No Good Deed Left Undone, page 14
Rebecca said, “What? What do you mean? My father? You’re saying Daddy is dead? How can that be?”
“He was killed in the barn.” Somehow she had completely forgotten how to have a conversation, had lost all knowledge of words that might soften the blow.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!”
Emma listened to Rebecca try to swallow her sobs. She knew her step-daughter was trying to remain calm.
She failed. “I’ll call you back later,” Rebecca said between gasps and hung up.
Emma sat there with the phone in her hand thinking about all the missed opportunities with Rebecca. Then she gathered herself together and called Ann about the funeral arrangements. She spoke to Grant’s idiot partner, Eugene Waters, about being a pall bearer. She was reminded from her few minutes on the phone with Eugene what a complete and utter creep he was. Even his voice made her skin crawl. Of this one thing she was glad: Grant’s death gave her ample excuse to sever all ties with Eugene.
Intermittently, Emma tried calling Kyle. Between these calls, she paced the house, watching what the forensic team was doing. They had already come in and instructed her how to put her fingers on the screen of the portable electronic fingerprinting machine. They had gone through Grant’s office with a fine tooth comb, bagging his computer but leaving most of his paper files. It occurred to her to remind them that he was the victim, not the perpetrator and then she just walked out of the room and left them to it. They didn’t ask if anyone else was in the house and it didn’t occur to her to tell them her son was asleep upstairs on the third floor. It wasn’t any of their business anyway, she told herself when she recalled William’s arrival. She walked down to the paddock, leaned against the black, four-rail fence and watched the horses.
Brought up in the city, Emma was terrified by horses the first time Grant had taken her to watch him ride. He was boarding his horse at a friend’s farm out on Route 340 in Virginia. She was charmed by the long lane lined with trees, the rolling pastures of grass that surrounded the house and barn, the sight of the horses munching grass and cavorting in their enclosure. But up close to them, she wasn’t sure about horses at all. They were huge animals, even if they seemed friendly.
Somehow, under Grant’s instruction, she had come to love them. First he introduced her to grooming the horse, long strokes with the curry comb, almost hypnotic in the repetitive movement, then the brush. She learned how to use her hand to stroke the horse Grant was carefully bonding her to, to navigate around her, to talk to her. When she was comfortable with the horse, Grant taught her to lead the older, gentle mare. She and the horse walked around inside the paddock where, if something spooked the horse and she reared, Emma could jump up on the fence and swing her legs over to the safe side. In a few weeks, she was sitting on the horse while Grant walked the animal on a lead, giving her instructions about her seat.
“Sit up straight, straighter … Toes out, heels down. Legs straight. Relax your hands. Elbows at your side,” he called to her.
The following week, she sat the horse on her own and walked in the paddock, a giant bestride the earth with a new perspective on the world. That was all it took. She fell in love with horses. She craved her riding time the way runners crave their run.
Her favorite horse, Annie’s Way, walked over to Emma at the rail and nuzzled her shoulder. Emma stroked the horse’s face and neck. Touch was some small comfort. She reached in her pocket and pulled out cut carrots and offered them in her palm to the horse. The horse kissed her palm. This is all I have left of Grant. She choked-up, breathless. All the pieces of her life broke apart at that moment, a puzzle she would have to reconstruct. She had no idea where to start or if she could put it back together in any way that made sense.
When the animal control officers returned the runaway horse, Paul, they helped Emma remove the saddle and bridle, put the halter back on the horse and lead him to the pasture.
“He’s a handful,” one of the officers said, laughing.
“Yes, he’s exactly like his owner,” Emma said.
Emma was grateful for their help in handling Paul. Her hands were shaking so much that it was difficult to undo the girth. When she removed the bridle, she noticed the reins had been tied together. A stab of grief went through her and she leaned against the horse. Paul nickered and nudged her with his nose. She would have to tell Paul that Grant was dead. She stroked the horse’s nose. Maybe he already knew.
Tying the reins was one of Grant’s methods for helping him steer the horse one-handed. He must have saddled Paul for their ride this morning. He would have done her horse next. Grant always said he preferred a push button horse, but Paul was anything but push-button. Grant liked the horse because he was ornery. At this moment, she cherished the paradox her husband was.
She went back into the house and tried again to call Kyle, the son who gave Grant so much trouble but who Grant loved nonetheless. Trying Kyle’s cell phone, she left him a text and an email to call her immediately. She called his school and explained to someone in the Dean’s office that his father had died and hung up before the woman on the other end of the line could say anything. Finally, in her desperation to find Kyle, she called Rhonda, who said Ann Roberts had told her about Grant’s death.
Rhonda was her usual whiney self. No matter what happened, it was always about her. Rhonda had no room in her small universe for anyone else. After some prodding, Emma realized that Rhonda didn’t know where her son Kyle was. He hadn’t responded to her calls or texts either.
“He’s probably sleeping off a drunk somewhere,” Rhonda said.
Emma shuddered at Rhonda’s carelessness. Today was not a good day for people to be careless about folks they were supposed to love. She might bite their heads off. She restrained herself with Rhonda simply because she couldn’t bear the conversation to go on another minute.
She realized she hadn’t eaten all day and went into the kitchen to make herself some toast. Instead of eating, she wound up looking out of the kitchen window at the barn. How is it possible I didn’t see the murderer go into the barn or come out? What the hell was I doing this morning that I was so blind? Then she remembered William again. William had arrived just at the moment when she would have been looking out the window at the barn, waiting for Grant to be done with his chores. William was the distraction, and William didn’t know that Grant was dead.
She felt horrified by the fact that she hadn’t awakened him immediately to tell him right after it happened. She had completely forgotten he was there. Who was the careless one now? She walked up the stairs to the third floor and knocked on the bedroom door. She heard a muffled, “Yeah?” from inside and opened the door. Her son was still in bed, head on the pillow, one eye open now to look at her. He’s either exhausted or depressed, or both, she guessed.
“Why don’t you get up now, sweetheart?” Emma said. “Take a shower, put on clean clothes, come down and have something to eat. I have to tell you something.”
“What? Tell me now,” William said, sitting up in the bed and swinging his legs over the side. “You sound on edge.”
Emma sat down on the bed, her hands on her knees. She had no idea how this news would affect her son. Grant had been kind and generous with William, but they weren’t close, far from close, although Grant wasn’t any closer to either of his biological children. She struggled to find the words to tell William what had happened. She had not yet had to say these words face-to-face with anyone, except the police and they didn’t count; that Grant was dead, that he had been murdered; that he was never going to walk into this house again, never ride a horse, never put his arms around her and kiss her neck. The words seemed truer said in person. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to get through saying them.
She took a deep breath, looked at her son, and said, “Grant died this morning, maybe right after you arrived, maybe while we were talking.” She stopped, put both hands on her face covering her eyes, her entire body shaking.
William sucked in his breath. He jumped out of bed, turned around, sat down close to her, put his arm around her and said, “What? No. God, Mom, that can’t be. What do you mean? Did he have a heart attack? Why didn’t you wake me?”
Emma shook her head, no. “Somebody killed him … in the barn … stabbed him.” Emma shook so hard she was unable to continue talking. She lowered her head.
William tightened his hold on her shoulder and waited. He rocked a little. She was aware of him chanting something under his breath. She looked up and saw his eyes were closed. He was grief-struck. Somehow William having a normal response to Grant’s death was a relief. It seemed odd, but his sorrow strengthened her. It was okay to grieve. Her brilliant son had just proved it with his reaction to the news. That realization gave her room to feel the deep sadness that had burrowed into her bones from the moment she found Grant dead. Emma let herself go, sobbing into her hands, then turned and leaned into William’s shoulder, making noises she would later think sounded like a crow cawing in anguish. Her son held her and rocked her until her sobs subsided. She pulled away to get a tissue and blow her nose.
When she had control of herself again, Emma said, “Did you see anything, William, when you got here this morning?”
William shook his head. “I don’t remember anything out of the ordinary, but I was focused on talking to you about leaving school. And I had just driven a long way, so maybe I wasn’t seeing much of anything.”
“Think carefully. You might have seen something and just don’t have it top of mind.”
William got up and walked around the room, he looked out the dormer windows that faced the barn and the woods behind it. “This view always makes me feel as if I’ve been transported into an earlier century.” The horse trailer was next to the graveled lane that led to the hayloft. There were police vehicles everywhere and people in uniform scurrying around collecting samples from the barn, ground and trailer. “Except now.” He looked at her in shock. “I remember I saw some guy running down the hill from the hayloft entrance toward the front of the barn where the horse stalls are. A guy wearing a Pirate’s baseball cap, with long hair. I figured he was there to help Grant with the horses.” William shrugged. “Is that important?”
Emma felt a sensation, an icy spike piercing her spine. “Yes, it’s important. We should tell the police while they’re here.”
By the time she walked down the stairs to the kitchen and began fixing William lunch, she was distracted again by thoughts of what to say at Grant’s funeral, who to call at the bank about their accounts, how she was supposed to get a death certificate. She began making a list and completely forgot to tell the police about the guy with long hair and a baseball cap running into the barn, or that her son William had arrived early enough this morning to see him.
3:00 p.m.
Lagarde and Black got to the house where Deputy Harbaugh had stashed Ron Tabor just at the moment that Tabor’s argument with his mother-in-law reached a fevered pitch. Lagarde could hear Tabor’s strained voice ten steps away from the blue front door of the stone cottage. He could get very loud, they discovered. How had Elaine had dealt with her husband? Maybe she didn’t deal well with anger, but maybe no one did well with anger, he reminded himself. He had still not crossed Tabor off his list of possible suspects in both murders. Tabor’s version of how he arrived home to find his wife stabbed to death, as relayed by Harbaugh, had occurred without any witness but his little girl, and that story was pretty self-serving. The guy was obviously ready to erupt at the smallest provocation, although, I haven’t yet met Tabor’s mother-in-law. Maybe she isn’t a small provocation.
Black knocked on the door and rang the bell.
They could hear Tabor’s mother-in-law yelling, “You stupid sonofabitch, if you’da been home more, she’d never have gotten in this trouble.”
Black cringed. “Glad she’s not my mother-in-law.”
“You’re not married, Larry,” Lagarde reminded him. “This isn’t so bad. It’s been a stressful day.”
Black grimaced and knocked again. A man he assumed to be Ron Tabor, looking harried and ready to knock someone’s block off, yanked open the door. “Yeah?” he said, staring at them.
“I’m Sergeant Larry Black. This is Detective Sam Lagarde.” Black paused to show his credentials. “Are you Ron Tabor? Where’s the deputy who’s supposed to be here with you?”
Tabor shook his head and shrugged. “He went to McDonalds to get everyone food.”
Looks passed between Black and Lagarde. That seemed to be a fairly lax interpretation of guarding a suspect.
“Maybe you should be more careful about opening the door without checking who it is when there’s a murderer running around,” Lagarde said to Tabor. “You and your daughter could still be in danger.”
Tabor immediately looked crestfallen, his jaw dropped, he hung his head, tears sprang into his eyes. He lowered his voice and said, “I never could spend more than an hour with Elaine’s mom. She gets on my nerves on the best days and this is not one of my best days.”
Lagarde could hear Tabor’s mother-in-law clear her throat in the room behind him. They obviously hadn’t learned how to ignore each other for the greater good.
Tabor stepped back from the doorway and let Lagarde and Black walk into the living room of the house where his mother-in-law, Mrs. Cynthia Bailes, had lived since she was a child. Mrs. Bailes was wearing a red sweatshirt that announced in large white lettering, “I Don’t Give a Crap What You Think” and a pair of jeans. It must have been what she was wearing when she was informed about her daughter’s death. No one, not even the Wicked Witch of the West, would have put it on after learning the news. Lagarde guessed she had completely forgotten what she was wearing, but he took her billboard announcement of her point of view as gospel. She was barefooted. Her short gray hair was permed into a virtual lamb’s-wool cap, making her appear to be dressed for winter sports. She might once have been as beautiful as her daughter, but Lagarde’s first quick surmise was that Elaine got her looks from her father. Mrs. Bailes held balled up tissues in both hands and periodically dabbed her swollen eyes.
Lagarde introduced himself as Black and he did a quick survey of the house. It was a comfortable home, solid, no frills, akin to Mrs. Bailes herself. In the living room, a blue sectional sofa in which all the seats appeared to recline was arranged in a semi-circle around the television. The sofa and large flat-screen TV were fairly new, perhaps purchased recently with money Elaine had given her mother. Lagarde didn’t really need to know where the money for the new furniture came from, and there was no point in asking questions that would make Tabor suffer more than he already was. The man did look wretched, Harbaugh was right about that.
Molly came running from another room to greet them. She seemed to have recovered from the trauma of having her mother killed this morning, but Lagarde reminded himself that children were hard to read. She would miss her mother for the rest of her life, whether she had witnessed the murder or not. The sound of her mother screaming would surely haunt her sleep for years to come. She wrapped her arms around her father’s leg and peeked around at Lagarde, who took the child’s total trust of her father as an indication that maybe the man wasn’t a murderer.
“I member you,” Molly said. “You came to our house already.”
Lagarde smiled at the child. “Yes, we did come to your house. We saw you this morning.” He looked at Elaine’s mother. “Mrs. Bailes, could you take Molly in another room while we talk with Mr. Tabor?”
“No way,” she said, her voice scraping her sorrow, a razor slicing her heart. “I’m staying right here. I got some questions of my own.”
He turned to Black. “Larry, why don’t you take Molly into the kitchen and draw with her for a little while. I’ll talk to Mr. Tabor and Mrs. Bailes.”
Black nodded and held out his hand to the child, which she took like they were old friends. Lagarde heard him ask Molly if she had paper and crayons. “I have lots of toys in my room,” the child said. “I stay with Granny when Mommy goes places.” She pulled Black toward her room. “My mommy went away for a long time,” Lagarde heard her say when they were nearly out of earshot, “but she still loves me, Granny said.”
“This is as good a place as any to talk,” Mrs. Bailes said, and sat down in the seat that she probably called hers directly opposite the TV screen. She pulled fresh tissues from the box on the seat next to her and pushed a button so that her seat reclined and closed her eyes. Like Tabor, she looked stunned, shocked beyond her ability to dissemble her grief. Her daughter had been the best thing she had ever done with her life. Lagarde guessed that Elaine had been the whole world for her mother. The thought of life without her daughter was incomprehensible.
“Thank you. Is Mr. Bailes around?”
Cindy Bailes threw her head back and laughed hoarsely, “That mutt hasn’t been ‘around’ for ten years. Drunken lout left me for some floozy he met at the race track. That’s alright, though, I got me a piece of his pension and his Social Security, him being a retired teacher and all. I work part-time at Walmart, and I got this house from my mother … and Elaine was always generous with me.” Her lips quivered as she picked up an orange throw pillow from the sofa and pressed it to her face.
“Mr. Tabor, why don’t you sit down also.” Lagarde indicated a spot a bit away from his mother-in-law. “I need to go over the timeline of when you arrived at home today and some other questions.”
Tabor nodded and sat down on the seat the furthest from Cindy that he could find. He leaned over, put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.
Lagarde looked around for a less comfortable seat, spotted a straight-backed wooden chair in the dining room and brought it over so that he could sit between them. If Tabor was dangerous, getting out of that deep sofa would slow his forward movement. At least that’s what Lagarde thought. From his more upright chair, Lagarde would be able to get the jump on him. Black was near enough to hear a scuffle, but Lagarde didn’t think Tabor would give him any trouble. The big guy looked like he had been crushed under the tires of his truck.
