Blood on Their Hands (Mystery Writers of America Presents: MWA Classics) Page 14

  Not that mine was much better. I’d lost my husband when my daughter was only ten. I hadn’t been to his grave since she moved away. Was it five years already? We used to make an annual pilgrimage on his birthday to bring flowers and clean off the stone. But now, I’d even given up wondering why he died, or what would have happened if he’d lived.

  And here I was back in a graveyard. I patted the dirt smooth around the flower and whispered, “Take care of this one, Jen. Rest in peace.” I splashed a bottleful of water around the base, then stood. The petals drooped noticeably.

  I sighed and closed my eyes. I knew what I had to do.

  I went directly to Mel’s.

  “Whose boat?” I asked him as I stepped on the brass rail to take a seat at the bar. Two spaces of the parking lot had been given over to a Grady White pleasure boat with a prominent homemade for sale sign.

  His mouth opened, then he froze for a moment. “Um, ah...well...let me get you a beer.” He strode over to the tap, selected a tall glass from the freezer, and studied the amber liquid foaming down its tilted side.

  Red heat seared my face in spite of the air-conditioning. “That’s not...?”

  Mel nodded as he set a coaster on the polished bar, then placed my glass exactly center. He couldn’t meet my gaze, and rightly so.

  “And you’re letting him sell it here?” I let the heat flush through my whole body. I didn’t reach for the glass. “I thought you were Jenny’s friend.”

  “Come on now, Barb...” Mel inched the beer closer. “It’s not like he pushed her or anything. It was an accident.”

  “If Greg Stevens wants to have an accident on his boat, then he should be the dead one.” I jumped off the stool. “Not Jenny.”

  “Maybe if life was fair,” he whispered. “But it sure hasn’t been for me.” He shot a piercing look at me. “Not for any of us.”

  I thought about his youngest, sick with leukemia, and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Yeah, you’re right, Mel.” I straddled the stool, raised my glass, and gulped a mouthful of foam before I hit the cool brew. After a swallow and a shrug, I added, “I just want to know what happened. Maybe...make some sense of it all.”

  “I can’t make sense of anything.” His eyes glittered with tears. “Not one damn thing!” Mel turned abruptly and grabbed the remote. He cleared his throat several times as he stared at the TV screen.

  One elbow balanced on the bar’s edge, I leaned my chin on my hand and watched with him. Swatches of color and unintelligible bits of noise flashed past—lives never completed. I took a slug of beer to clear my own throat.

  Mel stopped clicking when he hit the golf channel, vistas of green as far as the camera could see and the soothing tones of a whispering announcer.

  I zoned out everything else until I finished my beer. After a trip to the ladies room, I found another draft waiting. “Thanks,” I said, sliding back onto the stool.

  “Least I can do.” Mel dabbed a cloth at a drop on the counter. “Some bartender I turned out to be. Geez! I’m supposed to cheer people up.” He shook his head and straightened my coaster. “I’m sorry. I know you must be hurting.”

  “I just want to know how it happened.” And understand why. But was that possible?

  “They were here that afternoon.” He polished as he spoke, shining the laminated counter as if rubbing would improve its finish. “Drinking heavy.” He stopped and stared straight into my eyes. “You want to blame somebody. I’m your man. So lost in my own sorrows, I sold them a case without a thought for what could happen.”

  “You didn’t put them on the boat, send them out to sea.” I picked up my glass, and another drop of condensation hit the bar.

  “No, I didn’t. Didn’t make them drink it either.” He rubbed at the drop. “But I had my part in it, didn’t I? Didn’t we all?”

  Not me, I thought, draining my glass.

  Mel worked on another section of the bar, drawing circles with the rag.

  Experience told me he was finished talking. I tossed a couple of bucks on the counter and left him to his ritual.

  Two beers and here I was out in the parking lot, drunk enough to sneak aboard The Scavenger. With sweaty hands, I grabbed hold of the ladder and boosted myself to the first step. Well, I had a right, and one not gained solely from the bottle. Jenny was my friend and more—my confidant, a coconspirator in the endless battle to win at life, and maybe, one of the few who could understand my pain. The last step of the ladder creaked as I bounded onto the deck, blinking against the brilliance of the sun.

  It shone too brightly in a world without Jenny.

  The boat’s scuffed wood trim and reeking, mildewed carpet spoke of years of heavy use. I held my breath as I descended into the cabin. A built-in table and cushioned benches provided seating in the open area. A tiny bathroom lay forward and sleeping quarters aft. According to the newspaper report, Greg and the others didn’t hear a sound as Jenny fell to her death. Too drunk to watch where she stepped.

  Not the Jenny I knew.

  Covered with sweat and lungs complaining, I burst out of the cabin.

  A man’s head and wide shoulders appeared above the railing. “Can I help you?” he asked. He swung his legs on deck.

  “That depends,” I said, lifting one hand to shade my eyes. “Are you Greg?”

  He smiled. “Yup, the boat’s mine. Needs a little work, but—”

  “I don’t care crap about the boat.”

  His smile faded. “And you are?” He stepped toward me.

  “I’m Barbara, as in Jenny’s best friend Barbara.” I held my place.

  Greg turned sideways and sighed. “Oh, yeah, I remember Jenny told me you were away. At your daughter’s or something, right?”

  “What happened?” I turned to face him. “What did you do to Jenny?”

  “Huh? I don’t know what you’re thinking, lady. It’s what she did to me.”

  “That’s a laugh. She’s the one who’s dead.”

  “On my boat...I used to love the ocean.” He gripped the rail. “I was out on her every chance I could get. Not anymore.” He wrenched his hands to his sides. “That’s why I’m selling her. I’ve been a fisherman all my life. Now, I can’t even look at the sea.”

  “I repeat, it’s Jenny who’s dead.”

  He leaned into my face. “And you’d rather it was me. Well, let me tell you, lady—so would I.” He twisted away and stomped toward the ladder.

  “Wait!” I yelled and dodged after him. “Wait.”

  Greg paused at the bottom of the ladder and squinted up at me. “Why?”

  “Jenny was my friend. I’ve got to know.”

  He shrugged. “Seems to me you’ve already made up your mind.”

  I swallowed hard. I wouldn’t say please. “You owe me that much.” I scuttled down the ladder as he considered my statement. He’d have to refuse me face to face. I stood between him and the entrance to Mel’s. “What happened to Jenny?”

  “You don’t want to hear this.” He shook his head and sighed, then met my unwavering gaze. “I think...she jumped.”

  “You’re a liar. Jenny wouldn’t.” No way. My brain said get out of there, but my feet wouldn’t respond.

  “I don’t know what else to think.” He looked off into the distance. “We sailed out to watch the stars and started drinking boilermakers. We were making toasts with each round, giggling and joking. Just having a grand old time.

  “Jenny insisted we had to find the Big Dipper. We all staggered on deck. By that time, we couldn’t tell one constellation from another. I started making jokes about dippers. Me and Bill got thirsty from laughing so much and went down for another drink.” Greg shook his head. “Like we hadn’t had enough already. Susie had to go to the john. Jenny stayed topside. I never saw her again.”

  “Then how can you say she jumped?”

  “Look, the front of the boat has rails. Back here the sides are as high as your knees. You don’t just fall over them.”

  “
Then somebody must have pushed her.”

  “You’re crazy, lady. As crazy as your friend. She as good as told me she was going to jump.”

  “When? Why? Sounds like more lies.”

  “Believe what you want, but at the bar, she told me drowning was a good way to die. It couldn’t hurt half as much as living. If I’d known she was serious, I’d have run away in one hot minute.”

  I couldn’t listen any longer. I forced my feet to respond and sprinted to my car. Inside, with a shaky hand, I turned the key. I floored the gas and zoomed out of the parking lot. The radio blared Weather Report’s “Birdland,” and with each note my mind replayed the words, “Jenny jumped.” I snapped off the sound. Greg was wrong. He had to be!

  Then why did one part ring true? Jenny had told me once about a riptide that pulled her out to sea. Far from shore, battered and exhausted, she gave up and let the waves take her. She closed her eyes and waited for death, but instead, thudded up on shore far from her blanket. “I guess it wasn’t my time,” she’d said, “but that’s the way to die, being rocked to sleep by Mother Nature.” She’d laughed.

  If she had fallen in, half-drunk, could she have closed her eyes and waited?

  Blinking away tears, I slammed on my brakes too late, swerved, and rammed the back of a van.

  The road service towed my car to a body shop. With the bumper crunched in toward the tire, I couldn t drive it, but the garage assured me it wouldn’t be a big job. I figured it wasn’t half as big as the one I was tackling.

  A tall, thin mechanic with half-moons of grease under his fingernails gave me a ride home and left me with instructions to call my insurance agent. I promised I would, much as I didn’t look forward to the hassle. Insurance companies brought up bad memories.

  My husband’s suicide.

  Them dragging their feet with the payment. Me falling behind on the mortgage. Sandra and I almost out on the street. Bad as my marriage had been, I was used to it. I knew what to expect—late nights, alcoholic fights, and a next-day apology when he swore it would never happen again. Financial hell wasn’t much better. A nameless, faceless bank stealing my home. How could I fight back?

  That’s when my friendship with Jenny blossomed. She stepped in with advice, even recommended a lawyer. One letter from the uptown lawyer, and the insurance company paid up. I owed her a lot. Thinking about her good deeds and caring nature eased the tension between my shoulder blades, and I relaxed with a deep breath.

  Fifteen minutes later, no-car-phobia kicked in. My mind kept presenting all these places I needed to go—if I only had transportation. The trouble was, I did—Jenny’s car, a cute little red sports car, she’d left me. It sat in the garage with a couple of boxes of pictures and mementos on the back seat ever since the registration was transferred to me. Jenny s cousin had taken many things, but was selling the rest and had boxed what Jenny wanted me to have. I hadn’t gathered the gumption to go through it yet.

  I didn’t have to actually look at the pictures to use the car. I could just move the boxes off the back seat onto the garage floor. They would get lost in the collection of newspapers, boxes, and exercise equipment that littered my garage. Maybe I’d never have to deal with them. I was sure I’d forget all about them once I arrived at the mall. Shopping, every woman’s opiate, would take care of that.

  The car’s tires looked dangerously low, so I made my first stop a service station with an air pump. When the bell stopped ringing on the last tire, I remembered the donut. It had to need air. I popped open the trunk and tossed aside a worn navy windbreaker, an old clothesline, and a small black leather case that felt heavy. A softball, bat, and glove were stuffed into one corner, a plastic garbage bag, probably keeping an emergency blanket clean, in another. As I filled the shameful excuse for a tire foisted on the American public by some cost-savings mogul at the auto companies, I stared at the leather case, wondering what it contained. If it was anything valuable, I should call Jenny’s cousin and let her know.

  The donut didn’t look much better after I filled it, but that’s how they were. I wrapped the hose around the air pump’s lever. Before slamming the trunk, I grabbed the case. I tossed it on the passenger seat, then started the car. Soon, I found an opening and pulled into the traffic building on Route 18. Of course, the light at Tices Lane turned red. As I waited, I unzipped the case and flipped open the top.

  A gun! My foot slipped from the brake. I jammed it back on, and the car jerked abruptly. What was Jenny doing with a gun? A horn blared behind me, and when I glanced up, I saw the light had changed. I passed Tices Lane and took the next turn, driving on automatic pilot until I found myself back at my house. After turning off the car, I pressed myself against the seat back, held my hands over my eyes, and let my mind whirl, trying to assimilate the gun into what I knew of Jenny.

  I stumbled into the house, pushed aside a pile of strewn mail, and gingerly placed the case on the kitchen table. It might be loaded. I didn’t even know how to check. I flipped open the case again. The gun had a chrome finish with a fake pearl handle. On the side, the manufacturer had etched in two halves of a snake with the letters “BOA” in between. Below that, it read “CAL .25 Auto Pat. Pend.” I wondered if Jenny had registered it. Should I call the police to check? And if she hadn’t? What about her cousin? She might know something. How would I start the conversation? I had to think.

  Wait a minute, it might not even be Jenny’s gun. That made the most sense. She was holding it for a male friend. But who? And how did I get it back to him? I sure didn’t want to keep it. I grabbed the case and started toward the car. Bad idea. There was no way I could drive knowing the gun was rolling around the trunk. I returned to the kitchen, extracted the gun, careful not to touch the trigger, and turned the case inside out. No license. No bullets. That proved my theory. If it was hers, she’d have both. Relieved, I slipped the gun back in the case and stuck it in the rear of the pantry behind some vegetarian beans I’d bought with healthy thoughts in mind, but never eaten.

  I headed out to the mall again and ended up at the library, standing in line at the reference desk, prepared with a most outrageous lie. The librarian had sympathetic eyes, obviously corrected by contacts from the way she held them so wide open.

  “I need to find some books on guns,” I started.

  Her eyes opened even wider.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “This guy I just started dating…”

  She nodded, her eyes sympathetic once more, perhaps a casualty of the dating game herself. “Let’s try The Shooter’s Bible to start with,” she said and hustled me off.

  By the time I left the library, I knew the gun’s make, model, and date of origin. It used a magazine that held seven shots. The magazine would release with a button, so I could see if it was loaded. And as far as the librarian was concerned, she’d helped the cause of true love.

  But none of this information told me who owned the gun. I popped open the trunk in the parking lot. Maybe the license had fallen out. The windbreaker had a huge pocket in front. I fished out a ski hat, gloves, and...a magazine chock-full of bullets. Oh, Jenny! I slammed the trunk.

  After opening the car door, I sank into the driver’s seat, fighting nausea. I had never realized the depth of Jenny’s fear. No wonder she wanted a guardian angel. She needed protection in case her brutal ex-husband showed up. She hadn’t told me much about her life with him. Just that running away from home was the smartest thing she’d ever done. Yet, she must have been prepared for a battle royal if she was carrying a gun. I swallowed a mouthful of bile. For all of my professed friendship and loyalty, I hadn’t even suspected.

  I cleared my throat, trying to quash the vile taste of partially digested beer. Jenny had been fearful of reprisal from her ex, and now, she was dead.

  Maybe Greg or Bill knew him...maybe, one of them, or even both. That would make sense. They covered for each other. They’d pushed her off the boat because she’d left the guy, wounding his ego. I knew all the classic s
igns, having been there myself and having escaped by a tiny piece of luck—my husband had ultimately chosen to turn his violence against himself.

  I ran back into the library and looked in the phone book, waving my helpmate back to her reference desk. A petite woman named Susie had also been on the boat that night. If she’d heard something or knew something...I owed it to Jenny to find out.

  I found her address quickly, an apartment complex nearby. Stopping by a liquor store on the way would guarantee me a greeting as an old friend, even though the only thing we had in common was Mel’s.

  I was right about the invitation, only Susie had started without me. I gritted my teeth. There wasn’t enough liquor in the world to alleviate guilt. She needed to confess, and I would listen until she did.

  “Which one pushed her?” I asked, watching carefully in case I needed to dodge a spill, as she poured the last of her bottle of wine into my cup.

  “What you talking about, girl?” She hiccuped and erupted into peals of laughter.

  “Jenny. I’m talking about Jenny. And I’m going to keep talking about Jenny until you tell me.”

  “You gonna open that?” She pointed to the bottle of cheap Merlot I’d set on a cork coaster so I wouldn’t chip the glass in her coffee table. Although she had a set of wineglasses on display in a china cabinet, we drank from nine-ounce plastic cups.

  “As soon as I get an answer,” I said. “Remember that night on the boat with Jenny?”

  “Yeah, now, that girl could drink. Didn’t like none of that beer either.” Susie gulped a mouthful of wine. “No, classy stuff. Like what you brought. Had to have a cork for her.”

  Some of that was true anyway. Jenny liked good wine. “So she was drinking wine?”

  “Yeah, the guys told her switch to beer. They were so drunk! You know how drunk they were?” She leaned close and stabbed me with a long purple fingernail.