DEATH COMES TO AN OPEN HOUSE Page 5

  There was very little hope in that thought.

  Her legs weren’t working properly. Pulling herself up by the handle of the stove was unreasonably difficult. Then her eyes needed to focus. Blinking helped. One foot in front of the other in measured pace, Jean retraced her steps past the inert form, holding on to the counter, then lowered her head briefly, took another deep breath, swallowed hard, and made her way slowly into the living room and on and on through both floors, her breathing fast and shallow, her eyes taking in each room in minutes that stretched unreasonably in time.

  Furniture. Just furniture, pictures, decorations.

  It was a small house without attic or basement. Two bedrooms. Back in the living room, she stared at the oversized TV and forced herself to breathe properly.

  Why isn’t Kevin here? Or is Kevin hiding?

  She nodded. This was good. She was thinking logically. It was necessary to go back, calling his name to let him know it was safe to come out, and check closets, the bathtub, unlikely places, under the beds and behind the couch. All the places she had hidden when she was a child. Children learn how to hide.

  At the end, she nodded again, approving. She hadn’t called his name. Somehow, speech was impossible. But she had looked. Kevin was not in this house. It didn’t matter why. There was no other body, no need to see or touch death again.

  There was no rush now. Back in the neat living room with its two vases of welcoming flowers, Jean stood motionless for some time before dropping onto the black leather couch. It was time to call someone.

  Her cell phone was in her jacket pocket. That was good. Nodding approval of its presence, she took it out and pressed the number for Ed. Surely he would answer now.

  He did.

  She couldn’t.

  “Hello?” Ed repeated.

  Everyone tried again with cell phones.

  Jean managed some sort of sound.

  “Yes? Who is this?”

  She tried to form the “T” of “Theresa.” Somehow, it was a very difficult letter to articulate.

  “Me,” she managed. “M” was easier.

  “Jeannie? This is Jeannie, right? You need me at the DeLucca’s, darlin’?”

  No. That’s wrong. Where is this?

  Another slow breath.

  “College.”

  That was much better.

  “College? College Park? Theresa’s listing? Is that where you are? Why—what’s wrong? Why isn’t Theresa—”

  Ed’s voice changed.

  “Oh, my God! I’m coming. But I have to know. Do we need an ambulance? Is anyone hurt?”

  Jean shook her head “no.” There was no need for an ambulance now.

  “Jeannie?”

  “Dead.” For some reason, this word fell out easily, as if it had been waiting. “Dead, dead, dead …”

  She kept repeating it as the hand holding the phone fell to her side.

  Chapter 11

  Jean sat very still in the corner of the enveloping couch, legs curled under her, hands grasping her upper arms, waiting, watching through the bay window. I unlocked the door, didn’t I? Yes. I remember turning the knob. Nothing must keep Ed from coming in. And the police. Ed would have called the police. I should have, but Ed would have taken care of that. He was the boss. She remembered the biting loneliness from the time she had called 911 for her father. Then, as now, there seemed to be no one she could call to be with her. Kevin was supposed to be here. Rita would be good, but it didn’t seem right to call friends. Vivian would be more appropriate, motherly and an owner of the company, but Jean didn’t feel free to call her, either. Ellie wasn’t even a consideration. Ed would have to do. At one point, she felt a pang of guilt that her concerns were about herself, not Theresa, but there was nothing to be done for that dark elongated form seeping blood onto the white floor. Jean closed her eyes, as though that would shut out Theresa’s sightless stare. She opened them again quickly. Closed, there was nothing to see but the memory. Both the memories.

  There were birds in the tree by the curb. A maple tree, isn’t it? Yes, a maple. The birds and the tree were much better to think about, the birds, small, dark and not in Jean’s short list of known varieties and the green leaves caressing each other.

  A car stopped in front of the house. People got out. A man and a woman. Uniforms. Police. They came up the walk.

  A loud sound made her flinch. One hard rap on the door. No need to get up. The two darkly clad people came in anyway. There were two more behind them. That seemed a lot. None of them were Ed. They came over to her and showed her things and said names and then two of them went away.

  The small black woman knelt in front of Jean, put a hand on her arm and said to the man, “She’s in shock, Mike.” She turned back to Jean. “Are you hurt, honey?”

  Jean looked at her, wondering why she would ask that.

  “Someone has died here?” the woman persisted.

  Jean nodded. “Where is Kevin?” she asked, surprised at the smallness of her voice.

  “Who is Kevin? Is he the one who is dead?”

  Jean shook her head. “No, it’s … it’s Theresa.” It was still hard to say the name. “Theresa,” she said again more firmly, to make sure they knew. “And Kevin’s not here.”

  “Kevin,” the policewoman echoed.

  Jean nodded. “He’s not here. I looked.”

  One of the men appeared in the kitchen door and said, “in here, Mike.”

  The man standing over them turned and left.

  “The suit,” Jean said. A hiccup of a nervous laugh came out.

  “The suit?”

  “Yeah. On TV, they call them ‘suits’. Detectives. Sometimes. You have a uniform.”

  “Are you cold, honey?”

  “Am I? I have a jacket on. But I am. That’s funny.”

  There was a small red quilt on the back of the sofa. The woman was wrapping it around Jean’s shoulders as Ed came in. He walked quickly to Jean and sat down, putting an arm around her and pulling her to his shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Jeannie. It’s okay.”

  It wasn’t okay, but the words helped anyway and so did Ed’s arm around her. Her father, loving, but never physical, had rarely held her like this. It was nice. Ed’s hand was patting her shoulder as if she were a child as he and the woman talked. After a few minutes, tears began, cold, sympathetic fingers, stroking her cheeks.

  “Good,” Ed said. “That’s good. You just cry.”

  The “suit” came back, bringing one of the dining room chairs with him. He placed it beside the woman and sat down. He and Ed said some things to each other. It didn’t matter what they said. They weren’t talking to her.

  Then the woman left and the other “suit” took her place, squatting in front of the couch, a notebook and pen in his hands. They told her their names again and asked if she was able to answer questions.

  “Sure,” she said.

  She had to tell them about the offer, the time of the unanswered phone call, when she arrived, the open back door. They didn’t ask her anything more about Theresa. That was good. She didn’t want to think about reaching across … Jean blocked out the memory and looked at the birds again. Ed explained why she had mentioned Kevin. She had no idea where he was. There wasn’t much to say, really. It was surprising how calmly she was able to tell her small story. The pressure of Ed’s arm around her was really nice.

  They took her fingerprints. That was all right. They needed to know which ones were the killer’s. Why on TV did innocent people make such a fuss about fingerprints?

  Vivian came through the front door and, with only a sympathetic look at Jean, silently took a seat on the other side of the room. Her presence seemed reasonable. She was Ed’s wife. But, when the detective said Jean could go, Vivian came over, one hand reaching out, her face crumpled with sadness. Ed turned her over to Vivian.

  “I’ll take you home, Jean,” she said in voice that seemed to have some of Jean’s tears in it.

 
By then, this scene seemed less like a dream and more like reality and Jean realized these two were taking care of her. For some reason, that made her cry. She dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief Ed had given her.

  “My briefcase,” she said. “In the kitchen. There’s an offer on the DeLucca’s house in there, Ed.”

  “Are your keys in your purse?”

  “Keys? Oh. To the car. Yes. In my purse.”

  “I’ll take care of everything, Jeannie,” Ed assured her. “Don’t worry about anything. Viv will take you home and stay with you. Or take you wherever you want to go. I’m sorry you had—well, considering your history, it’s a shame it wasn’t someone else who found her.”

  “Come on, Jean,” Vivian said softly. “We’ll go home. We’ll have a cup of tea and I’ll stay with you as long as you need me.”

  That, Jean thought, would be a very long time. Her father was dead. And now the woman who was supposed to be her new mother was gone, too.

  Chapter 12

  It was Monday. Rita and Jean, still in pajamas at noon, were in Rita’s living room. Rita sat on the intricately patterned Persian rug, her legs bent back on either side, pale, bare feet with fuchsia toenails projecting from under black silk pajamas, her face obscured by a waterfall of reddish-brown curls that almost touched the laptop computer below them. Jean, barely awake on the tapestry seat of the Chippendale sofa, felt an almost painful gratitude for this strong friend who last night had listened to her disjointed ramblings, comforted her, provided aqua silk pajamas and tucked her into a heavily carved mahogany four-poster bed some time in the early hours of the morning.

  “I’m finished! I love computer tables, don’t you?”

  Rita gestured toward her laptop with a raw baby carrot.

  “Not really. Hand me the sunflower seeds, would you?” Jean dropped a lazy arm toward her friend.

  “Here. Sunflower seeds. Have some vegetables. Or grapes. Too many nuts are constipating. Now.” The carrot was in the air, poised for a decision. “We have to fill in the blanks.”

  “I think you’re nuts with this chart thing. Just because Theresa’s letter opener was …”

  Jean couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “I know. You don’t think someone from the office killed her.”

  “That other murder on an open house—”

  “Might be connected, true.” Rita tilted her head to one side. “Definitely weird. But the letter opener came from our office.”

  “Someone from outside could have stolen it. Always on her desk. And a lot of people knew about it. Hua said Theresa used to carry it with her to show it off until Harold made it so sharp it scratched the inside of her briefcase. And those same torn cards!”

  “I know. But there’s no way we’re going to solve the other murder or the attempted one. All we’ve got is Theresa killed by an item that never left our office. That’s where we start. The torn cards are obviously an attempt to connect her murder with the first one. But that doesn’t work, not with that damn letter opener. I’m going with this chart of mine! One of us!”

  “Or someone who came into the office on Saturday.”

  “Ah, true! Got to call Ed about that.” Rita hunched over the computer and smiled approval of her own creation. “We know everyone and their feelings about Theresa better than the police do. Besides, it’s fun. You cried most of last night. Time to get over it.”

  “You don’t get over … over the death of a friend in one night!”

  Rita studied Jean’s face.

  “Theresa you can get over in one night,” she said flatly. “Do you remember you said it was almost a relief you didn’t need to have Theresa review the offer? That her criticism was hard to take?”

  Jean put her hands over her face.

  “That was awful. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “But it was true. In vino veritas, girlfriend. ”

  It was true. The memory of finding Theresa still brought little waves of nausea, but Jean was beginning to realize this was not at all like her father’s death. The pain of grief just wasn’t there, even when she tried to find it. What was painfully there was the image of Theresa’s body and the memories of her father it brought back.

  She dropped back onto the couch.

  “Okay, so Theresa was a little … distant. Not warm. But she was important to me, helped me a lot. And I am sad, not really up to this detective stuff. Anyway, won’t the police take care of this?”

  “They’ll take care of a lot of stuff we can’t, like interviewing neighbors and investigating Theresa’s other friends, but we know our staff better than they do. We can just talk about it and see what comes up. And …” Rita paused and made sure she had her friend’s attention. “I know a lie when I see one. Not just because of my family. There was this course the board offered. The guy called them “tells,” like they do in poker, little physical signs that clue you into a person’s thoughts and emotions. Very useful when closing a deal. You should take it.”

  “Can’t afford it. But I get it. Like on TV. ‘Criminal Minds.’ Behavioral analysis. And that other one, ‘Lie to Me’. We can do that. And I guess I can do this. Can’t think about anything else anyway, so okay, I will play your game.” Jean paused. “Maybe I owe it to her. New thought there. I’m only thinking of myself, aren’t I? Although I can’t imagine anyone in our office …”

  A sip of wine drowned the unwelcome thought.

  “So I really do need to talk to Ed,” Rita said. “He’s known her the longest. This was just the agents yesterday, trading stories about our interviews with that incredibly sexy detective.”

  Jean tried to bring up a picture of the figures that had interviewed her yesterday.

  “Was he incredibly sexy?”

  “You were totally out of it, weren’t you? Yes. He was. Grim. Something massively sexy about grim in a dark, handsome, really built guy. I did not appreciate you and Viv arriving when you did last night. He might have stayed. But you’re forgiven. Detectives aren’t allowed to date potential suspects, anyway. I asked.”

  “Still think it’s odd he came here.”

  “Not really. I think they tracked down all of us ASAP. See where we were. And somebody told him I was your best friend. I was grilled about you. Ever so sweetly.” Rita grinned. “Great fun! Now. Who do you think would have had the guts to stick that thing in Theresa’s neck? You’re the one with the imagination. Oh, wait! Forgot where I was. Call Ed and find out who came in the office and could have taken the letter opener.”

  “Don’t want to.”

  Jean wished Rita wouldn’t keep pulling up that unwanted image. She cupped her hands around the comforting glass of wine.

  “Okay.” Rita unfolded herself and got up. “You’ve got a hell of an excuse.”

  Rita dialed, hung up, hit the repeat button and hung up again. This went on for some time before she gave up and went back to her spot on the floor.

  “All the lines are busy. Should have known. Probably a few hundred agents in the county want to hear every detail. We can stop by this afternoon after we get your clothes and your car. Or we can wait till Tuesday. You going?”

  “Going?”

  “To sales meeting.”

  Jean slowly pulled in that thought. The decision came more quickly.

  “For sure. Not staying alone here with nothing to think about but …”

  Another sentence Jean didn’t want to finish. She set her empty wine glass on the floor and rolled onto her back, light-headed from the wine and feeling better. There were probably other suspects, not just her office family.

  “There’s something we don’t know. Some motive,” she said. “We need an heir who stopped in the office Saturday.” Jean closed her eyes, wanting it all to go away.

  Rita rubbed the back of her neck, an echo of Ed.

  “Problem is it would be too obvious to come into the office to get a murder weapon. So back to us. Same problem there, though. Why would anyone from our office use a weapon th
at would incriminate us? Symbolic? Jealousy? Someone who would never earn the money that Theresa did? Why wouldn’t anyone—in the office or not—use a knife from home? Or a hardware store? Shit! We’re going to get hung up on that question no matter where we start.”

  “Ignore it,” Jean advised, aware that she was looking for an easy way out.

  “Okay.” Rita was clearly pleased Jean was at least willing to participate. “This table has the name of everyone in the office except us. The next column is PERSONALITY PROBABILITY. That’s why you’re not on it. Maybe I should be.”

  “Rita!”

  “What? You know I didn’t like Theresa and I could kill under the right circumstances.”

  Rita rearranged her legs again, cross-legged, and set the computer in front of them.

  “Next column, MOTIVE, then OPPORTUNITY.”

  Jean ate a slice of cucumber, wondering how she could keep eating.

  “Who’s first?” she asked.

  “Kevin. He was there.”

  “Not when I got there.”

  “Wanted to watch some baseball game on TV. Wouldn’t have done any harm to turn on the TV until someone came, but she sent him home. Sounds like Theresa. This thing never did scare her and remember how pissed she was about sharing the commission?”

  “So that’s what he said,” Jean said thoughtfully. “But he was right there. They do say the quiet ones, the ones you least suspect, are sometimes repressed and when they lose it, they lose it big time. That could be Kevin. But he needed her. The only money he earned was from her.” Jean thought about her own relationship with Theresa and added, “she used him a lot but didn’t pay much.”

  “Good thinking, girlfriend!” Rita sounded surprised. “Maybe he was repressing anger until the right time. Those other two things, the first murder and the other where the agent was threatened, maybe they provided the right time. This could have been planned, so he could have taken the opener. But the opener doesn’t tie in with the others and Kevin is at least bright enough to see that.” Rita paused, her hands over the keys. “But, you know, that thing might have had some significance for him. Sign of success, which he didn’t have?” The fingers began moving. “Good. We got us a suspect. Who’s next?”