Dead Man's Bones Read online

  “It wasn’t noticeable at all,” I said truthfully. “Anyway, you were larger and brighter than life. Nobody could possibly spot a little shiner.”

  Colin laughed and put his arm around her shoulders. “She was wonderful, wasn’t she?” he said, and looked down at her fondly. “She was the star, no doubt about it.”

  “Oh, please,” Ruby said. She lowered her voice under the party chatter. “Max will hear you, Colin. I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  “Hurt his feelings?” Colin asked, opening his dark eyes wide. “Why? Max was super. It’s no fun to play a little tin god, especially when your leading lady has all the great lines.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Ruby. She gave me back a smirky little smile, and I knew that Colin was playing straight man. “Hey,” I said, sotto voce, “Cassandra wants to talk to us. About some sort of proposal she has in mind. Monday at four-thirty. Okay?”

  “Fantastic,” Ruby said. “I’m hoping that—” Whatever she was about to say was drowned out by a burst of raucous laughter from the group behind us.

  Sheila came up to us. “Where’s Duane Redmond?” she asked over the hubbub. “Didn’t he come tonight?” She paused. “Or maybe he didn’t want to watch Max trying to fill his shoes.”

  “So you know about that?” I asked.

  “You’re surprised?” Sheila countered. “The chief of police is supposed to know what’s going on in her own town, isn’t she? Sure, I heard that Miss Obermann fired him.”

  “Chief of police?” Colin asked. He had turned to her when she came up. Was I mistaken to think that he was taken aback by the sight of her? Now, I noticed, he was eyeing her, quite appreciatively, I thought.

  Ruby grinned. “Chief Sheila Dawson, meet Colin Fowler, owner of Good Earth Goods, on the square.”

  “You’re kidding,” Colin said with an almost exaggerated disbelief. Deliberately, he dropped his glance to Sheila’s silk shirt and faux pearls, then back up to her eyes. “You’re a cop? Pardon me all to hell, ma’am, but that’s kinda hard to believe.”

  Ruby, busy with a cracker on her plate, had missed the glance. “Don’t you read the newspapers?” she asked Colin. “Sheila makes the headlines at least twice a month.” She put down her plate, held up an invisible newspaper, and pretended to read. “‘Courageous Chief Collars Parking Meter Thief.’ ‘Awesome Dawson Does it Again.’”

  “Ruby, you’re a scream.” There was a perceptible tension in Sheila’s voice, and her eyes were on Colin. This time, it was her glance that I intercepted. It held surprised recognition and something like a covert signal, not quite a head shake, but clearly a warning. There was something taut and still about both of them, and just for an instant, all the sound and motion in the room seemed to stop, as if somebody had hit a freeze-action switch, to allow the two of them to exchange silent, secret messages that the rest of us couldn’t hear.

  But then it started up again, both motion and sound. Glasses clinked. Somebody laughed. Colin bent to whisper in Ruby’s ear, then took her glass and his own and went in the direction of the bar, stopping to exchange a complimentary word with Max Baumeister.

  As Colin moved away through the crowd, my eyes went back to Sheila. I was suddenly, apprehensively, convinced that she and Colin knew one another. And that neither one of them was anxious to let Ruby in on the secret.

  But I knew it. Where did that leave me? And eventually, Ruby would have to know it, too. Where would that leave her?

  Jean and Cassandra came up with plates of food. “I think Duane must be sitting this one out,” Jean said to Marian, and I suddenly realized that I wasn’t the only one who might have seen the exchange between Sheila and Colin. “Poor guy. I don’t think he’d ever been fired before. It must really have hurt his feelings—otherwise he’d be here.”

  Cassandra turned to Ruby, her round face animated, her eyes sparkling. “Ruby, you were brilliant! You did it. You saved the play.”

  “It was all of us,” Ruby said earnestly. “Not just me.” She looked troubled. “Jane was not thrilled, though. I saw her marching out while we were still taking our bows.”

  “Miss Obermann must not have seen the whole production ahead of time,” I remarked to Jean. “Otherwise, you’d never have gotten away with it.”

  “She saw it all,” Jean said, chewing appreciatively on a meatball, “but not all at once, just in bits and pieces. And she said she didn’t want to come to dress rehearsal, since it would mean being up late two nights in a row.”

  “Thank God for old ladies’ bedtimes,” Marian said in an aside, popping a stuffed mushroom into her mouth. “Hey, guys, this food is terrific. You can cater my parties any day.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and grinned. “We’ll phone you about a date. We’re definitely looking for work.” I couldn’t help glancing at Sheila. Her head was half-tilted, and she was watching Colin, who was returning from the bar with a glass of wine in each hand. Fierce, undisguised feeling was written on her face. Whatever their relationship had been, it had obviously not been merely a flavor of the month. It had meant something to her.

  Ruby had gone back to the subject. “And when Jane was here, we tried to distract her with trivial mechanical problems, so she’d concern herself more with the renovations to the theater and less with the play.”

  “And we kept asking her opinion about Max’s scenes,” Jean added, “to make sure that he was playing her father exactly the way she wanted him played. I even took notes about what she said, so we’d be sure to get it right.”

  “And to cover your asses,” Colin suggested helpfully, handing Ruby her drink.

  Jean’s grin was mischievous. “I didn’t want her to come back later and accuse us of making her father look like a dodo bird on its way to extinction.”

  “But that’s exactly the quality that Jane caught—quite unconsciously—in her play,” Marian said. “And the only way it could actually be staged, without the risk of boring the audience to death, was to remake the Cynthia character.”

  “Where Cynthia was concerned,” Jean said, “we only had to tweak the actual script a little—it was mostly in the way Ruby played her. Of course it’s hard to say for sure, but she was apparently quite eccentric. Manic-depressive, we’d probably say today. She killed herself, you know. Dove headfirst off the roof of her house. Broke her neck.”

  “Her husband probably drove her to it,” Colin said. Sheila carefully did not look at him. “Or maybe her daughters.”

  “It’s not known for sure that she jumped,” Jean objected. “She didn’t leave a note. And the family insisted that she fell.”

  Ruby took the wineglass from Colin. “Oh, right,” she said, heavily sarcastic. “Cynthia just happened to fall off the roof of her house at three-thirty in the morning. And how do we know she didn’t leave a note? If she did, neither Jane nor her father would voluntarily hand it over to the police.”

  “Well, if you ask me,” I said, “it’s a very good thing that the Obermann sisters can’t take back their theater. If they could—”

  “What was that?” Sheila held up her hand.

  “What was what?” Marian asked.

  “It sounded like a shot,” Colin said. His mouth had gone tight, his eyes alert, his muscles tensed. I remembered the look I had seen the other day, the look of a man watching his back.

  “A car?” Jean hazarded. “A door slam?”

  “Maybe. But—” Sheila shook her head. “Sorry. What were you saying, China?”

  I was watching Colin. His head was turned, as if he were still listening. Listening and assessing his next move.

  “Only that it’s a good thing the Obermann sisters can’t take back their play and their theater,” I repeated. “If they could—”

  There was a commotion in the theater lobby. “Chief!” The uniformed security guard—the one who had been hired to make sure that none of the faux gems were filched—came running down the central aisle. “Chief Dawson,” he yelled. “You’d better get out here. T
here’s been a shooting.”

  Conversations stopped. People turned and blinked and sucked in their breaths. Sheila put her plate on the table and turned, peering down the dark aisle. “Lonnie? Is that you? What’s going on?”

  Lonnie vaulted onto the stage. “I was in the parking lot, getting ready to leave.” He was breathless. “I heard a gunshot, then another one, right close together. And then a woman screaming. It came from the Obermann mansion.”

  Marian pulled in her breath with an audible gasp. Jean let hers out with a dismayed puff. Marian put down her glass, her face suddenly white.

  “Oh, my God,” she breathed. “It’s finally happened! Somebody has murdered that wicked old woman!”

  My thought, exactly.

  Chapter Ten

  Oleander. This tree, being inwardly taken it is deadly and poinsonsome, not only to men, but also to most kinds of beasts.

  John Gerard

  The Herbal, or General History of Plants, 1633

  Sheila was suddenly all business. Taking charge, she ordered Lonnie to call for EMS and a squad car and to keep everybody in the theater. She told Ruby and Jean to make a list of the people who were at the party—as well as the people who should have been there and weren’t. She picked up her bag, pulled out a small flashlight and her gun, and beckoned to me and Colin to follow her to the house.

  Colin? If I needed a confirmation of their acquaintance —or whatever it was—that was it. What did this suggest about Colin’s past? That he had done police work? And where did this leave Ruby? But I couldn’t do anything with this stuff just now. I let it go and followed Sheila.

  It had rained during the performance, and the air was chill and fresh. The fitful wind chased fallen leaves across the damp grass and tossed the thick oleander bushes that lined the flagstone path to the back of the house, where a single bulb, haloed by mist, shone languid yellow, like a blob of liquid amber.

  The enormous house itself seemed to loom over us with an angry and poisonous presence, and I remembered McQuaid’s remark about vampires. The place was mostly dark, except for a dim glow on the second floor and a spill of red-tinted light shining through the shrubbery. It looked as if it came from a pair of French doors standing open at the side of the house, near the front. The only sound was that of a woman’s desperate, keening cry, not loud, but wordless and shrill, like a knife cutting wind. I shivered.

  Sheila and I circled the house in the darkness, hunched over and moving fast, keeping to the shrubbery where we could, hugging the wall where we couldn’t. Colin, without a word, had gone freelance around the house in the other direction, moving as if he knew exactly what he was doing. I certainly didn’t. I kept close behind Sheila; not because I was afraid, exactly, but because she had the flashlight and the gun, and she was the boss. I was just there for . . .

  My arms were breaking out in goose bumps and a distinct uneasiness had settled in my stomach. I had no idea why I was there, except that maybe Sheila wanted company, or she thought I knew the layout of the house and was acquainted with the Obermann sisters, neither of which was exactly true. And I didn’t like being there, either, for that matter. Cops-and-creeps drama is okay in the movies, but I can think of any number of things I’m better and braver at than skulking through rainy darkness in the direction of gunshots and the eerie sound of a woman sobbing, in the menacing shadow of a haunted house.

  So while Sheila was moving forward, intent on capturing whoever had fired those shots, I was nervously watching our flank and our rear, and listening with all my ears. But there wasn’t much to hear, just wind, and faraway thunder, and the sound of our stealthy movements, and that awful, shuddery wailing. Anyway, the guy who had shot that gun was probably long gone, chased off by the sound of Lonnie’s shouts, if not by the woman’s dreadful crying.

  I was wrong. The shooter was still there when Sheila and I finally pushed through the overgrown jungle around the house, reached the open French doors, and peered around them into the room lined with books and lit by a lamp with a red silk beaded shade.

  And it wasn’t Jane Obermann who had been shot. She was the one who had done the shooting, and somebody else was dead.

  THE gun still in her hand, still wearing the blue silk dress she’d worn to the play, Jane Obermann was standing in the center of the room, her dark eyes glittering, her mouth set and hard.

  Miss Florence, also still dressed, was half-sitting, half-lying against the wall beside the open door to the hallway. She was the one who was crying, the powder on her face streaked with tears.

  The victim was sprawled faceup on the Oriental carpet, a battered straw hat on the floor beside him. Under his hand was a wicked-looking wooden-handled butcher knife with a five-inch blade.

  “Hank,” I breathed, and knelt beside him, feeling for a pulse. I didn’t expect one; there were two bullet holes in his chest, a handsbreadth apart. His shirt was blood-soaked and blood had puddled on the red carpet under him.

  Sheila had already identified herself to Jane Obermann and had taken the gun from her unresisting hand. Now she turned to me. “You know this guy?” she asked tautly.

  “His name is Hank Dixon,” I said, thinking of McQuaid and the sisters’ plan to hire him to protect them against Hank. And thinking of what Hank had said to me a few days before, when I’d remarked that I was sorry about his father.

  “No call for you to be sorry, Miz Bayles. Man’s gotta die sometime. Woman, too, for that matter, I reckon. Ever’-body’s gotta die.”

  I’d taken his words as a philosophical musing, a comment on the transient nature of life. Now, as I looked down at Hank’s body on the floor, the remark seemed prescient, prophetic, heavy with another kind of meaning. Hank must have already known what he intended to do tonight.

  “There’s a story behind this, Smart Cookie,” I said in a low voice, wishing that McQuaid were here, instead of in New Orleans. He might have prevented this from happening—although at the moment, I couldn’t quite think how. “I’ll fill you in later.”

  Colin stepped into the room through the open hallway door, taking in the scene with a glance. “Everything under control?” The tone of voice was casual, but the confident authority behind it was not. Colin had been here, done this before. At some point in his past, he had been a cop.

  Jane Obermann had folded her arms across her chest and was eyeing Sheila with unmasked suspicion. “You hardly look like a policeman. Let alone a chief of police.”

  “I will be glad to show you my identification when I get my bag,” Sheila said, putting the gun on the fireplace mantel, out of easy reach. “In the meantime—”

  “If you intend to ask me whether I shot this man,” Jane interrupted, with some asperity, “the answer is yes. He was breaking in. He had threatened us. My sister saw the whole thing. She’ll tell you what happened.”

  Florence Obermann moaned weakly, and Colin bent over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Let me help you get to the sofa,” he said, and began to lift her.

  “Don’t!” Florence gave a scream of pain. “My . . . my hip,” she gasped. Her face was the color of paper. “I . . . I fell just as I came through the door. I think my hip is broken.”

  “I expect she’s right,” Jane said, in a tone of mixed pity and scorn. “She has brittle bones. She’s always breaking something. Last time, it was her wrist and several ribs.” She lowered her voice as if she didn’t want Florence to hear. “She has a bad heart, too.”

  Colin took a pillow and a knitted afghan from the velvet settee. He placed the pillow under Florence’s head and covered her. “We’ve called an ambulance,” he said gently, smoothing her straggly white hair back from her forehead. “It’ll be here in a few moments.”

  Sheila went over and knelt beside her. “I know you’re in pain, Miss Obermann,” she said, “and I’m sorry. But maybe you can tell me what happened here.”

  Florence lay back against the pillow. “She . . . my sister shot him,” she managed. “He was . . . coming through t
he door. He had a . . .” She closed her eyes, and her voice began to fade.

  “A knife,” Jane Obermann said firmly. “Tell them, Florence, so there’s no mistake.”

  “He . . . he had a big knife,” Florence whispered. “In his . . . hand.”

  In the distance, I could hear the wail of sirens. Sheila stood up. “Thank you,” she said. “You just rest now. Everything will be all right.” She turned to Jane. “The gun you used, Miss Obermann. Where did you get it?”

  Jane gestured to a glass curio cabinet, the one McQuaid had described to me. The door was ajar, and one of the glass shelves was empty. The other two shelves displayed guns.

  “It was my father’s gun,” Jane said, raising her voice over the sirens that now sounded very close. “I’m so glad that the case wasn’t locked. When I saw that wretched man coming through the French doors, I opened the cabinet, seized the gun, and shouted at him—to frighten him, of course.” She shuddered. “I had no idea the gun was loaded.”

  Both sirens cut off abruptly, one right after the other, and her next words sounded too loud.

  “I don’t even remember pulling the trigger. I suppose I was under a great deal of stress.”

  Sheila glanced at Colin, who nodded shortly and left the room. “Very well, then,” she said, turning back to Jane. “We’ll be busy here for the next hour or two. The ambulance can take your sister to the hospital. You may go with her if you like. But of course, I must ask you not to leave Pecan Springs until our investigation is concluded.”

  Jane gave a small, hard laugh. “So I’m not under arrest?”

  “No,” Sheila said quietly. “You’re not under arrest. I’d like to take your statement tomorrow morning at the station. I can send a car for you, if you prefer. And of course you’re free to ask your attorney to join us, if that would make you more comfortable.” She paused. “I’ll also want to take a statement from your sister, when the doctor gives us permission.”