I’d been grateful for the distraction, but now I said, “Nothing much. Mr. Guthrie’s hurt, but he’ll be all right.”
“She shot him, didn’t she?” the world-wise Maggie asked, and I shuddered.
“Yes,” I said, “she did. Now let’s go into the kitchen and get some hot chocolate, so you two can go back to bed.”
Their minds didn’t linger on shooting or Claire Guthrie another moment. They clamored around, helping me make hot chocolate, and then sat in the living room, sipping their drinks and discussing Hannah Montana. Then they trundled off to bed, and, restless, I went into the kitchen for yet another glass of wine.
I retreated to my bedroom office and sat at my desk, wondering about Claire and what would happen to her. I knew sleep wouldn’t come, so I tried to work on some new listings that came into the office, but I couldn’t concentrate. I wandered back into the living room, put on a Stan Kenton and Julie Christie CD, and curled on the couch to think about life’s vagaries. And that’s when I dozed off.
I suppose I dreamt about Claire—what else would have made me jump awake with the realization that I hadn’t called Claire’s lawyer? Frantic, I looked at the clock—almost midnight. Claire was in custody, without councel, for at least two hours, and it was my fault.
I rushed into the kitchen, grabbed the phone book, and then was stumped. What did she say his name was? I stared into space for a long moment. Angus! That was it—Angus something. My mind tried to play word games. Angus was a Scottish name, so maybe it was Mc-something. Fort Worth is now a large city, and thumbing in the phone book I realized we have a lot of lawyers—a whole lot of them. There was no Angus Mc-something, but I was sure it was an “M” name, so I thumbed through the M listings. Mayer, Manter, McDougal—he was Donald, not Angus—Meyer, Metz—Eureka! Angus Mitchell. I prayed he had an after-hours number, and lo and behold, the recorded message said, “If this is an emergency, call 817-381-1975.” My hands were shaking, and when a deep voice said hello, I blathered.
“Mr. Mitchell, my name is Kelly O’Connell, I’m calling for Claire Guthrie, she shot Jim, and she’s been taken to the jail.”
“Whoa, miss, slow down! Claire shot her husband?”
I took a deep breath. “Yes, in the…ah, derriere.”
“So she shot the sorry bastard in the ass,” he mused, and I wondered if he was the one who told her to do it. Or maybe it was an opinion about Jim Guthrie that a lot of people shared.
“When was she taken downtown, and by whom?”
“About nine. Our neighborhood patrol officer, Mike Shandy, took her.”
There was a bit of silence, and then he seemed to be thinking aloud. “Okay. She’s been booked by now. I’ll go right down there to keep them from questioning her without me.”
“I’m afraid she tells everyone she did it,” I volunteered. “She wasn’t sad or sorry or anything. In fact, she was kind of scary, remote—like she was in a trance or something.”
“Young lady,” he said, “that’s the best thing you’ve said yet in this conversation. I’m on my way. Thank you.”
“Yeah,” I muttered as I heard the buzz of a call disconnected.
The doorbell rang just then. Peering through the peephole, I saw Mike and opened the door. Every single woman my age should dream about opening her front door to a Mike Shandy. I’m tall, but he’s taller. I’m dark, but his hair is sort of dark blonde, cut close to his head for efficiency. He’s neither skinny nor fat, neither drop-dead handsome, which would scare me, nor marred by some awful features. He’s just…well, Mike, and his eyes light up with laughter when I open the door for him or when the girls rush to clamor for his attention. I’m lucky, and I know it. What I can’t figure out is why I haven’t bought into the whole falling in love thing, but I haven’t.
“You need to give me a key,” he said. “‘I’ll wake the girls ringing that damned old-fashioned clanging bell you have on the door.”
“Not a bad idea,” I said.
“What? Giving me a key or waking the girls?” He grinned and didn’t wait for an answer. “You got a beer? I’m off duty, thank goodness.”
I got him a Corona, picked up my glass of now-warm wine, and waited until he was ready to talk.
“Guthrie’s going to be all right, and the court-appointed lawyer will plead temporary insanity for Mrs. Guthrie. He’ll get her out on bail tomorrow, so she’ll only spend one night in jail. I’m betting that’s all she ever spends.”
I could feel my face flushing. “She has a lawyer,” I said.
“Well, he wasn’t there, and she didn’t speak up for herself.”
That didn’t surprise me. “He’s on his way downtown now. The girls distracted me, and… and I forgot to call him until just now.”
He gave me a long look that said, “Good going, Kelly!” But then he grinned and put his hand over mine. “You know, she said something strange to me in the car, something that had nothing to do with shooting her husband.”
“What?” I asked, even as I knew what he meant. I’d been chewing on her strange strong comment on Florence Dodson.
“She said she was glad her husband would be okay, but she wasn’t sorry that the old lady died. Called her a nasty bitch.”
“She said something like that to me too. I wonder what went on between them.”
“Well, it wasn’t homicide, so I guess she can’t get in more trouble for nasty thoughts. But I sure thought it was strange to talk about someone’s death that way.”
“And out of character for Claire, though I guess I don’t know her that well.” Remembering my conversation with Angus Mitchell, I asked, “Where will she go when she gets out? Not back to the house?”
“She and her husband will have to work that out. It’s way beyond my part of the puzzle. I’ll just have to testify at the trial.”
I frequently buy myself more trouble than I need, and this time I jumped in with both feet. “I’ll put her in my guest house.”
“Kelly! You can’t save everyone. Wait and see what she wants to do. Besides, I’m uncomfortable with your idea. Something about Claire Guthrie makes me nervous, and I don’t think you should expose the girls to her. And if it goes to trial I’ll have to testify against her.”
Didn’t think of that. But I wasn’t worried about the girls—Claire was a kind person, and she’d only shot in the heat of passion. I’d put the offer out there and deal with problems as they came up. “She was in shock tonight,” I said. “Tell me about Mrs. Dodson.”
“Not much more to tell. Looks like she fell. An old lady shouldn’t have been going down those rickety steps, even though it wasn’t full dark yet.”
“She wasn’t that old, and she was always…well, sprightly.” Of course she was sprightly—enough so to complain about a lot of things. I added, “I don’t think she fell.”
“Kelly, don’t go suspecting villains everywhere. People fall down steps every day, even much younger people, and sometimes they hit their heads.”
“I don’t believe it. I know you laugh at my hunches or instinct, but it’s there about this.”
Mike had the grace to look a bit ashamed. “I know I should have listened to your instinct about Jo Ellen North. I could have stopped things before she almost killed you. But this time…I think your instinct is out of whack. She fell. Period. End. Of. Story. The police will treat it as a homicide until they do an autopsy—routine procedure. They have to do that with all unexplained deaths. But I’ll bet you it comes back ‘accidental death.’” He took a pull on his beer and then asked, “Do you know about any family?”
“I think she had nephews. No children, but there were two men that used to visit her on occasions, like they’d come by the day before Christmas or Thanksgiving. Once or twice I saw one of them—the one that drove a Lexus—take her somewhere, maybe for Sunday dinner at noon. But they didn’t come often, and I think she was alone a lot except for her dog and her birds.” Mrs. Dodson’s house had cages, lots of them, full of parakeets and canaries. I guess they were her companions. I’d never been in the house but knew about the birds because she’d told my mom about them.
Mike smiled. “Yeah, those birds. They’d drive me batty in no time at all. But the house was neat, just crowded with stuff. Furniture that looked old, statues and bric-a-brac and everything on every table all over the place. I was afraid to move for fear of breaking something, but I doubt any of it was valuable.”
“Probably not. Was the house clean?” Oops, I sounded like my mom.
“Pretty much. As clean as a house with all those birds can be and as an old lady could keep it.” He hesitated. “It smelled bit like urine. You know how old people are.”
I wished he’d stop referring to her as old. “How old was she?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe seventy.”
“Seventy is not that old,” I retorted. “It’s too young for a healthy woman to die.”
I stopped, arms crossed in front of me, and thought about the way people stereotype the elderly. This was not the time to remind Mike that seventy is the new fifty or whatever. Besides, I thought Florence Dodson was quite a bit older than that. “Can you find the nephews?”
“Sure. They’ll run it down. There was one strange thing. We found a sleeping bag, kind of battered and old and—well, smelly—in the carport. Looks to me like a homeless person took up residence there. Be hard to find out and trace though. You seen anyone in the neighborhood?”
“No, but I’ve been gone from that street for eight months. How would Mrs. Dodson miss that? I think she goes in her carport frequently—and I know she still drives, uh, drove.”
We talked a bit more, but we were both tired and there didn’t seem to be anything either of us could come up with about Mrs. Dodson or Claire. When Mike said he had to go, I rose to walk him to the door. Our goodnights were getting more and more awkward. Mike usually gave me an affectionate hug or a quick kiss, but we both knew something much more intense lurked on the other side. As I stood next to him this night, he put his arm around me for that hug and then, unexpectedly, kissed me—hard, his tongue exploring mine, his fingers digging into my back.
And I responded. I’d been missing that attraction, that sense of passion, for a long time, but still my response surprised me. I quelled an instinct to look around and make sure the girls weren’t peeking again.
When we moved apart, we were both a bit stunned. Mike didn’t say anything for a long time. He stared at me. Then he muttered, “Kelly, I don’t want you hurt. I care too much. Please, for my sake, keep your nose out of both Mrs. Dodson’s death and Claire’s problems.” He meant of course the crimes I’d gotten involved in when I found a skeleton in a house we were redoing. In the end my ex-husband was killed, and I came close.
At that point, I would have promised him almost anything, but I knew I couldn’t abandon Claire and I wouldn’t let go of Florence Dodson’s death. Even if I didn’t like her much, she was a person with a life she liked—and she’d been my neighbor, for better or worse.
And then with a quick goodnight, he was out the door, leaving me to lock it with shaking hands.
“Mom? Everything okay?” Maggie’s voice called from her bedroom.
Didn’t that child ever sleep?
“I think so,” I called back. “I think everything’s just fine.” And I smiled to myself. I didn’t want to face at that moment what I was going to do about the girls if my relationship with Mike took a sharp turn—and yet I knew I wanted that sharp turn, apprehensive as I was.
****
The phone woke me around one-thirty in the morning. It was Angus Mitchell, telling me there would be a bond hearing in the morning at ten. “Claire hopes you’ll be there,” he said, his words almost a command. I asked where it was, grateful that I wouldn’t have to go to the jail again. I’d been there to talk with Joe, one of the young men who vandalized my skeleton house and my own home. The fact that I was now fond of him, and he’d turned his life around and was married to Theresa, my carpenter’s daughter, did nothing to erase the horror of the jail in my mind.
Grabbing the pencil and pad I kept by the bed, I scribbled down his directions and then managed to get my mind clear enough to ask, “Where will she go? I guess she can’t go back to their house. Or maybe she doesn’t want to.” He’d made it clear there should be no problem about Claire posting bail.
“I can’t say about that,” he said and cleared his throat. “I’m in a bit of an awkward place here. I’ve always represented Jim, and when they married I represented both of them. But….” He let his unfinished sentence hang in the air.
“Have you talked to him?” I wanted to add, “I thought you called him a sorry bastard,” but I guess business is business for lawyers like everyone else.
“The nursing staff wouldn’t let me, but they said it’s a superficial wound—painful no doubt and must make sitting uncomfortable.” Did I detect just the slightest amusement? “I’ll go to the hospital after the bond hearing.”
