Liar: An Irene Kelly Mystery Part 17

I returned to thinking about what an awful day he'd had, kept trying to think of comforting things to say, but none seemed adequate.

When the hara.s.sed pharmacy clerk finally called Travis's name, we walked up to the counter together. It was then, as we were standing at the counter, that-with his help-the memory came back to me.

I was standing to his left. The weary clerk shoved two plastic bottles of pills and a tube of ointment toward us.

"Which of the pills are for the infection?" Travis asked. She tapped the top of one of the bottles, then started to ring up the charges.

"Can I take that on an empty stomach?" he asked.

"Directions are right on the label," she said.

"Do I need to eat something before I take it?" he asked again.

She sighed with long-suffering, picked up the bottle and glanced at it. "Yes. Take it with meals." She rapped it down on the counter as if it were a gavel.

She had just finished entering a second set of numbers on the cash register when he said, "If I take the pain medication, will it make me drowsy?"

"Read the label!" she snapped.

"Can I operate machinery?" he persisted.

Wondering what was wrong with him, I picked up the bottle and said, "No, Travis. You shouldn't take these and drive."

"How many times a day do I take them?"

"As needed for pain, but not more than two every twelve hours."

I set the bottle down. He reached over with his left hand, and squeezed mine-quickly, quietly and as if in grat.i.tude. Nothing flirtatious about it.

I looked into his face. Suddenly remembered his father asking similar questions twenty-some years before. Remembered the clerk growing more and more angry with Arthur's persistent refusal to read the label. But why? Why hadn't he just picked up the bottle and read it himself?

Something had happened just before Arthur squeezed my mother's hand. She had picked up the bottles and read the labels aloud.

Comprehension finally dawned.

"He couldn't read," I said softly. Travis nodded and smiled a little.

Mistaking my meaning, the woman behind the counter first looked shocked, then turned red. "I'm so sorry, sir," she said quietly. "I didn't mean to embarra.s.s you."

"Nor I you," Travis said.

He took the first pain pill at a water fountain before we left the building. I held my questions until we were in the car.

"Your father-" I began.

"As you guessed."

"Arthur was illiterate?" I said, still not believing it. "Yes," he said.

"But he had his own business!"

"Yes. Landscaping-that was how he began, anyway. He had a wonderful sense of color and placement, loved making things grow, loved the outdoors. Even when he no longer earned most of his money that way, few things made him happier."

"But not being able to read! I just can't imagine how he managed to get by!"

"It wasn't easy," he said, closing his eyes, leaning his head back.

"I'm sorry, you probably aren't up to talking about this right now."

"To be honest, no, I'm not." He yawned. "But I'll talk more about it with you tomorrow-if you want to." He yawned again. "You've got a lot to think about now, anyway," he said drowsily.

I started the car, pulled out of the parking lot.

"Did my mother know?" I asked, unable to let this one question keep overnight.

He opened his eyes, looked over at me, then watched the road for a little while before he closed them again. I thought he wasn't going to answer. But then he said, "According to my father, yes, she did-but only after that day in the pharmacy." He smiled sleepily. "He always spoke highly of your mother. She kept his secret."

"But he could have explained to my father-"

He looked over at me again. "He was ashamed that he couldn't read. Can't you imagine what that was like for him? My dad knew that Patrick would blame him, not your mother, for that little squeeze of her hand. That's exactly what happened-your father a.s.sumed he made a pa.s.s at your mother. He worried at first that she would tell Patrick the truth, and his secret would be exposed to a man who already disliked him. But your mother must have seen how painful that would have been to him, because she let my father decide whether Patrick would know or not know." He smothered another yawn, closed his eyes again. "She never told Patrick. Never told anyone. My father admired her for that." I thought he had fallen asleep, but then he murmured, "I wish I had known her."

As I drove home I thought about Arthur Spanning-my uncle, not my uncle, perhaps my uncle again. A man who preferred having my father think of him as an unprincipled sleazeball rather than as someone who was unable to read. Did he have a learning disability-something like dyslexia? Or had he simply never learned to read? I remembered the "six years" of education on the death certificate.

I thought of my mother, keeping secrets from the rest of us, letting us think Arthur was a womanizer, letting the rift grow between our family and her sister's husband.

But he was a womanizer, I reminded myself. A bigamist. His illiteracy had nothing to do with that. Travis was probably right; it was impossible to imagine his parents were remarried-or whatever it would be called in this case. Why would Briana ever take him back? Because she pitied a dying man? Because of Travis?

I looked over at my sleeping cousin, his bandaged hand lying palm up in his lap.

That unexpectedly strong sense of protectiveness I had been feeling toward him all day resurfaced. The idea that someone had tried to harm him while he was staying at my home made me furious. I decided that if Rachel were awake when I got back to the house, I wanted to have a talk with her about the DeMonts.

Then again, maybe it wasn't a smart idea to bring him home. Whoever had tried to kill him knew exactly where he was staying.

How? I wondered. How did anyone find out?

No one other than a librarian in Mission Viejo knew that Travis was the storyteller, and she knew very little of his background. And even if she had revealed to the world that Travis was Cosmo the Storyteller, she didn't know where I lived. For that matter, she couldn't have been certain we were going up to the Valley Plaza Branch Library; for all she knew, I would just make a phone call to that library. Certainly no one knew he'd be coming back with us. Rachel and I hadn't known it ourselves.

I thought briefly of the car that had tailed us on the freeway. But not only had Rachel lost the tail, we weren't in the same vehicle when we headed home. Where had the tail started?

There was a Las Piernas PD patrol car sitting outside our house when I pulled into the driveway. Jack and Rachel were sitting on the front porch, talking.

"They're here to keep an eye on things," Rachel said, indicating the patrol car.

"I thought you two would be gone by now," I said. "I think I'll stick around," Rachel said. "If you don't mind. At least for tonight."

"Not at all," I said. "I'll put Travis on the foldout couch."

"Forget it!" she said. "He's been hurt. Give him the guest-room bed. I'll be fine on the couch."

"He could stay at my place," Jack offered.

But we both turned that idea down-we wanted to be able to keep an eye on him.

"I wonder if he realizes he's got a couple of mother hens looking out after him," Jack said.

"And what are you still doing here?" I asked.

He laughed. "Making sure the guy Rachel hosed down doesn't come back. Not sure those two cops in the patrol car out there would be enough to stop him from killing her."

Before he went home, Jack helped me rouse a very woozy Travis, and together we settled him into the guest room.

"Frank called," Rachel said as soon as Jack was gone. "He'll call back later. He's not too happy about what's going on."

"You told him?" I asked.

"You'd rather he just didn't find you at home at two in the morning?" I shrugged. "I guess not. Listen, if he calls again, tell him I'll be back in about an hour."

"Back? It's almost three in the morning. Where are you going?"

"Since I don't think I'll be able to sleep, I'm going to interrupt the beauty rest of the one person who might have led the bomber to my home."

"Oh?"

"A society columnist for the Express"

"I thought you said she didn't know your address."

"She doesn't, but to keep a man happy, she might have made the effort to find out."

Rachel laughed. "Be careful, she may be more dangerous than you think. You know where she lives?"

I nodded. "She throws an annual Christmas party at her place. I haven't been to one in a couple years, but I went to enough of them in my single days to remember how to find her house."

"Bene" she said. "And don't worry, I'll keep an eye on your cousin."

16.

Margot Martin didn't live far from me, at least not in miles. But then again, back when people lived in castles, the average scullery maid never lived far from the queen. Rivo Alto Island is a world away from my neighborhood.

The streets of Rivo Alto crisscross over the curving ca.n.a.l for which the island was named. Both the man-made island and its ca.n.a.l were the brainchild of a turn-of-the-century developer who looked at a mudflat and saw money. He wasn't wrong.

Margot's manse was one of the island's more modern ones; someone undoubtedly tore down an older house to build it-not an uncommon practice there. As a result, you'd be hard-pressed to find another area as small as Rivo Alto crowded with so many varieties of architectural style.

The houses are closer together than those in my neighborhood, but larger, and those situated along the ca.n.a.l, as Margot's is, each have private docks. The boats have plenty of s.p.a.ce, but it's tougher to get around on Rivo Alto in a car-I ended up double-parking in the narrow lane in back of Margot's place. At three in the morning, I figured I'd be fine until the paperboy tried to squeeze by.

On the way over, I'd thought about everything I knew about Margot Martin. It wasn't all that much, even though we had worked on the same paper for a number of years.

I knew that Margot had become a widow about ten years ago, and that the late Mr. Martin left her a bundle. She was his second wife; he was a widower when they met. She spent her thirties as a corporate wife, serving as Martin's hostess at numerous business gatherings, keeping the peace among the other wives at company golf tournaments.

After several decades of jet lag, intense pressure, rich food and three-martini lunches began to take a toll on Martin, Margot tried to help her husband cope with an attempt at a healthy lifestyle-but all the granola and bran m.u.f.fins in the world couldn't undo the damage. One evening Martin-having slipped out of the house while Margot was at a Junior League meeting-keeled over in the yacht club bar, breaking, as he fell, a bottle of single-malt Scotch that was nearly as old as he was, ensuring that his pa.s.sing was accompanied by genuine grief.

Before she became a corporate wife, Margot had briefly held a part-time job on a small regional magazine. When our previous society editor retired, she told our editor that Margot was "an experienced journalist" and asked that Margot take her place. I'm sure one look around the newsroom convinced him that no one else had the wardrobe to do the job.

Being a society writer is not an easy job; Margot often attends five events a week, sometimes two a night, usually dressed to the nines. The circles she moves in are relatively small and all are closely interrelated; no little amount of diplomacy is required when dealing-week after week-with Mrs. X who is bitter about not having that photograph of her in her newest gown in the paper, or Mr. Y who is angry that his daughter wasn't in the debutante ball photo, or Mr. & Mrs. Z who weren't mentioned in the article on the a.s.sistance League fund-raiser. One of the curses of newspaper work is that everyone's an editor-or thinks he should be. In her case, it's compounded by constantly dealing with people who are sure of nothing so much as their own importance.

But whatever sympathy or understanding I might usually be able to muster for Margot was gone that night. It had been a h.e.l.lish day, and I was fairly sure she must have led the bomber to my home.

Her house was dark. As I came up the walk to the front door, Margot's little Yorkies started yapping.

I smiled to myself. Things were looking up.

I knocked on the door. No answer, but I could hear the snickety-snick of Yorkie toenails scrambling across the marble entryway. The barking got louder, and then there was the telltale thump of a full eight pounds of ferocious protection launching itself against the door. Judging by the sounds, one of them was trying to shoulder it open, making a miniature leaping canine battering ram of himself, while the other was trying to scratch his way through the wood with forelegs that were only slightly slower than a circular saw.

"Nice doggies!" I said.

The barking became frenzied.

A light came on at the house next door. Still nothing at Margot's place. I rang the bell. The dogs went ape wire.

Above the doggie din, I heard Margot's phone ring. Apparently she heard it, too. Soon lights came on at her house, then went off at the neighbor's. "Hush," I heard her call, to absolutely no purpose.

The porch light came on. I already knew she had a video camera set up at the front door, so I looked toward the camera and said, "Open up, Margot, we need to talk. Now."

"Irene?" Barking in the background.

"Yep."

"Quiet!" I heard her snap at the dogs. They lowered their protests to growling. "Just a moment."

I heard her lead them away, probably shutting them up in the downstairs bedroom. She came back, apparently a little more awake and ready to do battle. Her voice was less sleepy now.

"Irene, what's gotten into you?" she said reprovingly. "This is no hour to be calling on anyone."

"Open up, Margot."

"Leave me alone. Go on, don't make me call the police on you."

"Please do call them, Margot. I'd like for them to know how the person who planted a bomb in front of my house learned where I live."

The front door flew open. "A bomb!"