Murder at Moot Point (23 page)

Charlie's stomach had the misfortune to come wrapped in a woman's body, a woman with a messy life. Once she'd finished her education and become a responsible, gainfully employed head of household she'd tried everything she could think of to ensure her stomach a comforting life-style. And sometimes for as long as a month or two she'd think she'd succeeded. Then something would happen or a series of little somethings would pile up, at first in her job—but as her daughter grew, increasingly at home. Still, this was the first time Charlie and her stomach had become involved in murder.

She rocked herself and hugged her stomach and tried to gain warmth from the bedspread and the fire. But she was cold from the inside out. Charlie'd awakened to find herself in the entry hall, checking to be sure she'd locked the door. Now she waited for something to come down the hall, something like whatever kept you afraid to look under the bed when you were a kid.

“See? I'm putting my whole arm under there. There's nothing,” Edwina would say and poke the flashlight under there too. “Can't even see anything. Come down here and look.”

“Whatever it was probably skittered into the closet before you turned on the lights.”

Edwina, who'd worked a long day before having to come home to work a long night, had looked very old and tired on those occasions, Charlie realized now.

When her turn came, Charlie, who'd put in long days herself, merely pulled up the covers on her bed and let Libby in beside her. “They're under your bed again, right?”

“Yeah, what are they?”

“Damned if I know.”

And Charlie and her daughter would snuggle together against the bogeyman. It had worked splendidly. But in all fairness, Charlie hadn't had a husband in her bed to complain, as had Edwina.

Chapter 25

“Charlie, stop it. What's the matter with you? It's me, Wes. Remember?”

Charlie's throat was raw, drier than a hangover. The body cast clamped around her torso again, the helplessness. No, it was Wes. “Put me down.”

“Will you behave yourself?”

The fire was out, the quilt bedspread on the floor. Daylight streamed into the room. And the sheriff's square face was bleeding.

There was blood under Charlie's fingernails.

“Last night you growled at me on the phone. At dinner you eyed me like I was some kind of meat. This morning you come in for the kill.” Wes did look hurt and confused. He'd had to get the owner of the Hide-a-bye out of bed to give him a key. “After I knocked and pounded and shouted, that is. Couldn't raise anybody but the neighbors. Probably still standing outside in their bathrobes waiting for the sheriff to haul out another body.”

Charlie couldn't seem to do anything but stare from her fingernails to his face and back again. At this particular moment he was the last person in the world she wanted to hurt.

“You must have been dreaming again. I know. Hey, it's okay.” He grabbed a paper towel from the roll by the sink and soaked it under the tap, held it to his wounded face. “But you weren't screaming this time, so I figured you were already dead.”

Charlie took the towel from him and wiped and blotted the blood until the lopsided grin returned. Then she painstakingly kissed each wound to make it better.

It was some time later that Charlie, wrapped once again in the Hide-a-bye quilt, sat on the couch to call home while the sheriff used her shower. Edwina wanted to know why, as long as Charlie wasn't in jail, she couldn't come home right away. “Tell them you're a single mother with a child to care for, for Pete's sake.”

Libby's music, friends, and television/telephone/eating habits were driving her grandmother up the wall. Grandmothering was fine in theory, but in reality Edwina had to get to the desert and back to work. Charlie tried to think of some comforting words but came up blank. She finally insisted her mother wake Libby instead.

“Mom, you in jail?” came a voice still slurred with sleep that managed to tug at a string connected somehow to Charlie's heart.

“Not yet, honey, but this is important. I want you to help me remember something, okay?”

“It's not even eight o'clock. Like, I haven't had my first diet Coke yet.” The voice had moved suddenly from sleepy to incredulous, putting a perceptible slack in the attendant heart-string. “What do you mean remember?”

Charlie described the wreck of the
Peter Iredale
as best she could without letting the panic it evoked into her voice. “Is there a picture of anything like it in the
National Geographic
on the end table? It's called the
Peter Iredale
if that helps.”

“Just a minute,” Libby said, incredulity melding into disgust. Charlie could hear her whisper, “She's freaking out, Grandma.” There was a buzz as Charlie's only two living relatives whispered back and forth. “
Peter Iredale
” rose to the top of the buzz and Libby came back on—live. “Grandma's looking. This have anything to do with the murder?”

“I don't know. I keep having nightmares about that wreck and I'm going to feel a lot better if you tell me it's just something I've been looking at at home and not seeing. Do you remember anything like that at the poster store on the mall or any place else we might have been together?”

Libby didn't, and disgust had given way to suspicion when, after a slight pause, Charlie's daughter asked, “You got a boyfriend in there with you?”

Charlie glibly lied that it was only the television, and turned from the direction of the shower where Wes was sounding off like a teenager's boom box. Charlie just knew Randolph Glick, whose car was parked outside the cabin two doors down, was on the phone even now to the authorities in Salem about this latest impropriety.

“You don't watch daytime TV,” Libby said, sweetly this time, “remember?”

“I do when I'm alone in hotel rooms, just for the noise and companionship.” Which was true. “Has Grandma found anything?”

Knowing full well the search had come to an abrupt halt at the mention of a boyfriend, Charlie cuddled the mouthpiece tighter into her shoulder and shielded it with the bedspread even though Wes Bennett and the shower had turned themselves off. Charlie was helpless to stem the tide of guilt washing over her at the thought of her mother's reaction.

She hadn't even had time to bring up the subject of the goddamned cat before her two female relatives decided they could find or remember nothing about the
Peter Iredale
but would keep looking and call her back.

Sheriff Wes had dressed and brought her a cup of instant coffee before he noticed the change in her mood. “You switching Charlies on me again, Charlie?”

“I called home while you were in the shower. Libby thinks I'm ‘freaking out.' Do you think I'm freaking out, Wes?”

“Well, let's see now.” He pursed his lips and gingerly fingered the scratches she'd left on his face. They'd turned into welts. “I've been here what, little over an hour? In that time you've tried to claw me to death and love me to death. And right now you look about ready to cry at the sight of me. It's possible you're freaking out.”

They ate cornflakes and fruit sitting on the balcony bench, their feet up on the railing. “Tell me,” the sheriff broke into her nagging thoughts, “was it the clams last night or the guilt over inflicting serious wounds upon my big mug this morning that made you so cuddly and sweet all of a sudden?”

Charlie stopped crunching flakes to stare up at him.

“I'm not trying to be insensitive or macho or anything,” he assured her. “I just want to know if I did something right for once … I guess.”

“I'm sorry, I don't know. I just needed you.”

“Jesus, don't apologize.” He laughed rich and deep where she'd never heard more than a chuckle before. “You want to talk about it? Your dream I mean? Hell, you want to talk bad dreams, talk to a cop—life we lead.”

And Charlie did, feeling less guilty and more silly by the minute. When she finished they were both grinning.

“Shit,” the sheriff said, his breath rich with the odor of plums, “there's a murderer running loose, you've looked upon two dead bodies since last Thursday, found yourself all but under arrest, and you're dreaming about a shipwreck almost a century old?”

Charlie had to keep reminding herself that, although she had an alibi for the time of Michael's death, her fingerprints were supposedly still on his gun. And that gun shot Georgette Glick. And the highest-ranking officer on the case had just slept with her. She felt guilty again. How this man managed to keep his office was beyond her.

“If I just knew I'd seen the
Peter Iredale
before, I could rationalize these stupid dreams, make sense of the senseless.” Charlie tried to explain to them both why Jack's OOBE's disturbed her so.

“He's just dreaming himself and trying to make a book out of it. I told you about the people around here.”

“But Jack's and my dreams are identical, Wes. That chapter he gave me to read would have sounded a lot less plausible if I hadn't dreamed I'd experienced something similar.”

“We all get tingly, floaty sensations sometimes when we're falling asleep,” he said. “We all have nightmares.”

“But how could I have them about the
Peter Iredale
before I saw it? That's the one thing that keeps coming back to drive me … to freak me out.”

“I wish there was only one thing about this case that freaked me out. But I remember standing on the beach years ago and this couple from Florida were taking pictures of it and making a big thing about running across a familiar landmark. They recognized it from a picture. That's a pretty famous wreck, Charlie. Odds are you did see it before you came to Oregon.”

He'd made her feel better yet again so, to be fair, she admitted she hadn't stayed at the Hide-a-bye when he'd dropped her off last night, but had gone back to the village instead. If she shared everything she'd learned with him perhaps between the two of them they could make some sense of it all.

“I knew about Mrs. Peterson's walls being covered with books,” Wes told her. “I was there before you were. Doubt it means anything.” He said it offhandedly but defensiveness had added an edge to his tone. Maybe he was changing sheriffs on her.

Charlie hurried to tell him of the scalding at Rose's and Dr. Paige's treatment with aloe. “I wonder if they ever called a doctor for Gladys.”

“No law says you have to call for medical assistance if the victim is an adult of sound mind and doesn't want it. What's this houseplant again? And how do you find out all this stuff, most of which is useless, by the way?”

“Tagging along, being an unofficial observer. I don't believe in amateur detectives any more than you do, Wes, but I can see how they might be places and learn things an official wouldn't.” She'd noticed the spark in his eyes when she mentioned houseplant. “You still haven't told me how Michael died.”

“Lab reports aren't in yet. But we think it was poison. There were fairly obvious signs plastered around the inside of the car and elsewhere which I won't go into since we just ate.”

“Thank you.” She licked sticky cherry juice off her fingers and went on. “Jack tells me that, contrary to obvious economic indicators, the institute plans to expand and Rose is going to buy back her shares from the Japanese investors and Paige hopes to build onto the Emporium. Doc Withers has marvelous plans for a pet clinic that is so poor he has to make house calls in Chinook and shuffle wine at the institute in the evenings. The economy has mysteriously picked up in the village. Noticed any such changes in Chinook?”

That gave him pause and he finally shook his head no. “But I did check it out with Olsen about his brother getting ready to sue the institute for unpaid bills and found out that was old news. Brother Dennis has paid up and Olsen's brother's in the process of preparing a bid on more improvements. That was another one of your puzzle pieces that didn't fit. But I checked it out, took you seriously, and investigated your suspicions.” His contentment had vanished. He lifted an empty coffee cup to his lips while his eyes searched this small section of the Pacific Ocean as if for the reason why.

“Let's get a second cup at Rose's,” Charlie suggested.

Wes insisted on making a private phone call first.

“How's Gladys this morning?” Charlie asked Rose, accepting the coffee being poured and realizing the same stomach that had given her so much trouble the night before felt happy as a jaybird after an early morning recurrence of a nightmare, a later morning comforting by the sheriff of Moot County, and the requisite guilt trip. No explaining stomachs.

“She's cool.” Rose poured coffee with one hand, and stifled a yawn with the other.

“Cool? I saw those burns last night.”

“That Paige ought to be an MD.” Rose bent close to squint at Wes's face as she filled his cup. “Looks like you should make an appointment with her, Sheriff. Either that or stay away from California women.”

“Rose, where did Michael Cermack eat usually?” Charlie asked. “Did he cook for himself or drive into Chinook? There's no deli in Moot Point.”

“We do breakfast, lunch, and dinner seven days a week. Why should he cook? We pack picnic lunches to eat on the beach and even carry-out. Rose's takes care of Moot Point. Who needs a deli?”

On the street outside, Wes stuck his hands in his pants pockets, rocked on his feet, and said casually, “I'd already figured out that's where Cermack got his lunch to take up to the lighthouse, unofficial investigator. But nice try.” He wrinkled his nose in good-natured condescension, as only a man who'd made love with a woman before breakfast would have the nerve to do.

Then he watched her face as Deputy Tortle drove up in a gray Toyota and stopped in front of them. Charlie's gray Toyota.