Murder at Moot Point (30 page)

“I think we should all go up to the institute and explain things on a reasonable basis.”

“She doesn't look like she's in any shape to be reasonable.”

“Could she be hurt bad? There's ambulances up on the highway.”

“Rose!”

“Well, she's not going to believe in anything you could do for her so it wouldn't help.”

“Especially after what you already tried to do to her.”

“Gladys!”

“Let's just go ahead as we'd planned but take her with us.”

“Can't very well leave her here.”

“He's going to have to do something about Eddie. This is too much.”

“Anybody know who it was up on the highway?”

“We've got our own problems right now. Here, help me get her in the van.”

Charlie was still reeling from her sickness when she was picked up by the armpits and deposited on the floor of a vehicle smelling of damp soil and hothouse flowers.

She was too dizzy at the moment to control her own life, but when they stopped and got her out of the van she intended to bolt off into the woods. In the dark … in the fog … old Eddie running loose in his lamp shade … oh, great. Was the massive sheriff off sticking needles under Frank Glick's fingernails to get a confession? Maybe he was trying to clear up the mess of an accident on 101. He sure wasn't here.

Charlie began to sweat. She floated over the
Peter Iredale
in the fog, touching the ship's vanished structure with her senses. Seeing nothing but vague shapes, obscured in murk, that refused to materialize once she reached them. She was too dizzy to be frightened now, too sick to care about the evil that might be there, too tired to be curious.

“One step at a time, Charlie, you can do it,” Paige said in her ear. Paige had a sweet little-girl voice. “You'll feel better when we get there.”

“Get where?”

“Up the stairs. Here, can you guys carry her? I don't think she can make it.”

“I was going to go back for her. I just wanted to find out what to do first, what to say.” That was Doc Withers. “What happened?”

“Eddie knocked her over. She hit her head.”

The air hung heavy with incense. Charlie knew it was incense because Libby burned a lot of the stuff in her room. That too was probably driving Edwina up the wall. Charlie usually just checked the funny smoke out for funny cigarettes and felt so relieved at finding none, incense made sense.

At this moment, however, it didn't. Charlie cracked an eyelid and winced, cracked the other more slowly. The people with her didn't notice. They sat in the smoke fog with their eyes closed, their legs lotused. Paige and Rose on one side of Charlie, Brother Dennis at her feet, Doc Withers and Gladys on her other side.

They weren't making mantra sounds. They merely sat uncomfortably around Charlie, as if she was the table at a séance, heads bowed. She could almost hear the effort of concentration over the repetitive mechanized music playing monotonous and soft off a tape somewhere close, not quite masking the party chatter wisping up through the floor below. Charlie was tone-deaf and machine-made music was particularly grating. But that didn't explain what she thought she was hearing now.

Gladys and Rose were definitely having trouble with their knees, which wasn't surprising—neither was a tiny, springy Oriental. Charlie could damn near hear the pain of joints demanding to stand and crack and pop. Brother Dennis was having problems with a dry swallow—too much wine and salted chips this evening. Doc was growing increasingly worried, disoriented, vague, uncomfortable, unsure. Paige on the other hand clasped her lips and her eyelids tighter and nodded. She might well have the answer.

Every last one of them was hoping the others were doing what they had all agreed to do, while individually none of them could keep from being distracted by their own worries. How could Charlie know any of this? No one was talking. Answer to what, Paige? What, Doc, are you so worried about?

Paige was the first to notice Charlie awake. Doc Withers the second. They both looked from her to their leader, Brother Dennis, and he too awoke. He blinked at each of them and noticed Charlie—oh yes, the problem at hand.

“Charlie Greene,” he intoned like a television Baptist, “all of us here have been doing our best to explain matters to you, each in our own way and telepathically. We are all of us good and honest people and we hoped that you could feel that come through in our inner voices. We wanted you to hear our story on the most intimate level possible because we've found ourselves in a terrible dilemma and need your understanding. Have you heard us?”

Rose and Gladys unfolded their legs. Charlie sat up and waited for the red circles behind her eyes and the pinging in her ears to subside. Her table and their chairs were made of cushions, as if someone had removed the wooden parts of a dining room set.

“Oh yes, I've heard you, Brother Dennis. I've heard you hoping like hell that Jack Monroe can run the show downstairs until you get back. I've heard Doc here worry about lovable Eddie running loose in his lamp shade. I've heard Gladys worry about her poodles, which she had not had time to let out to puddle before she came here. And Rose should be worried. It was her box lunch Michael ate before dying of poisoning. Gladys's knees are killing her. What is Paige worried about? Olie Bergkvist?” Where was this stuff coming from?

From Charlie's imagination of course. Incense and funny music and a knock on the head will do wonders for the imagination. There was nothing she had said she couldn't have deduced from what she already knew.

But it was right about here that it became clear, even to an injured and foggy head, that each of them felt nearly paralyzed by guilt. It didn't take telepathy to know it either. It was plain to read on their faces.

“You didn't
all
murder Georgette and Michael?” Charlie said, too stunned to think before she spoke. “You couldn't have.”

Chapter 33

Edwina Greene would have said, “If you can make a sorry mess sorrier, Charlie, you're sure to do it.”

Libby would have said, “Brilliant, Mom, seriously brilliant.”

Deputy Tortle would have said, “Jesus, when you play it stupid, you really go for it.”

Richard Morse of Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc. would have said, “Comes the day, Charlie, when you got to actually bite the bullet and place your brain on the chair and make the goddamned effort to think.”

Sheriff Bennett would likely have said, “I can't believe you did that. Even you—a female-woman-human-being person.”

There was fear in the room and that much fear concentrated from that many people, whether or not they were all good and all honest, was dangerous. You needn't be telepathic, sensitive, intelligent, or even sane to figure that out. A corpse on a gurney in a morgue could have figured that out.

Charlie had the urge to lie back down and pretend to be sick again to gain time to make better plans, but decided it was a little late for that. She could end up on Georgette's old gurney right alongside Michael if she didn't stay alert. She could even if she did stay alert.

So she sat there and watched them all think, while the party continued downstairs and the remorseless synthesized sounds pretended to be music. The room was circular, with windows nearly all around revealing nothing but black outside. The incense smoke thinned as the sticks burned to their ends. Charlie was gradually feeling better, stronger. The sheriff knew the crowd she was with last and knew where they were all likely to be. So if she was a good girl and stayed out of any more trouble and waited, she might have some help getting out of this.

If Jack was downstairs it could mean he was not involved in this dilemma Brother Dennis mentioned. If Charlie could get down to the party they could hardly harm her in front of witnesses.

This must be Brother Dennis's living quarters. By its size she guessed it to be the head of the octopus while the arms shaped the first floor of the institute. That left one more small story above—the hat atop it all. On the cabinet next to the sink nozzle sat a fancy Krups coffee maker, and next to that the passageway to the stairwell and a wall space void of window that could make room for the stairs leading to the floor above from a common landing. Odd building this.

And the people on this floor were getting odder by the minute. They all stared at Charlie but spoke to each other.

“No help for it now,” Paige said. “If only she hadn't come here. Everything would have worked out.”

“This can't go on.” Doc Withers looked prepared to choke. “Something's got to stop it.”

“He's right, it's really going to look ridiculous,” Gladys said. “Small place like this.”

“We're all in this together, don't forget,” Rose warned. “That includes you, Doc.”

“Why couldn't you have seen reason?” Brother Dennis finally addressed Charlie. “You're not looking at five murderers, but five human beings.”

Charlie was looking at five human beings changing before her eyes. Paige Magill looked her age now and then some, the once-plump rosy cheeks etched and saggy, her mouth drooping and resentful. Doctor Chuck Withers's boyish awkwardness had degenerated to twitching white-faced dread. Rose Kortinemi's swarthy face and sardonic expression had become suffused and puffy with a dark resolve. Brother Dennis Thornton's bony sallowness had taken on a yellow tinge and his eyes a resigned sadness. The skin on Gladys Bergkvist's face hung in lumps and sacks, tiny blood vessels mapping the ridges like rivers. But anger burned in her eyes.

Above the scratchy, tinny music up here and the chatter and laughter from below, the howling of a dog rose into the night in keening lament. Probably amplified by being funneled through a lamp shade.

“You realize,” Gladys said, “that if it hadn't been for that goddamned dog, none of this would have happened?”

The spell had broken and Charlie's captors looked away from her to each other. Charlie was on her feet and running for the stairwell. She'd have made it, too, if it hadn't been for the cushions. They poufed and slid and when her Ked slipped between two of them she went down.

How was it Charlie came up out of stupid nightmares screaming, but never thought to do it before they had her mouth taped? It had simply not occurred to her. Now she lay upstairs in the cupola-hat room, wrists and ankles trussed with tape as well, and called herself unspeakable things.

This was Brother Dennis's recording studio and office. They'd left a desk light on, which wasn't very smart. They were amateurs in deep trouble, five loose cannons. Very dangerous. Hindsight told her she should have made an effort to divide and conquer. Hell, it wasn't possible for five people to pull one trigger.

Charlie didn't know if they were down on the cushions planning strategy or out trying to quiet Eddie right now. She did know adhesive tape was one marvelous binder—the more she struggled against it the tighter it got. Why had anybody ever bothered with rope? Her head ached again, but what worried Charlie most were the twinges of nausea. If she vomited now, with her mouth so tightly taped she'd choke on her own puke and save the deadly five the trouble.

Great. This was not the kind of thing that was supposed to happen to people in Charlie's line of work. This happened to performers on TV or in film who staged getting killed and then got up and went home to bed. Charlie tried to imagine Edwina raising Libby through the teenage years and broke out in a sweat with the effort to keep from gagging.

Sheriff Wes Bennett was probably even now at the gates in his good old Bronco steed. He'd come charging up the stairs any minute.

Bullshit.

Charlie spent a few moments talking with her stomach, her gag reflex, her cop-out fantasy world, her headache, and her adrenaline flow, and then began looking seriously around Brother Dennis's office. Had her captors been pros they would have taped her eyes shut too. Which made them no less dangerous. Charlie hadn't a clue as to what weird idea they'd come up with next. All the writers she worked with had to use fairly formula criminals and perpetrators because entertainment is highly formulaic. That kind of dangerous person had some predictable parameters. Charlie's amateurs did not.

The desk light was above her and didn't illuminate much on the floor, but after rolling over once she found a loosened hinge on a cabinet door, rubbed her cheek against it, and decided it wasn't sharp enough to cut tape.

A line of tape ran from her ankles to her wrists behind her back. If she could cut that she could stick her feet through the circle of her bound arms and bring her hands up her front to tear the tape off her mouth and then dislodge it from her ankles. Sounded great in theory.

Charlie rolled over again and found herself sitting up, her back against the wall, the line of tape connecting ankles with wrists stuck to the rear of her pants. But she
was
sitting up, staring at Brother Dennis's desk across her knees. His desk had a cutout section in the center and the legs of a chair sat in it. And Charlie was sitting up, so she could conceivably, even trussed by tape, sit in a chair. Desks often had drawers with things like scissors and letter openers in them.

Charlie tried to be quiet as she rolled herself over and over until she was on the other side of the desk.

The damn chair had wheels. Charlie'd worked in offices long enough to know they generally do, but she had hoped. Getting into the chair in her trussed condition without moving it around was not going to be easy.

Eddie's spine-prickling howl rose again. It was awesome. Why would none of this have happened if it hadn't been for Eddie? Eddie hadn't shot Georgie and he hadn't poisoned Michael. Did they discover something Eddie had done and had to die for it? But you don't kill people to protect a dog.

Charlie flopped her chest across the seat of the chair, caught the edge of the seat with her chin to keep it from rolling out from under her, and was just barely balanced on the ends of her bent knees, her trussed ankles pulled up to where the tape stuck to her rear.