Murder Crops Up (18 page)

“So, this woman who’s stalking you. What’s that about?”

“You remember her—Carlotta. She lived next door when Vivien was alive.”

“I didn’t know your Vivien very well, and I don’t think I met Carlotta at all.” Claudia pulled over a bowl of lady apples on the kitchen table and chose one after careful examination. The apples had been gleaned through an elderly friend of Bridget’s who lived in Los Altos Hills. I had permission to pick anything in her orchard, which was no longer plowed and sprayed, but which still gave apricots and plums and peaches and apples in season. The fruit was small and occasionally wormy, but deliciously sweet with a wild tang, excellent for jams and preserves.

“Carlotta is just trying to find something to do with her time, now that she’s at the Forum and hasn’t got many household chores to keep her busy.” I spoke with a degree of dismissal I was far from feeling. Claudia was a powerful weapon; she was not the type to stand by and see a friend troubled. If she decided to take care of Carlotta for me, it could get ugly.

“She had better find something else to do besides bother you,” Claudia said, burnishing her chosen apple on her sleeve. She bit into it, her large, white teeth closing with a snap. She had excellent teeth for her age.

“It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.” I spoke as forcefully as I could. The force rather bounced off Claudia.

Amy came in. “All right. Now, what did that man say?”

Claudia raised her eyebrows. “What man? Is there something else besides your stalker?”

“Is there!” Amy plunged into a rather incoherent account, while I silently cursed the gods who had sent Claudia over on this day of all days. She was immersed in her latest book, which was a definitive biography of Jane Lathrop Stanford that required a ton of reading and a lot of time spent in various Stanford libraries. I had probably seen more of her during the past couple of months than anyone else in her circle, because one of my odd jobs was to do a weekly garden cleanup for her. She pays more than generously, and her garden is an interesting mix, displaying many of her past enthusiasms as well as the plants she is currently involved with.

But her curiosity is exceeded only by her determination to set things right for everyone she cares about. While Amy chattered away about dead people and Bruno Morales and the community garden and Tom Dancey, I waited for Claudia to leap into the whole mess with her usual enthusiasm for detecting, which is accompanied by a touching faith that she can accomplish more than the police, especially Drake, ever could.

She surprised me by saying, when Amy finally sputtered to a halt, “I’m sorry to hear of the deaths. But I’m sure Bruno has it all under control.” She sniffed. “It must drive Drake wild to know that his partner is in charge and he can’t mess it up.”

“Drake doesn’t mess things up. He and Bruno work together to solve cases.” I couldn’t explain why I felt the need to defend Drake. He would have found Claudia’s remark merely funny. What rivalry there is comes strictly from her.

“At any rate, interesting as this turmoil in the garden is, it’s not the reason I came over.” She bent that gaze on me again, the one that turns my knees to jelly and makes me confess even if I didn’t do anything. “Liz, I have reason to believe that Bridget is planning a birthday party for me.” She paused. “A surprise party.”

“As if anyone could plan anything with all this stuff going on.” I turned my back on her to scrub baby beets and carrots.

“You’ve heard nothing about it?” Even without confronting that gimlet stare, I could feel her powerful will reaching out to subject me to mental lie-detector rays. The only defense against this is the blatant sophistry of finding a truthful, even if nonfactual, answer to every question.

“Is today your birthday? I didn’t know.” I’d thought it was Wednesday. At least, that’s what Bridget had said.

“It’s Wednesday,” she said. “I wouldn’t care for a surprise party. If anyone were to give me a birthday party, I would want to look my best, and not like I thought I was going to baby-sit four rowdy children. And I certainly wouldn’t want any actual numbers mentioned, in terms of my age.”

I didn’t dare look at her. “If Bridget knows it’s your birthday, you’ll get a cake. That’s how she is.”

“She’s asked me to baby-sit for them. I assumed she’d spring dinner on me at the least. And, of course, a cake.” Claudia came over to the sink to dispose of her apple core in the compost bucket. She leaned against the counter next to me, intent on her goal. “But will there be people other than the Montroses? Will people take idiotic pictures of me dressed in sweatpants and gaping in surprise? Will I need earplugs to avoid being deafened by loud music? Will there be those terrible little hats with elastic that bites into your chins and makes you look like a lunatic? Will I be required to make a witty speech extempore?” She cleared her throat. “That’s the kind of thing I would like to know. I thought you could tell me.”

The beets demanded all my attention. I scrubbed furiously. “Well, Claudia, follow the Boy Scout motto in this case. Dress nicely, keep your mouth closed, accept no headgear, and think up some non-extempore wit. Then you’ll be ready no matter what happens."

She nodded once. “I see.”

“Is there going to be a party?” Amy stopped chomping her own apple long enough to ask.

“I will, no doubt, be the last to know.” Claudia turned her formidable attention on Amy. “You are visiting colleges? I know a few people at Santa Clara University and at Stanford. And Berkeley, come to that.” She frowned. “My Berkeley friend in the admissions office is retiring next month, so she won’t be of any use to you. But if you’d like appointments with faculty in any particular school, I might be able to help you. Otherwise it might be difficult to get interviews on the spur of the minute.”

I could see that Amy felt bad for leading Claudia to think her main purpose in visiting was to check out colleges. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d just started in and told Claudia everything. Claudia is the sort of person who can extract your story, no matter how personal, in the minimum amount of time. Since I can’t keep a secret around her, it is a good thing I have so few secrets.

Amy was made of sterner stuff than I thought, however. She thanked Claudia nicely and said she’d welcome any assistance.

“Come over this afternoon,” Claudia said. “After four. I’ll write down some phone numbers for you, and make a couple of calls if I have time. What curricula were you planning to check out?”

“Business school, international relations, and mechanical engineering,” Amy said promptly.

Claudia blinked. “Well, I believe I can help you in a couple of those disciplines.” She moved over to the door. “I know you’re busy, Liz, so I won’t linger. Let me know if you need some help persuading Carlotta to leave you alone. I’m rather good at that sort of thing, if I do say so myself.”

I saw her out the door, and Amy joined me to watch her stride away. “I bet she’s good at it,” Amy whispered. “She could make me do just about anything.”

“It’s a useful personality trait,” I agreed. “And she doesn’t really intimidate her friends. Often.”

“Right.” Amy turned back to examine the refrigerator. “So there’s going to be a surprise party, huh? Did you realize, Aunt Liz, that we haven’t had lunch yet?”

“I’m hungry.” And I was. It seemed like a long time since breakfast. “Shall I cook these veggies now or save them for dinner?”

“Dinner.” Amy didn’t even glance at the baby beets, glistening like rubies and topazes. I put them in the crisper. “Peanut butter is fine for lunch.”

She made a huge peanut butter and jam sandwich on the homemade bread I’d baked the previous morning. I made a slightly less epic version and put come carrots and celery in a dish on the table.

“Say, I saw a bicycle in the garage, Aunt Liz. Does it work?”

I swallowed peanut butter, not without effort. “Yes, I got it at a garage sale and Drake fixed it up. It’s not fancy, but it goes.”

“I could ride that to Claudia’s,” Amy said around her own mouthful. “And maybe leave early and stop on the way to check in at the office.” This referred to the stockbrokerage where she’d had a summer job on her previous visit. “I want to hear what the guys there think about the current market. Wanna make sure my college money gets the max.”

Hearing Amy talk about college interviews and savings made it pretty clear what course she’d chosen. I didn’t ask anything, however. I thought she’d tell me about it when she wanted. And I didn’t want to be backed into giving advice. I was still unsure how I felt about it all.

Amy spiffed up a little to visit her buddies at the brokerage house—she changed the ragged flannel shirt she wore over her baggy linen jumper for a ragged black sweatshirt, took the helmet I insisted she wear, and pedaled off down the drive. I settled down at my desk, Barker at my feet, and tried to prune my notes on an article about bitter greens for
Organic Gardening
into some semblance of coherent thought. This process wasn’t helped by not having an assignment—I’d queried a couple of weeks ago and not heard back yet, so I didn’t even know if they’d buy the article. I wondered if the editor had tried to call me at Drake’s and failed somehow to leave a message. I wondered if it was time to bow to consensus and get my own phone, even a fax machine. Even an on-line connection for my ancient computer, which probably couldn’t begin to handle it.

The speeding bullet of technology is making a Luddite of me. Why should it matter to everyone that they had to leave messages and write letters to contact me? Why did everything have to be done instantaneously? I looked at Charlotte Brontë’s
Shirley
on my bookshelf and knew that no one would have the effrontery to write such a book in this day and age. Readers lacked the attention span for Victorian masterpieces; the high moral tone Brontë espoused and her characters’ hidden reserves of passion would lack accessibility in the modern age. And the mind-boggling thing is that Brontë wrote it all on tiny scraps of paper while sitting near the fire in the evenings, the only time she had free for authorship. It seemed churlish to complain about lack of telephone and fax machine in the face of that triumph of determination.

All that the cogitation about office equipment accomplished was to keep me from getting very far with my bitter greens article. I had amassed a fair amount of information on the medicinal properties of mustard and corn mâche, of radicchio and arugula, and had to weave that material into the article without boring my reader to death. I didn’t much relish the task, but it was more appealing than the alternative, which was to go out and find a regular job, working amid all the complicated machines that populate the modern office.

Too scary. I looked at my elderly computer, so old that its sheer bulk occupied major space. In such an unintimidating environment, I should be able to compose a positive epic about bitter greens.

Chapter 21

The knock on my door came before I’d managed to put myself totally to sleep droning on about phytochemicals.

I looked through the window and saw Tamiko standing on the front porch. Huddled into a thick zippered sweater and a skirt, without garden gloves, she looked different.

I opened the door for her. “Hi, Tamiko.” She came in hesitantly.

“You must wonder why I’m here.” She glanced around, taking in my house. I wished that Amy had thought to pick up the clothes she’d pawed through to find her jacket.

“Not at all,” I lied politely. “I almost didn’t recognize you without some dirt under your fingernails.”

She smiled, but sobered immediately. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

“Sure.” I gestured her into the kitchen, away from the hurricane of Amy’s personal possessions that cluttered the living room. “Would you like some tea?”

“Yes, thank you.” She watched while I put the kettle on and warmed a pot. I spooned in some of my favorite blend of lemon balm, peppermint, and pineapple sage.

When I set the teapot, cups, and honey on the table, she spoke. “You probably know this is about Lois’s death. And Rita’s, of course.”

“I wondered.” I gave the tea a stir and tucked a cozy around it.

“You have the ear of the man who’s investigating. Detective Morales.”

“Yes, to some extent. So do you, Tamiko. If you have something you want him to know, call and talk to him or leave a message. He wants to hear anything you have to tell.”

“This is not something I know.” Tamiko leaned forward. “It is only something I wonder about. Have you noticed the stranger, Liz?”

I was pouring the tea, and her words took me by surprise. Some of the fragrant blend splashed on the table-top. “I’ll get it,” I said, grabbing a tea towel. “What stranger do you mean?”

“The man who walks around the garden. About noon, a couple of times a week. He wears an overcoat and a hat, and regular shoes—not tennis shoes.” Tamiko stuck out one sneaker-clad foot. “I have seen him a couple of times a week for the past month or so. Suddenly today I wondered if he had something to do with their deaths. Rita and Lois.”

I remembered the man strolling at the garden while Amy and I worked. “I’ve seen that guy—he was there today. Maybe he’s just some businessman who likes to walk around the garden after lunch.”

“He lingers,” Tamiko insisted, accepting the cup I put in front of her. I added honey to mine; honey brings out the sweetness of the herbs, and blends their flavors together. “Especially around the gate near our plots, I’ve noticed. And around the wood chips. Maybe he plans to pull women over behind the wood chips where Lois was found and—”

We stared at each other. “Lois wasn’t raped,” I said. “And neither was Rita.”

“Do you think Detective Morales would be interested in this?” Tamiko took a sip of tea and hastily put the cup down.

“I’ll mention it, and I’ll tell him you’ve seen the man a couple of times a week. But I don’t think it means anything, Tamiko. There are lots of people walking around there all the time. The woman with the golden retrievers, the man with the big shepherd—”

“And the woman in the blue jogging suit who runs very slowly and listens to headphones.” Tamiko nodded. “But they are doing something. This man is doing nothing. Why is he there?”