Dying to Read (7 page)

“I go sometimes.” He sounded defensive. “That’s how I got the painting job for Beverly.”

“So basically, when you go to church, it’s so you can pick up painting jobs?” she suggested.

“I do other stuff besides painting. Yard work. Minor repair jobs.”

He’d answered a question she hadn’t asked, and skipped the one she had asked, but she let it go. “A general handyman, then.”

“I guess you could say that.”

She thought about Uncle Joe and the uncleaned gutters and his broken hip. “My uncle may be needing some handyman help before long, if you’re available.”

He blinked in mild surprise. “I don’t usually do outside jobs, but . . . yeah, sure, if he needs something done, I could do it.”

“You have references?”

“References? You saw my work at Beverly’s. I did her kitchen. And you want references saying . . . what? That I can tell white paint from green, or I won’t paint the family dog by mistake?”

“It wasn’t necessarily your painting expertise I was concerned about. It’s best to be careful about letting strangers into your home.” She realized that sounded prim and huffy, but being careful about strangers was something her dad had drilled into her when she left small-town Gold Hill in southern Oregon. “You didn’t answer my question about how long you’ve been painting.”

“When I was a teenager back in Tennessee, my uncle had a construction business. I was dangerous with a hammer or saw, and a major menace with a jackhammer, but I did learn to paint. And I picked up a few skills with plumbing and roofing eventually.”

How old was he now? Thirty, thirty-one, somewhere in there, she guessed. So he’d been painting quite awhile. What she’d seen in Beverly’s kitchen showed he did good work. “Do you have a business card I can give my uncle?”

“No. But I’ll give you my phone number.” He tore a scrap off the flap of the envelope, wrote a number on it, and slid it across the table to her.

“So why didn’t you go to work for the uncle in Tennessee? Why come out here to Oregon?”

“Look, I think it’s my turn to ask questions. And I have a big one.” He leaned forward, arms on the table, blue eyes intent. “Your employer, this Joe Belmont, he sends you out to these strange places by yourself? Where you don’t know what kind of situation or what kind of people you might run into?”

“Actually, Uncle Joe doesn’t know I’m doing this,” she admitted. “All I was supposed to do was go to a certain place and find out if that was Willow’s current address. But she wasn’t there anymore, and I didn’t want to tell him I hadn’t found her, especially when he has . . . other problems.”

She also didn’t want to admit failure. Failure as a PI might not be something she’d have to add to her written résumé, but it would go on her mental list. “So I’ve kind of expanded the search on my own.”

“A search that might well be dangerous.”

“So far, the biggest danger I’ve run into has been you,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, but there could be a lot worse guys than me out there. Maybe that’s why I don’t like to see you chasing around alone and running into them. And women can be dangerous too. What do you know about this Willow? Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. Maybe she’ll strongly object to being found. She left Beverly in a suspicious hurry, if you ask me. I’m not even convinced Beverly wrote that reference letter. Maybe Willow Bishop is a forger and a thief and who knows what else.”

“Actually, she left the other employer rather abruptly too,” Cate admitted. With a dead body in her wake. And more missing jewelry.

“I could go with you to find Lexter Drive tonight. Unless there’s that husband or boyfriend you have to get home to.”

Cate glanced up. That definitely sounded like fishing. But with Mitch Berenski she wasn’t sure. “I live with my uncle and his wife. He’s Joe Belmont. Belmont Investigations. But you were right when you said I haven’t been a PI long,” she admitted. “I haven’t been able to find a steady job here, so Uncle Joe hired me temporarily.”

“Then let’s go to this address together tonight. I just don’t think you should be chasing around to strange places where you don’t know what you’ll run into. I mean, what if I’d been a serial killer yesterday? And you had just wandered into my clutches? Anything could have happened.”

“Why do you care?” she asked, bewildered by what seemed an unexpected concern about her welfare.

“I don’t know.” He leaned back, took a bite of sandwich, and chewed as if he were angry at it. “Maybe I have some kind of knight-on-a-white-horse complex. Subconscious need to save beautiful damsel in distress.”

“You make a habit of damsel saving?”

“No. It’s brand-new.”

Mitch connecting with his inner knight-on-a-white-horse, the same as she was connecting with her inner PI? And not a connection he wanted to make, if his grumpy stab of curly fry into ketchup was any indication.

Still, it might not be a bad idea to have a male with a strong arm along when she visited a strange address. He’d made a good point about Willow perhaps not wanting to be found.

“I’ll have to make a phone call first.”

She left the table and pulled out her cell phone. Rebecca answered immediately. She said Joe was awake now, cranky as a bear with a thorn in his paw, but he’d like to talk to her.

When he came on the phone she asked how he was doing, but Uncle Joe was not interested in giving a medical report and immediately asked about the Willow Bishop case. Cate gave him a highly condensed and edited version of her progress in finding Willow, leaving out dead body, unauthorized entry into Amelia’s house, missing jewelry, suspicions about Willow, a strong-armed painter, and a missing wedding ring. That didn’t leave much, but she firmly repeated to herself that there was no need to worry Uncle Joe with those details now.

“Anyway,” she ended brightly, “I’m on my way now to talk to a friend of Willow’s. But what I’m wondering is about Rebecca getting home. May I talk to her again?” Which got Uncle Joe off the phone before he could entangle her in incriminating questions.

Rebecca said she wasn’t sure how much longer she’d stay, but she’d just catch a taxi home. Cate dropped the phone back in her purse. It clunked against Amelia’s house key. She still had to see about returning that. When she returned to the table, Mitch had the address located on his smart phone.

“It’s not an area I’m familiar with,” he said, “but it shouldn’t be hard to find.”

She side-eyed him warily, weighing what she knew about him against the advisability of letting a strange guy into her car or getting into his vehicle. She didn’t see any knight uniform or accompanying white horse. “I’m taking my car,” she said.

“I’ll follow in mine.”

She guessed he knew what she was thinking. She gave him points for not trying to convince her of his noble intentions.

The plan went fine until they reached the street that was supposed to connect with Lexter Drive. It was blocked off, various hunks of yellow heavy equipment looming behind a lineup of sawhorses. She pulled up beside the barrier. Behind her, Mitch turned on the blinkers on his SUV and got out. She opened her window when he walked up.

“Looks as if they’re tearing up the street to widen it and put in a new sewer line,” he said.

It was an area of large, older houses that had seen better days but still maintained a genteel dignity in spite of a ripped-up section of sidewalk. A line of stately old trees stood between the remaining section of sidewalk and street. The trees were apparently destined to come down because two already lay on the ground. Down the street several people and a big yellow dog were clustered around the largest tree in the row. The people were looking up into the tree. The dog was doing something else.

“What’s going on down there?” Cate asked.

“Looks like neighbors standing around grumbling about their torn-up street. Maybe one of the kids climbed a tree.”

They looked at his smart phone again and decided that by going on for three more blocks they could circle around the closed-off street and still get to Lexter.

In those blocks, the ambiance changed to a rather shoddy commercial area. 2782 Lexter was a narrow, two-story white house sandwiched between an auto-repair shop and a tavern with a neon sign that read “icky’s Tavern.” The name looked appropriate, but Cate assumed there was supposed to be another letter up front to make it something else. She was suddenly not sorry she had a guy with a strong arm accompanying her.

They got out of their vehicles and walked to the door. No red Toyota parked in the driveway or at the curb, but there was a garage where it might be stashed. Lights shone dimly inside the house, but no amount of knocking or doorbell ringing brought any response.

“I guess that’s it for tonight, then.” Mitch sounded disappointed, which was also how Cate felt. “I’ll call you tomorrow, and we can figure out what to do next.”

“You have another painting job tomorrow?”

“I just paint on evenings and weekends. But I can take time off so we can come back tomorrow evening.”

Cate didn’t recall agreeing to an extended “we” situation, so all she said was a noncommittal, “Well, I’ll see.”

Just before she reached her car, he touched her arm. “I suppose I should tell you. I didn’t have any trouble reading that return address. Anyone could see it was 2782 Lexter Drive. I was trying to think of an excuse to see you again. I figured if I just called and asked you out, you’d tell me to go stick my head in a bucket of paint.”

Quite possible, she had to admit.

“Anyway, I thought you should know. I don’t like operating under false pretenses. But if your uncle needs some handyman help, I’ll be glad to do it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Back in their separate vehicles, she turned left at the corner and he turned right. She was relieved. Given his knight-on-a-white-horse attitude, she’d been afraid he might feel some obligation to see her safely home. Or would she really object to that?

She’d gone perhaps a mile before a thought interrupted her musings about Mitch Berenski. It just slammed into her head like a laser beam out of nowhere. A fantastic, totally improbable leap of imagination, which should probably be rejected like a Nigerian email offering fabulous riches.

Or perhaps it was an unexpectedly insightful intuition, that inner PI surfacing again?

She whipped into a U-turn right there in front of “Kelly’s Dog Grooming and Boutique,” where a pink neon poodle in the window wagged a blue neon tail.

 6 

Cate edged her Honda out of the lane of traffic and as close to the sawhorse barrier as she could get. There were no evening strollers on the blocked-off street now. Which wasn’t as Norman Rockwell serene as it had looked earlier.

Now the hulks of equipment loomed like yellow dinosaurs with metal teeth. Maybe the kind of dinosaurs that snacked on assistant PIs. Long lengths of black pipe, apparently destined for burial in the open ditch, stretched out like bloated snakes. Dark pockets of shadow could conceal anything from muggers to creepies released from some underground depths. A damp, earthy scent lingered in the air.

Cate skirted around the end of the blockade and determinedly picked her way past the downed trees and lengths of pipe. She wasn’t certain now which tree the people had been clustered around. Not the first one in the row. She waited until she got to the second tree, then looked up and called softly, “Willow?”

No answer. No answer at the next tree either. But at the one after that, branches rustled when she repeated the call. She craned her head backward trying to see up into the tree, but the shadows lurking among the branches were only unidentifiable blotches.

She felt a little foolish, as if she might merely be talking to a tree, but she tried again, louder. “Willow, are you up there?”

“Who wants to know?”

The voice was so close that Cate jumped. So did her goose bumps.

“My name’s Cate Kinkaid. I’ve been looking for you. Could you come down so we could talk? It’s hard to talk with my head all bent back like this.”

“Tough. If the construction company sent you to sweet-talk me out of here, forget it. This tree isn’t coming down, and neither am I. It’s criminal even to think of cutting down big, beautiful old trees like this.”

“How long have you been up there?”

“Awhile. I’d like to climb higher, but I’m kind of . . . nervous about heights.”

Not a good trait for a tree-sitting rebel. But admirable that Willow was doing this in spite of her fears.

“There’s no one here cutting anything down right now. Don’t you have to eat or go to the bathroom or something?”

“Are you a reporter?”

“No. Don’t you like reporters?”

“I’ve seen newspaper photos and TV videos of people sitting in trees or chaining themselves to tree trunks or logging equipment.”

“Does that accomplish anything?”

“Sometimes.” Then Willow stubbornly repeated her first statement. “I’m not coming down. I brought sandwiches. Though I spilled my bottle of water.”

“I have a bottle in the car. I’ll go get it.”

Cate picked her way back through the jumble of downed trees, mountains of asphalt and concrete, and yellow dinosaurs. She got a fresh bottle of water and took it back to the tree. She stretched on tiptoe to hold it up, and a hand reached down out of the branches to grab it.

“Do you really think you can keep them from cutting the tree down?” Cate asked.

“I have to try. People here on the street are upset about what’s going on. But the bathroom thing is a real problem.”

“Where would you have to go to take care of that?”

“Over on Lexter. Next to Nicky’s Tavern.”

“That’s where you live?”

“I’m staying with a friend for a while.”

Cate gave a mental fist pump of satisfaction. She had it, a current address for the client! Maybe she wasn’t such a failure as a PI after all. Now she could go home with a successful report for both Uncle Joe and client Jeremiah Thompson.

Yet she didn’t like walking off and leaving Willow here in her tree. Needing to use a bathroom. There was also the matter of Beverly’s wedding ring. Plus Amelia’s jewelry. And her death.

“If you want to come down, I could, you know, kind of watch the tree for you if you want to run home for a minute.”

“Maybe this is just a trick to get me out of the tree.”

A face appeared in the branches overhead. In the shadowy light, Cate could make out only an oval face, rather pale, but Willow could apparently see more.

“Hey, you look like me!” she said.

“That’s what I keep hearing.”

“You do. You really do.”

“I’m not from the construction company or the city. Or the police,” Cate added, after a moment’s reflection on Willow’s possible past activities. “I look honest, don’t I?” she said, trying to take advantage of their similar looks.

The face disappeared, but a moment later a slim figure shimmied down the tree trunk and dropped to the ground. They appraised each other through streetlight trickling through the branches. Willow dusted her hands on her jeans.

“You’re older,” she said.

And this vulnerable-looking woman, with twigs in her red hair and scratches on her hands, did not look to Cate like an Amelia-shoving, jewelry-stealing criminal. She was bundled in old jeans, ratty sneakers, and a gray hoodie. She was also cold, Cate guessed, from the way she danced from foot to foot and wrapped her arms around herself.

After a glance around the empty street, Willow said, “I guess the tree will be okay if I leave it for a while. You want to come over to my place and have a cup of tea or something? I need to get a heavier jacket too.”

“We can go in my car.”

At the narrow white house, Willow said her friend was at work. She waved Cate to the kitchen and headed down the hall to the bathroom. When she came back she yanked off the hoodie and, apparently not a tea purist even if she did make awesome meat loaf, stuck two cups of water in the microwave. She offered Cate her choice from a box of mixed tea bags. Cate selected an orange-cinnamon bag and dangled it from a finger as they waited for the water to heat.

Here, under the fluorescent kitchen light, she had a better chance to study her look-alike. A generic description indeed fit them both. Red hair. But Willow’s hair was more the “mane” of a romance heroine, Cate’s the picture in a shampoo ad recommending a remedy if your hair looked like this. Similar weight and height. But the pounds weren’t homesteaded around Willow’s hips, like Cate’s were.

Willow didn’t seem to be examining differences and similarities, but the bond of being look-alikes had apparently deteriorated, because she suddenly sounded less friendly when she said, “You said you were looking for me. Why?”

“I have some, um, news for you.”

“Good news or bad?” Willow asked in a wary tone.

“Both, kind of. I’m an assistant investigator with Belmont Investigations, and your great-uncle in Texas contacted my employer. Your grandmother recently passed away. I know that’s sad, but the good news is that she left you an inheritance. Your great-uncle is trying to locate you about it.”

Willow rubbed the back of her neck, as if tree climbing had stiffened the muscles. She did not seem excited by this news. “I see. And this great-uncle’s name is?”

“Jeremiah Thompson.” Did Willow have a lot of great-uncles?

“And I’m supposed to contact him?”

“No, there was something about his moving from one assisted-living home to another, so he’s going to call back later so I can give him your address.”

The microwave dinged. Willow handed one cup to Cate and dunked a peppermint tea bag in the other. “Good ol’ great-uncle Jeremiah,” she muttered. No sadness about the grandmother, no curiosity about the inheritance. “How’d you find me?”

“I’ve been hearing about how concerned you are about preserving trees, and I saw these trees being taken down, so it was just a hunch.” She handed Willow her identification card.

“A private investigation agency.” Willow shook her head. “He really sicced a detective on me?”

Mitch’s warnings about Willow ricocheted into the danger zone. Willow definitely did not sound happy about being found. Cate took a step backward. Cautiously she said, “Joe found an address where you were working for a woman named Amelia Robinson, but when I went there you’d already moved out.”

“Amelia told you about my interest in trees?”

“Well, uh, no. I met some women from a book club she belonged to. Also her niece and another woman you’d worked for,” Cate said, careful to keep her comments vague. She didn’t want Willow retaliating on anyone for giving out information.

“So one of them told you I’d been fired?”

“Fired?” Cate repeated blankly.

“You didn’t know I’d been fired?” Willow sounded surprised.

“No. I didn’t know why you’d left Amelia’s. No one else knew either. They thought it odd you’d left so abruptly.”

“Amelia’s idea, not mine.” Willow tasted the tea and dumped in two teaspoons of sugar. “She was in an awful mood that last morning I was there. I think she’d had a fight with her boyfriend or something. She asked if I had lunch ready for her book club, and I said I didn’t even know the book club women were coming for lunch. Then she called me forgetful and incompetent and fired me on the spot. It was so unfair!” Willow grabbed a dishcloth and wiped furiously at a stray spill of water on the counter, as if she were trying to eradicate some deadly germ, but Cate saw that she was also blinking back tears. “So I went and got stuff for the lunch, and then I just picked up and left. She was really hard to work for anyway.”

Cate broke the news gently. “Amelia’s dead.”

Willow choked on a swallow of tea. “Dead!”

“The police haven’t talked to you about the death, then?”

“I didn’t know anything about it. I can’t believe it! Dead? What happened?” She paused reflectively. “Though she did take all those pills, and sometimes she was a real zombie in the morning. If one sleeping pill didn’t work fast enough to suit her, she’d take some other kind. I always wondered if some morning I’d find her fallen headfirst in the bathtub or toilet.”

“Actually, she did fall. Down those stairs going from the third floor to the backyard. She hit her head on the concrete at the bottom. One of the Whodunit Book Club women and I found her.”

“How awful.” Willow paused, her expression going from horrified to puzzled. “I don’t remember her ever using those stairs. They looked like they might collapse under a toe tap.”

Cate nodded without saying anything.

Willow gave her a sharp look. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“No! Certainly not.”

“Why did you ask if the police had talked to me about her death?”

“There seems to be some . . . uncertainty about how she happened to fall.” At least there was uncertainty in Cate’s mind.

Willow’s eyes widened as the meaning of that sank in. “You’re saying maybe she didn’t just fall? Maybe she was pushed.” She stepped backward, eyes blazing. “And you think I did it! That’s why you’re really here!”

“No! My job with Belmont Investigations is just to find you for your great-uncle,” Cate said.

“Really?”

“Really.” Cate lifted her hands, palms up, in a gesture of innocence.

After giving Cate a long, hard look, Willow’s tense body relaxed, and she seemed less like a runaway horse about to bolt. She sounded reflective when she said, “I guess it’s possible someone could’ve pushed her. Not me, but someone. She wasn’t the nicest person in the world.”

“Anyone in particular you think could have done it? Not that I’m investigating,” Cate said hastily. “Just curious.”

Willow turned, picked up her cup of tea again, and took a sip. Her gaze slipped out of focus as she looked off into space. “She had those book club friends. Although they’re the kind of ‘friends’ who do a shark attack on anyone who leaves the room. There’s a niece who lives over in Springfield, some kind of snobby interior decorator who thinks where you put your sofa will change your life. Though her husband’s a little nicer than she is. I never found any of them very likeable, but I don’t know that any of them would push Amelia down the stairs.” Another pause. “But then, I don’t know that they wouldn’t do it, either.”