Murder in the Dog Days (Maggie Ryan) (10 page)

“So there was nothing different about him when he left?”

“Nothing I could see. Except he had a package.”

“He didn’t have it when he arrived?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I didn’t notice him till he was already at the door, and those bushes might of like hid it.”

“What did the package look like?”

“Brown paper. Maybe a grocery bag folded over. Shoebox size.”

“Good.” Holly was pleased. This might be something. “Bo, could I look out the window where you saw all this?”

Suddenly he looked uneasy. Had he been lying? Making up these helpful details? He muttered, “Hey, I don’t like people in my room.”

His mother giggled. “He won’t let me clean it, even. And it’s such a mess!”

Bo’s brother was hiding a smirk. Bo said sullenly, “She always gets my mags all mixed up.”

Holly realized what the problem was. She explained carefully, “I just want a look through the window, Bo. I’m not going to check your housekeeping. And it’ll be a lot more trouble for everybody if I have to get a search warrant.”

“Oh, of course you can look without a search warrant!” exclaimed Betty Morgan. But Holly waited for Bo to work things out in his head and give her a quick miserable nod before she followed Betty down the hall.

His room was in the front of the house, the corner nearest the Colby’s. She walked around to the far side of the bed and looked out the window. The view was as he’d described it. Even lying on the bed he could see across the Colby driveway to their front porch. This kid’s testimony might someday be important.

She turned and surveyed the room quickly. A chaos of posters, rock albums and tapes, electronic equipment, huge stacks of Marvel comics, candy-bar wrappers, soft-drink cans. But the bed was made. She lifted the nearest corner of the bedspread with her toe. There was his stash: papers, a bag of grass, plus a couple of bright pills. An easy reach from his pillow. Mom looking the other way, consciously or unconsciously. Well, Holly wasn’t into illegal searches tonight.

When she looked up again, Bo was standing in the doorway watching her, eyes terrified.

Holly joined him and closed the door behind her. “It all checks out, Bo,” she said. “You have a good view of their door. Let’s get down all the facts. This could be a real important statement.”

The boy nodded mutely and followed her back to the dining room.

6

At the upstairs den door, Olivia gripped the knob and pulled the door partway closed. “Okay, everybody, if you need anything, just let us know, okay?”

“Okay.” Donna, still puffy-faced but no longer weeping, was sitting stiffly on the edge of the open sofa bed. Tina was already lying on the other half, her eyes wide open, her lower lip trembling. Her mother was smoothing back her hair from her forehead in little mechanical strokes that couldn’t have been very comforting. Josie huddled alone on the extra cot, legs pulled up, her face hidden against her knees.

It was nearly midnight. Olivia had finally phoned her sleepy editor, who’d told her to stick with Donna now and check in early tomorrow. Before they’d left Betty Morgan’s, while Schreiner was interviewing Jerry, Maggie had urged Donna to call her relatives and friends. Obediently, she had: her sister Jill, the nursing home where her mother lived, her cousin Ann, a teacher at Honey Creek School named Linda who promised to notify the principal for her. But at the mention of Dale’s parents in Richmond she broke down. “No—the detective said to call them from Betty’s—but he says—” She covered her face with her hands.

“What’s wrong, Donna?” Maggie asked her gently.

“He says—he says he’ll take them!” Donna murmured.

“The girls? Of course not! He doesn’t have the right!” Maggie exclaimed vehemently.

Tears were trickling down Donna’s cheeks. “He doesn’t?”

“Of course not.” Maggie slid an arm around Donna but her blue eyes were fixed on the girls. “The girls stay with their mother. Don’t worry about that. Donna, Dale had insurance, right?”

“I don’t know. I mean, he never told me. But I think he did.” She was sobbing openly now. “I never thought about being without Dale. What am I supposed to do? I don’t know how to—I just can’t believe what happened! I can’t!”

“It’s hard to believe when someone close to you dies,” Maggie said softly, stroking her hair.

“Yes.” Donna dabbed at her nose. Tina was crying too, gripping her mother’s blouse with both hands.

“Dale’s father is upset too,” Maggie pointed out. “He’s not thinking about what he’s saying.”

“Maybe not,” Donna sobbed weakly. She clung to Maggie, who had held her and Tina for a long time until that first wave of open grief had passed.

Josie had watched them from her chair in the corner. She still hadn’t cried.

That was two hours ago. Now Olivia closed her den door on the three Colbys, aching for them. But what else could a person do? Hug them, give them beds, help them get through the hours.

And make sure Dale’s killer was caught. Damn it, that was worth something too.

Olivia hurried past the room where little Sarah slept and down the angled oak staircase to the living room. She paused at the door. Jerry, Nick and Maggie were sitting barefoot around the coffee table in uncharacteristically serious discussion.

“I like that idea,” Maggie was saying. “Guy breaks down the door, gets in and out, and somehow wedges the door closed from the outside. Maybe ties a string to a door wedge and pulls it under the door that way. So the next guy who tries to open it—yours truly, as it happened—thinks she was the one who split the wood. But really it was broken all along.”

“Right,” said Jerry. “But was there a wedge? Did you see anything?”

“No. But it might have gotten pushed back behind the door as I opened it. Brute Force Ryan, that’s me. Anyway, the cops will find it if it exists. There’s another problem too.”

“What’s that?”

“The noise. We heard the wood splitting.”

“That’s right.” Olivia moved closer to them and shuddered, remembering. “It was like a screech.”

Jerry caught her hand and kissed it before pulling her down to sit next to him on the sofa. “So maybe it screeches when it’s pushed back,’’ he said dubiously.

“So far,” said Nick, “we’re going to ask the police if they’ve found evidence of threads attached to the lamp, trick window frames, or mysterious screeching door wedges. Don’t you think Schreiner will find it all a tad far-fetched? Exceeding fantastical?”

“But what do you suggest? The room was locked,” Olivia said.

“Well, I’d like to know about the medication he was taking,” Nick said. “Could he have had some kind of reaction? Overdose, maybe, that could cause convulsions so he’d crash into the lamp?”

Jerry shook his head. “Not likely. You want a brief lecture about Dale’s medicines?”

“Sure,” said Nick.

“Okay.” Jerry seemed glad to be distracted from the grim crime scene into more general considerations. “To oversimplify hideously, there are two chemical messengers in the brain that have to be in proper balance. One is called acetylcholine, the other dopamine. Not enough dopamine, and you get Parkinson’s symptoms—stiffness, slow movement or even brief freezing episodes, tremor. That’s what Dale had. But if the seesaw tips the other way and there’s too much dopamine in your brain, you get loose-jointed, uncontrolled movement. Also restlessness. Hey, Mag, that’s it! That’s been your trouble all these years! Too much dopamine!”

Maggie stood up, gave Jerry a contemptuous look, dusted her hands on her shorts, and sprang onto the sofa arm next to Olivia. She paused there gracefully a moment, leg and arms extended in what would have been a beautiful arabesque if it hadn’t been for her belly. Olivia could see the sinews in the lean foot and calf tensed for balance.

“All right, all right,” Jerry admitted. “You do have a smidgin of control.”

Olivia grinned up at her, guiltily aware that she too would rather think about anything except Dale. “Cathy Rigby,” she said.

“Well, listen, soon as they have Olympics for people seven months pregnant, I’ve got it made,” Maggie declared. She stepped down neatly from the sofa arm and drew them firmly back to the problem. “So how do you treat Parkinson’s?”

“You try to restore the balance of the two chemical messengers in the brain.”

“So if Dale didn’t have enough dopamine, you’d just add some?” She settled on the floor, legs folded.

“I wish it was that easy! But for years Parkinson’s had to be treated by suppressing acetylcholine with anticholinergic drugs, so the two brain chemicals would be in balance.”

“Is that what Dale took?”

“Yes. But about five years ago they discovered that L-dopa could increase dopamine in the brain. So now they can restore the balance two ways.”

“Can you get too much L-dopa?”

“Possible. But it’s not likely that was Dale’s problem. He was on a very light beginning dose of L-dopa, and even that was still causing some nausea. He wouldn’t likely take too much.”

“Not on purpose,” Nick said.

“Also, he was still taking the anticholinergic,” Jerry continued. “The same drug that he’d been taking for years. He was at the highest dosage of that—probably that’s why his doctor wanted him to add the newer drug at this point. I suspect he was suffering some mild side effects from the anticholinergic. Reduced secretions—dry mouth and so forth.”

“Suppose he took too much of his old drug?” Maggie asked.

“Restlessness, floppiness. Plus forgetfulness. And maybe hallucinations. Psychedelic effects, little people having parties, writhing designs on the rug.”

“Wow.” Maggie was sitting cross-legged on the floor now, listening avidly. “Sounds like fun. Would he maybe take too much on purpose?”

“No,” Olivia said firmly. They didn’t know Dale.

“Not the type?” asked Nick dubiously.

“Well, now that you mention it, he’s not. Wrong generation. Too uptight to play games with his medicine. The whole time I’ve worked with him I’ve never seen him restless or twitchy. Slow, yes. A couple of times he sort of froze, couldn’t move his feet.”

“Yeah, that’s typical of Parkinson’s,” Jerry confirmed.

“But the real reason Dale wouldn’t overdose is that he was working on a story. He was a good reporter, damn it! And he wouldn’t risk forgetfulness or hallucinations if a story was breaking.”

“In any case,” said Jerry, “tripping wouldn’t have the charms for him that it does for some people. To patients with this sort of chemical imbalance, being normal is the amazing and glorious thing.”

“So an overdose is unlikely,” Nick summed up. “He’d been taking one drug for years with few problems even at high dosages. The other was prescribed in low—”

He was interrupted by a sharp rap on the door. Olivia hurried to answer it.

A couple stood there, erect in dark raincoats, the woman with steely gray hair, the man angular and balding. He said, “We’ve come for our grandchildren.”

“What?”

“Josie and Tina. Our grandchildren.” The man emphasized his point with an impatient tap of his furled but dripping umbrella.

Maggie was at Olivia’s shoulder now.  She scanned the grim pair and asked, “Are you Dale Colby’s parents?”

“Yes!”

“Well, I’ll go fetch Josie and Tina’s parent,” said Maggie sweetly, and breezed up the stairs.

Olivia decided not to ask these people in. Well, not unless Donna wanted them. It was raining again but the porch was a broad comfortable turn-of-the-century model where they could all talk easily enough. So when the man motioned to go in, she didn’t budge, just smiled and said, “They should be down soon.” All the same she was glad to note Nick and Jerry behind her in the arch to the living room.

Donna, wrapped in Jerry’s navy terrycloth robe, looked frail and uncertain as she descended the stairs. Olivia gave her an encouraging smile and said, “Would you rather talk on the porch?”

Donna’s frightened eyes checked the pair outside, then Olivia, then the comforting bulk of Nick and Jerry. She seemed to take heart. “Yes,” she said.

Mr. Colby’s lips tightened but he moved aside to let the phalanx of women out. Nick and Jerry remained inside, shadowy linebackers. Olivia waved at the wicker chairs. “Have a seat,” she offered.

“No need for that.” Mr. Colby refused conciliation and glared at Donna. “We came for Josie and Tina.”

Donna stared at her feet.

Maggie said, “You’re saying that you want to help Josie and Tina?”

“Yes, that’s it.” Mrs. Colby spoke for the first time, with a furtive glance at her husband.

“That’s natural, at a time like this,” said Maggie agreeably. “I’m sure there will be a lot of ways to help them.’’

“We want them with us,” said Mr. Colby.

“You mean Donna too, of course?” inquired Maggie. Donna was observing her now, brown eyes amazed, occasionally flicking a nervous glance at Mr. Colby.

Mr. Colby said impatiently, “No, not enough room, and she’s a bad influence.”

“Oh? In what way?” Olivia asked indignantly.

“Well, look what she did to our son!” exclaimed Mr. Colby. “Broke up his marriage. Let him catch that disease. And now let him get murdered!”