Touch-Me-Not (4 page)

C
HAPTER
6

Before he opened the back door of the van, LeRoy looked around once again, then tugged Jerry Sparks out feetfirst. The body had stiffened into a grotesque shape. He’d only read about rigor mortis. He slung the rigid body over his shoulder and made his way to the book shed behind the library. He laid Jerry Sparks facedown in a cleared space in the center of the shed and shut the door.

He drove home the long way, with the windows wide open.

Sarah was waiting up for him, knitting. “What took you so long?”

“Had to finish up something at work. I told you.”

She wrinkled what LeRoy used to think of as her pretty nose. “I hope you’re planning to take a shower.”

Later that same evening, Alyssa’s mother called out to her from the kitchen. “How was the knitters’ group, honey?”

“Okay, Mom.”

“I’ve made lasagna. Would you like some?”

“I’m not hungry, thanks.” Alyssa took her sweatshirt from the rack in the front hall and pulled her headband over her cropped hair. “I’m going out again.”

“Where are you going now?”

“Just out.”

“You need to eat something, honey.” Her mother stopped in the doorway, holding the pan of lasagna.

“Maybe later, Mom.” Alyssa opened the door. Her mother was still talking, so she waited.

“You’ve lost weight, Alyssa. You’ve got to eat.”

“I can’t deal with food now, Mom. See you later.”

“When will you be home?”

“I don’t know. Don’t wait up,” and Alyssa shut the door gently.

Victoria answered the knock on her kitchen door. “Well, good evening, Alyssa.”

“I’m sorry to be coming here so late, Mrs. Trumbull.”

“It’s not late. Have you had supper yet? I’ve got some nice soup.” Tendrils of savory-smelling steam wafted up from a pot simmering on the stove.

“Thanks, Mrs. Trumbull, but I don’t want anything. I hope I’m not bothering you?”

“Of course not.” Alyssa was the granddaughter of one of Victoria’s childhood friends. She resembled her grandmother so much that Victoria had a feeling of time running backward. The young woman was probably in her twenties, but seemed like a teenager. Her hair was cut short like a boy’s and she had a boy’s slender build. “You look as though you could use a little warmth. There’s a fire in the parlor.”

Alyssa was wearing her hooded navy sweatshirt with
TRI-TOWN AMBULANCE
printed on it in large white letters. She’d pulled the sleeves down over her hands.

Victoria led the way through the dining room and into the parlor, where McCavity lay stretched out, his soft belly fur toward the fire. Victoria settled herself into her mouse-colored wing chair. Alyssa stood uncertainly by the coffee table, hugging herself.

“Have a seat.” Victoria indicated the horsehair sofa, and Alyssa perched on the edge.

“I hope we don’t have a frost tonight,” said Victoria, wondering why Alyssa had come to her.

“Yes, ma’am.” Alyssa looked down at her hands, which were clasped together between her knees.

“You never can predict what Island weather will do,” said Victoria.

Alyssa nodded.

“I think you need a glass of sherry.” Victoria got up from her seat and headed for the kitchen.

She returned a few minutes later carrying a brass tray with a bottle of sherry, two glasses, and crackers and cheese. Alyssa had moved from the couch to the floor, where she sat with her legs crossed, stroking McCavity.

“Be careful not to pat his stomach,” warned Victoria. “He turns into a wildcat.”

Alyssa held up her hand. Thin red lines extended from knuckles to thumb. “He’s already explained that to me.”

“There’s witch hazel in the bathroom,” Victoria said. “Don’t you want to put some on that scratch?”

Alyssa got to her feet. “I’d probably better.”

She returned, holding a soggy cotton pad on her hand. Victoria breathed in the clean, pungent smell of witch hazel, a remembered cure-all for childhood scratches and mosquito bites. Alyssa dropped to the floor again near McCavity. He rolled over on his back, belly exposed.

She smiled and moved her hand away.

Victoria put a chunk of cheese on a cracker and Alyssa took it absently.

“You remind me so much of your grandmother,” Victoria said softly. “When she had something on her mind, it took her a long time to get around to talking about it.”

Alyssa nodded.

Victoria handed her a glass of sherry. “Do you remember her?”

“Not very well,” she said, accepting the wine. “I was only five or six when she died.”

“You look like her. She was very beautiful.”

Alyssa blushed and looked down at McCavity.

Victoria waited.

Alyssa said nothing for some time. She ate the cracker Victoria had given her, sipped her sherry, and helped herself to another cracker. The fire blazed up. McCavity shifted away from the heat.

“Two women in the group are getting phone calls from a breather,” Alyssa said at last.

“So I heard. Jessica Gordon and Maron Andrews.”

“I didn’t want to say anything at the meeting tonight.” Alyssa stopped.

“Go on,” said Victoria.

“I’m getting phone calls, too, Mrs. Trumbull. The guy says disgusting stuff before I can hang up.”

“Oh,” said Victoria, and waited.

Alyssa wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I need your advice, Mrs. Trumbull. I think I know who the breather is, and I’m scared.”

LeRoy couldn’t sleep. He tossed from side to side and from his back to his stomach. Before dawn, Sarah switched on the light. “I might as well get up. You’ve kept me awake all night.” She put her hand on his hot forehead. “You’re sick. I knew something was wrong.”

He sat up, swiveled his feet over the side of the bed, and put his head in his hands. “Leave me alone, will you?”

“You’d better see Doc Jeffers. If you’re coming down with something, I don’t want the boys to catch it.”

LeRoy got up, dressed, and left the house before the twins were up, without waiting for breakfast.

He drove through Vineyard Haven, quiet this early in the morning. Only a few shops on Main Street were lighted. His was the only car on Beach Road. As he drove, the sky turned from night black to gray. The horizon emerged and he could see boats magnified by their reflections in the still harbor. Circuit Avenue was deserted; his shop was dark.

LeRoy couldn’t think of yesterday’s event as anything but an incident. The Jerry Sparks incident. He’d have to remember to get rid of the Taser cartridge he’d stashed in his toolbox. He felt groggy and hungover, although he hadn’t even taken a sip of the Jim Beam he’d poured last night, had poured it back into the bottle, in fact.

He let himself into his shop, then made sure both the front and back doors were locked before he turned on the lights and opened the bottom file drawer. He unwrapped the cell phone and tucked his handkerchief into his pocket. It took him awhile to figure out where Jerry Sparks might have stored photos.

He checked everything on the cell phone, glancing at his watch every couple of minutes. Only an hour before Maureen would arrive and open up.

Messages from Emily Cameron, the girlfriend who’d spoken to him in the library parking lot. Their baby-sitter. Addresses, jokes, dates, notes. Pictures of Emily. No other photos. He finished before the hour was up. Sparks had lied to him. No photos. No videos.

Had he lied, too, about downloading the photos onto his computer? About having any pictures at all?

Someone knocked at the back door.

“Be right there,” LeRoy called out, and quickly stashed the phone back in the bottom drawer. He’d have to tend to the Taser cartridge later. He looked at his watch. Eight o’clock, the time he usually opened. He got up, kicked the file drawer shut, and made it to the back door.

It was the tall guy who worked at the Steamship Authority, directing cars onto the ferries.

“Hi,” said LeRoy. “Just opening up. Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Jerry Sparks,” the guy said.

LeRoy glanced behind him, as though Jerry Sparks might materialize. “He doesn’t work here anymore. Sorry.” He was about to shut the door.

The guy held up a large hand to keep the door from closing. “Name’s Beany. Sparks told me he’s working here part-time.”

“He doesn’t work here anymore,” said LeRoy, backing away from the door. “Sorry.”

“Give him a message, will you?” said Beany. “That’s a damned piece of junk he sold me and I want my money back.”

“Sure, but I don’t expect to see him anytime soon,” said LeRoy. “Sorry about that, buddy.”

“No problem,” said Beany. “When you see him, tell him I said, ‘Or else.’ ” With that, Beany turned away and stepped off the three back steps in one long stride.

“Sure. Okay,” said LeRoy to Beany’s departing back.

A key turned in the front door lock and the door opened. LeRoy swiveled around, expecting to see Jerry Sparks.

Maureen put her key back into her purse. “I didn’t realize you were here, Mr. Watts. The door was locked.”

“Sorry, I forgot.”

Maureen studied him. “You seem to have an awful lot on your mind, Mr. Watts.”

LeRoy nodded. “I’ve got a couple of errands to do, Maureen.” He had to find Sparks’s computer, and soon. “I’ll be away from the shop most of the morning. I broke off the key in the supply closet, so the door’s unlocked. Need to get a new key. Call me if something comes up. I’ve got my cell phone.”

It was another fine, bright morning with a brilliant blue sky and the scent of spring in the air. LeRoy was too preoccupied to notice. He checked his watch. After 8:30.

After 8:30. Victoria had been working in her garden for more than an hour. Last summer, she had sowed seeds of touch-me-not near a lush growth of poison ivy that thrived in a damp spot on the other side of her vegetable garden. She’d gathered the seeds from plants that grew alongside the brook on the other side of Doane’s pasture. When she was a child, even before she could read, she’d loved to touch the seedpods that popped like birthday favors, shooting seeds into the air and water and earth like tiny missiles. Last summer, she’d felt almost guilty, touching as many of the fat pods as she could reach to watch the exploding seedpods and the way the emptied pod split and snapped back into tight curls. It still seemed magical. Touch-me-not grew in the same places poison ivy did and was an antidote. You merely rubbed touch-me-not on your skin where it had been exposed to poison ivy, and the itchy rash wouldn’t develop. Or that’s what they said.

She got slowly to her feet. Eight-thirty wasn’t too early to call her attorney friend, Myrna Luce. Her legs had cramped from kneeling too long. But she’d found the green leaves of touch-me-not poking out of the dirt where she’d planted them. A good discovery for this fine morning.

She limped back to the house, her muscles gradually easing, and called Myrna. “I need to talk to you,” she said. “Unofficially.”

Myrna laughed. “I won’t charge you, if that’s what you’re asking. Come about four, and I’ll break out the sherry. Do you need a ride?”

“No, thank you. I’ve got transportation.”

C
HAPTER
7

Jerry Sparks lived, or had lived, in a basement room in a house off Wing Road, a place owned by old Mrs. Rudge. He’d done work for her in the past. LeRoy parked in the driveway, went up to her kitchen door, and knocked.

Mrs. Rudge shuffled to the door in her bedroom slippers, a wiry woman in her seventies, cigarette hanging from her lips, eyes half-closed against the smoke.

She held the door partway open. “Yeah?”

“Mrs. Rudge, I’m LeRoy Watts, your electrician. Is Jerry Sparks in?”

“Haven’t seen him for several days. He owes me rent.”

“I need to get something he borrowed from me. Mind if I take a look in his place?”

Mrs. Rudge removed the cigarette from her mouth with thumb and third finger and flicked the ashes onto the floor. “Be my guest.”

“Thanks. Is his place locked?”

“I doubt it,” and Mrs. Rudge shut the door.

LeRoy went around to the outdoor basement entrance and tried the door. Not locked, of course. Nothing much in the place. An unmade futon with a greasy pillow and a wadded-up blanket, empty carryout cartons containing dried-out Chinese food, a couple of pizza boxes with week-old cheesey dough stuck on the lid. A crappy easy chair he didn’t want to touch. A bare lightbulb hung from an extension cord wrapped around an overhead pipe. No computer.

While he stood there wondering where Jerry Sparks would have kept the computer, Mrs. Rudge barged in, bringing with her the smell of stale cigarette smoke. “Found what you was looking for?” She lit a new cigarette from the end of one that had burned down to the filter tip, breathed in the fresh smoke, and blew it out.

LeRoy shook his head. “Don’t see it anywhere.”

“He had a couple of good things, like a stereo and a radio, but he sold them.”

“A computer?”

“One of his drinking buddies took that away.”

LeRoy felt his stomach lurch and put his hand over his chest. “Do you know who it was?”

Mrs. Rudge took another drag. “Don’t know his name. Tall, skinny guy. Works for the Steamship Authority. I got no idea where he is. If you see him, tell him he doesn’t pay his rent, I’m moving his stuff out. I gotta live, too, you know. I’ll give him another week; that’s it.” She flicked the ash off the end of her cigarette. “How much longer you gonna be?”

“I’m done here, I guess.”

“You hear of anybody wants a nice room, tell them to call, okay?”

“I’ll do that.”

LeRoy trudged back to his van. Before he opened the door, Mrs. Rudge called out, “You tell him to move that junker car of his outta here. I’m not running a parking lot, you know.”

LeRoy opened the van door and stepped up into it. He’d cleaned the inside, swept it out. A green cardboard tree hung from the mirror, and the van smelled like pine.

So Beany had Sparks’s computer. He didn’t know Beany’s last name. He’d go to the Steamship Authority on Monday when the office opened and find out from them.

On the way back to the shop, LeRoy stopped at Shirley’s Hardware. Mary—he never could remember her last name, although he’d known her for the entire eight years he’d had his shop—cut a new key for him and he returned to work. He gave the key to Maureen, who tucked it under a plastic pencil tray in her top desk drawer.

“Mr. Watts, you really should see the doctor,” she said. “Yesterday I was sure you were coming down with something. You go on home. I’ll take care of things. The weekend’s coming up. Get some rest.”

“Guess you’re right,” said LeRoy, thinking if he didn’t find that computer soon, he was in deep trouble.

After lunch, Victoria dressed in her green plaid suit, put on the clip earrings that matched her outfit, and found her leather purse under a pile of papers on the dining room table. She considered whether or not she should take her lilac-wood walking stick, and decided that if she got a ride in a pickup truck, she’d like a bit of support.

At half past three, she marched around to the front of her house and crossed the road. Within a few minutes, a vehicle approached from Edgartown and she held out her thumb. It wasn’t a car after all, but a shiny new blue dump truck that slowed and stopped, as she knew it would.

The driver lowered the window on the passenger side. “Afternoon, Mrs. Trumbull.” The driver was Bill O’Malley, a man she occasionally saw at the selectmen’s meetings. He leaned across the seat. “Nice to see you on a fine day like this. Where’re you heading?”

“Myrna Luce’s law office in Vineyard Haven,” said Victoria. Through the open window she heard O’Malley’s radio playing something with a banjo and harmonica and a high male voice wailing a country-music ballad.

“At your service.” O’Malley slipped out of the driver’s side, truck engine still running, and went around to the passenger side. He was a tall, well-built young man in his mid-forties, with dark, unruly hair streaked with silver. Victoria admired men with nice flat stomachs. He brought out a black plastic milk crate and set it down for a step. “I keep it here just for you. By the way, how’s your granddaughter?”

Victoria smiled. “Elizabeth is fine. She likes her job. You know Myrna, don’t you?”

“Sure. Everyone does. She handled my second divorce.”

Victoria tucked her stick under her arm, grasped the metal handhold on the side of the truck, stepped up onto the milk crate, and, with a boost from O’Malley, swung up into the high passenger seat. She straightened her skirt over her knees. “Thank you.”

“Anytime,” said O’Malley as he stowed the milk crate behind her seat. “I’ll take you right there.”

He slammed the door shut, got back into the driver’s seat, and shifted into gear. “Where’s she working?”

“Who?” asked Victoria, then immediately realized she was being dense. “Elizabeth’s working as dockmaster at the Oak Bluffs harbor.”

“I’ll run my boat around there sometime, see how she’s doing.”

“I’m sure she’d like that.”

As they approached Vineyard Haven, O’Malley turned off State Road and followed a series of lanes until they reached what was once a small house, now tripled in size with a new two-story addition.

“Myrna’s law office is on the first floor,” explained Victoria. “She has a dance studio on the second.”

“That woman has almost as much energy as you do, Mrs. T.,” O’Malley said as he helped her dismount. “I’ve got a couple of errands to run, and can stop by in about an hour, if you’d like a ride home.”

“That would be fine,” said Victoria.

As she went up to the front step, a short, stout black woman opened the door. Her hair was twisted into long dreadlocks entwined with beads. She greeted Victoria with a warm bosomy hug.

Victoria, usually not much of a hugger, embraced her, then turned to O’Malley, who’d waited to see her safely met. He lifted a couple of fingers from the steering wheel in acknowledgment and drove off.

“It’s been too long, Victoria.” Myrna indicated with her beringed hands for Victoria to go first, and they entered her new law office.

African sculptures and carvings were displayed on low columns between windows that looked out on woodland. The wall to the right was lined with law books. Oriental rugs covered the polished wood floor.

Myrna seated Victoria on a satin-striped couch next to a ficus tree and sat across from her.

After they’d exchanged pleasantries, Myrna said, “Tell me what brought you here—besides Bill O’Malley’s cobalt blue dump truck.” She laughed and sat forward, her fingers laced so that her rings seemed to form a solid gold band. Her ears, too, were outlined in gold rings.

Myrna laughed again when she noticed the way Victoria was examining her. She shook her head and beads clicked.

“I know you’re involved with women’s issues,” Victoria began. “Do you still run the shelter for battered women?”

Myrna nodded and waved at a door in the book-lined wall. “That leads to my house. It’s not easy for batterers to get to their victims, since they’d have to go past me.” She bared her teeth in a smile. “You indicated on the phone that a woman you know is being stalked. Illegal, of course. I can get a restraining order for her.”

“It’s more serious than that,” said Victoria. “Three women. Possibly more.”

Myrna pursed her lips. “I see.”

Victoria told her about the breather.

“I recall your granddaughter was being stalked by her ex-husband.”

“That was frightening. He’s a sensible, well-educated man. I don’t understand what gets into some people.”

Myrna nodded. “More women are willing to come forward these days. Men, too. Stalkers are not just males.”

“I wanted to come in person rather than phoning,” said Victoria. “I suppose my interest stems from Elizabeth’s problems. Do you have any clients who are being stalked?”

“You know I can’t divulge names.”

“I don’t want names,” Victoria assured her. “I need to know if our stalker reaches beyond the knitters’ group.”

“Have the women notified the police?”

“They’ve talked with Casey, who’s not sure anything can be done beyond notifying the phone company, and they’ve done that. Last night, I attended a lecture on stalking and learned it can escalate into something quite dangerous.”

Myrna nodded. “Two of my clients are hiding out from ex-husbands who’ve gone beyond telephoning.” She looked thoughtful, then stood. “I’ll go through my files and see what I can find.” She arose from her seat and went over to a file cabinet near the bookcase, unlocked a drawer, and ran her fingers through a sheaf of folders. While Victoria waited, she pulled out four or five.

She returned to her seat with the folders and opened them one at a time. “These are stalking cases. Only one woman is getting phone calls from an unidentified man, a breather. The others know who the stalker is, ex-husbands or former boyfriends.”

“Would you be willing to meet with the women from the knitters’ group?”

“Anytime, Victoria. Let’s make it some evening, to be sure I’m not in court.”

They spent the rest of the time catching up on family news until the blue dump truck rumbled to a stop in front of Myrna’s office.

“Thank you,” said Victoria, and strode out to her waiting ride.