Thicker Than Blood (29 page)

“You gotta be kidding. ‘Hello, I clean toilets at the water agency and I just thought you might like to know you’ve got a drug smuggling plane in your warehouse and maybe a killer or two on your payroll.’”

“Goldie, he’d listen to you because you have no connection except the wastebaskets.”

“I couldn’t keep it all straight in my head. I’d forget something.”

“I’ll go over it with you. We can make notes.”

“How do we know this Greer guy would even talk to me?”

“You could go see him face to face.”

“Honey, you seem to be attributing a whole lot of virtue to being black.”

Chapter Forty-nine

Marty was awake and wearing real pajamas. Navy blue ones with white piping. That was reason enough to do it, he told himself. He had a horror of dying in a piece of blue-dotted cotton that tied in the back.

The early morning sun was just beginning to seep in under the dingy curtains. He’d slept better than he had in the hospital, but now he had to do some real serious thinking.

He tried to lever his feet to the floor but pain spiked from his side to his shoulder and back again. He nodded stoically. Cracked a rib or two and probably your damn skull, Marty told himself and tried again. This time he made it, but his face was pale from the effort. He glimpsed himself in the mirror and grimaced.

You can do it. He’d been telling himself that since he had lowered himself one step at a time on a back stairway from the hospital’s third floor, then forced himself to limp another two blocks before he called a cab.

In the cramped little kitchen, he ignored the sink full of dishes from God knows when, and bent, wincing, to remove a three-pound can of Chase and Sanborn from a cabinet. Having measured and poured, he leaned against the cabinet, scratched the bald spot that was beginning on the top of his head, and listened to the water chug itself into coffee.

When the machine had given its last chug, he poured a cup, limped to the living room and sank into the homely, worn, wonderful chair in his dusty, rumpled living room. Thank God he was home. But he couldn’t stay there any more than he could stay at the hospital. And he had to find Rachel.

He pulled the phone toward him and began dialing. It was barely six-thirty.

333

Rachel awoke with an amorphous memory of something terrible. It was still dark. The moon had found her through the top of the window, enveloping her in a pale circle of light. The fear that swept her along like a dry leaf in the path of a hurricane seemed to have been with her forever. She could hardly remember what her life was like before.

She kicked the twisted blankets loose from the mattress and lay there puzzling it over, watching the moon-shadow trees tease the cracks in the ceiling until they faded with the rising sun.

333

“You look glum,” Hank said that night. “Is that what happens when it’s your turn to cook?” They were eating dinner in the cabin’s tiny kitchen.

Rachel’s movements were like those of a windup doll. All evening, the only sound had been dishes scraping against each other and the clamor of a rain that had begun in earnest.

Her hand descended on the table, making the knives and forks chatter. “I can’t take much more of this,” she said, voice almost a sob.

“I know.” Hank took a sip of tea. It was watery and lukewarm, and a few fragments of tea leaves swam on the surface, but he barely noticed.

“Why is it happening to me?”

“It sort of fits together, that maybe someone saw you take something from the plane wreckage and didn’t know it got ruined by bleach in the trunk of your car. Except why would anyone be smuggling sodium selenate? It’s not an illegal chemical.”

Rachel was carefully examining the cracks in the kitchen table. “Three other things don’t fit. Big things. Monstrous things. Lonnie and Jason and Charlotte.”

Hank’s normally affable face had the look of someone who has waked one morning to find the sun going down. “I know,” he said for what seemed like the trillionth time. “Charlotte didn’t have anything to do with the drugs.”

“Why not?” Rachel asked. “Appearances can be deceiving. Not every drug lord has a mustache.”

Hank rubbed his chin. “Charlotte hated anything to do with drugs. Her daughter OD’d on PCP or some such thing and died.”

“How awful. You’re right. That probably rules her out.”

The ate in silence until, a bite of dinner halfway to her mouth, Rachel dropped the fork to her plate. “My car was parked on the road near where that plane crashed. If the pilot saw me around the wreckage.…” She reached for the phone. Dialed information. Then dialed again.

“Sheriff’s Department, Milligan.” The female voice that answered sounded vaguely offended.

“Do you log calls requesting license plate checks?” Rachel said quietly into the mouthpiece.

“Maybe.”

Rachel took her checkbook from her purse, studied its calendar, then gave the date and her own license number. “Did you run a check on that license that day?”

“I can’t give you that information.”

“Why not?”

“Not public information.”

“All I want to know is whether a check was made. No details.” The phone line buzzed with static. Rachel pressed on: “Either a check was made or it wasn’t. Nothing private about that. You guys use radios that can be picked up by anyone.”

“Hang on.” Computer keys clicked. “1SQZ753? Sure enough,” the voice drawled. “My shift. Must’ve done it myself. Oh, yeah. They said somebody found a key belonged to the guy with that license number.”

333

Goldie sat at the steering wheel while the cleaning crew climbed into the van. They had worked hard that night, had even covered for her because her mind just wasn’t on polishing floors. Now, with the job done, the van was rocking with leftover energy.

“Quiet!” she yelled. She couldn’t go see that Andrew Greer. Sure, Hank had a career to worry about and all she had was a job. But what if Greer called her boss?

She tossed some scraps of paper and a brown and shriveled apple core into the bag that hung from the dash. Fingers plucked at her sleeve and she turned to see Peter’s placid round face turned up to hers.

“Stop it,” she said peevishly. “You think I can drive with you pinching me? Get back in your seat.”

He dropped his eyes and obeyed.

She started to pull the van into the street, then backed it again along the curb and turned.

“I’m sorry,” she announced. “I’m just in a rotten mood. Anybody want some ice cream?”

Amid a chorus of giggles, she parked at a Dairy Queen and took orders.

When she returned with a cardboard tray of cones, Peter was still eyeing her warily. “I said I was sorry.”

Solemnly, he reached for a cone. “You won’t be mad if I show you something?”

“Of course not.”

“I think maybe you should see it. Maybe I shoulda throwed it away, but it was in such a funny place. Maybe I shoulda put it on the desk, but that lady isn’t here anymore.”

“What lady?”

“The one that’s gone. I was running the sweeper in the pretty office, and you know how it sometimes messes up the rug. This time it pulls the rug way up and way far underneath was this.” He took a sheet of paper from his pocket, unfolded it and handed it to Goldie.

She stared at it and dropped the tray of cones on the pavement.

333

Virginia Wexford was not amused. It was hard enough to suddenly have a new boss. Not that anyone could be as demanding as Jason had been.

She’d been up half the night, holding her little granddaughter’s hand while the child threw up, while her own daughter snored away across the hall.

She had told Barbara not to marry that idiot electrician. He drank and she knew he drank before she married him. A wonder he hadn’t electrocuted himself. Good riddance. Her daughter was a good looking, intelligent woman. She could have found a good husband. She could have joined the church singles group.

Virginia separated the papers on her desk into neat stacks. She’d built her career on orderliness, ninety-two-words-a-minute typing speed, and the ability to wear the same expression through tragedy, comedy, and past everything in between.

Andrew was a very nice person. He just had no idea how to run InterUrban Water District. Virginia would have to get him trained fast.

And now, unannounced, without a proper appointment, was this woman in jeans—jeans yet!—demanding to see him. And Virginia probably wouldn’t get out of the office until seven. This was not the way things were going to happen. No, sir.

She looked at her watch. Andrew was off the phone. Her feet made no sound on the thick carpet she had helped Jason select when he first became general manager. New ones always wanted to redecorate—like dogs doing their business on a fire hydrant, was Virginia’s opinion. She had survived three general managers. She would survive a fourth.

She cleared her throat, moved to Andrew’s elbow and spoke quietly. If you didn’t sit. If you made them look up at you at close quarters, they almost always gave in.

“Who?” Andrew asked.

Virginia repeated the name. “She doesn’t have an appointment.”

“What does she want?”

“She wouldn’t say. I told her you probably couldn’t see her, but she insisted—”

“Excuse me. Sir.” Goldie was standing in the office doorway. Her eyes pinned Andrew’s surprised ones. “It’s urgent.”

Andrew leaned his white shirtsleeves on the arms of what he still thought of as Jason’s chair and looked hard at Goldie. “I hope it won’t take long,” he said. “I really don’t have a lot of time.”

Goldie quickly took the chair directly in front of his desk. Virginia was still standing at his elbow. Goldie gave her a small smile and said in a voice as low and controlled as Virginia’s own, “Please close the door.”

When Goldie finished, Andrew was peering through his gold-rim glasses at his hands. The half moons on his nails were very pink against the rich molasses brown of his fingers. His face betrayed nothing. He was wishing he could get up, walk past the machine in the lobby that still held this morning’s newspapers, and forget what he’d just heard.

He looked up. “I’ll look into it,” he said, trying to conjure up a smile and failing. He was thinking of the firestorm of reporters and his promises to the board of directors.

333

“You’re out of your mind!” Rachel pulled her hand away from Hank’s on the sofa and stood, staring down at him as if his neck had suddenly sprouted a second head.

Hank looked away from her, the straight hair, bronzed by the light from the fire, masking his eyes. “I think it’s possible.”

“Bruno is a friend. A lifelong friend. He would never be involved in this. Never. Why would you think such a thing?”

He tossed the hair from his eyes and held her gaze. “Sodium selenate was involved with Jason and with Lonnie, and when the lab said the sample you took from the plane debris in the warehouse was the same, you said there had to be a connection. You said two incidents could be some wild coincidence, but not a third.”

Rachel’s face was stiff with shock. “I said selenium. I didn’t say Bruno.”

“That lab report is actually the fourth time selenium entered the picture. That’s what poisoned Farwell Ponds. You know that as well as I do.”

“That’s from the drain water. Everyone says so. That one has to be a coincidence. Are you sure the lab didn’t get something mixed up?”

“Labs are incredibly careful about that. But I don’t know.…” Hank’s shoulders under the slate blue chamois shirt lifted tensely, then fell. “Unless.…”

The little patches of hair on his hands looked red against his whitened knuckles. “I do think something is wrong with the water analysis figures from those ponds,” he said. “The concentrations are just too high. It doesn’t seem possible that so much selenium could have just washed out of farm soil.”

“That wetland refuge was Bruno’s baby. He helped set it up. You can’t think he’s doing something to those ponds himself.”

Hank turned his hands palm up. “It’s not impossible.”

“But Bruno is a farmer. No farmer would deliberately do something to get himself accused of destroying wildlife with his drain water.…” Rachel trailed off. She was seeing Bruno in the hotel lobby the morning before someone tried to break into her room. He had not asked what she was doing there. He had not asked why her hair was orange or why she was wearing those silly glasses.

“I’ve seen him in action at open board meetings. Bruno Calabrese is a tough old bird,” Hank was saying. “If he thought the end justified the means.…”

“But his entire life, every dime he has, his very being, is his farm,” Rachel said. “And if selenium is washing out of that soil like they say, and poisoning wildlife, land values are probably already dropping like a rock.” She walked to the window and pulled the faded drapes more firmly across the glass.

“Unless he sold his land just before the news hit,” Hank said softly.

Rachel turned, looking as though she’d been kicked in the stomach. “It wouldn’t be long before he could buy it back pretty cheap.”

Chapter Fifty

Saturday morning Andrew Greer, brand-new blue-and-grey Izod windbreaker open over his white Jantzen golf shirt, mowed his lawn even though the landscape maintenance people were due in two days. He liked mowing grass and he wanted to get away from his wife’s accusing eyes. The wind was up and his cheeks were rosy.

The mower zigzagged and the wind blew the clippings. Andrew had missed little Jennifer’s piano recital last night, his wife Jackie wasn’t speaking to him, and his son had greeted him at the breakfast table this morning with ‘What are you doing home?’ followed by the sort of blank thirteen-year-old stare that made Andrew long to prevent the boy from becoming fourteen.

Maybe Andrew could manage to get one of his feet under the mower blades and hack it off. Then he wouldn’t have to go back to that horrible quiet office where the carpet was so thick his secretary could sneak up on him.

He wished the electric mower with its bright yellow hundred-foot cord made more noise. He was tired of thinking.

One more swath brought him to the big weeping willow at the corner of his property. He turned the mower, brought the handle up, leaned his elbows on it and looked back at the house.