Murder at Moot Point (29 page)

So did Jack, Mary, Norma, Paige, Doc Withers, Gladys, and Rose. None of them seemed to be enjoying themselves much.

Charlie turned from one grill to go to another and literally ran into Deputy Linda Tortle. “You happen to know where our sheriff is by any chance? He's not answering his car radio.”

“He was at the Hide-a-bye about an hour ago.” Rose caught Charlie's eye and pointed out a corner cooker and Charlie was on her way.

“The Hide-a-bye?” Linda followed her. “Talking to one of Frank's family?”

Charlie shrugged and pointed a tongs at the black box attached to Linda's belt. “Can't you get ahold of him on that?”

“Well, yeah, if he's that close.” She turned away from the noise of the crowd and brought the box to her mouth. There was quite a bit of intermediate chatter before she reached her boss and turned back to give Charlie a questioning look. “Yes, sir, she's right here.” There were staticy barking sounds like a seal crossing a downed live wire. “Cooking tofu dogs, sir.” More barking. “Tofu dogs and eggplant burgers.” More barking. “Yes, sir. He says for you to—”

“I know, stay put. How can you understand a word he says on that thing?”

But Deputy Tortle was walking off down the beach still talking to the barking box.

The wind had died almost completely now and the tofu dogs and eggplant burgers didn't smell especially good. But the rain Charlie thought she'd been smelling half the afternoon didn't come. The dirty fog rolled up onto the beach instead and settled over the picnic. Jack, Brother Dennis, and Doc Withers lit replicas of old ship lanterns from the van and hung them on tent poles at the corners of the tarps or set them on tables. And the beach party went on.

As the call for charbroiled meat substitute dwindled, Charlie and Irene began dousing coals and scraping grills. Paige came up to Charlie and took the spatula from her hand.

“Get yourself some dinner while there's food left. I'll take care of this.” The big smile must have drowned in the shadowed dimples because it got lost before it reached the almond eyes.

After a bad night and an incredibly eventful day, Charlie was more tired than she was hungry. But she decided to show Jack Monroe her mind was not completely closed and tried a tofu dog on a bun with ketchup, mustard, and pickles. It tasted like ketchup, mustard, and pickles on a bun.

“I suppose you're only going to eat half of that,” he said, and popped open a diet Coke for her. She stood right in front of his table and ate the whole thing. His sardonic smile at least reached his eyes. “Good girl.”

Irene had been relieved, too, and she passed Charlie with a plate of beans, potato salad, and carrot cake. “Not even any mayonnaise in the potato salad,” she said and curled her lip, “just mustard and dill.”

Charlie nursed the Coke and wandered through the crowd, shaking her head when Doc offered her wine. She'd had too many mood swings today to trust herself with alcohol in the midst of murderers.

Funny, they had all seemed so innocent and predictable, if odd, yesterday. Tonight they all seemed suspicious and dangerous. Even Jack, her client and Keegan's father. Keegan Monroe was simply one of Charlie's favorite human beings.

The fog didn't help. Neither did the foghorn which she was uncomfortably aware of again. It reminded her of her first night in Moot Point and Georgette's eyeglasses dangling from one bent bow and her bent Schwinn crossing headlights trailing fog.

How long did it take the sheriff to put his pants on and get over here? How long was she supposed to stay put? Why hadn't she come in the Toyota?

The progression from dusk to twilight to night was harder to determine in fog than it was in smog. But the fog seemed very dark outside the limited glow of the lanterns now and it seemed to haze up the people and happenings and even colors under the tarps like old film gone blurry.

Maybe Charlie's contacts needed a few drops of rewetting solution, but with this kind of moisture that didn't seem likely. Maybe she was too tired to judge. Maybe she'd had too much sex with too much sheriff … maybe—she waved off yet another wine pass by the holistic veterinarian and then changed her mind suddenly, as it seemed she'd been doing all day, and waved him back.

There was one plastic glass of red on a tray filled with white. She reached for the red automatically but noticed the look in his eyes and hesitated. Then she took the one red and watched him. This man might sleep with ducks but he was no professional when it came to hiding relief.

“I'm very worried about Charlie the cat, Doc. I don't think Frank's caring for it.”

Maybe it
was
sticky contact lenses, night fog, and funny lantern light, or maybe it was Charlie the agent's growing paranoia—but Chuck Withers, DVM, appeared to be stunned. “Gladys said you didn't love animals.”

“Excuse me?”

“Gladys said, and even Paige, that you—”

“Doc, I know Georgette's kitty goes home looking for her, but are you seeing to its survival? Because we both know old Frank cares only for old Frank.”

The tray tipped as his thoughts moved elsewhere and Charlie reached out to help balance it. “Charlie the cat is right now in my house warm, safe, and fed. Probably snuggling up with Mortimer. There are no strays in Moot Point. If I can't find homes for them, they find one with me.”

“That's marvelous,” Charlie gushed. “And how is Eddie doing after surgery for his dewclaw?”

“You worry about Eddie too?” Doc's astonishment was growing.

“But not the same way I do about Charlie,” Charlie admitted. “What I don't understand about Eddie is how Brother Dennis can keep him as a pet at the institute with so many strangers coming and going. Let's face it, Eddie is a very protective German shepherd.” Eddie was one hell of a liability for someone running a place wooing the public, is what Eddie was.

“It's like Dobermans and mountain lions and sharks,” Doc said, one index finger and a wrinkling nose pushing his glasses, with the bow wired on, back up where they belonged. “They have a bad press. Some animals, in the concept of people, are bad. Like you could have the most loving, the sweetest Doberman in the world racing toward you, and if you didn't know the dog personally, if you had a gun in your hand, you'd shoot it, right? In self-defense. Not because it's a dog, but because it's a Doberman, therefore life-threatening. Eddie's one of the sweetest, gentlest animals you'll ever meet. He's got bad press because he's a German shepherd, that's all. He's also Brother Dennis's closest friend.”

Charlie smiled a smile she knew to be as shallow as Paige Magill's and moved on with her wine and her diet Coke, checking out the other known suspects at the foggy beach party. It was like the video of an old Humphrey Bogart film where everyone was smoking cigarettes and the cameras shot through a haze. Charlie was seeing them through fog instead, but knew without a doubt they were watching her too.

Every last one of them.

She took a sip of the wine, a sip so tiny she could do no more than taste it and could barely work it up into a convincing swallow.

It had a bitter, almost puckery taste that seemed to suck the moisture out of her tongue. Was it the “structure” of homegrown Oregon wine? Or was it the same flavor Michael Cermack had tasted just before he died?

Chapter 32

This time Charlie Greene had planned to stay put. She really wanted to. But this time the sheriff of Moot County didn't show.

She'd helped pack things in the van and the tables, tarps, and grills in a pickup that arrived from somewhere down the beach, after Brother Dennis and Paige led the searchers back to the institute, a line of laughter and bobbing lanterns disappearing into the fog. She could hear the one long after the second had disappeared leaving Charlie with three choices. She could ride in the crowded van with Rose and Gladys or walk up to the village with Jack and Doc and the last lantern. Norma and Mary and Irene had already left with the next to the last. Or she could sit alone in the dark, in the fog, and wait for the sheriff to find her.

Charlie decided to walk with the men, wishing again she'd brought the Toyota. Maybe Linda or Wes would give her a lift back to the Hide-a-bye. Doc held the lantern as they ascended the steps and went ahead. Jack followed Charlie.

“Didn't you like the wine?” the veterinarian asked her at the top of the stairs.

“I guess I wasn't in the mood. And it had a sort of bitter taste.” How do you know I didn't drink it? Did you watch me pour it into the diet Coke can? Or is it because I'm not dead yet?

“Taste?” Jack snorted. “What do you mean taste? White wine tastes like soda pop without the fizz—flat and
blech.
”

“But mine was red.”

“Brother Dennis only serves white wine at institute functions,” Jack told her. “Cheap jug white. I usually take my own.”

Before Charlie could ask him if he had tonight, Jack announced he was in fact going home to get a bottle right now and take it up to the institute and join the celebration. The last thing he wanted after last night was to sleep. The word “sleep” floated back behind him on the fog and he was gone.

“How can he see to go anywhere?” Charlie asked. “I can't see a thing.” Well, she could see a weepy streetlight not far away, but that was it.

“He knows the way.” Doc raised the lantern. “If he keeps walking straight he'll walk right into the Earth Spirit. Some people can see better than others in this stuff.”

“Did you get my wine from Jack's bottle?”

“He wasn't drinking on the beach, but there was a jug of red in the van for anybody who asked for it. People generally don't. Gladys and Rose drink red when they drink wine at all. But old Jack can get quite opinionated and superior for a man of awareness.”

“Did Jack tell you I liked red?”

“‘My agent is too sophisticated to drink that white vinegar of yours,' is how he put it. So Paige went and got the red.”

Between the fog and the angle at which he held the lantern, Charlie could see his face, but his expression seemed to waver indistinctly as it might under water. “Was it Paige who told you I didn't like animals, or Gladys?”

Fog sat like hoar frost on the tips of his raw-cut hair, streaked his glasses. “Why are you still suspicious of everyone? Haven't you heard Frank murdered his wife? You don't have to be so defensive anymore, so … California.”

“I don't know he killed anyone, just that he and Clara put Georgette under my car to make it look like I did it. Just like someone put her on her picnic table to make it look like
he
did it. Frank's from California too, isn't he? Doc?”

Charlie had finally gone too far with one of these patient, gentle, nice, New Age murder suspects. She'd picked a hell of a time to do it. “Doc, don't leave me—I can't see.”

“Stay by the lamppost. I'll be back.” His voice arrived after he was gone, his lantern light bobbing upwards on the slanting mountainside. Then it was gone too.

“I don't believe this,” Charlie told the lamppost and moved closer to it. “Doc!”

When you can't see much, you hear a lot. A door slammed somewhere, a rhythmic clicking sound approached her. A car horn and the screech of brakes up on 101 were closely followed by the nightmare crunch of impacting metal. The Pacific ploughed into the continent sounding lazy, as if its power were leashed by the fog. “Doc, come back, please?”

The rhythmic clicking had stopped. A low growl bristled hairs on Charlie's neck. The foghorn
oo-gaahed
dispassionately. Charlie had spent half her hours in Moot County trying to avoid the law. Here she was under the only light in sight and now there was no sheriff, no deputies, nobody but … Eddie.

The clicking began again, came closer … Eddie's toenails against the street. Eddie's toothsome grin entered the fog soaked circle of light, his eyes briefly refracting red from inside a lamp shade. It made his tiresome, monotone growl sound amplified and hollow. Bowzer, the schnauzer, had worn one like it to keep him from chewing on himself when he had an allergy.

“I understand you have a bad press, Eddie. Like sharks and Dobermans. But that you're really sweet and gentle. Hell, your own doctor told me so. And he told me you're Brother Dennis's closest friend. Hey puppy, nice puppy, I said
Brother Dennis.
”

Eddie, who hadn't been a puppy for a dog's age, snarled unspeakable things in his own language. Up on 101 sirens screamed in orderly and official panic toward the flesh-and-metal emergency she'd heard scarce minutes before.

“Hey, who says aloe is faster in emergencies?” she asked Eddie.

Which was a mistake, because he took it as an insult and soared off the road toward her as he had the first time Charlie met him. The lower end of one of his front legs was wrapped in white. The lamp shade struck her in the mouth, his front paws struck her chest. But the sharp pain where the back of her head hit the ground was the most impressive.

Charlie's stomach hurt again. Her mouth tasted strongly of mustard. Her head ached in a tight constricting band encircling everything from her eyebrows up. The foghorn sounded nauseated too. She was waiting to figure out what was happening when someone said, “… wine?”

“Not this late. Maybe it was a hit-and-run car in the fog.”

“It was a dog wearing a lamp shade,” Charlie said, finally figuring out she wasn't seeing anything because her eyes were closed. Nausea swamped her when she opened them.

“Charlie, are you all right?” Paige wavered into Charlie's wavy vision under fog-smeared lamplight. Was it Charlie's imagination or did the village florist and dream keeper sound disappointed?

“No,” Charlie reassured her. “I'm going to lose my tofu dog.” And she rolled over in time to do just that. While she gagged in misery, gasped, sputtered, and coughed, the conversation above her continued as dispassionately as the foghorn.