Thyme of Death (23 page)

“Is he likely to find out?”

“Probably not. I don’t think he’d
ask about a will unless Roz were actually dead. And she’s not.”

Ruby finished her cornbread and
licked the butter off her fingers. “Do you think Bubba suspects Meredith?”

“How could he? He hasn’t seen her
shoes. They made a cast of the print, but it won’t help him unless he gets his
hands on the original.”

“What about the gun?
If
Meredith
bought one, I mean.”

I thought. “I suppose it depends on
what shape that mantelpiece slug is in. The lab can match a bullet to a gun if
there’s enough left to work with. But those were soft lead thirty-eights, and
the one I saw on the floor was pretty badly deformed. It’s my guess it won’t
yield a successful ballistics test. Anyway, we don’t know whether or not
Meredith has a gun.”

Ruby paused. “So? What are we going
to do?”

I gave her a crooked grin. “What’s
this
we
shit, kemo sabe? You don’t have to get mixed up in it.” The
lawyer part of me cautioned that Ruby and I could get into big trouble for
obstructing justice. But the friend side of me said it was time to check in on
Meredith. I glanced at the clock. “It’s just ten,” I said. “Maybe I’ll drop in
on Meredith tonight.”

Ruby gulped the last of her milk. “I’m
already mixed up in it. I’ll go with you.”

We both went. Meredith’s gray Mazda
was parked in the drive. I put a hand on the hood. The engine was cold. It hadn’t
been driven that night. But that didn’t mean anything. Whoever shot at Roz had
been on foot.

The light was on in the living room
and I could hear the sound of the ten o’clock news as we walked up on the
porch. Meredith answered on the second knock. She was wearing the same blue
jogging suit she’d had on earlier—and her running shoes.

“Hi,” she said. She opened the door
wider, looking from Ruby to me. “Long time no see. Come on in.”

We followed Meredith into the living
room, which had been straightened after last night’s mess. Ruby glanced at the
sofa, and I knew that she was thinking that it was where Jo had died only a few
days before. But she sat down on it without saying anything. I sat down too,
feeling awkward and tense, the muscles knotted up at the back of my neck. I was
out of practice for this kind of thing. But even in the old days, this wouldn’t
have been fun. I liked Meredith. I hoped like hell she hadn’t done what I was
afraid she’d done.

Meredith switched off the TV, sat
down in the rocking chair, and propped her feet on the coffee table. I glanced
at me soles of her running shoes. If there’d been any earth clinging to them
from her waltz through the thyme bed, it was gone now. The soles were as clean
as if they’d been scrubbed.

“What’s up?” Meredith asked. She
zeroed in on me. “Have you changed your mind about helping me get proof?” She
turned to Ruby. “I assume she’s told you.”

Ruby nodded, very serious. “You
think Roz killed Jo.”

“Think!” Meredith said angrily. She
slapped the arm of the rocking chair with the flat of her hand. “I
know.
All
I want is a little help from—”

“What have you been doing tonight,
Meredith?” I asked.

Meredith stared at me. “What the
hell do you think I’ve been doing? I’ve been cleaning house. And while I was at
it, I was trying to figure out how to prove—”

“Did you come straight back here
from my place?”

Meredith frowned. “Well, no, not
straight
back. When I left you, I was pretty mad. I was tempted to go to the cottage
and tell Roz what Violett had told me. But I didn’t.”

“How come?”

“Because I didn’t want to tip her
off. I haven’t figured out what to do yet. When I do, I’d like to have
surprise on my side.”

“So if you didn’t go to Roz’s, what
did you do?”

She shrugged. “I stopped at Cavette’s
for bread, then came back here. I tried calling Roz’s office in New York, on
the off chance her secretary might still be there. I wanted to find out where
Roz was on Monday. But all I got was the answering machine. After that, I tried
the airlines, but I couldn’t pry any information out of them. I guess your
friend at the travel agency is our last hope. Or maybe McQuaid could dig it out
for us.” She looked at me, frowning. “How come the questions?”

I cleared my throat. “Last night,
after the break-in, you said you were going to get a gun.”

“Yeah.” Meredith tossed her head. “And
I got one, too. I went down to the gun shop at the corner of Brazos and
Eleventh and bought a thirty-eight revolver, just like the one I have at home.
Want to see it?”

Ruby and I exchanged a wordless
glance, and I nodded.

Meredith pushed herself out of the
chair and went to a small table. She opened a drawer and pulled out a gun and
handed it to me. It was a short-barreled thirty-eight, respectably heavy and
solid—and cold. “I’m not bloodthirsty,” she said. “I just want to be able to
take care of myself.”

I held the gun up and sniffed it.
There was an acrid smell of burned powder, and I could see powder residue on
the front of the cylinder. I depressed the catch and swung the cylinder out.
Fully loaded—five live rounds.

I handed the gun back. “It’s been
fired recently.”

Meredith put the gun back in the
drawer. “Of course it’s been fired. Do I look like a bimbo who’d buy a gun
without trying it out? There’s a range behind the shop. I shot a couple of
rounds to get the feel of it.”

“You reloaded?”

“Yeah. I bought it for protection.
An unloaded gun isn’t going to do me a lot of good.” She frowned. “What is
this?” she asked. “The third degree?”

Beside me, Ruby leaned forward. “What
about tonight?” she asked intently. “Did you use the gun tonight?”

Meredith looked at Ruby, then at me.
“No,
of course I didn’t use it tonight,” she said, in the tone of one
speaking to idiots. “I fired it this afternoon. I brought it home. I loaded it
and stuck it in the drawer.” Her patience was wearing thin. “What
is
this?”

I cleared my throat. “Somebody shot
at Roz tonight.”

Meredith stared at me. “Shot at Roz?
You’re kidding! Who would—” Her gray eyes widened. “You think I shot at her?”

“There was a print of a shoe like
yours in the dirt outside the window where the shots were fired. The gun that
was used was a thirty-eight.”

Meredith shook her head wonderingly.
“I still don’t—Shot
at
her? So she wasn’t hurt?”

“No,” I said.

I kept my eyes on her. I’ve
questioned a lot of people, and I pride myself on knowing when somebody is
lying. I was reasonably satisfied that Meredith was telling the truth. Not a
hundred percent sure. You can
never
be a hundred percent sure. But sure
enough to relax a little.

Meredith lifted her right shoe and
looked at the sole. She put her foot down. “Well, it wasn’t
my
shoe, I
can tell you that. It wasn’t my gun, either.” She paused. “Who do the police
think did it?”

“Bubba didn’t let us in on his
thinking,” I said. “But as far as I can tell, he doesn’t have any bright ideas.
Yet.”

“Bubba
never
has any bright
ideas,” Ruby said.

“Don’t underestimate him,” I warned.
“He knows his business. Anyway, Roz seems to think that most of the candidates
aren’t local.” Roz had paused slightly when Bubba asked her if any Pecan
Springs people

might have it in for her, but there
was no way of knowing what had gone through her mind at that moment “Well, you
can count me out,” Meredith said. “If I was going to shoot somebody tonight,
would I have bought a gun here in town this afternoon? That would really be
stupid.”

I agreed. That
would
be
stupid, and Meredith wasn’t. But Bubba didn’t have any way of knowing how smart
or how dumb Meredith was. If he found out about the gun—no, make that
when
he
found out about the gun— Meredith was going to be on his suspect list.

Meredith pushed her lips in and out,
thinking. “Is it possible that Roz staged the attack herself?”

It was a possibility I hadn’t
considered. But when I thought back on the second shot, the one that had ricocheted
off the window ledge and into the room, I had to shake my head. “At least one
shot came from outside the window.”

“And we heard the footsteps outside
after Roz started screaming inside,” Ruby said. “She couldn’t have been both
places at once. Anyway, what would she gain by staging an attack?”

None of us could come up with an
answer to that one.

“Well, I don’t intend to lose any
sleep over Roz,” Meredith said. “If somebody does her in, I won’t shed any
tears. In fact, it’ll save me a lot of trouble.” She glanced sharply at me. “That
doesn’t mean I’d try to kill her,” she added. “If I have my way, Rosalind
Kotner’s next starring role will be in court—on trial for murder.”

CHAPTER 14

I’d been home ten minutes when there
was a tap on the back door. It was Roz. She was still wearing her black
breaking-and-entering costume. There were dark circles under her eyes and sooty
furrows of mascara on her cheeks. She also wore the sweet perfume of scotch,
but she didn’t look drunk. She looked distraught.

“Can I come in?” she asked. She was
shivering slightly, although it wasn’t cold. “I need to talk.”

“Yeah,” I said, without enthusiasm.
I’d had a long day, there’d been several surprises, all of them nasty, and I
was ready to head for a hot bath and bed.

But I fired up the copper teakettle
instead. “Decaf okay?” I asked. I gave up the other kind when I left the law. I
hadn’t known until I quit how caffeine hyped me, what a crutch it was. The
first couple of weeks were sheer misery. I dragged around feeling fatigued and
spiritless until the toxins got flushed out of my system. Since then, I’ve
learned to be wary of caffeine even in its sexiest, most seductive form,
chocolate.

Roz nodded, hardly hearing my
question. She glanced at the straight-backed kitchen chairs and opted for the
rocker beside the kitchen window. When she sat down she went limp, like a
marionette whose strings had come unstrung. She rested her head against the
carved oak back and closed her eyes. That’s how she sat for the next few
minutes, until I touched her shoulder and put a mug of steaming decaf in her
hand. I pulled up a chair opposite the rocker and put my feet on the wooden
milking stool I found at an antique store in New Braunfels. It’s probably
ninety years old and the green paint has been rubbed off by countless behinds
in the course of doing the milking. But it makes a great footstool, table,
plant stand—whatever I’m in need of at the moment.

“What do you want to talk about?”

Roz sipped her decaf for a minute or
two. Then she said, in what I’d come to think of as her real-Roz voice, “I know
who shot at me tonight.”

“Who?’

“I can’t tell you just yet, because
I have to figure out what to do.” She raised candid blue eyes to mine over the
rim of her cup. “I’m sorry, China. I don’t mean to be obscure. I just mean ...
this person thinks I owe her something, and maybe I do. But I’ve got something
more important than that on my mind.”

I raised my eyebrows. Something more
important than stopping the person who had threatened her life? But it didn’t
sound as if she suspected Meredith. The bit about owing something reminded me
of what Violett had said this afternoon. Did Roz actually think Violett Hall
would take after her with a gun?

Roz pulled my attention back to the
conversation. “But that’s not what I came to talk to you about,” she said. She
put her cup on the window sill. “I came to tell you the truth about Jo and me,
and why you can’t—you absolutely
cannot
—give Jo’s letters and journals
to the library.”

I stared at her. This was the last
thing I’d expected.

“You see,” Roz said, with the air of
someone making her last confession, “Jo Gilbert and I were more than just
friends. We were lovers.” She paused. I made a noise that could have been
surprise, and she went on, speaking with slow, careful deliberation. ‘To tell
the truth, I was pretty unsettled when I first met Jo. I was still a kid—I had
acting talent and a good regional performing background and work, TV
commercials, children’s theater, stuff like that. But I didn’t know where I was
going, or what I wanted. I was just sort of drifting. Then Jo came into my life
and kind of... well, took it over. She helped me find confidence in myself,
help me develop a sense of who I was and in what direction I wanted to go.”

I made an encouraging noise. I didn’t
want to say anything to stem the flow of words or divert it.

“It’s hard to explain how things got
started between us. Anyway, that’s private. You don’t need to know. After a few
months of trying to figure it out, we decided it was good for both of us and
we stopped fighting it.”