Veiled Threats (3 page)

I
T WAS WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT BEFORE
I
LEFT
S
ERCOMBE
House, moving in a slow-motion trance of weariness and guilt. There had been plenty of guilt to go around as the police cars came, and then the fire truck, and then the ambulance that acted as a hearse, because Michelle had died instantly. Young Sean felt guilty about the fight, of course, to the extent that he could feel anything at all beyond his shock. Diane felt guilty for letting Michelle guzzle champagne while they got dressed. Nickie felt guilty for leaving her car keys lying around.

“If I'd just put them away,” she said for the fourth time, as we all stumbled out to our cars at last.

“Nickie, please, try not to think about it. Listen, shall I drive you home?”

“Oh. I guess I won't be driving, will I?” Her eyes were glassy, and she giggled, then laughed, on a rising, quavering note. “But Michelle won't be driving ever, will she? And I won't be driving the Mustang. God, I loved that car!”

She stopped herself, appalled. Jeffrey and Diane, their wedding night in ruins, stared at her. “I'm so sorry! I didn't mean that! I didn't—”

“Nickie, honey.” I shook her gently. “You're in shock. It's OK.” Thinking about her car at a time like this might seem
callous, but then I'd been thinking about my business. This could be a disaster for Made in Heaven.

“I'll take her home.” Dorothy Fenner was, for once, a welcome sight as she came down the porch steps. “I know the way.”

I handed Nickie over and trudged down the graveled drive, grateful to be left alone. But then my own guilt rose up. Worrying about my business was a trivial sin. What if I could have prevented the accident altogether? I replayed it over and over on my mind's movie screen: the brief, crucial time between Michelle's leaving the room, drunk and rude and alive, and her turning the ignition key, doomed. If only I'd cared less about the broken glass and spilled champagne and more about talking to her. If only I hadn't been so angry at my spoiled reception, and had gone after her right away. If I'd run across the grass instead of hesitating on the porch. If, if, if.

I reached my van, one of the few cars remaining beside the emergency vehicles clustered down at the bend. The driver's door was sticking again, and as I circled around to the other side the revolving light from a police car flickered on something shiny just under the front bumper. Mechanically, I picked it up: a business card case, dropped by a departing guest. I always ran a little lost-and-found service after a wedding. I wiped off the mud and tossed the case into my tote bag, where it joined the disposable camera, the dangly silver earring, and the plastic sandwich bag of what I hoped was not dope. The odds were good that nobody would call me about the bag, but the card case looked expensive.

I'd sort it out tomorrow. Tonight it was all I could do to navigate the empty streets of Seattle. I drove slowly to the east shore of Lake Union and parked in the narrow lot reserved
for houseboat owners, and for houseboat renters like me. I had lived alone since college, over ten years ago. Living alone suited me, but how many weddings can you watch without wanting to come home to someone? I'd had dates, I'd had lovers, I'd had six months of let's-live-together-and-see-what-happens. I hadn't had the nerve to marry someone, and most of the time I hadn't had the someone. Tonight I really could have used a someone.

I decided to leave all my stuff in the van until morning, and headed down the dock, my solitary footsteps echoing on the worn wood planks. I loved my houseboat dearly, and I hoped someday to buy it from my landlady. It was a shabby old place, with no closet space and a miniature kitchen and no heat in the bathroom, but it had two great virtues: a two-room second story that was now Made in Heaven's office, and a priceless location at the very end of a dock.

You passed a dozen or so houseboats to get from the street to my door, but on the lake side my only neighbors were ducks. I could sit on my narrow, splintery front deck, or retreat to the glassed-in porch when it rained, and see the whole lake, from the high-rises of downtown at the south end to the green slopes of Gas Works Park at the north. Speedboats and sailboats shared the waterways with flotillas of Canada geese, and sunsets flared across the lake above Queen Anne Hill and the Fremont drawbridge. When rain squalls burst and then faded, the water's surface changed from silver moiré to ruffled pewter to mother-of-pearl. Sometimes I spent whole evenings just watching the lake and breathing.

The dock was silent at this hour, the row of houseboats dark and sleeping. The few dim lampposts along the walkway cast tilted shadows of the flower boxes and hanging
baskets and driftwood sculpture with which my neighbors decorated their porches. I picked up a fallen honeysuckle blossom from beneath one basket and twirled it between my fingers. The evening's showers had left the dock gleaming in the lamplight, looking not quite real, a stage set waiting for the hero's entrance.

But this was a tragedy, not a romance, and the heroine had to play the scene alone. I could hear the slow, hollow slapping of waves under the logs and foam floats that supported each house. Over the edge of the dock, heavy guy-wires and seaweedy ropes disappeared into the black water. Unlike most of my neighbors, I was no swimmer, and the cold depths under my little street of boats looked eerily opaque. I leaned over the water and dropped the honeysuckle. It touched lightly on the black mirrored surface and floated away, slowly rotating, to disappear into the swaying shadows. Michelle's life had just disappeared. I shivered in the night breeze and hurried to my door.

Once inside, I left a phone message for Eddie to hear in the morning. Then I crawled into bed and tried to hold off the gloom by thinking about the handsome green-eyed man. But that all seemed so long ago, and anyway I was soon drifting into exhausted sleep. The man in the sweater, coming in from the rain … the other man in the rain … the heavyset man walking down the private drive in the rain. But it was a
private
drive; it didn't lead anywhere but Sercombe House.

I opened my eyes in the darkness. Where had the heavy-set man been coming from as he headed down the hill? He wasn't a wedding guest, or I would have noticed him leaving. Had he been—crazy thought—had he been somewhere near Nickie's car? Speaking of crazy … Crazy Mary said she'd seen someone “breaking things and stealing things.” Maybe
that was who she meant. He'd been shoving something in a pocket: a tool? Was Michelle so terribly drunk that she couldn't even hit the brakes, or was there something wrong with the brakes? I saw again the headlights slashing down the hill, and I wondered. The man in the rain, headlights in the rain, the car nobody drove but Nickie … I lay back, mind whirling, and surrendered to sleep.

I
LOVE TO SLEEP
. I
LOVE IT THE WAY SOME PEOPLE—INCLUDING
me
love
food or sex. I am a passionate sleeper, and I guard my mornings like a lioness guarding a dead zebra, so that I can gorge on sleep. The normal mornings, that is. The mornings when no one has died the night before. The Monday morning after Diane's wedding I slept in, but only by force of will, trying to stay unconscious because reality was so sad and messy and guilty.

I'd forgotten to switch my personal phone line over to the answering machine, and at ten-fifteen the one in the kitchen rang like a fire bell. I jammed a pillow over my head, waiting for it to stop, but it didn't. Ten rings, twenty rings, thirty
it
had to be Eddie. No one else would be so rude, and Eddie was too prim to come downstairs and hammer on my door when he knew I wasn't properly dressed. In fact he never came downstairs, stubbornly behaving as if my residence were miles away from my workplace instead of separated by a dozen wooden steps. I'd given him my one spare house key, in case he wanted a snack from my kitchen sometime when I wasn't around, but he never used it.

After thirty rings I decided to fire him, and after forty I decided to face the day. As I crossed the kitchen the linoleum was chilly underfoot, but the faded yellow walls were neon-lit
with sunshine. I perched on a stool by the phone. It had stopped ringing, but I knew it would start again, so I just sat there rubbing my eyes and trying to think. What was it that had seemed so urgent last night? That's right, the man in the rain. Pure fantasy, late-night paranoia.

On the counter before me was an antique toy I'd just bought: a miniature wood stove from the 1890's, five inches high and made of cast iron, right down to the nickel-sized skillet that sat on one burner. I swung the curlicued oven door open and shut, open and shut. I had planned on a leisurely breakfast while I cleaned off the rust and went over it with stove polish. What a silly, trivial little plan, made back when Michelle was alive. The phone clamored again. Time for a new plan.

“Good morning, Eddie.”

“Mrs. Parry left three messages on the machine before I got here this morning.” Small talk had no place in Eddie's repertoire. He got to the point and then prodded you with it. “Wants to see you at the estate ASAP, and she's pissed off.”

“About what, the dress?”

“Yep. Get on over there.”

“I'll come up first. I've got something to ask you about.”

I hung up and fished the business card case out of my tote bag, but when I pried it open all I found was a soggy wad of cardboard, glued together with rain. Maybe some of the cards would be readable later.

As I showered I speculated about the cards and the other lost items, and then my thoughts wandered to the second Mrs. Parry. Was she a sharp operator like her husband, or a trophy wife who spent all her time shopping? Heaven knows she'd spent enough when she ordered Nickie's first wedding gown from New York: Even in a too-small size, the thing had
been a positive snowbank of lace and beadwork, with a cathedral train and a fingertip veil. Nickie's lovely olive skin would have looked unpleasantly sallow against all those acres of stark white. I've always disliked that tired old notion that a snow-white gown is a symbol of purity, like the safety seal on an aspirin bottle.

I dressed quickly, in flats, and a pale lemon cotton sweater, and slacks. Grace Parry could live with me sans makeup and with my hair clipped back. She was from Chicago, I remembered now, and had gone back on business. So she did have a business. Probably antiques or art collecting or something else suitable for a tycoon's wife. I headed outside and upstairs, sparing a glance for my barrel garden on the deck, trying to focus myself on ordinary daylight instead of last night's darkness. The tulips and daylilies were past their prime, but the irises were still holding on, with nasturtiums curling at their feet. A couple of kayakers paddled by, their shoulders level with my front deck. I kicked some dried-up goose turds off the planking into the water. Canada geese are pretty, but their manners stink.

Upstairs, Eddie Breen was at his desk in the workroom, with his feet on the desk and a pile of invoices in his lap. He was a small, wiry man, tanned into a web of wrinkles, with lively gray eyes and fine white hair that was sparse enough to make his jug ears even more conspicuous. His standard uniform was as crisp as ever: khaki pants with knife-edge creases, spotless deck shoes and a white oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled back as precisely as origami. He looked more like a ship's officer than a CPA, though in fact he'd been both.

Eddie avoided weddings, on the principle that they led to the inherently undesirable state of marriage, and he avoided
our clients because he thought they were nuts to get married. But though he never attended them, Eddie's penny-pinching guaranteed that our weddings stayed on schedule and on budget. He was cranky and critical, but an absolute wizard with contracts, discounts, and taxes. He was also surprisingly vigorous for a man of seventy-two, which was handy since I wanted him to live forever.

This morning he looked up from his papers, chewing on an unlit cigar. I loathe cigar smoke, so Eddie only lit up while leaning out one of the windows. Windows made up most of the office's western wall, echoing the glass sunporch downstairs. You entered the office through what we called the “good room,” the one with new paint and framed wedding photos and halfway decent furniture, including a glass-topped coffee table invitingly covered with bridal magazines, etiquette books, and portfolios of gowns, cakes, and floral arrangements. The workroom, through a connecting door, was larger and messier, with both our desks facing the lake, the secondhand computer on its stand in the corner, and a couple of scratched gray file cabinets along the back wall. With the door closed, clients saw only efficiency and elegance. With it open, as it was now, Eddie could easily bellow across both rooms.

“You OK?”

He'd gotten my message, then. “Yeah, I'm fine.”

But he could see that I wasn't. As I crossed the good room and dropped into my desk chair, he came over to pat my shoulder. Pretty good for a non-hugger like Eddie.

“ A t least Diane and Jeffrey have left for Paris by now, so they'll have lots to distract them.” I sighed. “Pretty grisly way to start a honeymoon.”

“Well, try not to dwell on it.”

“But I
am
dwelling on it. I should have stopped Michelle before she ran outside. And now I've got this spooky thing I can't get out of my head. See, there was this man….” I described the figure in the rain, the dead-end road, and my sudden suspicion that the Mustang had been tampered with. “What do you think?”

The cigar swiveled to the other side of his mouth. “I think I remember when you saw a suspicious fellow casing the houseboat, and it turned out to be a real estate agent.”

“Well, he was lurking around!”

“And I remember you thought your friend Lily's new boyfriend was married, because he wouldn't show her his house, and it turned out he was just a lousy housekeeper.”

“Didn't it strike you as funny when he kept putting her off?”

“No, it did not. What strikes me is that you keep playing Nancy Drew, when you should be drumming up new business.” He lifted the invoices. “ We are seriously behind this quarter.”

“I know, I know, but really, don't you think I should tell the police?”

“Well, the police called this morning, as a matter of fact.” He picked up a notepad and glared at it. “A Lieutenant Borden. Wants you to call him, but not 'til this afternoon. Says a Mrs. Fenner told him you were encouraging the bridesmaids to get drunk.”

“What?! I was not! That bitch. OK, I brought them a bottle of champagne, but I always do that. They all have a little toast and—”

“Well, this Michelle kid had more than a toast, didn't she?”

“I know. I should have stopped her. I … I … Eddie, it
was so
awful
—” Suddenly I was shuddering, and Eddie actually did hug me.

“Hey. Hey, I didn't mean to upset you. Carnegie, don't.”

“Sorry. I'm OK, really.” I took a deep breath, then took the slip from him with the lieutenant's number. A nasty thought occurred to me. “Eddie, if I tell the police I saw someone suspicious, they'll think I'm just avoiding this accusation about getting Michelle drunk.”

“Well, they might. Honest to Pete, Carnegie, you do have a lively imagination. Why on earth would anybody try to hurt the Parry girl? She's only about nineteen.”

“Twenty-two. Well, I don't know. Keith Guthridge must be pretty angry at her father, with his grand jury testimony coming up.”

“Angry enough to kill Parry's daughter? Jesus, that would guarantee Parry's testimony against him. Doesn't make sense.”

“No, no, of course it doesn't. Maybe I
am
just avoiding the accusation. I'll never give my bridesmaids champagne again.”

“Worry about that later. Right now, worry about that faded old dress you bought the Parry girl. And about these bills. I've said this before and I'm going to say it again: You're undercharging for this wedding, and you're spending too much time on it instead of marketing for new business.”

He was just trying to distract me, but I let him. “I'm only charging them our standard rate.”

“Douglas Parry is not standard, for God's sakes. He makes millions off widows and orphans; you don't have to knock yourself out to hunt down good deals for him. Christ, we could charge him double on everything and he'd never notice!”

“Eddie, I see your point, I really do. But Douglas Parry hasn't been convicted of anything, OK? In fact he hasn't even been accused, not yet. Even if he is, it won't affect us. This wedding is going to establish our reputation. What's left of it after last night.”

“Louise can't pay her mortgage with our reputation,” he said. Louise was my mother, the widow of Eddie's oldest friend and a dear friend in her own right. “That payment deadline is coming up.”

“Oh, Eddie, you're worried about her, aren't you? I'm going to pay her back soon, honest I am. If I have to I'll get another line of credit on the business. I won't let her down.”

“I know you won't,” he relented. “I'm just fussing. You get yourself over to the Parrys’, and we'll take in a show tonight, OK? Get your mind off things.”

Every couple of weeks the entire staff of Made in Heaven went out for a bad movie and a candy binge. Art films I saw with Lily. Eddie and I preferred science fiction, but we'd take natural disasters, gangsters, or spies, as long as it was loud, fast, and unbelievable.

“It's a date. Thanks, Eddie.”

He made a shooing motion with his hands. Resisting an impertinent urge to kiss him on top of his silky white head, I took the notebook on Nickie's wedding out to Vanna. Maybe he was right, and I was being overimaginative about the man in the rain. Well, I'd tell Douglas Parry about the mysterious stranger, and he could tell the police if he wanted to, and that would be that. I put the van in gear and the transmission made a faint but ominous new noise. Soon, I promised my faithful vehicle. You'll get a tune-up soon.

I picked up a scone and a double cappuccino from Federal Espresso, my favorite caffeine pushers, and headed
across the Evergreen Point Bridge over Lake Washington, admiring the whitecaps on one side of the span and the calm silvery water on the other. The Parrys lived in Medina, a semirural enclave of the rich and rustic on the east side of the lake. Just a modest little cottage with a quarter mile of shoreline, a view of Mount Rainier, and a staff of five. Just a place to hang your hat, dock your sailboat, and have the chauffeur park your Rolls. Ray Ishigura, the groom, was a middle-class military brat whose family lived in a split-level in Tacoma, near McChord Air Force Base. But Ray had the potential to be a pianist of international reputation, which must have helped his courtship in Douglas Parry's eyes.

I managed the scone just fine, scrounging on the floor for a tissue to wipe my fingers. But the coffee did me in just as I started up the Parrys’ half-mile driveway. I swerved to miss a jaywalking squirrel, and a stream of hot brown splotches suddenly bisected the front of my sweater. I had nothing on underneath, and nothing in the van to change into. Great.

Swearing the way only children of the merchant marine can swear, I pulled up in front of the house, dabbed at the splotches, and walked past a line of cars that made Vanna look as downscale as her driver. Nickie's car was gone, of course, but there was Douglas Parry's splendid silver Rolls, and two sports cars, a hunter-green Jag and a blood-and-silver Alfa Romeo that looked fast standing still. I had some nail polish that color once, but it kept me awake at night.

As I stepped up to the front door, I remembered my first visit to consult with Nickie. In my infinite wisdom, I'd known exactly what the Parry estate would look like: mock Tudor, maybe a French baronial tower or two, stiffly groomed grounds, lots of antiques. Wrong, on all counts. The house was Northwest avant-garde, with a king's ransom in oldgrowth
cedar in swooping curves and jutting angles and unexpected skylights.