Murder at Moot Point (21 page)

“Everybody's got relatives someplace. You feeling sorry for the guy or … Charlie, how about my chapter? Did you like it or hate it or what?”

“Well, I liked it.…” She watched his face come apart at her tone, which would not have earned her a cheerleader's job. So she sat up perkily and asked, “Do you really feel like something comes up out of the bed and hits your back and shoulders and then realize it's the ceiling?”

Jack Monroe perked up too, now that he could be the center of attention, and was off on a pitch that would have died in the hallway before it reached a producer's threshold. “Of course OOBE's are only part of my book but there's not much of substance been done on them, you know. There is one book out that covers it fairly well but it hasn't had much distribution.”

He took her out in the shop and showed her a paperback with a spooky cover,
Out-of-Body Experiences
, by J. Paul Read. But there was another on the shelf below that caught her eye and she pulled it out.
Mentalphysics
, by Brother Dennis. There was a picture of him on the back cover, smiling broadly, his fillings retouched.

“You wouldn't be interested in that, Charlie,” Jack said confidently. “It's self-published.”

“But I suppose you sell a lot of them with the institute right here in town.”

“I used to, but he decided to make the institute the only outlet so he sells them up there himself. Pretty soon I'll be able to sell my own book right here and everywhere else too.”

“Is there bad blood between you because of Paige? I heard you used to be friends.”

“And because of you, Charlie Greene.” The intense blue eyes under the salt-and-pepper eyebrows probed hers until she had to look away. Jack Monroe may have been a Grape-Nut but he was not stupid. “We're still friends, just not as close.”

“What's his last name?”

“Thornton. And you're more interested in him and what goes on in this town than you are in my book.”

“I am implicated in a murder that happened in this town and I don't know anything about the place. Help me, Jack.”

“Nobody really thinks you shot Georgette. You're being silly. You didn't even know her. And it was Michael's gun. You didn't know him either.”

“And my fingerprints were on it. And now Michael's dead. And I don't know what's going to happen next.”

“Your fingerprints? But how …” He sat on a cushion and drew one up for her near a wall heater.

“You hadn't heard? I thought news got around here in seconds. And I can't imagine how unless I was tricked into touching it thinking it was something else. But there is definitely a conspiracy going on. So far I'm the only suspect. Now talk to me, please. We'll get back to yours, but let's concentrate on my problem for a while.”

Jack agreed, obviously stunned by the fingerprints. Or could it be an act? Yes, Olie was usually back in Moot Point by now. No, Jack hadn't questioned the lateness of his arrival. “He's got to be seventy-five anyway. Man's old enough to come and go as he likes.”

No, Jack didn't know of any kind of relationship between Clara Peterson and Frank Glick. “I'm not the nosy neighbor type, Charlie.”

No, he hadn't gone to Georgette's memorial service today. So he couldn't fill Charlie in on people's reactions there. “I don't believe in churches and never go in one. Went to celebrate her passage at the institute and that's enough.”

No, he had no idea who would want to shoot Georgette or why she'd be riding her Schwinn at night without a light and in the fog. No, he hadn't been aware of any suspicious undercurrents in the village that could have culminated in two deaths in so short a time. “Unless Michael killed her, felt bad about it, and committed suicide. I always thought he was a little nuts. But you're asking the wrong person, Charlie. You should talk to Rose over at the restaurant. She's psychic, you know. She doesn't want to be and she's half scared of it. But she can't help it. Surprised she hasn't figured it out already.”

“Okay,” Charlie stood up and motioned her client to do the same, “let's go over and ask her right now.”

Chapter 23

But Rose Kortinemi wasn't behind the cash register or at the tables. One of the white-shirted young waiters with his short hair moussed to hard perfection blocked the entrance to the kitchen. Behind him a woman sobbed between long drawn-out groans.

Jack pushed the young man aside with one outstretched arm and the kid nearly bounced. Jack walked in and Charlie followed.

Gladys Bergkvist lay on the floor, her wet blouse half off and her skirt drawn up to expose a beefy thigh and hip. Her underpants and panty hose had been cut open, her skin an angry red all along that side from shoulder to thigh. Under the fluorescent lights, and against her Scandinavian and Oregonian pallor, the red patches resembled radiant blossoms just opening.

Rose knelt beside her with one knee on her chest trying to knot a kitchen towel around a pack of loose ice cubes before they got away from her. A waiter held Gladys's ankles to the floor.

Jack grabbed a towel and yelled for more ice. “Grease or water?”

“Water.”

“When?”

“Just now.” Rose had her ice pack formed and laid it gently across her half sister's burned arm.

“Call Paige?”

“She's on her way.”

“Charlie, get over here and help me.” Jack handed his agent an end of the towel to hold while a cook scooped ice into it.

“Are you sure you're supposed to use cold? Has anybody called an ambulance?” Charlie asked, the contents of her stomach starting to Jazzercise as welts and blisters formed magically on the victim's beet-red thigh.

Jack covered them with the second ice pack and asked Rose what happened. Gladys had apparently decided Rose's cook was talking back to Rose and had “waltzed” into the kitchen to chew him out just as another cook was lifting “a goddamn vat” of water off the fire because it was boiling over. Somehow they'd collided, Gladys taking the whole heat.

“She's been drinking all afternoon. I tried to get some food into her but she didn't eat much. God, I'm glad you're here, Jack.” Rose moved the ice around gently on Gladys's top half.

Jack did the same on the lower. Gladys still moaned but she seemed to be calming. Maybe you did put cold on a burn. But with something this bad you also called 911.

“Has anybody called a doctor yet?” Charlie asked.

Jack's eyes met Rose's over the prostrate Gladys in a look that lifted four eyebrows. It probably said, “California.” It's the look people from Texas get in Colorado, where Charlie was raised. The look Coloradans get in Wyoming, and everybody from the lower “forty-eight” must get in Canada.

Gladys's wonderful jewelry winked at Charlie from the corner of a chopping block behind Rose.

“Gladys isn't that big a drinker.” Jack moved his pack and the welts and blisters were still there. But Charlie couldn't detect any new ones forming.

“It's Michael's dying. That was too much after Georgette and everything. Gladys has always been too sensitive.”

Charlie was about to demand that medical help be called instantly—it would probably have to come clear from Chinook—when Paige Magill burst into the kitchen hugging a green spiky plant in a large earthenware pot. She slid across the floor in the water generated by the accident and the melting ice packs and came to land next to Jack.

“Knife,” she demanded.

“I am serious about this doctor thing,” Charlie insisted.

One of the cooks handed Paige a knife and she began slicing the tips of the plant spikes off and handing them around. Charlie found herself holding a drooling tip. Paige noticed Charlie then, and again that quick, provincial look passed among the insiders.

“Squeeze the goo out and smooth it on ever, ever, ever so gently,” Paige ordered, between gasps for breath. She'd come on the run.

Gladys grimaced and squeezed tears out of her eyes. “Paige? Did you get here in time?”

“I think so, Gladys. And you are to think good thoughts. A nice cool mountain meadow. A cool stream runs through it and wildflowers dot the cool green grass alongside it. Can you see it, Gladys?”

“Yes,” Gladys said, but weakly.

“Now feel it.”

The leaf tips reminded Charlie of cactus and there were sharp barbs on the outside edges but she could squeeze the cool soft width of the leaves without getting pricked. The pulp oozed out in a stringy, treacly, colorless spit. It was slow going and Rose soon had most of the kitchen help and some from the dining room kneeling thigh to thigh, applying layer upon layer of the gross goo on her half sister. As soon as Charlie's piece of leaf spike ran out of stringy spit she was handed another, as Paige cut them farther and farther down.

Charlie looked up once at the man in the chef's hat directly across from her and he rolled his eyes like Wes Bennett did when pontificating on Grape-Nuts.

“Don't you think we should get some real medicine?” Charlie interrupted Paige's endless chant about the coolness of the rocks, trees, clouds, breeze, and insects. “This woman has been badly scalded.” Real medicine came in bottles or tablets or needles, everybody knew that.

Several of the help from Chinook glanced at her as if they agreed but kept their lips clamped.

“Don't rub it in now, just drip it on,” Paige said, ignoring Charlie, and continued the cooling liturgy with hardly a pause.

By the time the plant was nothing but oozing stumps, Gladys's red patches were fading to pink. The skin had probably died and was preparing to fall off, leaving Gladys even more exposed than she had been for the last fifteen minutes. But Rose put her half sister's clothing lightly back together and helped her up. She and Jack walked the patient out the back door. Paige hugged the amputated plant to her bosom and followed.

Charlie shrugged at the snickering kitchen help and went after them. It wasn't long before she realized they were walking Gladys home. No rushing her off in a car for medical assistance, no calling an ambulance. Oh, no, not in Moot Point.

Gladys hiccupped sporadically the entire distance but walked along briskly for someone who ought to have been on a stretcher.

Charlie stopped when she noticed the sheriff department cars and unmarked but obviously official vans on the concrete apron in front of the three-door garage. Michael's loft was fully lit above, and in the Bergkvist house next door Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe, and Joe waxed happily hysterical.

Charlie turned on her heel and stepped off alone into the dark.

The Moot Point Consciousness Training Institute was lit even more festively than Rose's, the semicircular drive festooned with flickering candles in paper bags, every third one having given up the ghost to the moist air. But the low slant of the tentacled roof of the main building deflected much of the light from the windows off at the woods at odd angles. Charlie was reminded of the Disney flicks in which animated trees came alive to terrorize fairy-tale maidens.

She listened for Eddie's barking and didn't feel better for not hearing it. If the sound had come from the back of the building she'd have at least had reason to hope he was kenneled.

But everything seemed so open, peaceful. A couple strolled past her and smiled. She could hear chatter and normalcy wafting from the open doors ahead.

If you've just been stringing plant spit across a half-naked scalded woman, walking uninvited into a group of perfect strangers seemed patently normal. So Charlie did.

The dining room/lounge area was filled with searchers and Charlie received a few curious glances, but these people were new to each other today and probably couldn't be sure they hadn't seen her before. They might think she was hired help from the village. Most of them had anywhere from ten to thirty years on her. All but two of them were women. Perhaps the men were out strolling with their ladies among the candles in the paper sacks or down at Rose's chuffing cheeseburgers.

Words like “aliveness,” “lovingness,” “psychecology,” “synchronicity,” “empowerment,” “life force,” “aromatherapy,” “channeling,” and “rolfing” permeated the air along with lingering odors of garlic and spicy teas. Doc Withers appeared carrying a tray of plastic wine glasses, and by the time he wove his way to Charlie there were two left. It was white wine, which she detested unless it was champagne, but she took one to appear as if she belonged.

“Ms. Greene, I didn't know you were into transformation.” Taking the last glass as his own, he set the tray on the corner of the raised hearth and led Charlie off to the hallway leading to the bookstore tentacle. “What did you think of it?”

“Well … it's a trifle sour, but it does have lots of structure.”

“My book?”

“The wine.”

“I was talking about
Holistic Health and Nutrition for Your Pet.
” He looked as disappointed in Charlie as Jack Monroe had not long ago.

“Uh, it's not my field of expertise but I do sense a great deal of life force and lovingness. You
have
heard of what just happened to Gladys?”

“Gladys?” The boyish innocence, behind the thick glasses he had constantly to push back up his nose against the law of sliding sweat, was lost on Charlie. This was the man who slept with ducks.

“Bergkvist. At the Scandia. Which reminds me, have you seen her husband around yet this summer?”

“Something's happened to Olie?” he asked.

“No, to Gladys.”

“What could happen to Gladys?” Mother figures were supposed to be invincible.

“You answer my question and I'll answer yours,” Charlie told him. “Isn't Olie due back in town by now?”

“I don't pay any attention to whether he comes or goes. Why should I? What's happened to Gladys—Mrs. Bergkvist?”