“And that would be equally no one else’s business,” I said pointedly.
“Oh, you’re no fun!” Becca recrossed her legs, picked up the morning newspaper, and tossed it down. “Well, how’s old Joe C?”
“I haven’t called the hospital yet, but I hear he’s still alive.”
“He’s lucky you came along.” Her narrow face was utterly sober.
“Eventually someone would have called the fire department, and the firefighters would have gotten him out.”
“Well, I’m going to say thank you anyway, since Joe C is my great-grandfather.”
“Did you visit him often?”
“I hadn’t been to Shakespeare since I was a little kid. But since Uncle Pardon died and I moved here, I’ve been by to see him maybe once every two weeks, something like that. That old rascal still likes short skirts and high heels, you know?”
“Yes, I know.”
“Kind of pathetic. But he’s a peppy old bastard; I’ll give him that. Still capable of launching into you in the wink of an eye, you give him cause. Rip you another asshole.”
“You specifically?”
“No, no. I was speaking in general. Not me.”
Was I supposed to ask who? I decided not to, out of sheer perversity. “I understand you inherit, with the other great-grandchildren,” I said instead, not knowing why I was commenting on what Bobo had told me.
“Yep, that’s the way I hear it.” Becca was smiling broadly. “But the old so-and-so isn’t dead yet!” She seemed pleased to be related to such a tough bird. But then her face grew serious. “What I really came here to tell you, Lily, is that you may be getting another visit from that woman sheriff.”
“Why?”
“Anna-Lise says all the karate women will come next. Because of the way Deedra died.”
“How did she die?”
“She was-.”
A heavy knock on the door interrupted this interesting bit of dialogue. “Too late,” Becca said, almost blithely.
Before I could say anything, Becca just got up and went out my back door. I was left to answer the front with an increasingly bad feeling.
“Sheriff Schuster,” I said, and it was impossible for me to sound anything but grudging. This day had been too much for me already.
“Miss Bard,” she said crisply.
Marta stepped in with Deputy Emanuel on her heels.
“Please have a seat,” I said, my voice cool and insincere.
Of course, they did.
“The results of Deedra Dean’s autopsy,” Marta Schuster said, “were very interesting.”
I raised my hand, palm up. What?
“Though various things were done to her after death”-I couldn’t help remembering the glint, of glass between Deedra’s thighs-“she died of a single hard punch to the solar plexus.” The sheriff tapped her own solar plexus by way of visual aid.
I probably looked as stumped as I felt. I finally could think of nothing to say but, “So…?”
“It was a massive blow, and it stopped her heart. She didn’t die from a fall or strangulation.”
I shook my head. I was still clueless. Whatever reaction Marta Schuster was expecting from me, she wasn’t getting it, and it was making her angry.
“Of course, it might have been an accident,” Clifton Emanuel said suddenly, so we both looked at him. “It might not have been intended to kill her. Someone might have just punched her, not knowing how hard they hit.”
Still I stared like a fool. I tried to understand the significance of his statement, which he had definitely delivered as though he was giving me the Big Clue.
“A hard punch,” I said blankly.
They waited, with twin expressions of expectancy, almost of gloating.
And the shoe dropped.
“Like a karate strike,” I said. “So… you think… what do you think?”
“The pathologist said a person would have to be strong and probably trained in order to deliver such a blow.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. There was no defense against suspicion. There was no way to deny what they were simply thinking. I thought so many things at once that I had trouble sorting the ideas out. I recalled the people in my karate class, and scanned the faces in the line. Every one of the students who’d been in for more than a few months (as you can imagine, the class has a high attrition rate) had known Deedra. Raphael Roundtree had taught the math class Deedra took in high school, Carlton Cockroft had done her taxes, Bobo was her cousin, Marshall had seen Deedra trot in and out of Body Time’s aerobics sessions. Though I could hardly believe it, each one could’ve slept with her, too.
And that was just the men. Janet had known Deedra for years, Becca was her landlady… and I worked for her.
I thought, There goes my business. I’d survived other scandals and upheavals in Shakespeare, and kept working, though not as busily as before. But if serious suspicion fell on me, I could kiss my livelihood good-bye. I would have to move. Again.
No one wants to be scared of her cleaning lady.
Schuster and Emanuel were still waiting for me to respond, and I couldn’t summon a word to say. I stood. After a second of hesitation, they stood too. I walked to my door and opened it. I waited for them to leave.
They looked at each other questioningly, and then Schuster shrugged.
“We’ll see you later,” she said coolly, and she preceded Emanuel down my two front steps.
“I don’t think so,” I said, and closed the door behind them.
I sat with my hands on my knees and tried to think what to do. I could call a lawyer on Monday… who? Surely I knew a lawyer or two. Well, Carlton could recommend one. But I didn’t want to do that, didn’t want to spend the time and money to defend myself from a charge so unfounded. The sheriff’s own brother was a more likely suspect than I. I figured that was why she was attaching more weight to the “karate strike” theory than it maybe deserved. How could you characterize a blow? It was what it was. If you could call a stopped heart the result of a “karate” blow, you might as well go on and say, “This strike was delivered by a right-handed student who’s taken goju-ryo karate for approximately three years from an Asian-born sensei.”
If an autopsy could show Deedra had been punched while she was standing, that would surely be important. There probably weren’t that many men, and even fewer women, in Shakespeare who could deliver such a blow, or who would even realize such a blow could be fatal. But if Deedra had been punched while sitting or lying down- in either case resting against a hard surface-well, that feat could be performed by a much larger pool of people.
Just at the moment I couldn’t quite visualize how such a sequence of events could have occurred, but it was possible. Among the many things the sheriff had neglected to mention was Deedra’s artificial violation. Was that postmortem or antemortem?
When I thought about it, a lot depended on the answer to that question.
And why had she been left out in the woods? It was really bad for the case for my innocence that the place she’d been dumped was off a road I frequented. There were other homes and businesses out on Farm Hill Road, sure. There was a car repair shop not a quarter of a mile beyond Mrs. Rossiter’s house, and an antique/craft/flea market barn not a mile beyond that. That made me relax a little; the finger wasn’t pointing so obviously at me.
Where had I been the night Deedra was killed? That would’ve been a Sunday. Last Sunday, though it seemed at least a month ago. Jack hadn’t come that weekend; I’d done my usual chores on Saturday, the same list I was trying to complete this Saturday: two quick cleaning jobs, straightening my own house, shopping for groceries. I often followed that up by cooking for the coming week and freezing my meals. Yes, I recalled, I’d cooked Saturday night so I’d have a whole day on Sunday to do nothing much besides go work out, do some laundry, and finish a biography I’d checked out of the library.