Thyme of Death (24 page)

“You weren’t worried about being
discovered?” I asked. “Pecan Springs is a small town, and you
were
living
together.”

Roz seemed a little more at ease
now, as if my response assured her that I wasn’t making moral judgments. “Sure,
we were worried—at first. But after a while, it didn’t seem like much of a
problem. Women live together for all kinds of reasons. And Jo was ... well, you
know what she was like. The pillar of the community, all that, very sort of
stern, reserved. It just didn’t occur to anybody that anything was going on. We
were discreet, but discretion didn’t seem necessary—except for Jo’s daughter,
of course. Jo had the idea that Meredith would be opposed, so she kept her at
arm’s length. That wasn’t hard, since Meredith was busy with school and her
career. I felt bad about it and tried to get Jo to soften up. But you know how
she was. Once she got something into her mind, that was it. That was the way
things were going to be, no matter what.”

I nodded and sat back, sipping my
decaf. So far, so good. Roz’s story fit with the way I had doped things out.

Roz began to rock, signaling a new
chapter. “But then things changed. I got a lucky break. One of the guys I was
working with in children’s theater in Austin had a friend in New York. An
agent, Jane Dorman. The guy did a test video of some of our kids’ stuff and
sent it to New York. Jane put us together with a producer who was looking for
what we were doing, and that was it.” She shook her head, musing. “I still can’t
believe it, sometimes. It was a one-in-a-million chance at the brass ring, and
I got it. The rest you can read about, if you haven’t already.”

“What happened with you and Jo?”

Roz raised her shoulders, let them
drop. “The same thing that happens when anybody gets zapped with a big chance.
It pulled us apart. I asked her to come to New York—over and over I asked her.
Sometimes she’d come for a few days, a week. But she despised New York, hated
apartment living, traffic, noise, pollution. The city was a symbol for
everything she
didn’t
want in her life. After a while it got harder and
harder to hold the connection. And it was a lot more dangerous than it had
been before, when I was nobody.” She smiled a half smile. “I’m a
children’s
star,
you know. It wouldn’t be good for public relations if people found out that
once upon a time StrawBerry Bear had a lover. A woman lover.”

“Yes,” I said, “I see.”

“So I broke it off with Jo. It wasn’t
easy for either of us, but we both knew it was a good idea. And she was ready,
too. It was so tough for her, not being able to have a real life together.” She
darted a quick glance to see how I was reacting. “Anyway, Jo always wanted the
best for me, wanted me to be happy. When I told her that Howie and I planned to
be married, she was absolutely
delighted,
offered to help with the
wedding, that sort of thing. She wanted to send the letters back right away,
but I said no, hold on to them, I’d pick them up the next time I was in town. I
knew she was ill, you see. I figured I’d fly down for a day or two to visit
her, cheer her up, and get the letters. I had no idea she was so depressed that
she ...” She swallowed hard.

“I’ve been feeling so
guilty
about
her death, China. I feel like I’m responsible.”

I shifted. “Responsible? How do you
mean?”

Roz looked down, looked up, looked
down again. “She said she wanted me to marry and be happy. She said she was
ready to let go of what we’d had together. But she must have been more hurt
than I realized about the end of our relationship.” Tears welled in her blue
eyes, threatening to spill over, and her lip trembled. “I feel as if I drove
her to suicide, as surely as if I’d been here and given her the pills. That’s
why it hit me so hard when I found out what happened. I may be responsible. I
hate myself for that.”

I thought fast. Roz’s story was a
masterly blend of truth and fiction. I knew Jo hadn’t been delighted about Roz’s
upcoming marriage, or willing to end the relationship amicably, or eager to
give over the letters. I had satisfied myself that Roz had been there on Monday,
that she’d had both the means and the opportunity to poison Jo. The trouble
was, I didn’t have any hard evidence—yet. I didn’t have the rental car contract
or her plane tickets. I wanted like hell to confront her with what I
knew—Violett’s account, the clerk’s story about the Everclear and the Hot
Shot—but it just wasn’t enough. The chances of pulling a confession out of her
were just about nil. And even if I did, it wouldn’t be worth much. A good
defense attorney could shoot it down.

So, even though I hated myself for
playing along with her game, I was stuck—for the moment. I pulled out a smile
and pasted it on my mouth. “I’m really glad you’ve told me all this, Roz. It
helps me to put things into perspective.”

Roz nodded. “I wish I’d come clean
in the beginning. But Jo didn’t want Meredith to know about us, and I thought
she had the letters. I’m sure Jo wouldn’t have minded your knowing, though,
especially since she trusted you enough to give you my letters for safekeeping.”
She reached forward and put her hand on my arm in a sisterly gesture. “If it’ll
make things easier for you, China, I’ll take them tonight.”

I shook my head regretfully, falling
back onto my earlier lie. “I understand what you’re saying, Roz, and I
agree—these letters definitely won’t be going to the CTSU Library. But I have
to talk to Alice Dale first. I’m sure you understand.”

Roz gave me a measuring look. “You
are
going to return the letters to me? Tomorrow, perhaps?”

“Probably not tomorrow. The first
part of the week is the best I can do. I’m Jo’s literary executor, and I really
feel I have to handle the job right.” I gave her my most engaging grin. “That
comes from spending a big chunk of my life as a lawyer, I guess.”

Roz sighed, resigned but accepting. “I
suppose.” She rose from the chair. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m very tired.
It’s been a long day.”

I saw her to the door and watched
her walk down the path to the cottage. It had been a long day for me, too,
crammed full of surprises, not the least of which was Roz’s partial confession.
I had to hand it to her— she was a superb actress. If I hadn’t known what I
knew, I might have fallen for her story. I might even have given her the
letters.

I skipped the nightly hot bath
ritual and went straight to bed. I had the feeling of suspended elation I used
to get when I was coming up on closing arguments and summation, ready to test
myself and the case against the jury’s final verdict.

I had no idea how absolutely final a
verdict it was going to be.

I woke at seven the next
morning—Sunday—with the nagging sense that I hadn’t finished something. For a
minute, I wasn’t sure what it was. Then I remembered my dream, a confusion of
images in which Violett and Meredith and I, each dressed in athletic shorts
and running shoes and with a smoking gun in hand, raced around and around the
cottage. First one of us was ahead, then another, until none of us knew who was
chasing whom or why. The race came to an inconclusive end when Bubba popped
out of the thyme bed waving a checkered flag. Ruby would probably say that the
dream was a message from my Inner Guide. I felt vaguely irritated. If my Inner
Guide had something important to say, she could learn to speak English.

I rolled out of bed and onto the
carpet, where I did a few yoga stretches to get my spine unkinked and my brain
operating. If I’d understood Roz last night, she thought Violett was the one
who had fired at her. It hadn’t seemed likely to me at the time. On the other
hand, Violett’s recent behavior had certainly been unusual. Maybe my dream was
saying something important about Violett. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to
cross her off the list. Maybe I should at least talk to her first. I stood up
and did a couple of forward stretches and a back bend. Then I found a pair of
jeans and a navy blue sweatshirt that said
life
is uncertain, so eat
DESSERT
first.
I open at one on Sunday, and the morning is good choretime, so I got
busy. The laundry hamper was overflowing with at least a month’s dirty
clothes, and I took three minutes to dump a load of sheets into the washer, add
soap, and set it on white wash.

Then I tied a red bandanna over my
head to disguise the fact that I should also have washed my hair, shrugged into
a denim jacket, and set out for Violett’s a little after seven-thirty. I
figured a good, fast walk would get the last of the cobwebs out. I also wanted
to confront Violett early, before she got to church and somebody treated her to
a full report of last night’s incident. Mr. Cowan probably wasn’t the only
neighbor who’d heard the fracas. I wanted to be the first to tell her, so I
could watch her reaction.

As I rounded the corner, heading
north on Guadalupe, I spotted Roz on the other side of the street, going in
the opposite direction. She was wearing pink sweats, pink running shoes and
pink socks, with a pink scarf wound turban-style around her head. She was
moving quickly, chin up, arms bent at the elbow and pumping, flinging her hips
from side to side in a stiff-legged, heel-toe walk. She looked like a pink
ostrich in a hurry. As she passed, she glanced up and waved.

As luck would have it, I didn’t have
to go all the way to Violett’s house to see Violett. I ran into her in front of
Cavette’s Grocery. Cavette’s is a mom-and-pop store—actually a pop-and-son
store, now in its third generation, on the corner of Guadalupe and Green. An
old-fashioned market, Cavette’s  has wooden bins and wicker baskets of fresh
fruit and vegetables lined up out front, butted up against the glass windows
which are pasted over with hand-printed notices of Tupperware parties and
four-family garage sales and lost dogs and baby-sitting. The Cavettes buy
organic meat and produce from local growers, which means they depend less on
the massive food distribution system that shackles most of us. They’re a good
market for my fresh herbs, too, in season. It gives me a lift to see cellophane
packages of Thyme and Seasons basil and rosemary and marjoram displayed in
their produce section, along with some little ceramic pots of chives I’d sold
them a couple of weeks ago. I feel every bit as proud of those chives as I ever
felt about a well-done legal brief. I haven’t figured out whether that judgment
represents an overvaluation of my chives or an undervaluation of my briefs.

Violett had just come out of the
store carrying a brown paper bag. She looked much worse than she had yesterday
afternoon. Her face was chalky, her cheeks sagged, her shoulders hunched. Her
purple woolen sweater was buttoned crookedly and the lace collar of her navy
dress was half up, half tucked under her sweater. Untidy brown hair stuck out
from the green knitted cap she’d pulled on against the morning chill. She
averted her eyes when she saw me, and tried to brush past.

I put my hand on her arm. “How’d the
herb tea work last night?” I asked. “Were you able to sleep?”

She pulled her arm away. “I didn’t
take any,” she said, and then added jerkily, still not looking at me, “I
decided I didn’t need it.”

“Violett,” I said, “have you heard
about Rosalind Kotner?”

“What about her?” Her voice was
guarded, cautious.

“Somebody shot at her last night,
through the window of the cottage.”

If I’d been looking for a reaction,
I got one, although it wasn’t exactly what I expected. Violett took an
involuntary step backward. “Shot at her with a ... gun?”

“That’s what people usually shoot
with,” I said. I frowned. “Are you okay?”

Violett’s face was gray. She
clutched her grocery bag like a shield. “My ... my father had a gun. He was
loading it and I came up behind him and he shot his foot.” The words tumbled
out fast, without any deliberation.

“That’s pretty traumatic,” I said
with real sympathy. “How old were you when it happened?”

“Seven. My mother said if he died it
would be all my fault. He didn’t, but his foot was never right That was my
fault, too. Mother made him get rid of the gun.” Then her second reaction hit. “Is
she all right?”

“She’s okay,” I replied. “A little
shaken, but okay.”

She closed her eyes. “That’s good,”
she breathed. “If somebody had killed her before I...”

The door of Cavette’s Grocery opened
and Mr. Cavette himself hurried out—young Mr. Cavette, that is. He’s every bit
of sixty-five. Old Mr. Cavette is now in his eighties and still runs the
old-fashioned cash register that he started business with sixty years ago. The
youngest Mr. Cavette, whom everybody calls Junior, is pushing forty-five.
Junior is the meat and produce buyer. He’s the one who buys my herbs.

“Oh, Miz Hall,” young Mr. Cavette
said breathlessly, “I’m so glad I caught you.” He has ruddy cheeks and a
fluffy fringe of white hair around a bald head so shiny it looks like he
polishes it with Pledge. He plays Santa in the Pecan Springs Christmas
Festival, and last year the Festival Association raffled off a Christmas turkey
to buy him a new Santa suit. It was about time, too, because the kids were
making fun of the holes in the old one.

He held out a sack. “You forgot the
rest of your groceries. Eggs, mushrooms, tomato juice— Your company’d have to
go hungry if I let you go home without your breakfast fixin’s.”