"I don't want to call again. Let's take the rug up."
Within ten minutes they had the wet rug up. Moving the car and truck, they spread it across the parking apron as if carpeting the driveway for royalty. While they were thus occupied, and Joe watched from the living room windows, Dulcie found Hanni's purse in the kitchen and pawed inside searching for Hanni's cell phone.
Not there.
The Landeau phone stood on the kitchen counter right above her, but she daren't use it. Even as Joe stood watch, Ryan and Hanni returned to the house.
"They were here," Ryan grumbled, coming in. "And they spilled something. Did you tell Sullivan we're laying the new rug tomorrow?"
"I told him."
"Why didn't he tell you what they did? We can't lay the rug until we know for sure what this is. The only other possibility is groundwater, and I have a deep trench clear around the hillside. Maybe Marianna came down alone and didn't tell Sullivan."
Hanni raised an eyebrow.
"Have you checked your tape again? Maybe she left you a message."
Hanni just looked at her, her short white hair catching a gleam through the skylight.
"Call your tape. Where's your cell phone?"
"Forgot to charge it last night," Hanni said. "Left it home in the charger."
"If you'd get another battery…"
Hanni shrugged, and headed for the kitchen as Ryan stepped outside to stroke Rock. The dog glanced in toward the space behind the carved chest where the cats crouched, but then he grew rigid, looking nervously around the room and pulling to get inside. Hanni returned, looking at her watch.
"Marianna called my tape half an hour ago. Said she just woke up, said she was down day before yesterday and spilled a bottle of pinot noir, that she came down to tend to some errands and to arrange a birthday surprise for Sullivan-that it was too late to call me, that she hadn't told Sullivan she was down here and she knew I wouldn't spoil the surprise. She took a lot of time explaining it all," Hanni said, amused.
Ryan laughed. "So. Cold-blooded Marianna has a lover?"
Dulcie glanced at Joe, her green eyes equally amused. Sullivan Landeau was out of town a lot, was on the boards of half-a-dozen companies. She had heard Ryan and Clyde speculating on what Marianna did for entertainment.
"She said the wine bottle spun and fell before she could grab it, that there was wine everywhere, that she sopped it up with towels, and sponged the rug."
"Can you imagine Marianna Landeau sponging a rug?"
"Dallas was on my tape too. He has the report from ballistics. He wants you to go on back to your place, he'll meet you there."
Ryan had knelt to examine the wood floor. Looking up at Hanni, she stiffened. "Why my place, why not the station when it's only a few blocks away? Why doesn't he want me to come to the station?"
"He said he'd let himself in. Shall I come with you?"
"Why do I feel so cold? I have no reason to fear the ballistics report."
"You didn't kill him, so what's the big deal?"
Ryan rose, biting her lip. As they turned to leave, the cats slipped out past them and dropped into the bushes, moving so close to Rock they brushed against his leg, startling the big dog. They were concealed among the lavender bushes when Ryan undid Rock's leash.
Crossing to her truck as Hanni locked the house, Ryan was just getting into the cab when the Coldiron truck arrived, Louise driving. Hanni waved to her. "Good shopping?"
"Awesome," the little woman said, laughing.
"You want a rug for one of your rentals?" Hanni gestured toward the ten-by-ten square of beige shag. "It's nearly new. A bit damp. It smells like pinot noir."
"Added bonus," Louise said as Eby came up the drive.
The cats watched Ryan turn out onto the street as Louise and Eby and Hanni rolled up the rug. And still they hadn't called Dallas to tell him they'd seen the old man, to give the detective the make and license of the unlikely car Gramps was driving.
"Senior citizens," Ryan told the big silver dog as she turned out of the drive, glancing back at the Coldirons. 'Tough as old boots." Of the half-dozen older people she had met since she moved to the village, the Coldirons were not unusual. Theirs was a tough generation. She wondered if her own age group could half keep up with them, or with Charlie's gray-haired aunt Wilma who walked miles every day, and could hold her own on the pistol range. Or with Cora Lee French or with sixty-some Mavity Flowers who still did forty hours a week cleaning houses. "Those folks were the depression children, the children of war, the survivors," she told Rock. 'Tough as alligator hide." And she kept talking to the big dog to avoid thinking. She did not want to go home and face, Dallas's ballistics report.
"She's scared," Dulcie said, watching from the bushes as Ryan's red truck pulled away. "Scared to go home, afraid of what Dallas has found. If Rupert was shot with her stolen gun…"
"So someone set her up. Question is, what other contrived evidence did they leave for the police to find?" Joe watched Hanni help the Coldirons load the rug. When the truck and Hanni's Mercedes pulled away, he rubbed his face against a warm boulder then leaped atop the smooth granite, looking around the garden. "What was the dog on about? What did he smell?" He stood looking, then dropped down again and trotted back along the drive sniffing at the concrete.
He picked up Eby's scent, then that of Hanni and of the dog. He found the fainter scent, perhaps days old, of a woman, most likely Marianna Landeau. Nothing else. Whatever the dog had smelled, escaped him. His mind still on getting access to a phone and calling Dallas, he turned to look at Dulcie.
"It's only ten blocks to Ryan's place, and the day's getting warm. Maybe she'll leave the truck window down for a few minutes-right there in her own driveway. Maybe we can call Dallas while he's still at her apartment."
"Just a nice run," Dulcie said, and she took off through the woods heading downhill toward Ryan's duplex. Leaping bushes or brushing beneath them, she was thankful that she and Joe had been given more than the usual amount of feline stamina; most cats were sprinters, your average housecat was not made for long-distance running. Careening down the last hill to the back of Ryan's apartment and around to the front, she wasn't even panting hard.
A squad car sat in the drive beside Ryan's truck. The cats smelled fresh coffee. They circled both vehicles, but all the windows were up; and the covered door handles were beyond a cat's ability to manipulate. Joe leaped at them, trying, but it was no good. There was no chance of using either phone to call the detective. Joe gave her a sour look and they fled around the side of the duplex to the back, where the tiny bathroom window waited.
15
Leaping at the sill, Joe snatched and clung, hanging by his claws, peering down into the empty bathroom, then dropping to the sink and to the linoleum. As Dulcie followed, faintly they heard Ryan and Dallas talking, their voices so solemn that Dulcie shivered.
She liked Ryan Flannery; the young woman was bold and bright. She liked her because Clyde did, and because she was Dallas Garza's niece. Liked her because Ryan had taken hold of her life and straightened out the kinks, exercising an almost feline degree of sensible independence: If you're not welcome, if you're badly treated, make a new start on life.
Now that Ryan was just into her new life, she didn't need this malicious attempt to ruin her.
From behind, Joe nudged her. "Get a move on." She'd been crouched as still as if frozen at a mouse hole, overwhelmed by her own droughts. Trotting into the studio, out of sight of the kitchen, they slipped beneath Ryan's daybed.
The hardwood floor was admirably clean, no sneeze-making dust, not a fuzz ball in sight. That was another plus for Ryan. There was something really depressing about finding the underside of a couch thick with stalagmites of ancient, congealed dirt, the dusty floor littered with bobby pins, lost pencils, and old gum wrappers, with tangles of debris that clung to the whiskers or was gritty to the paws.