J. Jance - Improbable cause

“What seems to be the matter with your sister?” I asked.

Rachel stopped in the doorway and looked at me before she answered. Reticence and hesitation weren’t her style.

“She broke her hip,” she said finally, decisively, then turned on her heel and disappeared through the dining room into the kitchen. Moments later we heard the banging of pots and pans as Rachel bustled about making lunch.

Buddy, confined to a large cage in the corner of the dining room, had been quiet when we first entered the house. Now, with Rachel out of the room, he piped up again. “What’s your name?” he asked, not once but several times.

We ignored him. There’s something undignified about being trapped into a conversation with a parrot.

The living room was light and airy, but filled with the motley collection of cheap knickknacks and trinkets-“tack” my mother would have called it-that had been gathered over two separate lifetimes and then somehow blended together.

In the corner next to the front door sat a. papier-mache elephant’s foot jammed full of umbrellas. Above it, an antique wood and brass hat rack held two yellow rain slickers with matching hats, two bright red motorcycle helmets, and two identical khaki-colored pith helmets. The two sets of helmets puzzled me. Neither Daisy nor Rachel looked much like the motorcycle or jungle safari type.

I wandered over to the fireplace to examine the marble mantel. On it sat a miniature zoo, complete with tiny, inch-to inch-and-a-half-tall animals, cheaply but recognizably made. There must have been a hundred of them in all. For a fastidious housekeeper, it would have created a dusting problem of mammoth proportions. From the layer of dust visible on each of the animals, however, fastidious housekeeping didn’t seem to be part of Rachel and Daisy’s program.

Rachel came into the dining room carrying a stack of dishes, stopped by the table, and looked over at me. “Those belong to Daisy,” she announced when she saw I was examining the animals. “The salt and pepper shakers are mine,” she added.

The built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace were loaded with equally dusty salt and pepper shakers of all sizes and descriptions, many of them imprinted with gaudy letters that proclaimed the item’s geographic origin. Matching headstones came from Tombstone, Arizona. A set of bears were emblazoned with Yellowstone National Park. A smiling senor and senorita had Tijuana printed on their shoes.

“Where are you from?” Rachel asked, walking up to stand beside me.

“I’ve lived in Seattle all my life,” I answered.

She bent down, reached unerringly to the back of the bottom shelf, and retrieved two tiny replicas of the Space Needle. “I got these from the World’s Fair in 1962,” she told me proudly, rubbing off a dusty film with the hem of her apron. “I keep them all loaded. That way I can always put something appropriate on the table whenever we have company. It’s less expensive than ordering flowers.”

She took the two mini-Space Needles to the dining room and placed them in the middle of the table with a genuine flourish.

“What’s your name?” Buddy asked her.

“You be quiet or I’ll cover you up,” she warned. Buddy shut up and ducked his head under a wing.

Daisy came down the steps just then. She was wearing a pair of light khaki trousers and a matching khaki shirt with a giraffe symbol sewn above the breast pocket and a series of silver and gold pins attached to the top of the pocket itself. On her feet were a pair of rubber-soled yellow and gray duck-hunting shoes straight out of an L. L. Bean catalog.

She spoke to Rachel, who was busily setting the table. “It’ll still be light by the time I get home. We can unpack the trailer then.”

Walking over to the hat rack, she peered critically into a mirror while she settled one of the two khaki pith helmets on her head. I took back everything I’d thought about her not being the safari type. She looked the part to a T.

“You’re not planning to leave without eating lunch, are you, Daze?” Rachel asked. “It’s almost ready.”

I think Daisy would have left without lunch if she could have gotten away with it. She sighed, put the helmet back on the rack, and led us to the dining room table.

I would have left, too, if I’d only known what was coming. The table was set with what had once been state-of-the-art Melmac, now scratched and worn with too many years of hard use. The orange wild flowers that bordered the edge of the plates had long since faded to a shadow of their former glory.

Daisy directed Al and me to chairs while Rachel began serving soup into mercifully shallow plastic soup dishes. The moment she ladled some into my dish, I knew I was in deep trouble. It was as though my mother had returned from the grave to haunt me.

It was soup all right, tomato soup, but not the thick, dark-colored, good kind. This was a thin, faded pink, made with milk and tomato juice. Small darker pink sunrises of curdling tomato floated here and there on the pale, milky surface.

The soup was exactly the kind my mother used to make when I was a child. I had been able to choke it down only if I could fill the bowl so full of crushed soda crackers that I couldn’t see the color of the soup anymore- or the curdles. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a soda cracker in sight, only a platter of what later turned out to be tofu sandwiches that proved to be tougher to choke down than the soup.

“We’re both vegetarians,” Rachel explained lightly as she passed me the platter of sandwiches. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about Dotty.”

Dotty evidently wasn’t.

Al managed to down the meal with every evidence of gusto. Daisy finished her soup, gulped half a sandwich, and left the table, taking both a pith helmet and a motorcycle helmet with her as she rushed out the door.

Rachel glanced at her watch. “She’s supposed to be there by two, but she’s always early. That’s the way she is.”

When Rachel disappeared into the kitchen to serve the coffee, I stuffed the remainder of my tofu sandwich in my jacket pocket. Al caught me in the act and gave me a quick wink just as our hostess returned.

“What’s so funny?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” Big Al said. “I got something in my eye.” Telling fibs comes naturally to Detective Allen Lindstrom.

During lunch I had deliberately delayed our questioning in hopes of dealing with Rachel alone. I had a hunch she’d be far more communicative once Daisy was out of the way. Now, over strong coffee and stale cookies, I opened the discussion.

“You don’t seem to be very curious about what happened to your nephew.”

“Curious?” she demanded, with bright sparks lighting up her pale blue eyes. “Why should I be curious about him? Whatever happened to him, it was probably better than he deserved.”

So much for auntlike decorum and sorrow.

“Oh, I’m sure Dotty will be wild with grief,” she continued. “She always doted on him so, even though he never deserved it, not for a minute. He was just like his father, you know.“

“How’s that?”

Rachel looked at me carefully, appraisingly. “Don’t you go trying to trick me into talking to you,” she cautioned. “Our mama always told us that the Beasons don’t wash their dirty laundry in public. I married into the Millers, but I’m still a Beason at heart.”

“Tell me about your sister,” I said.

“Which one, Dorothy or Daisy?”

“Dorothy, the one who’s in the hospital. Which hospital is she in?”

“I told you, she’s in no condition to talk to you. If I tell you where she is, you’ll go straight there and bother her with all this. It’ll be better if she doesn’t find out about it until tomorrow when she’s home here with us.”