The Last Annual Slugfest (7 page)

“Grandma was worried about you.” “Grandma” was Rosa. “When Uncle Chris got home he told her what happened, and she was worried about the sheriff keeping you here so long. She said she and Uncle Chris would still be up and you should stop by on your way home.”

“How long ago was that, Donny?”

He glanced around the dark parking lot as if searching for the answer. The rain bounced off his thick hair. “I don’t know. Maybe half an hour, maybe more. Why?” A true Fortimiglio, he wasn’t about to let a question go unanswered.

“I just figured she probably didn’t realize how late it would be before I got out of here.”

“Oh, no,” Donny said quickly, “Grandma said you should come no matter how late it is. She said if it was later you’d need to come even more.”

“Tell her I appreciate that, but—”

“She said she’d put an apple pie in the oven so it would be cooling when you got there.”

I leaned back against my truck. Again, I was aware of how exhausted I was. It had been a long day
before
Edwina Henderson died. And after we discovered her body, I had been running on adrenalin and brandy. Now both were used up. There was nothing I wanted to do as much as go home, settle into a warm tub long enough to let the heat soak into my body, and then crawl into bed. But this was clearly more than a casual kindness Rosa was offering. It was Rosa’s offer of reconciliation. And after a year of estrangement from the family, I wasn’t about to refuse.

“I’ll follow you there,” I said, and climbed into my pickup.

Donny had jumped into his own truck, made a U-turn, sending sprays of mud in a semicircle across the parking area, and raced out the rutted, unpaved exit road before my engine was warm. By the time I started down the road, there were no visible lights other than my headlights. I turned left onto North Bank Road, going east toward town.

There were no other vehicles on the road. The overhanging branches of redwoods and eucalyptus blocked out the sky and held back the rain just long enough for it to weigh down those branches, and crash like a breaking wave on the windshield. North Bank Road curved as it ran beside the Russian River here; it was impossible to see more than fifty yards ahead on the straightest stretch. And now with the rain and the darkness, it was like going through a fun house tunnel, never knowing what could spring up around the next curve.

The Fortimiglios’ house was up a driveway off North Bank Road, just west of town, across from one of Edwina’s Nine Warriors. It was a dark red rectangle that looked like a box for a long, narrow shoe. Built into the hillside, the lower level had originally been foundation. Later, one year when the fishing had been good, they had added a recreation room and two bedrooms down there. But to the uninformed eye, the lower level still looked like the foundation.

A screened porch ran the length of the main floor. I could remember many evenings during my first summer in town when I had sat on the porch with a plate of homemade ravioli on my lap and a glass of burgundy beside me. The spicy aroma of Rosa’s tomato sauce intermingled with the fresh scent of eucalyptus outside, and occasionally a cone from one of the smaller redwoods bounced off the porch roof. And Chris’s parents, his sisters and brothers-in-law, the various Fortimiglio grandchildren, and five or six of the people Rosa had run into in town that day would be clumped in small groups around the three green wicker tables. Rosa would join one group long enough to see that everyone had full plates, and to hear what they were discussing, then she’d moved on to the next group, pollinating each conversation with the insights from the last, so that even if we hadn’t talked to everyone ourselves, we all had the sense of being together.

And that winter, when it was too cold to sit on the porch, some of the ill-matched chairs were dragged inside. Chris would light a fire, and when that proved inadequate, would turn on the electric heater at the far end of the oblong living room. We would all line up in the kitchen, accepting more spaghetti than we could hope to eat and a second scoop of Rosa’s homemade sauce. We would take the plates and the ever-present glasses of red wine into the living room and settle on the maple sofas or the padded rockers, or perch on one of those ottomans that no longer had chairs to match. And we would down every strand of spaghetti.

After the murder we’d all been involved in, Rosa’s dinners had stopped. Rosa didn’t blame me—she’d told me that one awkward moment standing in the Safeway parking lot. It wasn’t my fault. I had been the last person seen at Frank’s Place before its owner, Frank Goulet, was shot. The sheriff suspected me, and in my struggle to clear myself, I’d discovered things my friends, Rosa’s friends, and Rosa herself didn’t want publicized. I’d discovered the killer. I was sorry. Rosa didn’t blame me, but she’d never forgiven me either. A lot of people hadn’t. The insularity that had protected Henderson had been pierced; Henderson, as it had been for the winter people before then, didn’t exist anymore. People didn’t blame me, but they watched what they said. I never again had the feeling of belonging that Rosa had given me that first year.

As I pulled up in front of the house, I realized how much I’d missed being here for the last year.

“Vejay,” Chris called to me from the kitchen door. “Up here.”

I made my way around the west side of the house to the kitchen door. There was a front door that led in from the porch, but I had never seen anyone come in that way. Regardless of their business, the kitchen was always the first stop for any visitor.

Rosa was putting the pie on the table when I walked in. Seeing her here after so long, I realized that she was smaller than I had remembered. She was probably not much taller than five foot—a sturdy, buxom woman with short, thick, gray hair and the bright blue eyes that Chris had inherited.

She took a step, reaching out to me. Then she stopped, her arms momentarily stationary in an aborted hug before they dropped to her sides. “Vejay, it’s good to see you. It wasn’t right that the sheriff should keep you so late. I told Chris that. The sheriff knows you work hard and you have to be tired. Now you sit down and let me get you some coffee. Or would you rather have something else?” Her words, the same things she would have said a year ago, sounded forced.

“No. Coffee’s fine. Nothing keeps me awake.” I sat at the table.

Through the doorway I could see only one dim lamp on in the living room, and I could hear the low sound of the television.

Rosa put the coffee cups down and began cutting the pie. As if on cue, Donny hurried in from the living room, accepted a piece that looked like an entire meal, and disappeared back through the doorway.

I stared after him. I’d never seen this house so empty of people. And Rosa, I realized, had never looked so clearly her age. A year ago I’d sat in this kitchen and she’d jumped up to get me coffee, to get the cream, another trip for the pie, and yet another for the forks and then the napkins—all interspersed with questions and, as she took in my answers, a smile of approval, a smile of speculation, of thought; even her nod of sympathy had held the remnants of that smile so integral to her that it was never totally absent.

Now she still bustled, still smiled, but the smile no longer fit. It was like the Sunday dress worn by a cancer patient for a last trip out that reminds one not of the happy times when it has been worn but only that those times are gone forever.

Placing my slice of pie in front of me, Rosa said, “It’s so hard to believe. Edwina. Well, you know, Vejay, she was a woman you could gladly have throttled. But you wouldn’t kill her.”

“Someone did, though, Mama.” Chris forked a piece of pie. “If there had been another dish or two, after ours, she would have died right up there on the stage.”

“Chris,” I said, “do you think the murderer put the poison in your dish because it was the last one?” As soon as I said it, I looked guiltily at Rosa. If Chris hadn’t told her the poison was almost surely in their pizza … but, of course, he had. By now he would have told her everything he had seen anyone do or say since his arrival at the lodge.

“I don’t know,” he said, glancing at Rosa. Then he looked back at me. “Vejay, someone put poison in my dish. Why
my
dish? I …” He swallowed, then picked up his coffee cup, took a gulp, and almost choked on the hot liquid.

Rosa put down the fork she’d been holding halfway between pie and mouth. “You’re a friend, Vejay. You know us. We’ve been in Henderson for a long time. From when Chris’s grandfather was a boy. You know that not everything we’ve done we’d want the sheriff to know about. There’ve been hard times, you know that.”

I nodded. For fishing families seasons are boom or bust, and in recent years the boom seasons had been scarce. And when there aren’t enough salmon to go around, there are still payments to be made on the boat, the insurance, the gas; and for the bait and the ice that are needed to go out into the empty sea every day, hoping that the cohos or the chinooks have finally come back. And there are house payments, and clothes and food. Most years, the old fishing families like the Fortimiglios cut back or borrow, or scrape by hoping for next year. But in the bleak winters that follow, there is always the temptation of those empty vacation houses, with the televisions and stereos and VCRs, the cabins or chalets of the summer people who have gone back to their real homes in San Francisco or Sacramento. There is the knowledge that whatever their loss, insurance will reimburse them. I knew that there had been times when that temptation had been too great for members of the Fortimiglio family.

I’d read in
The Paper
that this year promised a good salmon season. It would start Monday. And Chris needed to be on the water when the sun rose.

“Vejay,” Rosa continued, “the sheriff won’t know that Chris couldn’t have killed Edwina, that murder isn’t in him. He’ll think about those things in the past—not that Chris did them; Chris was never involved. Chris was out at sea. But the sheriff won’t care about that. The sheriff will think of us as a family of thieves.”

“Maybe he’ll get a lead to the real killer, Mama.” Chris had put down his fork, too.

“Maybe, Chris, but …” A year ago, when the sheriff had suspected me of murder, Rosa had never doubted that innocence was protection enough.

“But he’ll start with you, Chris,” I said for her. “And when he’s satisfied beyond a doubt that you couldn’t have done it, then he’ll look for other suspects.”

Chris nodded grudgingly.

Rosa didn’t say anything. She didn’t look at me. But the request she’d invited me to her house to hear, the request she couldn’t bring herself to make, was clear. To anyone else I would have protested that my familiarity with murders came accidentally, and that I, of all people, was not the one to deal with the sheriff. Edwina hadn’t been dead four hours and already the sheriff had warned me to stay out of the way. I said, “How can I help?”

Rosa looked up. She smiled, but her eyes still couldn’t meet mine.

“Tell me what you know about Edwina,” I said. “Maybe we can think of who would want to kill her.”

“Chris and I did talk about that,” she said, now relaxed enough to pick up the pie-laden fork. “There are no secrets about Edwina. She helped out in the tobacco store when she was in school, and afterwards she was there full-time. She had had two sisters, both younger. One went to college and moved away. She had a son. They, the three of them, she, her husband, and the boy, came here to visit the summer we made our trip East to see our relatives, the year after the fishing was so good. That sister died years ago. But I remember Edwina talking about her nephew’s visit. I remember her saying the trip was a sixteenth-birthday present for the boy.”

“Then this boy will inherit?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “Surely Edwina would have left her money to Leila. Leila’s the only child of Edwina’s sister Margaret, God rest her soul. Edwina and Margaret were very close. It was the other sister who was the outsider.”

I had forgotten about Leila Katz, Edwina’s niece. She had driven to the hospital with Edwina’s body. “I thought they weren’t speaking.”

Rosa shrugged. “More coffee?”

“Thanks.”

She retrieved the pot from the stove and poured. Putting it back, she said, “Edwina had her fallings out, but they were never serious. If she had lived, things would have come together for her and Leila. Leila was her niece. Edwina wasn’t about to let that go. Edwina was very set in her view of family. It was because she couldn’t understand Leila’s way of life that she wasn’t speaking to her. But that would have worked itself out.”

Chris laughed. “If Edwina had changed her will every time she had a falling out, she would have had to write it on erasable paper.”

“So what there is to inherit, Leila will probably get,” I said.

“Oh, Vejay, you don’t believe that Leila would kill her own aunt just to inherit some land,” Rosa said. It was like Rosa to think too well of anyone she knew to imagine them a murderer, even if that meant narrowing the alternatives to Chris. But in this case she was right: Leila was a friend of mine and I didn’t think she had killed her aunt—at least I didn’t want to think it. I said, “Tell me about Leila. What was she like growing up?”

Rosa lifted her coffee cup to her mouth and sipped thoughtfully. “Leila was always different from the other girls. She dressed different. She seemed distant, controlled, like someone from the city. You know what I mean, Vejay,” Rosa said awkwardly.

I smiled. “I lived in the city long enough to know. You mean Leila wasn’t as friendly, as open as kids here.”

Rosa nodded, clearly relieved that I hadn’t discovered an unintended affront in her comment. “Leila’s mother, Margaret, was in a wheelchair. Her father died quite young, and in any case, he never lived here. He wasn’t Catholic. Edwina never could accept that, that her sister could have married outside the Church. I suspect that’s one reason why they didn’t live here when he was alive. But when he died, Margaret and Leila came back and moved in with Edwina. Leila must have been eight or nine then. Edwina kept close tabs on her. She insisted Leila go to every class or discussion or potluck dinner that they had at St. Agnes’s. I guess she was worried about Leila’s soul. But that was too much for a child. Even Father Calloway told Edwina that. And Edwina was so piqued at him that she went to Mass at St. Elizabeth’s in Guerneville for the next month.”