Page 55 of Wham Line
“The night Mal was murdered.He went in through a side door.”
“He told me he was sitting in his car.”
Larry snorted.“He wasn’t anywhere near his car.And I’ll tell you something else: yesterday, before Sparkie started going on and on about how she knew who the killer was, she told me she’d caught Jethro going through her purse.”
“Why would Jethro be going through her purse?”
Larry shrugged and sat back.He flipped his notebook shut.
I opened my mouth to ask another question, and my phone buzzed.I went to dismiss it, but when I saw Fox’s name on the screen, I stopped.
“Excuse me,” I said.“I have to take this.”
I answered as I stepped outside; even under that low, gloomy sky, the day’s relative brightness made me blink, and the breeze off the ocean sliced along the back of my neck.“What happened?Is everything—”
“The sheriff is going to arrest Indira,” Fox said.
“What?”I glanced up and down the pier.“Where are you?Is she arresting Indira right now?”
“No.”Fox sounded out of breath, and noises from the other end of the call suggested movement.To someone else, away from the phone, they said, “Hurry.”
“Fox, what’s going on?Is the sheriff there?Let me talk to her—”
“The sheriff isn’t here yet, but we only have a few minutes.The fingerprints came back on the gun, and they’re a match.Thank God I have my sources.”Again, they spoke away from the phone: “Hurry!”When their voice came back, the timbre was different: high and strained.“We appreciate everything you’ve done for us, but you don’t need to worry anymore.”
“What does that mean?Fox, put Indira on the phone.We all need to calm down and think clearly about this.Let’s talk to Bobby—”
“Goodbye, Dash.Thank you for trying.”
And then the call disconnected.
Chapter 14
I called Fox.
They didn’t answer.
I called Indira.
Nothing.
I looked for Keme and Millie, but they were gone.I tried their phones, and they didn’t answer either.
When I turned to say goodbye to Larry, he was leaning on the refrigerated display case, pointing to one of the fish as he said something to a woman who must have been from out of town.
I jumped in the Malibu andflewback to Hemlock House.A part of me wanted to call Bobby—if the sheriff was going to arrest Indira, maybe he could talk to her.But that was a childish hope.Bobby couldn’t tell the sheriff what to do.And anyway, Sheriff Acosta was a good sheriff; if she thought she needed to arrest Indira, it was because she had evidence she could no longer explain away or ignore.Say, for example, Indira’s fingerprints on the murder weapon.
Indira, I thought as I drove, what did you do?
When I got to Hemlock House, it was stark and black against the gray sky.No sign of Fox’s van.No sign of Millie’s Mazda3 either.When I went into the coach house, no cars were parked inside.I ran up the stairs and pounded on Indira’s door.No answer.I tried the handle, and it turned.
Inside, the rooms looked as neat as they had on my last visit: everything in its place, everything tidy.No drawers hanging open.No piles of sentimental trinkets that had been gathered and then abandoned.No signs, in other words, that someone living here had packed up and run.But no Indira.No Fox.
I tried Hemlock House next, wandering through the high-ceilinged rooms, calling out names.The lamps and chandeliers were dark, and I was in too much of a rush to turn them on, so I moved through the house in the hazy gray light that filtered in through the windows.It gave the house new shadows and made familiar rooms strange.It was like coming back after a long time.Or like something out of one of those post-apocalyptic movies, where a house looks exactly as it did the day everyone disappeared—a blanket that had slid halfway off the chesterfield; a glass of water left on the kitchen counter; Bobby’s Adidas on the tray near the back door.
The sound of the front door opening echoed through the house.
Maybe they'd realized they’d made a mistake.
