Dead Body Language (2 page)

“What can I do for you, Ms. Penzance?” I asked, after a warming swallow of do-it-yourself mocha.

Lacy glanced around, licked her lips, then began to speak. I studied her nearly motionless mouth, feeling the onset of a headache from the intense concentration.

“I can’t talk to you here. Could you buy one of these raffle tickets for the frog-jumping contest this weekend? Everyone will assume that’s what we’re talking about. Then I’ll meet you—” She looked down at her purse and I missed the rest.

I reached a hand forward. “I’m sorry—what? You’ll meet me …?”

“I’ve got to go,” she interrupted, suddenly looking a little frantic. “Twenty minutes. In your office. Please. It’s about my sister … she’s missing …”

I thought that’s what she said anyway. Before I could clarify, she cut me off again and I missed what she said. She had a frustrating habit of interrupting me. It couldn’t
have been much—a couple of words—but I was really curious as to what she wanted from me.

After all, this was Lacy Penzance, widow of Reuben Penzance, former mayor who had recently relocated to Pioneer Cemetery. She was an icon in Flat Skunk, a relic of elegance and wealth from the heydays of the gold rush in this now rustic, gold-stripped town. When she wasn’t selling tickets for charity, Lacy spent most of her time living alone in the Victorian Penzance mansion over on Penzance Street, not far from the renovated Penzance Hotel.

The storefronts, when not sporting some form of the word “gold” to attract tourists, often featured the name “Penzance”: Penzance Video Rental Store stood next to ’Nother Lode Diaper Service, Penzance Development and Real Estate rented space adjacent to the Slim Chance Health Spa. You couldn’t take two steps without seeing the ubiquitous name.

In the early 1900’s the Penzance family had attempted to rechristen the town after themselves. But the residents wouldn’t hear of it. The name Flat Skunk lingered like a bad odor. It could have been worse. Many of the original Mother Lode town names are unprintable. The rest are just as creative as Flat Skunk: Gomorrah, Humbug, You Bet, Whiskey Slide, Poker Flat, and Git-Up-And-Git. I’d meet her if only to find out what could be so important that she needed me. Hopefully Jeremiah Mercer, my part-time assistant, would be there to interpret for me. I didn’t want to miss a word.

“Fine. My office,” I said. I hoped I said it quietly.

“That will be four dollars, please.” This time I had no trouble reading her lips. Her exaggerated mouth movements were no doubt a performance for the onlookers. So, she was going to stiff me for a pair of frog-jumping tickets I didn’t even want. If it was a scam, she was quite a con artist.

I forked over the cash and thanked her for the tickets with little enthusiasm. I stuffed them into my jeans pocket as she moved on to the next unsuspecting diners. Curious to see her try to stiff them with her sales technique, I
slurped my not-quite-mocha and unfolded the napkin with the mystery puzzle.

“Got a deadline, Connor?” Sheriff Mercer asked, as he stopped by my table on his way to the cash register. At least, that’s what I thought he said. It wasn’t easy reading his lips with that toothpick dangling from his mouth. Thank God he had given up the tobacco-chewing habit that was so popular around Skunk.

“Eight thirty-seven in the morning is much too early to be planning the perfect murder, Sheriff. Deadline or no deadline.”

“Who you gonna kill off this week? I got the one last week. I knew the dentist did it. You never fooled me.” He grinned proudly and tapped the table with a sausage finger.

“Might as well give it up, Connor. We’ll take care of any mysterious murders that occur around here. You better stick to writing the obituaries.” He hoisted up his khaki pants at the waist and sauntered out the door as if he didn’t have a care in the world. That calm exterior was what made Sheriff Mercer so effective in his job. And damn if he didn’t solve every one of my mystery puzzles.

I stared out the window at the bubble-gum blossoms of the flowering plums that framed the old Pioneer Cemetery across the way. Those pink puffs gave the crusty old mining town an incongruously delicate fluffy trim, like the cake crumbling with age in
Great Expectations
. Around here it didn’t matter if I couldn’t hear the hoot of the owls or the rustle of the rivers—I could feel the heartbeat of the forty-niners in the antique town I now called home. I didn’t miss San Francisco a bit; I loved everything about the Mother Lode.

In the early mining days, murder had been a preferred form of recreation in this Mother Lode town of Flat Skunk. According to my Cornish great-grandmother, Sierra Westphal, 836 gold-diggers were axed, hacked, hanged, shot, or stabbed to death during the five years that followed the 1848 discovery of gold in California. Sierra, or Grancy as my father used to call his grandmother, wrote in her tattered diary: “If you ask me, the mortuary is
the real gold mine in this Califoyrna town.” She’s partly responsible for my being here.

Back then, more brothels and saloons flanked the muddy “gold-paved” streets than all the churches, banks, mortuaries, and jails put together. Today the gold country is part of California’s attic, a tame collection of tourist traps, trendy boutiques, bed-and-breakfast inns, and bogus gold-mining expeditions. About the only threat to safety is stepping into the line of fire of a tobacco-chewing spit-shooter.

And this coffee.

“More?” asked Jilda, crinkling up a Cornish nose that was common among long-time residents from Rough & Ready to Angel’s Camp.

She relaxed her squint and poked at her frizzy, permed hair with sparkling fingernails. I’d made a promise to myself early on not to take her up on her offer of a free introductory manicure. Otherwise I’d probably be sporting bejeweled inch-long acrylic nails, dipped in Neon Magenta.

“Didja hear me, Con?” she said, raising the coffee pot to illustrate her question.

“Got an antidote?” I replied as she poured. Before I settled here, I used to think any mouth-breather could work at a diner like the Nugget if they could chew gum while using a pencil and didn’t have cholera. But Jilda’s ability to pour coffee from a height of three feet without spilling a drop had changed one of my many stereotypical attitudes.

I tried to shake my thoughts back to the matter at hand—my weekly deadline—as I stared at the false front of the hotel across the street. The bucolic picture faded from view as one of the town’s good ol’ boys headed toward the café from across the street. The man’s lumbering gait and self-conscious mannerisms distracted me from the frothy view of the trees and my halfhearted attempt at completing the next mystery puzzle.

Mickey Arnold, wearing the ubiquitous 501’s and a khaki sheriff’s department shirt, grinned, waved, and needlessly tucked in the shirt as he approached the café
window. It wasn’t vanity that caused him to straighten up, more like insecurity, I thought.

I waved back at the thirty-something deputy sheriff, even though his body language was telling me more than I wanted to read. Despite being deaf, I don’t possess super X-ray vision as some “hearies” seem to think. Where I am not able to notice a change in tone of voice or notice a subtle vocal nuance, I can read a face and interpret body language well enough to see what many hearing people overlook. A twitch of an eyebrow or a shift in body weight often speaks louder than words.

Did Mickey realize his current swagger and strut were shouting all kinds of messages? It didn’t matter—all that was about to change dramatically. The still attractive, impeccably dressed Lacy Penzance, her attention focused on the tickets she was stuffing into her bag, was moving toward the door—and heading right toward Mickey.

I waved a warning hand at him, but he apparently mistook it for flirtation. He gave the window reflection another glance, smoothed his buzz-cut hair, and checked his belt for kinks and twists.

“Watch out!” I mouthed through the glass. But Deputy Arnold was too busy primping to read my lips. I’m self-conscious when I raise my voice in public. When I lose control, I’m told I sound squeaky and distorted. I held back for a few moments, then yelled just as he made a turn. Too late.

Too bad, because he didn’t look at all attractive in the Nugget Café doorway, sprawled on top of a startled, gasping Lacy Penzance.

The impact was solid and forceful, obvious from the aftermath. I almost felt it myself. Lacy’s roll of tickets and the contents of her purse had scattered in all directions—under tables, counters, and feet—while the deputy’s hat and sunglasses bit the dust at top speed. He’d smacked into Lacy Penzance so hard, it’s a wonder he hadn’t knocked her unconscious.

Perhaps if he had, I wouldn’t have gotten poison oak, my underwear would still be in my top drawer, and a few more Flat Skunk citizens would still be alive.

A
s several diner patrons jumped to the rescue, I stared at the usually immaculate Lacy Penzance as she lay gasping at the bottom of the wreckage.

The self-styled first lady of Flat Skunk had been flattened like road kill, her belongings spiraled out around her. I felt sorry for her.

Deputy Arnold clambered to his feet, his face a kaleidoscope of colors. After awkwardly assisting the disheveled woman to an upright position, he knelt down and fumbled with her spilled purse and tangled frog-jumping tickets. I watched him gather up an assortment of coins, keys, papers, letters, makeup, pills, tissues, and other can’t-live-without items and stuff them into her purse. By the time he’d brushed Lacy off and offered his apology, he’d long forgotten about me.

But as flustered and self-conscious as the deputy was by the encounter, Lacy Penzance appeared unruffled. Three generations of cold hard cash did wonders for a person’s carriage, equilibrium, and self-confidence. Although her skirt was slightly off center and her blouse
modeled a new smudge, she moved away from the spectacle as gracefully as if she had just danced
Swan Lake
.

When the performance was over I told myself to get back to work before I caused any more damage. I hoped Mickey would be too embarrassed to join me. I don’t much enjoy small talk, since lipreading is always a challenge for me. And I was definitely not interested in Mickey romantically. Besides, I had work to do.

“Deadline, deadline, deadline.” I chanted my mantra as I stabbed a pat of butter with the latest weapon I’d been turning over in my hand.

“What if I used a knife?” I said, checking my teeth in the shiny reflection. “I could go into the office while the students are at an assembly, close the door and—damn! That won’t work, Connor. This is supposed to be a locked-room mystery. You can’t use a knife without being in the room. And if you leave, you can’t lock the door. Unless—”

I glanced up from the knife and caught Deputy Arnold’s concerned look, as well as a series of side-glances from the few remaining café patrons. You’d think they’d all be used to my verbal idiosyncrasy. After all, I was becoming accustomed to theirs.

Wolf Quick, sometime gold-mining guide and freelance jewelry designer, gaped at me like a slack-jawed mackerel with a forkful of Hangtown Fry. The ponytailed man cursed as the unique mixture of eggs, bacon, and oysters tumbled back onto the plate. I had been by Wolf’s jewelry store only once, to have him melt down a gold bracelet. I wanted the gift returned to its original nugget state, as a keepsake of five years wasted with the wrong man.

French McClusky, owner of the Memory Kingdom Memorial Park, and Celeste Camborne, the mortuary’s grief counselor, shared a look of moderate concern before resuming their probable discussion of designer headstones and color-coordinated casket liners. Between the balding, middle-aged man and the big-haired, thirty-something woman lay a coil of Lacy’s tickets.

French, looking more like a cheap lounge singer than
a mortician in his discount suit and drugstore toupee, owned a chain of mortuaries in the Mother Lode, an area heavy with prospective business thanks to the influx of aging retirees. Celeste, dressed in clothes too young and frilly for her age, served the customers during their time of sorrow by offering a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen, and a nice sharp fingernail to point out the best buys in bereavement accommodations.

Luckily I hadn’t yet had any use for their services in Flat Skunk.

Even the old prospector, “Sluice” Jackson, paused in his relentless muttering long enough to peek at me from under his caterpillar eyebrows.

“It’s one of those locked-room puzzles, you know … a solve-it-yourself whodunnit, for my newspaper. I’m on deadline and I’m sort of … stuck,” I said to no one in particular, as I made a two-fingered jab to my throat—the sign for “stuck.” Sometimes a sign expresses a concept better than two dozen words. But I could tell by the way Jilda snapped her gaping mouth shut and the rest of the diner patrons glanced at each other, that I hadn’t convinced anyone of my sanity.

I ran my fingers through my hair again, a habit I’d developed since I’d cut it on impulse the day I left San Francisco. I felt to see if my side part was straight, then stretched a knot out of my back. Anything to avoid work, as William James once advised. This damn puzzle was not coming together easily and I had other news stories demanding attention.