Elizabeth Zelvin - Bruce Kohler 04 - Death Will Save Your Life (7 page)

“Good afternoon,” Barbara said. “What a beautiful day.”

She drew her legs up on the bench and twisted, arms leaning on the back, so she could see him better. He wore a faded denim shirt a few sizes too big for him, the sleeves rolled up over arms so muscular they looked like bundles of ship’s cable. Grass-stained khaki cutoffs and surprisingly new-looking running shoes completed the ensemble.

He beamed at her and waved the rake exuberantly.

“Hello. Yes, it is beautiful!”

“It certainly is. Don’t you do tai chi? I’ve seen you in the group down by the lake in the morning.”

“Up with the birds. Early, early.”

He laughed, as if using the cardinals and finches as an alarm clock was the best joke ever told. The Tibetans had a reputation for joyousness. Everyone here loved them.

“Martial arts are not Tibetan, are they?”

“A-clicketa.”

“Sorry, I don’t understand,” she said.

“Eck-a-leck-i-ta,” he pronounced carefully. “A little tai chi, a little yoga, a little mandala from my country. Lots and lots of sitting.”

“Oh, eclectic, I get it. Sitting? Oh, of course, you mean meditation.” She slapped herself lightly on the side of the head, which made him laugh.

“Sitting and chanting very spiritual, but not good exercise.”

“Doesn’t burn any calories.”

They laughed together. Barbara could imagine finding a hundred years had passed when she stopped laughing and left the garden.

“Where do you sit?” she asked.

He slapped his rear and laughed so hard he dropped the rake.

“Where do you think? Wise man or woman not need many turns of the Wheel to figure that out.”

“I meant do you have some special place?”

“Ahhh. Sure, I go up.” He waved his arm in a graceful gesture.

“Up the mountain?”

“Hmmph. Not much of a mountain.”

Of course. Compared to the Himalayas, Woo-Woo Farm was flat.

“But you climb up there. To the Outlook? Where you can see out over the, uh, hills to the river?”

“Sometimes see, sometimes dark. Quieter in the dark.” He shook his head. “Stay away last few days. Not good, what happen there.”

“Not good,” she agreed. “How do you get up there in the dark? You can’t see—you could twist your ankle.”

“I levitate,” he said.

Was he pulling her leg? Using the wrong word? Or was he the real thing? The Farm abounded in flaky people, but she could believe this wonderful old man had genuine spiritual power.

“Don’t need to see,” he said. “Not like jackrabbit with phony Buddha name.”

Now how on earth had a word like jackrabbit entered his vocabulary? And who was he talking about? Oh!

“Phony Buddha name—you mean the chef? The tall guy from the kitchen?”

“Hmmph. Jackrabbit. Many more turns of the Wheel before he nip at the heels of Enlightenment. I get a few more lives myself for speaking bad about him. Not very nice. Sorry.”

A noisy group of interns clattered and scuffed past them on the path, destroying the careful patterns the old man had made. They were wearing bathing suits and carrying towels. Barbara suddenly remembered that she had told Jimmy she would meet him at the room, so they could change and go for a swim while the heat of the day held.

“You said Madhouse—the jackrabbit—goes up the hill to the Outlook at night? On the road? The dirt road, not the trail?”

“E-leck-a-trick-ahh.” He spun an imaginary wheel.

Electric car. Of course! The staff could use the carts.

“But how does he see the way?”

“Bin-ock-a-la. Red bin-ock-a-la.”

“Binoculars. In the dark? Red? I don’t understand.” But suddenly she did. Madhouse must have a pair of nightscope binoculars. He couldn’t levitate like her new friend. But with the right technology, he could see in the dark.

I dunked a red bandanna in the lake and tied it around my head, wondering what kind of bacteria you could get from swan poop. The sun beat down on bodies that covered the beach and spilled onto the grass. Heads bobbed as swimmers dabbled around a wooden raft. Farther out, canoes sliced through the water. Jojo came up beside me as I watched a tall, slim figure in a red canoe round the bend.

“The ever impressive Annabel,” he said.

A pair of swans with wings half unfolded like boats on Boston Common sailed across Annabel’s route, trailing five fluffy brown pint-sized babies. The red canoe stopped on a dime. The swans scooted to safety.

“They’ve asked her to stay on here,” Jojo said. “Annabel’s hot now.”

“And you represent her.”

Jojo pursed his lips. In a phony French accent, he said, “But of course.”

Clown. Jojo ambled away. Jimmy arrived, damp and slimy.

“You smell like duckweed,” I said. “What have you been up to, and where’s Barbara?”

“Barbara wanted to swim around the bend,” he said. “If you think I’m slimy now, you should have seen us right after we fell into the duckweed. We were picking it off each other when we heard someone crying on the other side of a huge bank of rushes. We peeked, and it was Feather, so Barbara told me to go away and went to see if she could help.”

“A regular Mother Theresa, that girl,” I said.

“Watch it, dude.”

“Aw, c’mon, you know I love her. Look, the hammock’s free. I’ll go warm it up for you while you go jump in the lake and get the rest of that slime off. You’ll like the hammock. They don’t have them on the Upper West Side.”

Jimmy liked the hammock, once he got used to it, and we were squabbling over whose turn it was like the pair of eight-year-olds we once had been when Barbara arrived.

“So what was with the distraught damsel?” I asked.

“Oh, poor Feather,” she said. “She had a huge fight with Madhouse about leaving the Farm. He’s counting on the money Melvin left her to get him to Katmandu, and she said maybe she didn’t want to go to Katmandu. She said Melvin left the money to her, not to him, because her brother wanted her to be happy. So then he said if she didn’t want enlightenment, what
did
she want, and she said she wanted to find her own way for a change and he didn’t have a monopoly on enlightenment.”

“Go, Feather,” I said.

“I bet he didn’t like that,” Jimmy said.

“He said he didn’t need her or her brother’s money,” Barbara said. “He said he knew a thing or two, whatever that meant. I asked, but Feather didn’t know, because that’s when she called him a self-centered phony, and he slapped her. That’s why she was crying. Her cheek was still bright red.”

“The bastard!” Jimmy ruffled up and growled like an outraged grizzly bear. “Did you tell her she should leave him?”

“Jimmy!” Barbara sounded shocked. “You know I can’t tell other people what to do. I’m in Al-Anon.”

An unusually large crowd packed the Can that night. Everybody wore wispier and more fluttery clothing than usual, longer dangly jewelry and more of it, and an awful lot of feathers in the hair.

“Why is everyone all dressed up?” Barbara asked.

“It’s Midsummer Night,” a woman at the next table said.

Her friends chimed in.

“There’s a ceremony down by the lake at midnight.”

“You’ve got to go, it’s the best part of the summer.”

“It’s sort of Native American and sort of medieval and Druidic. Well, it’s hard to describe, but you’ll see.”

“Oh, God,” Jimmy muttered into his organic apple juice, “taking the name of the Celts in vain again.”

“And there are morris dancers.”

“Oh, we have to go!” Barbara bounced.

“We wouldn’t want to miss the morris dancers,” I said.

“Are we having fun yet?” Jimmy muttered.

“Hey, look who’s here.” I turned to greet Honey. She looked particularly pretty in a lavender nymphs-and-dryads kind of dress. She wore her hair loose except for a few random tiny braids bound at the ends with amethyst beads.

“You look great,” I said.

“Do you think I should be wearing black? I couldn’t find anything in the store.”

“You look terrific,” Barbara said.

“Have you heard about Midsummer Night? It sounds like so much fun! But maybe I shouldn’t go.”

“A little fun won’t kill you,” I said. “Come and sit down.”

I pulled Honey down onto my lap and wrapped my arms around her slender waist. I felt as happy as I’d ever been for about thirty seconds. Then Callaghan and another policeman clomped in. As they breasted their way through the noisy crowd, people skittered away like a school of small fish with a shark on their tails. They came straight to our table.

“We need to ask you some questions, Mrs. Markowitz.”

Honey jumped up, looking terrified.

“Are you arresting me?”

“Not at the present time, Mrs. Markowitz, but we’re asking you to come with us to the station and answer some questions.”

“I want to go with her,” I blurted.

“You have no standing, Mr. Kohler,” Callaghan said. “But it seems you do have an interest.”

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Still walking right into trouble. By falling for Honey, I’d given her a motive for murdering her husband. And from Callaghan’s dirty look, he thought I had a motive of my own.

“No!” Honey said. “He—they have nothing to do with this. They’ve been nice to me because I’ve lost my husband, that’s all.”

“But you knew each other before you came up here,” he insisted.

Jimmy, thank God, remained calm.

“You’ll find that isn’t true, Detective.”

“You can be sure I’ll check that out personally,” Callaghan said.

I’d be okay, because there was nothing to find. Nobody conspired to commit murder on the basis of two days’ acquaintance. But whether he saw Honey as a mercenary trophy wife or a victim at the end of her tether, he might think that meeting me had pushed her over the edge.

“I’ll be fine.” Honey stuck her chin out. “I have my lawyer’s number in my bag.”

She might have lacked backbone while Melvin was alive, but she had found her courage since he died. I hated to let her go. But I didn’t want to make things worse. As they escorted Honey out, she cast a despairing glance over her shoulder. Not so brave, then. But “acting as if” like a champ.

Jimmy put his hand on my shoulder.

“You couldn’t stop him,” Jimmy said. “Stewing about it won’t help.”

“So what can I do?”

“Tonight, maybe nothing. In the morning, if she hasn’t come back, we’ll see.”

“It really is one day at a time, sweetie,” Barbara said. “We’ll do all we can to help.”

“It sucks,” I said. “So what do we do now? Go off to this midsummer ceremony as if nothing had happened?”

“You’re angry,” Barbara said.

“You’re damn right I’m angry.”

“You’re not going to drink, are you?” Jimmy said.

“No, of course not.”

“Come on,” Barbara said. “We’ll ask the Great Spirit to help get Honey out of this.”

“Maybe they’ll let you howl at the moon,” Jimmy said.

We found the whole population of the Farm and a sizable contingent of townies gathered on the beach and the grassy area behind it. Crickets, tree frogs, and the voices of the crowd provided a cheerful music. Fireflies winked on and off overhead. I could smell wildflowers. I felt myself calming down. Jimmy was right: worrying wouldn’t help Honey. I might not exactly enjoy myself, but I didn’t have to sit there in a daze of misery. I would do the Now thing this evening or die trying.