Sweat breaking out on her forehead, stricken as if by a sudden flu, Belle collected the familiar sherry decanter from the credenza and took a large slug, another and another until she fell back onto the couch, mastering with difficulty the urge to retch, hoping that the liquor would work its tranquillizing miracle. After a few minutes of deep breathing, she got up to search for the phone, lifted the receiver with two fingers and dialled the police, reminding herself to shut the door lest the animals seek out what their body language signalled they already knew.
“Is Steve Davis there? Please find him. It’s important,” she said in strangled tones to the switchboard operator.
“What’s up?” Steve asked, several eternities later. “Another restaurant we can case out?”
“A friend of mine is dead. Anni Jacobs. I found the body. Her house is down from mine. 1703.”
His even tone felt like a cool hand on her brow. Steve never wasted words. “I’m on my way. Half an hour tops.”
Steve had been Uncle Harold’s good friend before Belle had arrived in the mining town. With reluctance, he’d left his roots behind on a remote reserve, joined the navy and had risen through the ranks of Sudbury’s finest. A few years younger and overly protective, he often tried to give her unwelcome advice, which she shot back in kind, especially concerning his rocky marriage. Recently he and Janet had bandaged their wounds and adopted a three-year-old girl with serious emotional trauma. The fight to gain her confidence had been difficult.
The Bristol Cream had clouded reality by the time Steve arrived with several officers and a plump blond man in wire-rimmed glasses whom he introduced as Dr. Mitch Graveline. Apparently it was necessary to certify the body one hundred percent unlikely to rise again like Lazarus. Later, one of the town’s part-time coroners would conduct a post-mortem Helen Keller could have deciphered, given the head wound and the nearby stick.
Steve toured the room, pushing back a shock of thick black hair from his face, its coppery complexion highlighting a proud Ojibwa heritage. He glanced back over his shoulder. “We usually send the nearest patrol car to secure the scene. I pulled rank to take the call. Did you touch anything?”
“Did I what? Haven’t you told me a hundred times about people corrupting a crime scene?” She marshalled consonants in the rolling wake of the liquor. All able-bodied vowels could fend for themselves.
His six-six frame leaned toward her, and he narrowed his dark eyes as he gave an educated sniff. “Are you drunk?”
She waved off the accusation in cavalier fashion. “So I borrowed some of the sherry. And it was the sommelier’s choice for an impromptu wake. Check my prints and file them for future reference. Better scrape up some DNA, too, or however they collect the stuff.”
Zeroing in on the empty bottle at her side, he frowned like a principal preparing to issue a detention, then spoke firmly. “I won’t tell you to calm down, because if you get any calmer, you’ll pass out.”
“I came, I saw, I took her pulse and headed for happy hour.” Scattered thoughts outraced her manners. Following routine, Steve made her repeat the narrative. How many times would she have to tell this ugly story?
“Her pulse, right,” he said. Meanwhile Dr. Graveline, the invisible man, pulled on plastic gloves for the examination. She had been unaware he had remained in the room, so quiet and efficient were his movements.
“She might have fainted. I didn’t notice her stick at first,” Belle said, feeling foolish as she pointed to the end table.
“Hers, eh? Bag that when the doctor’s finished,” he said, with a motion to an officer hovering with an evidence kit. “What’s the wound like, Mitch? Could it have been a fall?”
“Trauma to the back of the head.” Gingerly the physician examined the stick, its knob darkened. “Let’s see now.”
One corner of Steve’s mouth rose. “The traditional blunt instrument?”
Graveline retrieved a giant magnifying glass and rotated the stick under a table lamp, examining the grain. “I’d say so. Oak’s a tough wood. Won’t split like pine. There’s minimal damage to the skull and little bleeding. We’ll know more later, but one solid crack in the right place would have done the job.”
“Only one?” Belle asked with blurry astonishment. “I know she was old, but wouldn’t the blow have to be pretty lucky? Or rather, unlucky?”
The doctor scribbled into his notebook and gazed up with the innocent liquid eyes of a Jersey calf. “Tell you a story made the rounds in Medical School. Seems that a band was playing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ when a trombone player got so carried away with Dixieland spirit that he rammed his slide into a trumpet player’s head. Smack into the most vulnerable spot behind the ear. One more saint joined the chorus.”
“Murder by ragtime,” Belle said with a thin smile.
Steve cleared his throat pointedly. “How long ago?”
Sheltered partially by a wing chair, Graveline removed a thermometer he had placed unseen. Then he tested the flex of the joints. “Rigor is a temperaturmental creature, pardon the pun. So many variables. On average, it’s well underway after twelve hours. Offhand I’d say sometime last night, if no elves fiddled with the furnace or turned on an air conditioner. And with the consistent lividity, I think we can conclude that the body wasn’t moved.”
The atmosphere turned from laboratory to kindergarten when a stocky young woman clumped in, chewing like a mad cow. “No broken glass, forced locks. Nothing out of place outside. Doesn’t look like no robbery.” She blew an enormous bubble. “Those mutts are stupid. Could care less who runs around.”
Steve flashed her a punishing look. “That’s all, Officer. Check the grounds and make your report. First thing in the morning on my desk.”
Hoping that the bubble would splatter all over her ungrammatical and vacuous lips, Belle glared at her without effect. A woman was dead, for God’s sake. Then a bark sounded from the yard. She stood with the hint of a totter, the perennial animal lover. “The dogs are probably hungry. Missed a couple of meals. May I give them some food, Steve? I doubt if their prints will be a factor.”
At his nod, she left to rummage in the kitchen’s obvious places, locating a large bag of kibble, but when she took their bowls to the porch, they turned their heads away, same as Freya would react under serious stress.
Steve tapped his watch and flipped through notes as she returned to the couch. “All right. Dinner’s over. And mine’s getting colder somewhere between here and town. So much for a quiet Sunday afternoon shift. Let’s start at the beginning.”
Belle began with the bear-baiting, the campaign to foil the hunters, her innocuous day, ending with the sherry overdose turning her mouth into a sugary cesspool.
“Get serious. Are you saying that she caught someone in the act? And if so, why come back here? More logical that with all the attention they would simply have packed up and found a more remote spot.” Suddenly Steve rose from the couch and moved around Graveline to look at Anni’s shoes.
“Moccasins. But household ones. No sign of outside wear. So we’re clear there. She wasn’t marched back at gunpoint.” He raised a coal-black, expressive eyebrow. “What exactly did the woman do? Did she damage any vehicles like she threatened?”
“She said that she had torn the place down. I don’t know about any other sabotage. It’s been a while since we talked.” A picture of Anni on a mission impossible flashed through her mind. “She’d have told me. We had a kind of compact, a stew . . . ardship.” Sobering fast, she thought, flexing her vocabulary.
“A dangerous one. Playing Rambo. Could have made big trouble.”
Belle bristled,