Dying to Read (3 page)

“There are peculiarities, though, aren’t there?” Doris added thoughtfully. She itemized the oddities that also clung like white cat hair on black velvet in Cate’s mind. “What she was doing out there on the stairs. Willow disappearing so suddenly.”

The entire Whodunit bunch, with more hostilities than the Mafia toward an informer.

“I didn’t notice, but now I wonder, was Amelia wearing any jewelry?” Doris asked.

Cate tried to remember. The slacks and sweatshirt weren’t the kind of outfit you’d worry about accessorizing. “I don’t know. I don’t remember seeing any.” But she hadn’t been thinking about jewelry then. “Why?”

“Amelia has a lot of jewelry, expensive stuff. You know, push someone down the stairs. Grab the jewelry off the body. Run.” Doris smiled ruefully and waved a hand in front of her face as if to dispel such thoughts. “I’ve been reading too many mysteries.”

Out in the driveway, Cate exchanged good-byes with the Whodunit ladies. She handed out business cards and asked them to call if they heard anything more about Willow. Doris headed for an older-model compact Ford parked farther down the street, well away from the more expensive vehicles in the driveway.

Cate headed home to where she’d been living with Uncle Joe and Rebecca since just before Christmas. The sunny spring day had turned to a gloomy drizzle, and Cate found doom-and-gloom settling around her like a soggy blanket. The terrible image of Amelia’s body lying on the cold concrete. Suspicions tumbling around inside her head that someone may have deliberately done this to her. A disappointing sense of failure about today for herself. Her report to Uncle Joe would be short and uninformative.

Went to address on Meisman Street.

Subject no longer living there.

Don’t know where she went.

End of report.

By the time Cate turned onto the street where Uncle Joe and Rebecca had lived for the past fifteen years, the sense of gloom had advanced into an all-too-familiar feeling that she was drifting in life. Or, to put it more accurately, floundering. Floundering from failure to failure. Here she was, twenty-nine years old, and what did she have to show for it? She’d graduated from college with a degree in education and failed as a teacher. Two years as marketing manager with a bath and spa products company, until the company merged with a larger company and she wasn’t one of the employees retained after the merger. A collapsed engagement. Two years in the office of a construction company that was downsized when the California housing market crumbled. Nine months of looking for a job and finding nothing.

Oh, there’d been a few jobs since she’d come to Eugene. She’d grabbed anything that offered a paycheck. Christmas elf at the mall. Stuffing flyers under windshield wipers. Wearing a bunny costume and waving a sign directing people to Top-Time Tax Service. But she hadn’t been noticeably successful even at those endeavors. At the mall, she’d tripped over her pointy elf slippers and fallen into a buxom woman who whopped her with a purse. The flyers job ended when she accidentally dropped her entire stack of flyers in a Noah-sized puddle in the mall parking lot. The tax people had let her go because her sign waving lacked “exuberance.”

If God had a plan for her life, it was as invisible to her as the calories in a plate of brownies.

By now the embedded sliver throbbing in her palm felt as if it went all the way to her elbow, but she forgot pain at the sight of an ambulance pulling out of Uncle Joe’s driveway. Next-door neighbors and people across the street stood outside their homes watching.

Cate screeched her car to the curb and jumped out. “What’s wrong?” she called frantically to the next-door couple leaning on their rail fence. “What happened?”

“It’s Joe,” the woman said. “They took him in the ambulance.”

“Was he conscious?”

“We couldn’t tell,” the man said.

“Rebecca went with him?”

“She practically jumped in the ambulance.”

“Where would they take him?”

“They took my sister to RiverBend when she had a heart attack.”

Heart attack. All too possible, given Uncle Joe’s cholesterol and blood-pressure numbers.

Cate was marginally familiar with Eugene area hospitals. She’d been turned down for an office job at the RiverBend hospital. She jumped back in the car. At the emergency room, she gave Uncle Joe’s name at the desk, and the woman told her to wait while she checked on whether he’d been brought there.

Cate perched on a sofa in the waiting room, but she couldn’t sit. She paced. She sniffed that faintly antiseptic/medicinal scent of all hospitals, a scent that seemed more a message of doom than vigilant cleanliness. She prayed. She drank coffee from a machine in the corner. Prayed and paced some more. Wondered if she should call the other hospital. Flipped through a magazine. Prayed again.
Take care of Uncle Joe. Please, please, please, Lord. And Rebecca too.

She finally got the meager bit of information that yes, Joseph Belmont had been brought to the emergency room. Privacy regulations prevented them from giving out information about his condition, but the person who’d come with him would be notified that Cate was out here.

After an hour and a half Rebecca emerged through the swinging doors. Her usually crisp gray hair drooped into a wispy halo around her tired face. Her shoulders also sagged wearily. She and Cate met and silently wrapped their arms around each other.

Cate didn’t know what to ask because she feared the worst. “Is he . . . ?”

“They’re taking him into surgery.”

Not the worst
—Thank you, Lord!—
but . . . “Heart attack?”

“No. Can you believe it? He was cleaning gutters on the garage. I heard a thud—” Rebecca shook her head, her brow scrunched, and Cate suspected exasperation was how she was dealing with the fear. “Can you imagine? Up on a ladder. With that bad leg of his.”

“He fell?”

“And broke his hip. The surgery is to put it back together.”

“He’ll be okay?”

“He’s probably too stubborn not to be okay.” Rebecca pressed her lips together, then the fear burst through, and her face crumpled. “Oh, Cate, I’m so scared! I know of two people our age with broken hips. Neither of them lived more than a year.”

“We’ll pray.”

Which they did, arms around each other there in the waiting room, asking for skill and wisdom for the doctor and healing for Uncle Joe, and Cate added a prayer for strength for Rebecca. The hospital staff let Cate accompany Rebecca to a smaller, more intimate waiting area nearer the operating room.

“All this time I’ve been fussing and worrying about his cholesterol and his heart. All that tofu! Tofu burgers. Tofu turkey. Grabbing the salt shaker away from him. And what I should have been doing was following him around with a mattress so he wouldn’t get hurt if he fell. Serve him right if he limps on both legs now.” Then Rebecca broke into another torrent of tears that contradicted her grumpy words. “I feel so helpless. I know God is in control, and he listens to prayers, but sometimes . . .”

Cate patted her shoulder, feeling helpless too. Because bad things happened to good people. Rebecca and Uncle Joe had been married some fifteen years now. Both had gone through several years of aloneness after their mates passed away, before square-dance lessons . . . and God . . . had brought them together.
Please, Lord, don’t separate them now.

It was evening by the time the doctor came out to talk to Rebecca. He explained how he’d inserted screws and a metal plate to hold the bone together, and Uncle Joe had come through the surgery satisfactorily. He also said, in a very offhand way that Cate suspected was designed to be honest but also to keep from alarming Rebecca, there could still be complications, and Uncle Joe would require physical therapy. Rebecca didn’t want to leave the hospital, but Cate finally persuaded her.

The phone was ringing when they walked in the door at the house. And it kept ringing. Concerned neighbors and friends from church who had somehow already heard the news, wanting information or offering help. Rebecca gave out information while Cate opened a can of chili because they’d missed dinner. She tried to dig the sliver out of her hand, her ineffectual efforts reminding her that the world was probably fortunate she hadn’t aimed for a medical career. She finally had to ask for help.

Rebecca swabbed the spot with alcohol. “How did you manage to do this anyway?” she scolded. “I thought you went to confirm some woman’s address, not tear into the woodwork.”

Cate decided not to tell her the full story. After the worries Rebecca already had about Uncle Joe, she didn’t need to hear about someone else’s fatal plunge. “Just an old stair railing I happened to grab at the house.”

Next morning, the phone rang continuously with people calling to ask about Uncle Joe. Cate and Rebecca finally let the answering machine take care of the calls. At the hospital, a nurse let Rebecca in to see Uncle Joe for a few minutes, but he was nauseated, perhaps an aftereffect from the anesthetic, so no other visitors were allowed.

They had come in Cate’s car. Rebecca didn’t want to leave the hospital, even if all she could do was sit and wait. They agreed that she’d call Cate’s cell phone if she needed Cate to come get her during the day, otherwise Cate would return that evening.

On the way back to the house, Cate made a determined decision. She was not going to have another failure on her record. Because, even if she didn’t have to put it on a written résumé, it would be on a mental one. She
was
going to find Willow Bishop. Uncle Joe’s accident, terrible as it was, gave her a little more time.

At the house, she ignored the ringing phone. She cautiously opened the door to Uncle Joe’s office. Maybe she’d absorb something PI-ish in there.

Uncle Joe had kept an office in a professional building back when he was a full-time PI, but he’d worked out of a home office the last couple of years. Clients seldom came to the house, but there was a separate entrance to the office if they did. The no-nonsense room held a glass-topped oak desk, a computer and printer setup, filing cabinets, a copy machine, two hard-backed chairs for clients, and Uncle Joe’s framed PI license on the wall. Under the glass covering the desk was an oversized map of Oregon.

Cate retrieved the key from where Uncle Joe kept it under a lamp and unlocked the desk drawer containing his files on current cases. He’d shown her all this before she’d gone to locate Willow. But this time she saw something she hadn’t earlier. A gun! Tucked in the back of the drawer, small, but sinister as a hooded figure in a dark alley. Which somehow suggested that not all Uncle Joe’s work had been routine and unexciting. Cate pulled out the folder on Willow, shut the drawer on the gun, and studied the contents of the file.

Uncle Joe had skipped over some of the information. Willow’s real name was Winona. She seldom used it, but she’d had to provide a birth certificate to get an Oregon driver’s license. The great-uncle who was trying to locate Willow was Jeremiah Thompson, and he’d said his grand-niece might be using a different name than Willow, possibly something tree connected. Holly or Laurel or Aspen.

The phone on the desk rang. Belmont Investigations was on a different line than the home phone. She checked the caller ID. An out-of-area number. She intended to let the call go to the answering machine, but a raspy-sounding voice identified himself as Jeremiah Thompson. Willow’s great-uncle! Cate grabbed the phone.

“Mr. Thompson? This is Cate Kinkaid, Mr. Belmont’s assistant. I’m afraid he’s incapacitated at the moment but—”

“Incapacerated?” In spite of the rasp in the older man’s voice, the mispronounced word came out with a hint of Southern drawl.

“He’s had a bad fall and broken a bone—”

“But I gotta find Willow! The family’s chargin’ around like a herd of hungry sharks, and I don’t want ’em cheatin’ Willow out of what she’s got comin’ from her grandma’s estate.”

“Actually . . .” Cate swallowed and tried to inject efficiency and competence into her voice, though that was a lot like trying to make a steel rod out of a noodle. “I’m working on your case myself. In fact, just yesterday I went to Willow’s most recent address. She’s no longer there, but I’m, um, hopeful that I can locate her for you within a very short time.”

“You sound awful young to be a private investergator, missy. Everywhere I go, some young whippersnapper’s runnin’ things now,” he muttered darkly, the Southern accent even more noticeable, along with a hint of hillbilly twang.

“Yes, I know,” Cate soothed. “But I have the file right here, and I’m wondering if there’s anything more you could tell me about Willow that might be helpful.”

“I ain’t had no contact with Willow for nigh on to . . . well, I dunno. The years go by faster’n I can grab ’em with a pitchfork. But, lemme see. She’s got that sweet smile, and all that red hair, purtier than a red heifer, as my mama, bless her heart, used to say. When she was little I used to tease her ’bout her hair lookin’ like she fell into a bucket of barn paint.”

Cate pulled a spike of her own hair forward and peered sideways at it. Red barn paint it was. “I was thinking more along the lines of occupational abilities. It appears she may have recently been employed as a helper for an older woman.”