Thyme of Death (5 page)

I touched Meredith’s shoulder. The
Jo I knew and loved had been reserved, sometimes remote, but it was hard to
recognize her in Meredith’s description. Still, I knew what it was like to want
a mother and find her missing.

“I think it was just the old
mother-daughter thing,” Ruby said. “My mother won’t stop telling me what an
idiot I was to let Ward get away. And she
still
keeps after me about
finding another husband to take care of me.

Meredith shook her head. “It was
more than that. Even when we lived together, I didn’t know her. And these last
fifteen years—” She raised her shoulders and let them fall, a despairing
gesture. “When I was a senior, my grandmother died and left Mother some money.
She gave me enough to pay my college tuition for four years. She took the rest
and moved down here and bought this place. When I got the job in Dallas five
years ago, I thought she’d be pleased. But she didn’t even want me to
visit
her,
for God’s sake. It was like I belonged to a part of her life that was over,
being married to Dad, being a housewife, even being a mother. She didn’t want
anything—even me—to remind her about it.” She put her head in her hands. “And
now this. She was a mystery. A total mystery.”

I understood something of Meredith’s
despair, but in a different way. My mother’s drinking had kept me from knowing
her. But even at seven, I had understood why she did it. My father’s law
practice was the most important thing in his life. She was a poor second.
Nothing—not a huge house in University Hills or a white Cadillac or a generous
allowance—could compensate her for his loss. Not even her daughter. Nothing
but the booze.

But it wasn’t just her alcoholism
that made my mother unknowable. It was the nearly overwhelming idea of
mother,
a woman who was me and yet not-me, from whom I had somehow, by some
complicated and tricky maneuver, to separate myself. I wondered whether any of
us ever really knew our mothers, yet whether we could ever be successful in
knowing ourselves apart from them.

Meredith raised her head and took a
deep breath, as though unloading her feelings had made her feel better. “But
things were improving between us,” she said fiercely, trying to convince
herself. “She was down, but it didn’t have to do with
us.”

“Well, sure,” Ruby said
comfortingly. “There was the airport, and Arnold Seidensticker. She had plenty
else on her mind.”

Arnold Seidensticker is the owner
and publisher of the
Enterprise,
Pecan Springs’ weekly newspaper. The
Seidenstickers and several hundred other German immigrants had settled the area
in the 1840s. They’d brought their German customs and their culture, which is a
large part of the charm of the area today. Most of the other immigrant families
died out or diluted themselves through marriage or moved on. But for over a
hundred and fifty years, the Seidenstickers remained the town’s leading
citizens. That’s what made Arnold Seidensticker think he had a mandate to
promote Pecan Springs as the site of the Austin-San Antonio Regional Airport, a
complex that was supposed to rival the Dallas-Fort Worth airport in terms of
air traffic and the flow-through of dollars. Jo and the Anti-Airport Coalition
were all that stood between him and success.

Meredith smiled a little. “Mother
was plenty ticked off at that guy, all right. She said if she ever got to the
point of hiring outside muscle to keep the airport out, he’d be at the top of
her hit list. You know Mother’s temper. And I wouldn’t blame her if she did.
Seidensticker was a pain in the ass.”

That was Jo, all right. She liked to
surprise people with her South Side tough talk, and she had a temper that matched
her mouth. I had the idea that Meredith was a lot like her in that respect,
too.

“But she was feeling better about
the airport lately,” Meredith went on. “She wouldn’t tell me what it was all
about, but I think she’d discovered something— something she hoped would keep
the airport from going through.”

Ruby scowled. “That’s another reason
I don’t think she killed herself. She’d never abandon the field to Arnold
Seidensticker. It would give him too much sat
isfaction. And without her,
the Coalition’s likely to fizzle. She was the main energy behind it.”

“It wasn’t Arnold Seidensticker who
was getting to her the last week or so,” Meredith said. “It was somebody else.
Somebody named Roz. No big deal, I guess. But her phone calls definitely upset
Mother.”

“Roz?” Ruby asked. “Rosalind Kotner,
the one who does the StrawBerry Bear shows?”

“That’s the one. Mother said she
used to rent her a room. Do you know her?”

Ruby shook her head. “I’ve seen her
on TV once or twice. She looks like Alice in Wonderland with good legs.”

I had to smile at that. When I’d
seen the show, Roz was wearing a short pink pinafore with a flirtatious white
eyelet flounce, white stockings, and black patent-leather slippers, her hair in
girlish blond ringlets.

“I’ve met her,” I volunteered. “She
stayed in my guest cottage once when she was visiting and your mother was
having the house painted.” I didn’t add, although I might have, that Jo Gilbert
and Roz Kotner struck me as an oddly assorted pair. Jo was older, and her
reserved grace threw Roz’s coy, kittenish cuteness into high relief. And Roz
liked the spotlight. Whenever she was around, Jo sat back and let Roz capture
all the attention.

Ruby came back to the subject of Jo’s
supposed visitor. “China,” she said, “if somebody else was here this morning,
would there be fingerprints?”

I picked up the teapot and poured
three cups of peppermint tea. “If there are, Bubba will find them. He may look
like a dumbass, but McQuaid says he’s plenty sharp.” As an ex-cop, McQuaid
ought to know.

“What’ll he do?” Ruby asked,
reaching for a cup.

“He’ll check the bottles and the
glass and the note for prints, and dust the coffee table and other likely
places. He’ll get a handwriting expert to verify that Jo actually wrote the
note. He’ll ask you and Meredith what time you left, when you got back, that
sort of thing. The medical examiner will do an autopsy and establish cause and
time of death. The report, along with the death certificate, will come out in a
few days. It may or may not settle the question of how she died.” I put a cup
down in front of Meredith. “There are things you need to think about, Meredith.
Funeral arrangements, notifying family, stuff like that. Is there anything
Ruby or I can do to help?”

Meredith stood up. “Mother made that
part easy, at least,” she said. She got up and left the room. A moment later
she was back with a large folder. She opened it and took out a sheaf of papers.

“Instructions,” she said. “It’s all
here. Mother expected to get well, of course, but she made plans in case she
...” She took a deep breath. “She was determined to be in charge either way.”
She gave a small, hurt-sounding laugh. “I suppose she didn’t trust anybody
else but herself to make decisions. Certainly not her daughter.”

“You see, China?” Ruby challenged. “That’s
what I mean. Jo wanted to be in charge. She wouldn’t do a thing like...” She
shook her head, then got up and went to the counter and started fooling with
the cake.

“Yeah, I see,” I said. Suddenly I
felt very tired. What I saw was that it was pointless to argue with Ruby.

From her point of view, suicide didn’t
seem consistent with Jo’s character. But from a different point of view—the
idea of Jo wanting to take control of her life, and her death—it was entirely
consistent. And, although it didn’t seem very likely, I had to admit that it
might even have been an accident. Unless Bubba or the medical examiner turned
up something definitive, we’d probably never know exactly what happened.

Looking as if she were glad to be
doing something constructive, Meredith began going through Jo’s papers. “She
wants to be cremated as soon as possible, no funeral, just a memorial service.
She suggests Pecan Springs Park. There’s also a copy of her will here— her
lawyer helped her rewrite it last week—and a list of her assets.”

“Last week?” I asked.

“She just wanted to be prepared,” Ruby
said defensively. “In case.”

I turned to Meredith. “Relatives?”

“Lucille, mother’s sister. She lives
in Hawaii, so I guess we could have the memorial service on Thursday. That’ll
give her time to get here.”

“Want me to call Roz?” I asked. “They
were friends a long time. She’ll probably want to come.”

“Whatever,” Meredith said. “I don’t
care.”

Ruby turned away from the counter
with Jo’s birthday cake, alight with fifty-nine candles arranged in tight
circles. There was a single candle in the middle. She set the lighted cake on the
table in front of us.

“One life ended, its lessons
learned,” she said, her eyes on the blazing candles. “I think we should honor
this day by singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ “

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel if a
bunch of my friends got together and sang “Happy Birthday” when I was dead. But
I didn’t say anything. The three of us joined hands around the table and sang.
Thinking of Jo, my eyes blurred with tears and my throat hurt.

“Rest in peace, Mother,” Meredith
said. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I hope you didn’t do it because of me.”
Then she took a deep breath and blew out the candles. But the one in the middle
somehow escaped. It still burned brightly, and for a long time we sat in
silence, hands linked, watching its steady flame.

CHAPTER 3

“So Ruby gave Bubba a hard time,
huh?” McQuaid asked. It was Wednesday evening, and he’d come over for dinner.
He sat down in the rocker, propped his feet on the antique milking stool, and
took a long pull on his Lone Star.

“She doesn’t think Jo killed
herself,” I said.

McQuaid shoved a shock of dark hair
out of his eyes and leaned back comfortably. “Yeah, well, my money’s on Bubba.
He may act like a hick, but there’s nothing wrong with his head.”

Cops are like that, even ex-cops.
Brothers under the skin. McQuaid may take a few cheap shots at Bubba just for
fun, but he accepts his competence as an article of faith. Me, I’m not so
accepting. I was on the other side of the fence for fifteen years, remember? It
was my business to question cops’ judgments. Often the best way to do my job
was to prove that they hadn’t done theirs. It was an adversarial relationship I
haven’t grown out of, and probably never will.

But there’s nothing adversarial
about my relationship with McQuaid, even if he is—was—a cop. He’s a big man,
six feet, one-ninety-plus, with the broad, well-muscled shoulders and thick
thighs of an ex-U.T. quarter-back, which is one of the things he did before he
joined the force. I have a large kitchen
- th
ey made them
large, back when children came by the dozen
-
but when
McQuaid walks through the door, it shrinks. When he’s around, there’s never
enough room. My body becomes tinglingly aware of his body, and I find my eyes
lingering on the white scar that runs diagonally across his tanned forehead,
where some crack-crazy doper slashed him with a knife. On the twice-broken
nose, the lived — in face that’s seen plenty of action in its thirty-five
years. I find myself thinking high-voltage thoughts, bedroom thoughts. It feels
like somebody’s turned the heat up.

I pulled my attention away from
McQuaid and back to the subject. “The M.E. got his report out in record time.”

McQuaid glanced at me. “What’d he
come up with?”

“What Bubba expected. Jo had taken
enough of those pills to kill her, and the alcohol contributed to the toxicity.
Cause of death, cardiac arrest brought on by an overdose of barbiturates. Approximate
time of death, noon.”

“Prints on the pill bottle?’

“All hers. She could have bought it
at any drugstore.”

“When’s the memorial service?”

‘Tomorrow. Jo’s sister Lucille is
coming from Honolulu. I called Roz Kotner’s office in New York yesterday and
left a message that Jo had died. I haven’t heard whether she’s coming.”

McQuaid nodded. “How’s Meredith?”

“Hanging in there. She’s staying on
in the house a few weeks, trying to decide what to do. She’s on leave, but she’s
thinking she might not go back.”

Actually, I thought Meredith was
handling Jo’s death better than Ruby was. Ruby was still vehemently insisting
that it wasn’t suicide. It wasn’t an accident, either, she said, which didn’t
leave much of an alternative.

I bunched another handful of spinach
leaves on the chopping block and picked up my knife. I was making herbed
spinach-cheese lasagna, with three kinds of cheese and my own tomato sauce,
with plenty of fresh parsley to offset the extra garlic McQuaid loves. I cooked
the garlic the way I usually do, by putting a couple of cloves into the skillet
with the onion I was sautéing. When the onion’s done, I use a fork to mash the
cloves. Too many people make the mistake of mincing the garlic first, which
makes for burned garlic and a bitter-tasting dish.

McQuaid usually comes for dinner
once a week or so, depending on his university schedule and what’s happening
with his son. Brian is ten. McQuaid is a divorced single parent. I met him back
in Houston, on a pro bono case where I argued for the defense and he was the
prosecution’s chief witness. My client had shot her husband seven times. The
jury returned a not-guilty verdict after I pieced together a history of
persistent abuse and battery. After all, there’s a limit to the number of
times a woman can accidentally fall down the stairs. McQuaid is one of the rare
cops who care more for justice than the law. He’d tried to convince the D.A.
that they couldn’t make a murder charge stick. I wasn’t surprised when he
appeared in the shop one day to tell me he’d left the force to teach at CTSU. I’ve
been trying since then to convince myself that this is just a comfortable
friendship with some exceptionally fine sex thrown in.