thirty-eight

Goldie decided to high-tail it back home before the sidewalks got any more treacherous, and I thought a long, hot shower would do me some good, so I left Tom watching a NOVA show about melting glaciers and ducked into the bathroom. I set my phone to maximum volume and laid it on a towel beside the bathtub. I turned the shower on as hot as I could stand it, sprinkled a few drops of peppermint essential oil under the spray, and stepped in. I’m worlds away from New Age-y, but I have to say there really is something to the revivifying effects of peppermint essence and steam.

When I stepped out of the shower I checked my phone for missed calls, and again after I dried my hair, but no one had called. My face was red from the hot water, so I patted on some moisturizer and stared into the mirror. The woman staring back at me looked older than the one who lived inside me, and she still looked tired. I fished around in a drawer and found some eyeliner and beige shadow. They helped a lot, even without the mascara I couldn’t locate. I re-secured my towel and scurried into the bedroom, where I stepped into clean, comfy yoga pants and pulled a soft gray cardigan over my black t-shirt. The mirror over my dresser revealed a much more human-looking being than I had felt like half an hour earlier.

The ten-o’clock news was on when I rejoined Tom. Robbery at a fast-food place. Some political idiocy. Several accidents attributed to the icy roads. Better weather on its way. Tom clicked the TV off and said, “Feeling better?”

“Much,” I said. “Think we could rearrange the seating assignments?”

Jay was stretched out beside Tom, his hind feet pushed up against the cat in Tom’s lap and his head on my embroidered Australian Shepherd pillow at the other end of the couch. Drake was on the floor, belly up, a round chewy hanging from his forearm like an enormous bracelet.

Tom set a protesting Leo on the floor and said, “Jay. Off.”

Jay opened one eye and looked at me as if to say Really? I felt like a heel since he looked so comfy, but I signaled him to get off, and he rolled his feet to the floor, toddled a few steps, and crashed. I’m not sure he ever woke up completely.

Tom wrapped his arm around me and we sat in silence for a few minutes. “Jade hasn’t called.”

“She will.”

“She said she’d call at ten.”

Tom hugged me. “She’ll call. She has a lot on her plate there.”

I knew it was true, but couldn’t help feeling that my plate—Mom’s plate—should have priority tonight. “I’ll give her ten more minutes. Then I’m calling her.”

“I think this is a time when no news is probably good news, Janet,” said Tom, and I knew he was right. Someone would call if my mother had another “event.” I decided to change the subject.

“Goldie’s trying to recruit you for the teach in, right?” I asked.

“Sort of. Mostly she wants me to take a look at the flora out there. See if there’s anything of note.”

“Of note? Like endangered or something?” I knew there were quite a few endangered species in Allen County and other parts of Indiana, so it wasn’t a crazy idea. “Could they stop the development if there’s an endangered species out there?”

“It’s possible,” said Tom. “It’s not that simple, but it could be an argument in their favor. But here’s the thing,” he said, and paused. “I didn’t want to get into it with Goldie tonight, but I think they need to think this through. At least Alberta needs to if she wants to keep the cat colony out there, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, endangered plants are one thing,” said Tom. “Endangered mammals, birds, or amphibians are another.”

The light went on. “Oh, crap. So the opponents of Alberta’s TNR program could use an endangered animal as an argument to remove the cats.”

“Exactly.”

“But the cats have been there for years, according to Alberta,” I said. “So if they’ve been living alongside the endangered animals …”

“There’s no way to know whether the cats are a problem for other species without a field study, and we don’t have any such thing for this piece of land,” said Tom. “I looked at some of the studies but they’re scattered, and they don’t necessarily apply here.”

“So Alberta is going to have a moral dilemma on her hands,” I said.

“Maybe, “ said Tom. “But I …”

My phone cut him off.

“So sorry, dear,” said Jade. “The time got away from me.” She assured me that all was well, and that she would be there all night. “I’m not officially on duty, but I’m going to sleep here just in case.”

I said I’d be over first thing in the morning.

Tom got up and looked out the window. “Looks like the rain has stopped, at least for now. Drake! Jay! Let’s go out before it starts again.”

I pulled my old blue afghan from the back of the couch and wrapped it around me. My mother had knit it for me the summer before my freshman year in college. Thirty-some years of spin cycles and tumble dries had softened the yarn, and a spot near one edge sported a slightly different blue yarn where Mom had repaired it after a puppy got hold of it, but it was big and warm and felt like love.

Love. Tom’s voice floated to me from the kitchen, where he was toweling eight wet feet and talking some sort of silliness to the dogs. I heard the refrigerator open and something about a treat. Leo heard, too. He focused all his senses on the sounds, then leaped off the chair and hurried to join them. I could live this way, I thought. But as soon as I thought it, the voice of doubt piped up. You like your freedom, it said. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds in the kitchen. A knife hitting the cutting board, sit and down and spin commands. I could almost hear Janis Joplin singing about freedom and loss.

Exhaustion was taking me again when the phone in my kitchen startled me back to the moment. “You want me to get that?” asked Tom.

“Please.”

The usual greetings followed, and then Tom said, “Hutchinson.”

I abandoned my warm afghan nest and went to the kitchen. “Wonder why he’s using the land line,” I muttered, wishing I had put socks on. The vinyl floor was cold. Tom smiled at me, and he and the critters went back to the living room. I sat down, pulled my feet up onto the chair, and wondered why I had never trained my dog to fetch my slippers.

“Sorry to call so late,” said Hutchinson. “I heard about your mom. I just wanted to see, well, you know, to check on you?”

I filled him in, and thanked him for his concern. I thought he was about to hang up, but then he said, “My buddy who’s on the Rasmussen case called me. He wanted me to know that I’m in the clear.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Yeah. I guess sometimes it pays to be on the Internet at odd times.” He lost me there, and I didn’t say anything. I was starting to shiver, and wanted to cozy up between Tom and my afghan again. I stood up and paced the floor.

“You know, the timeline on Facebook vouched for my being online.”

“Ah. Well, that’s good, Hutch.” I gazed at the knife and cutting board. Tom had washed them and put them in the rack to dry.

“Yeah. I mean, I wasn’t really worried, but it’s better for the investigation if they narrow the suspect list,” said Hutchinson.

What had Tom cut up for the dogs?

“He had something else, too. Nothing official yet, I mean, you know, a report, but the coroner says …”

I opened the refrigerator and looked in, half listening to Hutchinson. I stared at the shelf for a minute, trying to figure out what was missing.

“… that Rasmussen was hit …”

I knew what they had eaten. The leftover eggplant parmesan I’d been saving for lunch.

“… by at least two different weapons.”

“Dammit,” I said.

“What?”

“Sorry,” I said, shutting the fridge. “Two weapons? So that means, what, two killers?”

“It’s possible,” said Hutchinson.

It was hard enough to believe that any of the people I knew to be on the potential-suspect list could have killed a man. But two of them? Conspiring to commit murder took Rasmussen’s death to a whole new level.

“So, I wanted to let you know,” said Hutchinson, “because they may be talking to people they know might, you know, work together.”

I held my breath and waited for the other shoe to drop.

“People who had problems with Rasmussen,” said Hutchinson. He sounded a bit apologetic. “Like Louise and her father, or Marietta and Jorge, …”

I closed my eyes, knowing what was coming.

“… you and Tom.”