Outdoor lighting strategically lit up the shrubs in the Jenkins’ vast front yard, which was inconvenient. The Bougainvillea bush where Bull buried Petey showed in the spotlight like a trampy starlet soaking up her fifteen minutes of fame.
I’d pulled the tire iron out from under the spare tire in my trunk, because I didn’t have a handy shovel or spade in the car. The ground was still soft from the evening watering, and the knees of my pants were soon soaked through. Jabbing and pulling with the iron only loosened the ground into a pile of sifting dirt. If I wanted to get to the corpse under that dirt, I was going to have to use my hands.
Two cupped hands at a time, I removed stones, sand and earth and dumped them next to me, working slowly, because I didn’t want to suddenly touch stiff feathers or, please no, maggots. I wished the idea of squirmy, grubby worms hadn’t come into my head, because I went back to using the tire iron, and it was taking forever.
Finally, with a soft thud, I hit something solid. After removing the lid to the shoebox, I leveraged the iron under Petey’s corpse and gave it a shove. He flipped up onto the edge of the hole and then slowly rolled back in. Good enough.
I leaned back on my feet and closed my eyes, taking two deep breaths to steady my nerves. I willed my mind back to the night of the Blue-Ribbon Babes show and invited Petey to come along for the stroll down bad-memory lane. I remembered the moment when I discovered Elvira’s body and could hear his wings flapping, and the repeated squawks of “Meow!” as he tried to escape his cage.
Tell me what happened, boy. Tell me who did this.
Nothing.
I imagined how it might look from his point of view on the counter of the Blue-Ribbon Babes set: a dark form sneaking up on his former mistress, skillet raised above the victim’s head, ready to strike.
Give me a face, honey. Just a peek.
What if the bird had chosen that exact moment to clean his feathers, and with his face turned away from the set, actually missed the whole murder? What if Petey had nothing to tell? What if I was out of my mind, kneeling in the dirt, expecting a dead animal to talk to me?
“What are you doing?”
I scrambled to my feet and brushed off my knees. Catherine Jenkins stared at Petey, then me, her brow wrinkled as if wondering what possible explanation I could have for messing with a dead bird. I thought fast.
“I was driving by and saw a coyote digging up Petey.” I picked up the crowbar. “I scared him off with this and, well, I was just trying to decide if it would be worth it to rebury him in the same spot, or if I should…I hadn’t really made it past that point.”
She made a face. “I wouldn’t want to have to touch that thing. Come on inside.”
“I don’t want to bother you.”
“You’re a mess.”
I held up my hands. There was sand up my nails, and I’d cut my index finger on a stone. Blood had mixed in with wet soil, and it looked as if I’d been mixing chocolate cake batter with my hands.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll just wash up real quick and get going. Auntie is going to worry if I’m not home when she gets there.”
“She was still at the party when I left, so don’t rush.”
Catherine unlocked the garage door and switched on the light. We passed through into the kitchen. I was still clutching the tire iron in my grip, so I rested it against the cabinets. It was too dirty to put on the table. I turned on the faucet and let warm water run over my hands.
“Better her than me,” I said. “I don’t like parties.”
“I know just what you mean. I’m not that social myself.”
A loud flutter passed by my ears and I ducked down and searched the ceiling. Catherine stepped back and followed my gaze.
“What is it?”
“Didn’t you hear that noise?”
“What noise?”
“I think you might have a bat in the house.”
Catherine covered her hair with her hands and frantically searched the kitchen. “I don’t see anything. Are you sure?”
I listened. “I swear I heard something fly by my head.” Unnerved, I scrubbed my hands with soap, rinsed, and searched for a paper towel.
“Under the sink,” Catherine said.
I opened the cabinet and rummaged around. “You’re out.”
The fluttering noise came so close to my head that my ears popped, and with that pop, I was on the Blue-Ribbon Babes set. Elvira bent over the kitchen sink and scrubbed her mixing bowl. She rinsed it, turned off the water with her elbow, and went in search of a dish towel to dry her hands. A shadow pulled the cast iron skillet from under the counter, crept up behind her and raised the weapon high. With one crashing movement, Elvira Jenkins dropped like a rock, and her daughter-in-law, Catherine Jenkins, stood over her, a satisfied smile on those thick, gorgeous lips.
Startled, I lost my balance, and landed on my butt, just as the tire iron swung past my head and crashed to the floor.
“You!” I gasped.
She raised the iron again, and I scrambled around the island and ran into the living room. She was close on my heels, and in a repeat of my performance with Petey, I jumped the coffee table to put the piece of furniture between us.
“Why couldn’t you leave it alone?” she said, her upper lip curled in a snarl. “I deserve my privacy!”
“Privacy?”
She swung the iron and brought it crashing down on the coffee table. I fell back onto the couch and looked at the ugly gash left behind on the wooden surface of the table. She headed right, so I went left.
“You thought you were so clever, dropping little hints. Your career will lead to exotic places. And meow, meow, meow. Rubbing it in my face.”
I rolled out of the way just in time to escape the next blow. My brain worked furiously, and though it begged for a rest, I forced it to explain why it hadn’t connected the clues with Catherine Jenkins. Exotic? Meow? What did she think I knew? And then it hit me.
“You worked at the Kitty Cat Club!”
Her eyes narrowed, and a low growl rose in the back of her throat. Her fingers tightened around the iron and she lunged forward, but I was ready for her this time. I grabbed the iron before it could connect and yelped at the pain in my palm. We struggled, her face so close I thought she might bite me. I reared back and gave her a head butt that clacked my teeth together. Her grip loosened, and I jerked back and forth until I wrested the iron away, but I pulled too hard, and it flew out of my hands and under the couch.
As I held my side and panted for air, I took in her fit body and flaming red hair. “Oh my gosh! You were an exotic dancer?”
“Don’t act so surprised. I knew what you were up to.” She threw up her hands, waved them girly style, and launched into a mocking imitation of me. “Let’s play the nickname game. I’m Sissy and this is Gertie. What’s your nickname, Catherine?”
“I didn’t actually ask. You brought it up, and you said they called you Kate.”
“Any moron can figure out Kit is short for Catherine. Even that idiot Elvira figured it out. She knew I owned my own business in Reno.”
“You said out east.”
“Reno is east.”
“Not from here.”
She threw back her head and shrieked. “You’re just like my mother-in-law. So superior. She’d been to the Kit Cat Club to protest with her busy-body group. The old gas bag is one of the reasons I had to close down. No one wanted to pass by a group of screeching old ladies to get into the club.” She added in a reasonable voice, “It ruined the ambiance.”
“And then you met Tim?”
“He was one of my best customers!”
I gasped. “Did Elvira know?”
She smirked. “I assume he didn’t share that with his mommy.”
“So? Why did it matter?”
“It didn’t. Not exactly.”
She clenched her fists and started to cry. “It wasn’t her business!”
“If Tim knew about it and it didn’t bother him, why murder Elvira?”
“Because she found out about the abortion.”
The tears turned into sobs, and she dropped down onto the coffee table. “God help me, I had an abortion.” She looked at me as if pleading with me to understand. “I didn’t know it would affect my ability to get pregnant. I didn’t know there would be any consequences. I believed what the nurse told me. In and out and it’s all behind you. And for a while it was. I didn’t think about it, and everything was fine. I met Tim. We got married. And then we wanted a family.”
By now she was sucking in deep breaths of air.
“It took forever to get pregnant, but I thought it was my age, and when I was finally expecting, we were so happy.” Her voice went dead. “And then the first miscarriage. And the second.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Elvira started nosing around. She was going to help make things right, like she always did.” She barked out a laugh. “I don’t know how she found out.”
I had my suspicions, but I didn’t think Nurse Moira meant to let it slip. Maybe she just mentioned she met Catherine before, in Reno. Elvira seemed to have done a bit of protesting in Reno. Maybe she saw Moira when she protested at the clinic, and recognizing her at the doctor’s office, put it together.
Catherine’s eyes blazed. “And then that self-righteous witch said she was going to tell Tim. He had a right to know. It would have killed him. Actually, it would have killed our marriage. Tim wanted a child so badly. If he found out we couldn’t have children because I’d—I don’t think he could have handled it.” She stopped crying. “So, I killed her instead.”
“I understand the bird, because I mentioned he’d been talking. Quite frankly, I’m not that sad about Petey. He was pretty annoying. But why Fiona?” My face muscles, wrinkled in thought, then relaxed as I figured it out. “Oh. She did hair for the girls at the club. You’re the old boss she recognized. And then she suddenly had money. She was blackmailing you.”
Before me sat the most dejected woman I’d ever seen. Her eyes were rimmed with red from crying, her hair stuck out in a wild mess from our tussle, and her shoulders slumped in defeat. She looked vulnerable. Her heartache over the loss of her children touched me, and before I’d thought things through, I said, “I’m so sorry.”
She met my gaze. “Me too. Nothing personal.”
Catherine had gotten her wind back—surprising, considering all the talking she’d done—and she launched herself through the air and tackled me. I hit the ground hard, and even though the wind was knocked out of me, when she wrapped her fingers around my throat, I fought back. I pushed her shoulders hard, but her grip held tight.
“Don’t—want—another—murder,” I gasped.
She didn’t like my advice and squeezed harder.
In the distance, a voice called my name. Was it God? Or my dead grandma? No offense, Granny, but I wasn’t ready for a reunion. I jammed one knee between us, but the room started to swim.
I heard a loud thump, then another, then a crash of glass. A rattan patio chair flew over our heads and rolled across the rug.
Bowers wrapped his arms around Catherine’s shoulders and pulled her up. She still held my throat in her grip, and she dragged me to a sitting position. When he finally shook her loose, she kicked and struggled like a spitting cat.
“Okay. Calm down.”
Bowers jerked her arms behind her back and shoved her to the ground. With one knee between her shoulder blades, he pulled out his cuffs. I crawled over and watched while he cuffed her hands. I wanted to make darn sure she was helpless before I let down my guard. When he had her properly restrained, I fell back on the floor to catch my breath.
Bowers leaned over me and took my chin in his hand. “Are you alright?”
I coughed a few times, still trying to get my breath. “Just dandy.”
“Catherine?”
I looked up to see Bull, Auntie, and Tim staring in open-mouthed surprise. This was going to take some explaining.