Wendy Hornsby - The Color of Light

Max walked me inside through the front door, giving the Dumpster a wide berth. In the kitchen, he reheated the leftover tomato bisque that Roy had made two days earlier. I retched when I saw the color of the soup he set in front of me. I pushed the bowl away, folded my arms on the table and rested my head on them. I kept seeing the seeping red canyon cleaved between Larry’s staring, pale gray eyes.

Max knelt beside my chair and put a hand on my back.

I turned my face enough to see him. “Did I do this, Max? Did I set something in motion?”

“That’s two questions,” he said. “Different answers. First question: You give yourself too much credit, Maggie. What happened to that poor guy isn’t your doing. Second question: Maybe you did start something.”

I fell into his arms and wept. He tolerated the snuffling only so long before he reached for the tissue box on the counter and handed it to me. I sat back, blew my nose and took a few deep breaths.

“You know what Mike would say, don’t you?” he said.

“Mike said a lot of things.” I pulled out a fresh wad of tissues and blew some more.

“Your Mike would say, you make your bed, you lie in it,” he said. “Larry Nordquist is lying in the bed he made for himself.”

“That’s a bit harsh,” I said. “Whatever he did, the poor bastard didn’t deserve what he got.”

“Maybe not.” He struggled to his feet and cleared the soup off the table. “Is there anything you need to tell me about this Nordquist fellow before the police start asking you questions?”

I shrugged. “Like what?”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Saturday night after we got home from the Bartolini party,” I said. “It was late, after ten anyway. I went out to the garage to look for Dad’s gun.”

“Did you find it?”

“Jean-Paul did,” I said. “Dad built a false bottom into one of his desk drawers and hid it there.”

“Mm-hmm.” He nodded. “That’s something Al would do.”

A sudden thought seemed to hit him with a jolt. “You didn’t happen to fire the gun?”

“No, no. I never touched it. Don’t worry, Larry left here, intact, under his own steam,” I said. “He got in on his own, too. He knew where Dad kept a garage key hidden and he just walked right in.”

“What did he want?”

“He’s in a twelve-step program, though I think he’s fallen off the wagon. He’s been going around making amends with people for any wrongs he thinks he did them. But I think he wanted me to say that I had done him wrong, too,” I said. “When we were kids, we had a fight because he was trash-talking Mrs. B. And I won. He wanted me to know that what he said was true.”

“Trash-talking Tina Bartolini?” He tossed away that notion as ridiculous. “What negative thing could he possibly say about Tina?”

“It turns out Larry was a bit of a Peeping Tom,” I said. “He told me he saw her with a lover.”

That gave him pause. He thought over the possibility, shaking his head, trying to reject it. Finally, he said, “Never. Not her.”

I pointed at my chest. “Remember how I got here?” I said. “My dad, the salt of the earth, pillar of the community…”

“Point taken.” But still skeptical, he asked, “Did Larry tell you who this supposed lover was?”

“He wouldn’t say. But he did confess that he showed Isabelle where to find the key to the garage.”

That bit of information cleared up a mystery for him: how Isabelle had gotten into the house at night to creep into my room. He said, “The little prick.”

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” I admonished.

“Honey, I’m a lawyer. If I never spoke ill of the dead I wouldn’t do much business,” he said. “Where’s the gun now?”

I pointed up. “Loaded, in a drawer next to my bed.”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

There was a knock on the connecting door to the dining room. Before we had a chance to answer, Kevin pushed through. “How’s everyone in here doing?”

“We’re still mostly vertical,” I said.

“Ready to answer some questions?”

Max sat down beside me and took my hand. I knew that if Kevin asked me anything that Max, my attorney, thought I shouldn’t answer, he would squeeze that hand as a signal to stay quiet.

Before he sat down, Kevin took a glass from the cupboard, filled it from the tap and drained it in a few gulps. He refilled the glass before he sat down across the table from us. “It’s that smell, you know. You just can’t get rid of it. Have any lemons?”

“Look in the fridge,” I said.

“What’s going on out there now?” Max asked as Kevin opened the refrigerator and began his search.

“Our crime scene investigator has taken over. The department is working crowd control; it’s getting to be quite a circus.” He found a lemon in the crisper, took it to the sink and cut it in half. “Most of the neighborhood is out there, trying to get a look. Wouldn’t be surprised if someone started selling ice cream and balloons. I saw a media satellite truck down the street. I advise you to stay put until they’re all gone.”

I asked, “Shouldn’t you be out there, Detective, detecting?”

“Not much we can do until the scientific team finishes.” Kevin squeezed one half of the lemon into a glass of water and rubbed the other half under his nose. He sat down opposite us, with the glass in front of him, and took out a notebook and a pen. “But we can get some of the bread-and-butter questions out of the way while we’re waiting.”

He clicked his pen and looked at me. “You ready?”

“Fire away.”

In answer to his questions, I told him about Larry’s visits on both Friday and Saturday nights. I hesitated before telling him what Larry said about Mrs. B, but somehow, whether true or not, that nugget seemed important, and so I did.

Kevin clicked his pen a couple of times, apparently concentrating on something he had written before he looked up at me.

“Why didn’t you tell me that yesterday?” he said. “We spent all that time up at Indian Rock, and you never mentioned Larry or what he said.”

“Yesterday it was gossip,” I said. “Today it could be something else.”

Like a good detective, he put some effort into keeping his expression neutral. He reacted with some interest, however, when I told him about finding George Loper on my front porch Friday night, lying in wait for Larry, who was hiding behind the hydrangea. I told him that Larry had been coming into the yard all summer to look after Mom’s garden. Both Mr. Sato and George Loper had shooed him away; Mr. Sato had called the police, as Kevin well knew because I’d asked him to look into it.

Thinking about Loper’s baseball bat and the gash I saw on Larry’s forehead, I asked, “What was the cause of death?”

“Too early to say.” He changed the subject to time frames: when did I last see Larry, when had we last deposited refuse into the Dumpster? What had we last deposited into the Dumpster? The Dumpster was out front and accessible to anyone; had I seen anyone other than people in my household use it? The answers were: Larry was last seen around eleven o’clock Saturday; the big clean-up happened Saturday, but on Sunday we were still tossing out bags and boxes of junk gathered the day before. I hadn’t seen anyone other than our household use the Dumpster, but I wasn’t keeping watch over it. The last deposit I knew about was Hong’s fast food wrappers a little over an hour ago.

“The Dumpster started smelling bad on Sunday night,” I said. “George Loper made sure we noticed.”

“What happens now?” Max asked.

Kevin shrugged. “Nothing happens until the medical examiner clears the scene. My chief may call in a special homicide squad from the county sheriff to advise our department, but that decision will depend on what the M.E. has to say.”