Tea-Totally Dead

Tea-Totally Dead

by Jaqueline Girdner

Copyright © 1994 by Jaqueline GIrdner

Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.

www.ereads.com

KATE JASPER MYSTERIES

by Jaqueline Girdner

Available from E-Reads

ADJUSTED TO DEATH

THE LAST RESORT

TEA-TOTALLY DEAD

A STIFF CRITIQUE

DEATH HITS THE FAN

MURDER, MY DEER

For my mother-in-law,
 
Eileen Booi,
 
who I am happy to say
 
 
bears no resemblance to Vesta Caruso.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I’d like to thank Gary Erickson of the Marin County Coroner’s Office for his good-natured answers to my gruesome questions. Any gruesome mistakes, however, are strictly my own.

KATE JASPER: Marin County’s own, organically grown, accidental sleuth. She owns Jest Gifts, a gag gift company.

WAYNE CARUSO: Kate’s lover. The shy restaurateur is a former bodyguard, but can he guard his own heart from his mother’s merciless jabs?

VESTA CARUSO: Wayne’s mother. After more than twenty years of incarceration and over-medication, she was released from Shady Willows Mental Health Facility. Now she’s high on accumulated rage.

HARMONY FITCH: Vesta’s new friend. She’s moved out of her car and into Vesta’s condo, where it’s safe. The aliens can’t get her there.

ACE SKERITT: Vesta’s little brother, a former professional wrestler. Are his warm and winning ways as phony as his trick falls?

ERIC SKERITT: Ace’s grandson. He’s thirteen and he knows
everything.
But does he know who the murderer is?

TRENT SKERITT: Older brother to Ace and Vesta. He’s the respected dean of Fulton College. And he’s as cool as Ace is warm, at least on the surface.

INGRID SKERITT: Trent’s wife. She looks like Barbara Bush, but the former First Lady never cried this much.

LORI OLIVER: Trent and Ingrid’s daughter, a masseuse with long, red fingernails and a penchant for New Age seminars.

MANDY OLIVER: Lori’s daughter, a twelve-year-old artist and vegetarian. Does she like animals better than people?

DRUSILLA NORTON: Just call her Dru. The youngest of the Skeritt elders, her bubbly personality seems to be going flat.

GAIL NORTON: Dru’s daughter, a morose psychotherapist. Her father committed suicide.

BILL NORTON: Dru’s second husband and stepfather to Gail, a quiet man… far too quiet.

CLARA KUSHIYAMA: Vesta Caruso’s part-time nurse. She survived an internment camp in World War II, but may not survive her involvement with Vesta.

PAUL PAULSON: Vesta’s nosy neighbor. He’d love to sell you some predeveloped real estate.

DETECTIVE SERGEANT UPTON, DETECTIVE AMADOR, OFFICERS YODER, ZAPPETINI AND LEE: Members of the La Risa Police Department.

JENNY QUINTARA: Investigator for the Marin County Coroner’s Office.

JUDY MULLIGAN: Kate’s warehousewoman. She has a problem.

BARBARA CHU: Kate’s best friend. Barbara is a psychic, but is she intuitive enough to spot a murderer?

FELIX BYRNE: Barbara’s lover, a newspaper reporter and major pest.

Assorted Police Personnel, Waitresses, Waiters and Mourners.

- One -

“You just don’t understand,” Wayne told me.

He kept his hands clamped on the wheel of his Jaguar and his eyes clamped on the road ahead of him, the road that was taking us north to La Risa, where Wayne’s mother was living in the condo he had bought for her. We whizzed by a Safeway truck.

“But—” I tried.

“You can’t understand,” he explained impatiently. “It’s not just Mom. It’s her
and
her whole family.
My
whole family! They’re not like normal families—”

“Are you scared?” I interrupted.

He turned to me, quiet for a moment. I looked into his face, a battered face dominated by a large, cauliflower nose and heavy brows that were presently lowered like curtains to shield his vulnerable brown eyes. God, I had learned to love that face.

“Scared to death,” he answered softly, then turned his half-hidden eyes back to the road.

I should have figured it out sooner. Wayne was babbling. And Wayne had never babbled. Not in all the time I’d known him. When I’d first met him four years ago, he’d been shy and silent. Then he’d progressed to monosyllables. And eventually to actual speech. But never babbling. On the other hand, he hadn’t faced the third day running of his family reunion before either.

“It won’t be that bad,” I told him. I reached a hand over to squeeze his well-muscled thigh. I wished I could give him a good hug, maybe hold him in my arms, but that wasn’t a good idea while he was switching lanes. And babbling.

“It
is
that bad, Kate,” he insisted, his usual baritone growl thinned by tension into an unnatural soprano. “You haven’t been there…”

I squirmed guiltily inside my seat belt as Wayne went on. I had excused myself from the first two days of the reunion on the grounds of work. I really did have work to do. It was October, time for Jest Gifts to gear up for Christmas. Past time. I had designed new ornaments for all the legal specialties this year. So, while I had pored over mail orders, inventory lists and production schedules for items like Santas in gilded cages (for the criminal attorneys) and red-nosed reindeer in leg casts (for the personal injury specialists), Wayne had spent the last two days with his family, neglecting his own duties as owner and manager of a string of restaurants and art galleries that he had inherited from a man whose body he used to guard.

Now it was Friday evening. It was my turn to meet the Skeritt clan for a buffet dinner at Vesta’s. At least they weren’t coming to our house.

“… not to mention Uncle Trent’s wife and daughter and granddaughter,” Wayne was saying. “And Uncle Ace’s grandson. And Aunt Dru and her daughter and husband—”

“I’m sorry. I missed some of that last bit,” I said. “So tell me again,” I prodded. “These are all your mother’s side of the family—”

“I don’t have a father’s side of the family,” he interrupted gloomily, then pressed his lips back together. His face in profile was unmoving, carved rock. But the tendons in his neck were alive and bulging with feeling. Even the veins in his arms seemed to throb.

And that was the second time Wayne had interrupted me. He didn’t usually do that either. Or indulge in blatant self-pity. Guilt yes, self-pity no. Until now. Not that I blamed him. He was right, he didn’t have a father’s side of the family. He was an illegitimate child. His mother had been born Vesta Skeritt. She had only been a teenager some forty-three years ago when she gave birth to Wayne, listing the long-dead Enrico Caruso as the father of her baby and calling herself Mrs. Caruso. Wayne’s real father had never been mentioned.

I squeezed his thigh again sympathetically. Even his thigh muscles were tensed to rock hardness.

“So, your mother has a sister and two brothers?” I prompted in a voice of forced cheer, hoping to jump-start Wayne again. Watching his veins throb in silence was even worse than listening to him babble.

“She has three sisters,” Wayne answered dully. “Aunt Dru, she’s the one you’ll be meeting tonight. Then there’s Aunt Nola, the one who couldn’t come to the reunion because she’s at a halfway house. She’s an alcoholic.” He let out a long sigh that ended in a high, keening note. Did he even know he had made the sound? “And Aunt Camille. She’s the well-adjusted one. But of course,
she’s
not coming.”

I nodded. He swiveled his head around on his shoulders as he zoomed past a gold BMW. The exercise did nothing to loosen the bulging tendons in his neck. Maybe I could talk him into a professional massage after dinner tonight.

“Two brothers,” he continued. “Uncle Trent, he’s the dean of Fulton College now. He helped us out financially when I was growing up. But I just never could bring myself to… to…”

“To like him?” I guessed. I was good at charades too.

“Yeah, that’s right. Now with Uncle Ace, it’s always been different.” Wayne’s face softened for a moment. “He was as close to a father as I had growing up. He took me camping, took me to the park and the zoo. Got me interested in weight-lifting. All kinds of stuff. And Aunt Ellen, his wife. She was a sweet-natured woman. She died about fifteen years back, some kind of cancer. It was real hard on Uncle Ace.” The softness had left Wayne’s face. It was carved in rock again.

I wondered what was in his mind. Was he mourning for his Aunt Ellen? Or was he remembering his childhood days when Ace hadn’t been there, Vesta’s “bad days” when she had beat and humiliated Wayne for a series of transgressions he had never understood?

“Ace was a professional wrestler, you know,” Wayne added in a monotone.

I knew. Wayne had told me no less than four times in the last half hour. He really was rattled. What was going on at this reunion, anyway?

“Wayne?” I said tentatively.

I wasn’t sure if he heard me. He let out another sigh. This one ended in a groan.

“Sweetie, what’s wrong?” I asked finally.

Wayne was silent for a few heartbeats. When he answered, it was in a whisper.

“Mom’s pretty angry about Shady Willows,” he said. Then he rolled his shoulders a couple of times and stepped down on the gas to pull around a Volkswagen Rabbit.

“Oh,” I said softly.

Now that I knew what was bothering him, I wasn’t sure what I could say to him to make it better. What can you say about a mistake that was made over twenty years ago? If indeed it had been a mistake. All I knew was what Wayne had told me, his evidence dredged from his own guilt-tinged memories. That Vesta hadn’t been able to cope when Wayne had left home for college at eighteen. That she had made a series of frantic phone calls, twice swallowed too many sleeping pills and finally, just about the time that Wayne was sitting down to his first midterm exam, she had gone in early to the bar where she waited tables and very calmly slit her wrists. After that, Vesta Caruso had been declared incompetent and had been committed to the Shady Willows Mental Health Facility, where she had sat drooling in front of the TV in the day room for the next twenty years or so.

Wayne’s mother might still have been at Shady Willows, but a year or two ago a nosy social worker had figured out that Vesta was over-medicated. Relying on the social worker’s recommendation, the hospital staff had reluctantly cut Vesta’s daily dose of downers in half. Bingo! Vesta wasn’t drooling anymore. She was talking. And she was angry. And Wayne felt guiltier than ever, blaming himself for not realizing that Vesta’s condition had been caused by her medication. Not that there was any way he could have known.

The brief three months Vesta had subsequently spent living with Wayne and me must have been a relatively minor version of hell for us compared to what Vesta had endured at Shady Willows, but I still didn’t care to repeat the experience. Ever. My own neck was tense now. My whole body was tense. I took a deep breath. She wasn’t living with us anymore, I reminded myself. She had her own condo, paid for by her loving son. I took another breath.

“Don’t let her manipulate you too much,” I said gently into the silence.

Wayne sighed once more. “I know my mother manipulates me,” he replied impatiently. Then he softened his tone. “I know it intellectually, but emotionally…” He shook his head. “I just want to make her happy, Kate. At least for a couple more days. It’s her birthday tomorrow.”

“You already got her the present she wanted,” I grumbled. Was it jealousy that ignited my outrage over the poor little minks who had given their lives so that Vesta could have a fur coat? It was certainly too late for the minks’ sakes. The coat was already sitting in a box in our living room, tied up in a great big pink bow.