Thyme of Death (16 page)

The woman turned her piercing eyes
on me. “I collect poisonous plants,” she said coolly, picked up her pots of
herbs, and left. I grinned. Some people raise piranhas, others walk barefoot
through rattlesnakes, and still others cultivate poisonous plants. It takes all
kinds.

The woman was on her way out when
McQuaid showed up. “Thank God,” I said fervently.

McQuaid raised an eyebrow. “That
wasn’t quite what I was expecting. You found my note?”

“Yeah. Thanks for doing the dishes.”

McQuaid’s nod was slightly aloof. He
was still smarting from the night before. “Hank’s got the truck finished. Want
to take me? Then you can have your car.

“Fantastic,” I said. My hands were
itching to get to Jo’s boxes. “Let me check with Ruby.” McQuaid went out to the
car and I put my head into The Crystal Cave to ask Ruby to watch the shop.

Ruby was on her knees in front of
the minerals cabinet, rearranging quartz crystals on a black velvet cloth. “Sure,”
she said to my request, “if you’ll trade me an hour this afternoon. I’ve got an
errand to run.” She didn’t betray any animosity about our discussion the day
before. That’s Ruby.
She
never carries a grudge. I guess men are just
different.

“Fine,” I said. “If I have to leave,
Laurel’s available.” I didn’t ask her what her errand was. I just hoped it
didn’t have anything to do with Arnold Seidensticker. I had enough to worry
about as it was. But I thought I should tell her what had happened. “Jo’s house
was burgled last night,” I said.

Ruby stared up at me. “Burgled!
Somebody broke in?”

“That’s the usual method,” I replied
dryly. I hesitated, wondering whether to tell her my suspicion about Roz. I
decided against it, at least for the moment. If I told her that, I’d have to
tell her about the letters, and from there on, the story got complicated.

Ruby’s face set in hard lines. “It
must have been Seidensticker,” she said grimly. “I’ll bet he heard that Jo
uncovered something that could stop the airport. He was looking for it.”

I sighed. “There isn’t time to argue
with you now, Ruby. I’ve got to take McQuaid to get his pickup. How about
coming over for dinner tonight? We can talk about it then.”

“Great,” Ruby said. “I made a pot of
chili last night, and there’s enough to feed both of us and then some. If I
bring it, will you mix up a batch of your terrific jalapeno cornbread?”

I nodded. “About seven, huh?” Ruby’s
chili took second place in the last San Marcos Chilimpiad, where you can taste
some of the most soul-searing chili in the world. She makes hers with
home-cured venison sausage from the deer her brother-in-law provides her, and
Lord knows what else. It’s worth a batch of corn-bread.

“My friend Mary Richards is showing
some of her art at the University Faculty Show,” Ruby suggested. “Maybe we
could go over after dinner.”

“Great idea,” I said. I figured that
by evening, I’d be ready for a little R and R to get my mind off things.

It took about fifteen minutes to
deliver McQuaid to Hank’s, where his blue Ford pickup, complete with new water
pump, was waiting. Back at my place, I put the boxes on the kitchen table and
turned the burner on under the copper kettle. I felt the need of a mug of
strong tea.

The boxes were bound with duct tape,
and tied together with string. There was a note on top. “For China Bayles,” it
said. As I cut the string, peeled off the tape, and opened the first box, I
felt myself shifting into the defense-attorney mindset: setting up
hypotheticals, framing questions, working methodically through possible
answers. Meredith hadn’t turned up any personal papers, so if Jo had kept Roz’s
letters, they were almost certainly here. And if Roz and Jo had been lovers, as
Violett claimed, their correspondence probably did more than just hint at their
relationship. That could explain why Roz was anxious to get her hands on the
letters—so anxious that she might have risked breaking into Meredith’s house to
search for them. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t much of a risk, compared to
what could happen if the letters fell into unfriendly hands. Obviously, the fiancée
of a Senator who was being touted as a presidential candidate wouldn’t relish
rumors about a lesbian affair.

On top of the papers in the first
box was a note in Jo’s handwriting. “China,” it said, “I’d rather Meredith didn’t
read these. Otherwise, do as you think best with them.” I laid it aside. If the
letters contained references to Jo’s affair with Roz, I wasn’t surprised that
she didn’t want Meredith to read them. The fact of the affair, if it
was
a
fact, probably also explained why she had kept her daughter at arm’s length,
out of her life. She hadn’t wanted Meredith to know about Roz.

The first box was full of
rubber-banded packets of letters still in their envelopes. In Jo’s tidy
fashion, a slip of paper with a name written on it was tucked under the rubber
band of each packet, identifying (I assumed) the correspondent. I took the
packets out of the boxes and laid them in front of me on the table. There were
five packets. The thickest was labeled “Roz.”

The second box was heavier than the
first. In it were six spiral-bound notebooks, their pages filled with Jo’s
writing. Her journals. I flipped through the top one quickly. The last entry,
dated about three months before, was on the last page of the book. Somewhere
there must be another journal—the
current
one. But where?

I put the lid on the box and set it
on the floor. If the letters turned up nothing, I’d read the journals to see
what references Jo had made to her relationship with Roz.

The teakettle was boiling. I poured
water over a spoonful of lemon herb tea in my favorite earthenware pot and left
it to steep while I settled down at the kitchen table. But when I opened the
packet tagged “Roz,” I found something unexpected. A document folded into a
paper sleeve. Roz’s will. When I quickly scanned through the usual boilerplate
to the named beneficiary, I discovered that in the event of Roz’s death,
everything of which she had possessed passed to her “beloved friend and
faithful life’s companion, Josephine Gilbert.”

I folded the document and put it
back in the sleeve. There wasn’t any way to tell whether this will had been
superseded by a later one; after all, Jo had just rewritten
her
will.
But unless Roz had made a new one— and if I knew anything about people’s
will-making habits, I’d bet she wouldn’t do it until she was actually
married—Jo was Roz’s sole beneficiary. And even if she’d made a new will,
this
one was ample evidence that her feelings for Jo went deeper than casual
friendship. If I were Roz, I’d be as anxious to get my hands on this as I was
to get my letters.

I laid the will aside. The letters
were arranged by date, oldest on the bottom and the most recent on top. I
counted quickly. There were forty-two, covering a period of about four years.
Better than half were clustered in the first year, with me rest spaced out
over the next three. There were only two letters in the last few months. I
couldn’t know how many letters Jo had written to Roz. No doubt Roz had already
destroyed them.

I picked up the oldest letter and
unfolded it. The paper was pink (naturally), slightly fragrant, and worn at the
creases, where it had been folded and unfolded many times. I read it once
quickly, and then again, more slowly. Yes. Their relationship had not been simply
a friendship. The letter was full of endearments, not in themselves evidence,
of course—my aunt Mildred liberally sugars her letters to me with “dears” and “sweethearts,”
and we haven’t seen each other since I graduated from high school. But beyond
that, there were unabashed and explicit references to lovemaking, to nights
spent together, to the longing of parted lovers. It was an eloquent letter,
overflowing with declarations and entreaties. To Roz’s lover, it must have been
intimate testimony of unreserved, enduring affection. To an objective reader,
it was a foolish letter. It was sufficient, by itself, to destroy. By itself,
it could wreck any hopes that Roz might have of becoming the Senator’s wife
and, in due time, the nation’s First Lady.

I poured an earthenware mug of
lemony tea and sipped it, feeling as if I had just peeked into somebody’s
bedroom while they were getting it on. I didn’t have to read any more of the
letters to know how Roz and Jo had felt about each other when Roz left Pecan
Springs for fame and fortune in the Big Apple. But their feelings had evidently
changed. I had to read some of the later letters to know whose feelings had
changed, and how. I took the last two off the top of the stack.

The next-to-last letter was dated
six weeks ago. It was brief, only a couple of pages, and cool—not frigid, but
not terribly friendly. Roz had obviously cooled. Had Jo? Without her letters I
couldn’t be sure, but reading between the lines I suspected that she hadn’t. I
was more sure of it when I read Roz’s last paragraph:

I must ask
you once again to send my letters back. I realize that you want to keep them
for sentimental reasons. But what I said to you over the phone last night is
true. I don’t intend to continue our relationship. Whether you accept it or
not, Jo, there’s nothing more between us. I have been seeing someone else—a
man—and I am now quite certain that something will come of it. Please send the
letters
immediately.

Roz

I was beginning to piece things
together. The phone conversation Roz referred to must have been the one
Meredith remembered—the argument between Jo and Roz that seemed to upset Jo. Jo
must have been desperately hurt by Roz’s rejection and her insistence on
erasing all traces of their relationship, a hurt that she obviously couldn’t
share with her daughter. I put the letter back and took out the last one, dated
only two weeks ago. It was shorter and more curt, written fast and hard, with
savage underlining.

I don’t
understand why you refuse to return the letters. If you think that by holding
onto them you can convince me to reopen our relationship, you’re wrong,
wrong,
WRONG!!
If you think you can use the letters to destroy my new relationship,
think again. Don’t play games. You’ll be the only loser.

R.

I stared at the angry words, trying
to feel the depth of Jo’s pain when she read them, trying to put myself into
that moment. Had she knotted up inside with a pain even sharper than the pain
of her cancer? Had her hurt, her disappointment, her despairing grief been powerful
enough to compel her to kill herself?

And there were darker questions. I’d
once helped to defend a client in an ugly case where incriminating letters had
led to blackmail, which in turn had led to the murder of someone who threatened
to tell everything to the newspapers. Had Roz feared that Jo would go public
with their secret? Not likely. Roz would know that Jo—however firmly she stood
for her private convictions—would not publicly brand herself a lesbian in this
rednecked community. If Arnold Seidensticker and his buddies found out that Jo
was gay, they’d use it to discredit her efforts to stop the airport.

But what if Roz feared that Jo might
reveal the truth, not to the community, but to Senator Keenan? What if Jo, in a
flash of anger and terrible despair, had threatened to tell Roz’s fiancé about
her past, perhaps even to show him the letters? In the game Roz was playing,
the stakes were extraordinarily high—the Keenan millions, a chance at the
White House. What if Roz had decided she couldn’t trust Jo to keep her mouth
shut? What if—?

And there I was, right back to where
I’d been the night before. Only now, I had a motive and the proof— the
letters—to back it up. A motive for murder. What was I going to do about it?

After a moment, I bundled the
letters and put them back into the box. Then I tied both boxes together and
carried them into my bedroom. In the walk-in closet, I pushed the wicker
laundry hamper aside. Behind it, there’s a piece of loose paneling that
conceals an opening into the space under the stairs where I keep a few things
I don’t want to risk losing—like the nine-millimeter Beretta my father gave me
years ago, when he’d taught me to shoot. The only time he ever spent with me was
on the range, and I prided myself on learning well, to please him, to show him
that girls could be as good with guns as boys. I’d used the Beretta only once
since then. When I think about it now, the fact that I used it in self-defense
doesn’t really matter. Somebody is dead—somebody very sick—and it was my gun
that did it. My finger that squeezed the trigger, deliberately, smoothly, just
the way my father taught me. I wasn’t sure why I kept the Beretta. To remind
myself, maybe, of how easy it is to step over to the other side.

I lifted aside the paneling, shoved
in the boxes, and put the paneling back up. Then I pushed the hamper across it.
If Roz took a notion to ransack the place, she’d have to get very lucky to find
what she was after.

Then I went back into the kitchen,
poured another mug of tea, and took it to the rocking chair, where I sipped it
and thought. By the time I had finished my tea, I knew what I was going to do.

CHAPTER 10