I went to the kitchen for knives and forks while Bob got beers and soft drinks out of the refrigerator. Kay handed out napkins from the basket that holds her collection of those-that-don’t-matter-if-you-get-pizza-sauce-all-over-them.
“I can barely remember that long ago,” she said, shaking her head. “Chef Boyardee pizza in a box—a little packet of dough mix, and a little can of sauce, and a little packet of desiccated cheese. I was in the eighth grade and you were a mighty sophomore, and I wasn’t sure I'd like this pizza stuff but you were so incredibly sophisticated that I had to act like I did no matter what it tasted like. Was that your first pizza too? I never knew that.”
We settled with the dogs at our feet. Their interested faces clearly expressed their hope that pizza bones would fall on the floor. The bagels we’d consumed earlier had no effect on our willingness to attack the contents of the boxes. Ambrose spread his napkin on his lap and picked up his knife and fork. As he cut into his slice of pizza, he said, “Oh, yes, that was me at the age of fifteen, the complete cosmopolitan.” He looked around the table at each of us. “I understand that I carried away the Albatross at just the wrong moment, but that’s about all I do understand.” He conveyed a neat bite of pizza to his mouth and chewed.
Kay paused in her reach for a pizza slice and looked at Bob and me. “Permission to speak freely? I can vouch for Ambrose’s trustworthiness.”
“Of course,” I said, and Bob nodded. Kay turned to Ambrose.
“Bob is a hypnotherapist. He had a copy of a video of a session with a client who, while under hypnosis, remembered seeing his stepfather in the house on the night that his mother died.”
“That sounds fraught with peril,” Ambrose said. Kay nodded.
“Her death was ruled a suicide because Carl Walsh, the stepfather, had an alibi for being elsewhere, and Ian had blanked out the memory of seeing him in the house. We think that Ian confronted his stepfather with his recovered memory, because Ian died the same way his mother had, an apparent suicide.”
Ambrose had cut another bite, and hastily swallowed it so he could ask, “I take it, Bob, that you hid this tape in the ungainly piece of furniture I hauled out of here this morning?”
Bob nodded. “Except that the tape in the Albatross is a copy of the original. I put the original in my safety deposit box in my bank in High Cross. What I didn’t know at the time was that Walsh owns that bank—he inherited it from Ian’s mother. I don’t know how he got into my box, but that’s where I kept the original tape.”
“My goodness,” Ambrose paused in cutting another bite, “is nothing sacred?”
I had just taken a big bite of pizza, and strings of cheese were festooned from my lips back to the slice. I was trying to separate myself from the cheese when Ambrose’s mild rhetorical question struck me as wildly funny under the circumstances and I snorted with laughter. This had the effect of drawing all eyes to me. I chewed hastily. “Sorry, don’t mind me.”
Kay frowned and went on. “It's possible that a police detective tipped Carl off to the existence of the tape. Bob tried to tell him about his suspicions, but the detective brushed him off. But he was the only person Bob told about the tape.”
“Suggestive.”
“When the tape disappeared, Bob figured if this guy had killed twice, it wouldn’t be safe to hang around and wait for him to do it again. So he came to Willow Falls to hide while he figures out what to do.”
“So, is the possible untrustworthiness of the police the reason we are having this cozy discussion of murder without the help of Ed or any of his minions?” Ambrose asked.
“Right,” said Kay. “I don’t think Ed would spill the beans. But he is still mad at me, and now he’s peeved at Louisa for not getting the license number of Bob’s kidnapper.”
Ambrose’s eyes widened. “Kidnapper!”
“Last night Bob was kidnapped when he went into the Food Right near his house,” I explained.
“By the bad guy? My god, Bob, how did you get away?” He sat up straighter in his chair.
Bob shook his head. Kay said, “No, he was taken at gunpoint by a woman. We don’t know who she is but we think she must be working with Walsh. Bob was able to hypnotize her into a deep sleep and get away, and Louisa and I found him in an old barn near his house when we were going to get Louisa’s car.”
“Ah, Louisa’s car.” Ambrose looked at me. “I was a trifle surprised to see you arrive here this morning with the two dogs in a taxi. What happened to your car?”
Why do people always ask you a question just as you’ve taken a bite of food? I’ve long been convinced that waiters are trained to do it—they sweep by and ask “Is everything all right?” just as you’ve inserted your fork into your mouth, so you can only mumble, and they sweep away again, leaving you no chance to say anything, and your only opportunity to ask for a clean knife or another napkin is gone. This didn’t seem like the time to ask Ambrose if he had ever worked as a waiter. I held up my hand to indicate I needed a moment, and Kay jumped in.
“Louisa was waiting in Bob’s car last night when he went into the grocery store. She saw him come out and drive away in the other woman’s car. She went to Bob’s house this morning to see if he was back, and while she was there she saw a strange man searching her car.”
“Which, if I'm remembering correctly, looks exactly like Bob’s car,” Ambrose said.
“Right. We assume he thought he was searching Bob’s, but his is still parked in Louisa’s garage. When Louisa saw the guy at her car, she ran out the back door with the dogs and got lost in the woods and eventually got to a phone and called a cab and came here, which is when you saw her.”
She made me sound like an idiot, and I knew I'd certainly looked like one when I arrived at her store. “It wasn’t just the woods,” I said, “it was him searching in the barn while we were hiding behind the hay bales—”
Bob looked upset. “I still can't believe he came so close to finding you in the barn.”
“—and that neighborhood with all those stupid curving streets that look alike. I thought we’d never find our way out. It was almost worse than being in the woods.”
Ambrose peered at me with real sympathy. “That must have been frightening, Louisa, though I don’t think either of these dogs would let anyone harm you.” He added judiciously, “And I’ve been lost in places like that neighborhood myself. Believe me, you were lucky to escape merely damp and with a cab bill.”
“Uh, thanks,” was all I could come up with. The image of Ambrose lost in a suburban housing tract beggared the imagination.
Kay swept on. “When we got to Bob’s house we were just in time to see the woman in red—”
“Woman in red?” Ambrose repeated.
“She was wearing a red suit when she marched me out of the grocery store,” Bob explained.
“Only when we saw her again she’d changed clothes and had on a red plaid shirt,” I added.
Ambrose nodded. “I see. Go on, please.”
“Thank you. I will.” Kay glared at Bob and me. I forbore to point out that it was Ambrose who had interrupted her. “We arrived just in time to see this woman drive off in Louisa’s car. I called Ed, I mean the police, but we haven’t heard anything about the car yet. We came back here and made Bob tell us what’s going on.”
“We wanted to watch the tape of Ian’s hypnosis session,” I added.
“Which I hid in Kay’s store,” said Bob. “I was afraid that Carl would catch up with me sooner or later. There would be no reason for him to look here for the tape.”
“And when we went downstairs to get it, we learned he’d hidden it in the Albatross, which you picked up this morning,” Kay said. “So now we need to get the tape back. And we’re waiting to hear from the police about Louisa’s car, and we’re waiting for another shoe to drop. We don’t know when or where Carl or the woman in red will show up.”