two

Charlotte herded the women, still straightening their clothes, into Alice’s living room. She peered at them through the thick lenses of her white-framed glasses. “Focus, ladies!”

Francine knew what was coming. Charlotte fancied herself a sleuth. It would take everything she had to keep Charlotte out of trouble now that a dead body had been found.

Francine took one side of the sofa. Alice sat in her usual place, a blue paisley upholstered chair. Joy sat by the window.

Charlotte remained standing but leaned on her cane. “You hear those sirens?” She put her right hand to her ear for emphasis. “They’ll be here any minute. Francine is right. We need to tell the truth, because five people can’t keep a lie going for that long. And if it comes out we’ve lied once, they’ll wonder what other things we’ve lied about. So we tell the truth, agreed?”

Alice smoothed her white linen pants, trying to make them look neat. “I disagree, and I know Mary Ruth would too, if she were here.”

“Is Mary Ruth still getting dressed?”

Alice pointed a finger at Charlotte. “It takes her a little longer than the rest of us in the best of circumstances. And these are far from the best.”

“I’m here now.” Mary Ruth bustled into the living room, running her hands through her short brown hair, trying to get it under control. She normally used a straightener to keep it flat. She wore a loose flowered blouse that billowed out over navy blue elastic waist pants. “Do I look okay? What’s happened?”

“Nothing yet,” Alice said. “But Charlotte is about to bully us into agreeing to tell the police we were skinny-dipping.”

“Oh, must we?” Mary Ruth’s face was red, and she mopped her forehead with a handkerchief.

Charlotte stared them down. “No, of course not. Feel free to tell them whatever story pops into your head. Technically, you hadn’t gone skinny-dipping yet. But know that Francine and I intend to tell the truth. At least our stories will agree. Once they’ve heard it from us, they’re bound to recognize that’s why we were here and that you simply chickened out.”

Joy stopped brushing her hair and pointed the brush at Mary Ruth. “You can’t tell them you didn’t skinny-dip. Then it might come out that I didn’t either, and I won’t get on the front page of the Star.” Francine recalled Joy’s #6 item specified a Major Metropolitan Newspaper, which ruled out the local Hendricks County Flyer.

“I guess you don’t leave us any choice.” Mary Ruth flopped onto the other side of the couch from Francine, grumbling. She pulled a small mirror out of her purse. “But I don’t look presentable enough to be on the front page of the Star.”

Alice fingered the cross on her necklace. “ None of us do. And God forbid it gets out that I host nude parties.”

“Maybe you just think that,” Joy said. “Maybe once the word gets out, other people will be doing it and you’ll look like a trendsetter.”

Alice did not look convinced.

“This will all blow over,” Francine said. “Once the police start focusing on the dead body, no one will remember what we were doing here.”

Charlotte continued in her authoritative voice. “Speaking of the dead body, I know how this investigation is going to go down. First, they’ll send a patrolman to check things out. He’ll no sooner see the dead body and then he’ll call for a detective and probably the coroner. Eventually we’ll be separated for questioning. Fortunately, Alice’s house could host a bed and breakfast convention. Alice, be thinking of rooms they can put us in.”

Francine slipped her cell phone out of her purse. She thought the comparison to a bed and breakfast wasn’t far off. Alice’s house had five bedrooms, all themed, like the Blue Room, the Tea Rose Room, and the Queen Anne Room. Plus, her basement with its half kitchen could house a family of four.

Alice gripped the arms of the leather club chair she was sitting on. “Five rooms! But the housekeeper hasn’t been here in a week, and the basement …”

“Not to worry, dear,” Joy said. “Just use the four bedrooms upstairs and your master suite on this floor. No one even has to go into the basement.” She patted the pockets of her pants. “Has anyone seen my phone? I want to text my grandniece about this.”

Francine thought the sirens sounded like they were just outside. She touched an app on her own iPhone and typed a name in the search bar.

Charlotte stood behind her. “What are you doing?”

“I’m Googling Friederich Guttmann.” She made a selection and the web page loaded. “You want to hear what I’ve found?”

Joy perched at the large bay window. “Three squad cars! They sent three squad cars. Isn’t that overkill?”

“For heaven’s sake, it’s a murder, Joy. In Brownsburg, Indiana!” said Charlotte. “I’ll bet there’ll be more here before this is over.”

“How long will this take, do you think?” Mary Ruth asked, still looking into her handheld mirror. “My eyes are already so bloodshot you can’t tell if they’re brown or I’m one of those vampires on True Blood. I need some sleep. I have a catering job at lunch.”

The doorbell rang. Everyone froze.

When the silence continue a few seconds too long, Francine pulled herself to her full height, which at 5'10", was taller than the others. “You should get that, Alice,” she prompted, trying to gently take command.

“Oh. Oh, yes.” Alice got up and started for the front door. As she crossed in front of the window, red and blue flashing lights streamed in, rotating across their faces and splashing against the walls.

The sirens stopped, leaving an eerie silence. Then the doorbell rang, shattering the quiet. Alice tentatively opened the front door. An authoritative voice issued some kind of identification and she backed away, letting the officers in.

The lead patrol officer turned out to be female, but she was very no-nonsense. As soon as she determined the body was indeed dead, she called for a detective to take over the investigation, just as Charlotte had predicted.

It seemed like only minutes before the detective arrived. The patrol officer stepped outside to brief him. The women were nervous, but they exhaled in relief when they saw Detective Brent Judson enter.

Jud was a Brownsburg native, still boyishly handsome in his mid-thirties. He’d received his degree in criminal justice from Indiana University before landing a spot on the Brownsburg force. He and Francine’s boys had played football together. He was dressed in civilian clothes.

“Jud!” Charlotte said, coming to life. She hobbled across the living room. “Great to see you.”

“Your reputation precedes you, Mrs. Reinhardt,” he said. He spotted Francine and walked past Charlotte. “When they notified me and I recognized whose neighborhood the call came from, I hurried over. I’m sorry to see you’re one of the people who discovered the body, Mrs. McNamara. And you, Mrs. Jeffords. Are you okay?”

Alice nodded, but not convincingly.

Francine patted his forearm. “We’re fine, Jud. But you must remember to call me Francine.”

Charlotte poked at him. “Hello, Jud.”

“Ah, Mrs. Reinhardt …”

“Charlotte.”

“… Charlotte, good to see you as well.” He spoke to the group. “If you will all please follow the instructions the officers will give you, we’re going to get this investigation under way as quickly as possible. He turned to Alice. “Mrs. Jeffords—Alice—if you’ll please show me where you found the body?”

Alice finally spoke up. “Well, actually I didn’t find it.”

Charlotte couldn’t contain her excitement any longer. “Plopped right out of the door to the pool shed when it was opened. I’ll show you.”

Jud gently restrained her.

She glared at him. “Don’t you want to hear the story?”

“Oh, indeed, I do. We’re going to want to hear it from each of you. But for now, I’m going to ask you to not discuss it further. Just do as the officers ask, and we’ll try to get you back to as much normalcy as we can, given the circumstances.” He took a breath. “And now, Alice, the body, please.”

_____

Charlotte and Joy were in the process of telling the police officers which rooms they wanted to be questioned in when a second sleepy-eyed detective arrived. He told them to quiet up and dispatched them to rooms of his choosing for questioning.

“I don’t know what the pecking order is,” Charlotte told Francine under her breath, “but I don’t want to be interviewed by the backup detective.”

“No talking,” he said.

Francine ended up in the blue bedroom, upstairs at the back end of the house. She’d heard of it but had never been in it, despite having known Alice for twenty-five years. Blue Room was not an understatement, either: the walls were sky blue, the carpet a turquoise, the bed comforter navy, and the pillows—of which there seemed to be a dozen—spanned the spectrum from a light aqua to teal. Alice’s only consent to non-blue seemed to be the white frames on a series of race car photographs placed around the room. Francine spotted a CD player on the dresser and hoped for a Ray Charles collection. Alice wouldn’t catch the subtle humor, though, she thought.

She’d been in the room long enough to discover how uncomfortably the daybed served as a couch when Jud opened the door. He crossed the room and sat opposite her in an office chair one of the policemen had rolled in. “Now, Francine,” he said, “please tell me again what you and the other women were doing when you found the body.”

There was simply no way to soften it. And besides, by the amusement in his eyes, Francine was fairly certain he’d interviewed someone else first and knew the answer. Probably Charlotte, but possibly Joy. “Skinny-dipping,” she said. “It was on Joy’s list.”

“List?”

“Her Sixty List. Her bucket list of sixty things to do before she dies. We made them when Alice turned sixty. She was the first. Sixty at sixty. We thought that was significant. Each of us has our own list, although some of them have overlapping items. You know what bucket lists are.”

He nodded. “I saw the movie with Morgan Freeman. You’ve been working on these a long time, then?”

“Twelve years. Alice is seventy-two now. The rest of us aren’t far behind.”

“Are you close to finishing your lists?”

“Goodness, no. We did the easy ones first. Then it got harder. We dropped it for a long time. We only came back to them recently.” Francine didn’t tell him why. Joy’s recent bout with breast cancer and then Charlotte’s difficult knee surgery had them worried about their health. Now the lists seemed more important. “You’re probably too young to have a bucket list.”

He didn’t reply. “So have you had this skinny-dipping event planned for some time?”

“Six weeks.”

He seemed surprised. “Six weeks for that?”

“Alice wanted Larry to be gone so she wouldn’t have to create an excuse to get him out of the house all night. We didn’t want anyone else to know. Well, at least she didn’t.”

“What did you tell your husband?”

“That we were having a Sunday-night slumber party. Which, I should add, is not a lie.”

Jud didn’t comment one way or the other. “Why was Larry out of the house?”

“Alice and her husband are into real estate and rental properties. He’s at a convention in Las Vegas. He left on Friday.”

“You kept this slumber party from everyone?”

She nodded. “I didn’t tell anyone. I can’t vouch for the others.”

“You seem to have gone to a great deal of trouble to make it dark. The security light in the Baggesens’ back yard …”

“I don’t know anything about how that happened.” That also was true. Francine had heard something about Charlotte using a shotgun, but she didn’t see the incident herself.

Jud made more notes. Francine tried to sit up straight on the daybed and keep her hands in her lap, prim and proper. Even though she knew Jud well enough that she had almost given him a hug instead of returning his handshake in the living room, he was keeping the interview very professional, and she felt she should treat it the same way.

But the daybed was uncomfortable. This thing must be hell to sleep on.

“Tell me how Mary Ruth found the body.”

She stopped twisting and focused on the thirty-six year-old detective’s hazel eyes. “She smelled something unusual coming from the shed. She said it had the bouquet of an outhouse, but then you should hear her describe a wine. We thought maybe it was a dead raccoon. She opened it and Friederich Guttmann’s body fell out.”

“We haven’t identified the deceased yet.”

“Everyone who knows auto racing in our group seems to be pretty sure it’s Friederich Guttmann. He looked to be about fifty, which matches his bio, and his face matches the image I pulled up on Google before you got here.” She held up her cell phone.

Jud chuckled at that. “You have a smartphone.”

“And why should I not have one? Doesn’t your mother?”

“Mom’s not very tech-savvy,” he replied. “So Mary Ruth both found the body and identified him?”

“You say that as though it’s suspicious. According to Google, he was pretty well known.”

“Let’s go back to when Mary Ruth opened the shed and the body fell out. What happened after that?”

Francine gave up trying to look dignified on the uncomfortable daybed. She went into a half-lounging position. It didn’t help. “I was in the pool at the time. By the sound it made when it hit the concrete and the way the others were reacting to the smell, I suspected it was bigger than a raccoon and probably dead. So I swam over to the side and got out. By then I suspected it was a body. I felt I had to check on it—him—because I’m still a nurse, even if I am retired, and if there was any way to save him …”

“Commendable.”

“But he was stiff to the touch, and when I saw his face I became certain he was dead. I told Alice to call 911, and then we all rushed into the house to get dressed.”

Jud scribbled in his notebook. “And what time was that?”

Francine didn’t have to think long. “About twelve fifteen. A neighbor shouted it at us when she told us to be quiet.” She sat up and yawned. Now that the adrenaline rush from finding the body was over, fatigue was setting in. She checked her cell phone. It was nearly two a.m. Perhaps it was a good thing the daybed was uncomfortable.

Glancing around the room, she noticed a grouping of framed photographs just above the dresser. She could see they had race cars in them. She wondered what the significance was. She was so absorbed that Jud’s next question startled her.

“How do you suppose Alice was able to prepare the pool this weekend without smelling anything?” he asked.

“Wouldn’t it depend on how long he’d been dead? I’m no coroner, but I’m not sure he’s been dead all that long. He was still in the grips of rigor mortis, and he didn’t smell like he’d decomposed much. It was mostly his waste products that caught Mary Ruth’s attention.” Francine suddenly realized she was not helping Alice’s cause. If he’d been killed recently, how would he have gotten into the shed without her friend seeing it or somehow being responsible? She quickly amended her answer. “But really, Alice is allergic to everything that exists. Her nose is perpetually clogged. And she said she forgot to add chemicals to the pool, so she never got into the shed.”

“If it was as dark as you ladies insist it was, how could you be certain it was Friederich Guttmann?”

“With a flashlight. Once we knew we had a dead body on our hands, Joy ran into the house and got a Maglite. So we had better light at that point.”

“You have to admit this obsession with darkness makes your group look suspicious.”

“Alice and Larry have a privacy fence, but it’s not that tall. Nearly every house around here has a second story. Anyone who wants to see into the back yard, could do it.”

“Did you really think someone would be up after midnight spying to see if the pool was in use?”

Francine was starting to get annoyed. “Jud, for someone who graduated as high up in his class at Brownsburg High School as you did, you ask terribly naive questions. We’re old. Most of us have body issues. Do you really think we want bright lights shining on these bodies?”

“If I may say so, you are in terrific shape. You have nothing to worry about.”

Francine blushed. “That’s kind of you. But I still wouldn’t want to take the chance someone might catch me skinny-dipping.”

“But weren’t you up kind of late? Would the neighbors have expected to see you ladies in the pool at that hour?”

“Just because we’re old doesn’t mean we don’t stay up late,” she said, even though she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen midnight. “The pool’s heated. Alice and Larry could use it at any time.”

“Did they?”

“I don’t know, Jud. Why don’t you ask Alice?”

“I already have.”

“Then why did you ask me?” She realized she knew the answer. “To see if what we said matched. I get it. What did she say?”

“She said they really don’t use the pool that much. She said they hadn’t used it for a week or so.”

“I’m not surprised. Do you mind if I get off this daybed? I think it was brought here straight from Guantánamo Bay.”

Jud had a bemused look on his face. “You can walk around if you want.” He looked down at his notes. “This won’t take much longer.”

Francine strolled over to the grouping of five racing photos over the dresser. The outside four were action shots of midget cars going around a track. Midget cars were small, stripped-down cars that looked like rolling cages just big enough for the drivers. The center photograph, however, had a regular-sized NASCAR vehicle in it. In front of it stood Alice and Larry and the driver of the #51 car, Brownsburg’s own racing success story, twenty-four-year-old Jake Maehler. At least, most everyone in Brownsburg regarded him as a success, even though she knew he hadn’t won a NASCAR race yet.

She took hold of the ornate white frame and lifted the picture from the wall to get a better look. Clearly it was taken at a racetrack, though Francine didn’t know which one. The palm trees revealed it was not in the Midwest.

“Do you have any idea how the body got into the pool shed?” Jud asked. “Could any of your friends have had something to do with it?”

“Absolutely not. We’ve all known each other for at least twenty-five years. If we had any secrets, Charlotte would have pried them out of us by now.”

Jud laughed in spite of himself. “I’m saving the interview with her for last. She’ll probably try to interrogate me.”

Francine thought back to Charlotte’s dealings with the Town of Speedway police force. “I’d watch your step. Ever since she helped the Speedway police prove her uncle was murdered …”

“I have friends who work there. I’ve been warned. But what were the odds she’d be involved in another murder case?”

Francine lifted her hands, palms up.

Jud cleared his throat. “Now, please don’t get upset. We’re asking everyone this question: Can you account for your whereabouts on Saturday?”

A clue, Francine thought. He must’ve disappeared on Saturday or they wouldn’t be asking. “Let’s see. Saturday morning we got up around seven. I fixed breakfast and we read the paper. I did some house cleaning. After lunch I gardened while Jonathan mowed the grass. Then in the afternoon I picked up Charlotte and we went grocery shopping. She has physical therapy on Saturday mornings, which wipes her out, so I come over after her nap and get her going again. Then she, Jonathan, and I went out for dinner. Charlotte likes the Bob Evans out by the interstate so we went there. I’m sure you can verify all of that.”

“Did you know Friederich Guttmann?”

She shook her head.

“Did any of your friends know him?”

“You mean like Mary Ruth or Alice? They recognized him, but I’m not sure they knew him personally. I’d never heard them mention him before.”

Francine stared at the photo in her hands. She learned in her Google search that Friederich had been Jake Maehler’s longtime mechanic when Jake had been younger and involved in midget car racing. Alice and her husband had been longtime fans of Jake’s. Was there a connection there? She didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to bring it up. She tried to hang the picture back up, but in her affected nonchalance, it slipped out of her hands.

BAM! The frame hit the floor, face-side down. In an instant Jud was there, picking it off the floor. He helped her rehang it but studied it when he noticed who was in the photograph.

“Do Alice and Larry know Jake Maehler?”

“I really don’t know.” He continued to look at her the way policemen do on cop shows when they don’t believe someone. “That’s the truth,” she protested.

“I believe you,” he said, though Francine thought he sounded unconvinced. “But I am going to check my notes to see if Alice mentioned it. If she didn’t, I’ll ask her about it.”

Francine hoped she hadn’t gotten her friend in trouble.

“You can go now,” Jud said, gathering up his notes. “But if you think of anything else, please get back in touch with me.”

“Okay.” She left the room hoping Charlotte would be interviewed soon so the two of them could start comparing notes before it got much later. She also wanted to tell her about the ugly blue bedroom.