honestly answered. “Does it bore you, Tucker?”
“No.”
“Tucker, you can hardly read.”
“Oh yes I can.” The corgi glared at Murphy. “I’m not an Afghan hound, you know, obsessed with my appearance. I’ve learned a few things in this life. But I don’t get what a murdered priest has to do with lovers. Isn’t Valentine’s Day about lovers?”
With a superior air, Murphy lifted the tip of her tail, delicately grooming it, and replied, “The old belief was that birds pair off on February fourteenth and I guess since that was the day Valentine was murdered somehow that pairing became associated with him.”
“I’m sorry I’m late.” Miranda bustled through the back door. “I overslept.”
Harry, up to her elbows in mail, smiled. “You hardly ever do that.”
They had spoken Sunday about the murder of Hank Brevard and, with that shorthand peculiar to people who have known one another a long time or lived through intense experiences together, they hopped right in.
“Accident?” Miranda placed packages on the shelves, each of which had numbers and letters on them so large parcels could be easily retrieved.
“Impossible.”
“I guess I’m trying to find something—” A rap on the back door broke her train of thought.
“Who is it?” Harry called out.
“Miss Wonderful.”
“Susan.” Harry laughed as her best friend opened the door. “Help us out and make tea, will you? Rob showed up early and I haven’t started a pot. What are you doing here this early, anyway?”
Susan washed out the teapot at the small sink in the rear. “Brooks’ Volvo is in the shop so I dropped her at school. Danny’s off on a field trip so I had to do it.” Dan, her son, would be leaving for college this fall. “I swear that Volvo Ned bought her must be the prototype. What a tank but it’s safe.”
“What’s the matter with it?” Miranda asked.
“I think the alternator died.” She put tea bags in three cups, then came over to help sort mail until the water boiled. “You’d think most people would have mailed out their Valentine’s cards before today.”
“They did, but today”—Harry surveyed the volume of mail—“is just wild. There aren’t even that many bills in here. The bills roll in here next week.”
The teakettle whistled. “Okay, girls, how do you want your tea?”
“The usual,” both called out, which meant Harry wanted hers black and Miranda wanted a teaspoon of honey and a drop of cream.
Susan brought them their cups and she drank one, too.
“Murphy, what are you looking at?”
“This Jiffy bag smells funny.” She pushed it.
Pewter and Tucker joined her.
“Yeah.” Pewter inhaled deeply. “Addressed to Dr. Bruce Buxton.”
Puzzled, Tucker cocked her head to the right and then to the left. “Dried blood. Faint but it smells like dried blood.”
The cats looked at one another and then back to Tucker, whose nose was unimpeachable.
“All right, you guys. No messing with government property.” Harry snatched the bag, read the recipient’s name, then placed it on the bookshelves, because it was too large for his brass mailbox. “Ned tell you anything?” she asked Susan.
“No. Client relationship.”
Susan’s husband, a trusted and good lawyer, carried many a secret. Tempted though he was at times, he never betrayed a client’s thoughts or deeds to his wife.
“Is Bobby Minifee under suspicion?” Miranda put her teacup on the divider between the public space and the work space.
“No. Not really,” Susan replied.
“Anyone seen Coop?” Harry shot a load of mail into her ex-husband’s mailbox.
“No. Working overtime with all this.” Susan looked on the back of a white envelope. “Why would anyone send a letter without a return address, the mail being what it is. No offense to you, Harry, or you, Miranda.”
“None taken.” Harry folded one sack, now emptied. “Maybe they get busy and forget.”
At eight on the dot, Marilyn Sanburne stood at the front door just as Miranda unlocked it.
“Good morning. Oh, Miranda, where did you get that sweater? The cranberry color compliments your complexion.”
“Knitted it myself.” The older woman smiled. “We’ve got so much mail—well, there’s some mail in your box but you’d better check back this afternoon, too.”
“Fine.” Little Mim pulled out her brass mailbox key, opened the box, pulling out lots of mail. She quickly flipped through it, then loudly exclaimed, “A letter from Blair.”
“Great.” Harry spoke quickly because Little Mim feared Harry had designs on the handsome model herself, which she did not.
“I also wanted you ladies to be the first to know that I’ve rented the old brick pharmacy building and it’s going to be my campaign headquarters.”
“That’s a lot of space,” Harry blurted out.
“Yes.” Little Mim smiled and bid them good-bye.
They watched as she got into her car and opened Blair’s letter. She was so intent upon reading it that she didn’t notice her mother pull up next to her.
Mim parked, emerged well-dressed as always, and walked over to the driver’s side of her daughter’s car. Little Mim didn’t see her mother, so Big Mim rapped on the window with her forefinger.
Startled, Little Mim rolled down the window. “Mother.”
“Daughter.”
A silence followed. Little Mim had no desire to share her letter, and she wasn’t thrilled that her mother saw how engrossed she was in it.
Shrewdly, she jumped onto a subject. “Mother, I’ve rented the pharmacy.”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Zeb Berryhill called your father and wondered if he would be upset and your father said he would not. In fact, he was rather looking forward to a challenge. So that was that.”
“Oh.” Little Mim, vaguely disappointed, slipped the letter inside her coat. She was hoping to be the talk of the town.
“It must be good.”
“Mother, I have to have some secrets.”
“Why? Nobody else in this town does,” said the woman who had secrets going back decades.
“Oh, everyone has secrets. Like the person who killed Hank Brevard.”
“M-m-m, there is that. Well, I’m off to a Piedmont Environmental Council meeting. Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“You, too, Mumsy.” Little Mim smiled entirely too much.
As she drove off, Big Mim entered the post office just as Dr. Buxton pulled into the parking space vacated by her daughter. At that moment her irritation with her daughter took over the more pressing gossip of the day.
“Girls,” Mim addressed them, “I suppose you’ve heard of Marilyn’s crackbrained plan to oppose her father.”
“Yes,” came the reply.
“Not so crackbrained,” Pewter sassed.
Bruce walked in behind her, nodded hello to everyone, opened his box, and almost made it out the door before Miranda remembered his package. “Dr. Buxton, wait a minute. I’ve got a Jiffy bag for you.”
“Thanks.” He joined Mim at the divider.
She placed her elbows on the divider. “Bruce, what’s going on at the hospital? The whole episode is shocking.”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t the most pleasant guy in the world but I don’t think that leads to murder. If it did a lot more of us would be dead.” He looked Big Mim right in the eye.
“Was that your attempt at being subtle?” She bridled when people didn’t properly defer to her.
“No. I’m not subtle. I’m from Missouri, remember?”
“Two points.” Murphy jumped onto the divider, Pewter followed.
“Let me out,” Tucker asked Harry, because she wanted to be right out there with Bruce and Mim.
“Crybaby.” Harry opened the swinging door and the corgi padded out to the public section.
“You and Truman.” Mim rapped the countertop with her long fingernails.
“Here we go.” Miranda slid the bag across the counter.
“Ah.” He squeezed the bag, examined the return address, which was his office at the hospital. “Huh,” he said to himself but out loud. He flicked up the flat red tab with his fingernail, pulling it to open the top. He shook the bag and a large bloody scalpel fell out. “What the hell!”
* * *
11
Coop placed the scalpel in a plastic bag. Rick turned his attention to Dr. Bruce Buxton, not in a good mood.
“Any ideas?”
“No.” Bruce’s lower jaw jutted out as he answered the sheriff.
“Oh, come on now, Doc. You’ve got enemies. We’ve all got enemies. Someone’s pointing the finger at you and saying, ‘He’s the killer and here’s the evidence.’”
Bruce, a good four inches taller than Rick, squared his shoulders. “I told you, I don’t know anyone who would do something like this and no, I didn’t kill Hank Brevard.”
“Wonder how many patients he’s lost on the table?” Pewter, ever the cynic, said.
“He probably lost more due to bedside manner than incompetence,” Mrs. Murphy shrewdly noted.
“He’s not scared. I can smell fear and he’s not giving off the scent.” Tucker sniffed at Bruce’s pants leg.
