Читать книгу Polly Deacon Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - H. Mel Malton - Страница 32

Here is the cycle of living and dying

solemnly sung by the waves

in the throat of the bay.

—Shepherd’s Pie

The bear was Upon me, licking my face and whining. I threw my arms around it and wondered if it would be safe to open my eyes. I was ready for anything. My chest hurt, but that was because the bear was so heavy. Well, not that heavy, actually, but I supposed that things were different in the afterworld.

I heard something big moving towards me, but I figured my bear would protect me, and anyway, I was dead, so what did it matter? I opened my eyes and found myself looking into the bear’s mouth, which was big and red and smelled like dog kibble.

“You okay, Polly?” If that was the voice of God, I was definitely in trouble. It was Morrison. I sat up carefully, my arms still around the bear, which looked suspiciously like Lug-nut.

“Oh God. I’m not dead. Oh God.” At the same time somebody else was saying “Oh God Oh God” too, over and over.

I looked over at Carla Schreier. She was crumpled in a small heap, shivering and moaning in fright.

“Make it go away, Jesus,” Carla whimpered. “Make it leave me alone.”

Things happened pretty smartly after that. Some other cops I didn’t know showed up and everybody asked a lot of questions. Lug-nut stayed glued to my side, which I liked a lot.

Carla insisted that she’d been attacked by a bear and had shot at it in self-defence. But there was no sign of any bear.

“I didn’t see a bear,” Morrison said to a superior who wasn’t Becker. Where was he, anyway? “I saw Carla Schreier pointing a gun at Polly, and I drew my own weapon, but I didn’t have time to use it. Schreier screamed, the gun went off, and then they both fell to the ground. I thought she’d got you, Polly.”

“If there had been a bear, Lug-nut would be chasing it right now,” I said.

“There was a bear, I tell you,” Carla insisted. She was flanked by two police officers, and the shotgun had been whisked away. “It came out of the bush straight for me, roaring. That’s why I fired. Look, it scratched me.” She offered her sleeve for inspection. The sleeve was perfectly okay, the skin unharmed. She stared at it in astonishment and then went apeshit.

I made sure the cops had the crucifix in hand, although it didn’t really matter. Carla was incriminating herself all over the place and praying for me to be struck by lightning. She called me a witch a dozen times, and they took her away, shrieking and struggling.

Morrison drove me to the Laingford cop-shop to make a statement. Becker was there waiting for me in a drab little interview room, tapping a pencil and looking like he hadn’t slept in a week. We sat opposite one another, a battered wooden table between us. Someone had carved their initials into the surface—“D.W. was here”—and I wondered fleetingly what D.W. had used to make the marks. They’d searched me for weapons. Hadn’t they searched D.W.?

“I have to go fill out a report,” Morrison said. “You want a coffee or anything, Polly?” I shook my head and he left us.

Becker’s face was tight and he was all business. He banged out question after question concerning the past hour or so, and I answered as truthfully as I could, trying not to feel aggrieved. I didn’t think I was going to get an apology from him. After all, he had just been doing his job. The only thing he did wrong was to get involved with a suspect—me.

When we got to the part about Carla and the gun, I got a tad emotional. I wanted to tell him how frightened I had been, to explain that looking into the face of Death had been monstrous and horrible, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that anything I said would be chalked up to my own drug-dependent flakiness.

“Now, you said that Carla told you why she killed Mrs. Travers? Tell me about it,” he said, pencil at the ready.

“Won’t that be hearsay, Detective?”

“She’ll tell us something, I expect, but from what Morrison has said, she’s gone off the deep end, so your testimony will be important.”

“Will it be admissible?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m a pot-head whose friend was murdered. How can you be sure I’m telling the truth?”

His face softened a little and he reached across the awful table and touched my hand. I grabbed it and held on.

“Polly, you blush like a mad thing whenever you lie. Top to toe. You know that,” he said.

“So you do remember. I wondered if you’d just wiped it out of your mind.”

“I won’t ever be able to do that,” he said and extricated his hand, massaging it as I had done when he took he cuffs off me ages ago. “I’m still kicking myself for it. It was a mistake. We shouldn’t have done it.”

“‘Shoulds’ really piss me off,” I said. “Somebody says ‘should’ and I immediately avoid doing whatever it is. Somebody says ‘don’t’ and it makes me want to do it more. Tell me, Mark Becker. You had a good time, didn’t you? Before, you know, I made my oh-so-tragic mistake?”

“Yeah. I did. But please don’t want more, Polly Deacon. We’re incompatible. I’ll see you around and I don’t want to think every time I do, that I made a dumb move and I ‘should’ re-think it. I’m too damn busy. You need some sensitive artist-hippie-guy who doesn’t care what you do to yourself, and who has the time to double-check every move he makes. That’s not me. Now can you tell me what Mrs. Schreier said, please?”

I got my face under control, whipped my mind back to Carla and the forest and told him.

“Could you tell me why you killed my best friend?” I’d said to her. Carla had taken a moment to gaze up at the tree I was standing under. There was a slight breeze blowing, making that whooshing sound pine trees make when they’re dancing with the wind. I had thought it was one of that last sounds I’d hear, ever.

“Well, that was just a little mistake of mine, actually,” Carla said. “I didn’t realize it until you told me just now that you’d given my cross to her. Where did you find it?”

I had told her briefly about Poe.

“What a pity, “ Carla said. “Maybe she didn’t have to die at all. You see, after John’s death, I felt badly for her and went over to see if there was anything I could do and to tell her about my baby—-you know, share some womanly conversation. When I got there she was acting strange and she was wearing my cross. The last time I’d seen it was the night John died. I was wearing it when Eddie and Francine came home, telling me that Eddie had hit John. I reached for it and held it and prayed, oh, I prayed that John was dead. Then, after I’d put them to bed with a nice hot drink, I went over to see for myself.

“I still had it on when I called Freddy to come help, because he smiled at it—he gave it to me, you know. It must have fallen off when we were moving the body. That’s why Samson put it in Francine’s coffin. He told me that part of our lives was behind us now.”

“So you killed Francy because she was wearing your crucifix?”

“Of course. She had found it, don’t you see? She knew it was mine. I’d worn it for years, when she lived with us. It was a part of me. Oh, I know it went against Pastor Garnet’s ideas, but I found it comforting. I figured she’d found it in her house and I’ve only been there once, when I went to execute John. I’ve worn it for sixteen years. She wore it to mock me.”

“She didn’t, Carla. She just said it looked familiar, that’s all.”

“Well, how was I to know that? She looked at me. She knew. So I made her a nice hot drink there in her kitchen to help her sleep.”

“Then you wrote the note and strung her up like a bag of potatoes?”

“Oh, she was much heavier than a bag of potatoes. But we farm-women are strong, you know?”

“I know.”

That was when Carla had told me to relax and not move around, then she’d lifted John Travers’s shotgun to her eye and taken careful aim. That was when I had been saved by a bear that didn’t really exist. I tried to explain that part to Becker, but he didn’t seem too convinced.

“I’m glad you’re okay, Polly,” he said, putting away his notebook. “You’ll probably have to testify.”

“Will it come out that we slept together?” I said.

“I doubt it. It was incidental.”

“Great. Incidental. Great.”

He came out from behind the table. “Dr. McCoy,” he said, really close to my face. “That goat-poison? There’s an antidote. It’s called work. Law. Stuff like that.” I kissed him, right on the mouth, despite the likelihood of cameras in the interview room and guys checking us out behind the mirror next door. Becker did not struggle, much anyway. Then he touched my face with a sad hand and led me out of the room.

Morrison took me back to George’s place. George made coffee and plopped his bottle of Glen-sneeze on the table beside our mugs. Morrison sighed deeply and reached for it before I could, but he poured a hefty slug into mine first.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” Morrison said. “It was a close call, Polly Deacon. We could have lost you if it hadn’t been for that bear.”

“But there was no damned bear.”

“Well, there might have been. A second before we got there.”

“And Lug-nut didn’t notice? You got there before she fired at me, right? But she said it attacked her.”

“The bear must have been in her mind,” George said. “I‘v got a friend at the Rama reserve who would say that was powerful medicine.” I had a flash of the Vision-Quest workshop and Dream-Catcher. Good medicine, good medicine. Maybe my hamster had grown up, finally. I would never know for sure.

“Anyway, you did get there in time, Earlie. That was a good thing,” George said.

“Yup.” Morrison explained that it was Eddie who put the pieces together. “Poor kid was keeping a lot of secrets,” he said. “He knew his mother was carrying on with Travers. Knew it right from the beginning because he walked in on them in the Schreier’s barn. Knew she was pregnant, too. Heard her throwing up in the morning, he said. He’s had a hard time.”

“He didn’t have anything to do with John or Francy’s deaths, though, did he?” I asked.

“Not really, aside from covering up. He says you caught him in the Travers’ house after the police tape was up. How come you never told us?”

“I thought he was looking for a book Francy had lent him, one his mother had made him return. He confirmed it himself, later. I didn’t really think he was up to anything bad in there.”

“His mother sent him over to look for the crucifix,” Morrison said. “She told him that Francy had stolen it. He didn’t believe her, but I guess he realized it was important, somehow.”

“Was he carrying on with Francy, like Carla said? I hoped not, but I did wonder.”

“Not according to him, no. He just liked her, that’s all. He said that Samson had forbidden him to go over there, but he did anyway. His mother didn’t seem to mind. Probably gave her a chance to see Travers.”

“Was it Samson who gave him the black eye?”

“Nope. That was Freddy. Seems Eddie always suspected that Samson wasn’t his real father. When Carla let slip that the crucifix had sentimental value on account of the fact that his father had given it to her, he figured it out. Samson Schreier didn’t hold with that sort of thing, he knew that. So the kid sniffed around for a likely father and came up with Freddy.”

“Why would Freddy hit him?”

“The kid went over to the dump for the big father/son confrontation. Didn’t go too good, it seems.”

“Ah.”

Eddie had told the cops about the squirrel note, which his mother had pasted together one night when she thought that he was asleep. The police had grilled him for a while, and then decided that they needed to talk to the Schreiers senior.

“Just before we left we got a call from the Pastor at the Chapel,” Morrison said. “He told us that you had grabbed the crucifix and made a run for it. He said he’d called the Schreiers, figuring you’d gone over there, asking for you, and he let the story out. Carla Schreier’s reaction was a bit wild, he said, and he got worried.”

“Nice of him,” I said, faintly.

“That was when I high-tailed it over to your cabin. When Lug-nut saw me, he barked once, then ran off along the bush road. Kept looking back to make sure I was following.”

Lug-nut the wonder dog. I was bursting with pride. I patted Luggy’s head and he slobbered all over my hand.

“I called Carla Schreier, too,” George said.

“I know. She told me,” I said.

“After the telephone call I realized that you would never miss one of Rico’s parties, particularly if Ruth was there with her guitar. So I set out to bring you back and encountered a large number of screaming police cars headed for the Schreier’s farm. I knew that if there was trouble, you would be there.”

“Thanks, George.”

It was nine o’clock. I suddenly thought of Ruth Glass singing My Life, My Death in that haunting, healing voice of hers.

“Do you think they’re still at it?” I said. Then the phone rang. It was Rico, wondering where the hell we were. We looked at each other after George hung up.

“Earlie,” he said, “you off duty yet?”

He was.