CHAPTER 20

   But Nellie turned out to be wrong. Although it was true that the general level of hilarity wasn’t up to that of previous years’ Weenie Roasts, Singalongs, and Chugalug Contests, there was an unmistakable crackle of lively interest in the air as people gathered in the cookout area near the crumbling, weedy tennis courts at seven o’clock. Even the qualmish presence of Farrell Honeyman, who had come to confer with John and had been induced to stay for the cookout, failed to dim the sparkle. The eyes of the younger members, in particular, returned again and again to the faces of the Founding Members, not so much with outright suspicion as with a kind of curious and speculative relish.

Julie, John, and Gideon, off to one side, surveyed the scene from the small rise on which the tennis courts were set. Below them the line at the barbecue pit, which Honeyman had just gone to join, was beginning to shorten as people got their steaks and found seats.

“Well, look at the bright side,” Julie said. “You’re not going to have any trouble getting a big registration for the 1993 conference.”

Gideon smiled. “Wouldn’t you love to have a booth selling buttons and T-shirts? ‘I survived 1991.’ You could make a fortune.”

He turned to John, who was looking glum. “No progress?”

John shook his head and sipped beer from a bottle. “Anything from the fingerprint people?”

“What can they tell us? There aren’t any fingerprints on the weapon, and finding prints on anything else doesn’t prove a thing. Everybody and his grandmother was in there playing poker Monday night.”

“Everybody but Frieda,” Julie said.

“Wrong,” John said. “She came in to drag Nellie out of there at about two in the morning, so she’s got an excuse for her prints being there too. Oh, one thing: we pinned down the time of death a little closer. Now it looks like Harlow bought it somewhere between four and five o’clock Wednesday afternoon.”

“How did you come up with that?” Gideon asked.

“One of the employees, the kid who brought around the towels.” He gestured with the bottle at a tall, skinny boy with a turned-around baseball cap, one of three people who were working at the barbecue pit and who was at that moment serving Honeyman his steak. “Him. He was there a couple of minutes before five, and the do-not-disturb sign was hanging on the door. I figure that’s got to mean Harlow was already dead, don’t you? I mean, why would Harlow put the sign out? He wouldn’t know anybody was coming around with towels.”

Gideon nodded. “True.”

“The employee,” Julie said. “Did he see anything?” “Nah, just the sign. He couldn’t see anything through the window. Come on, they’re starting to run out of steaks over there.”

They walked to the stone barbecue pit and got utensils and plastic plates from a table alongside it.

“Why couldn’t he see anything through the window?” Gideon asked. “I could see through the window.”

“Weil, there were those flowers right in front of it. They made it hard to look in.”

“But I looked in. I saw Harlow.”

John shrugged as he helped himself to a roll. “I guess he didn’t look as hard as you.”

“Were those his exact words? He couldn’t see anything?”

“Look—”John lowered his voice; they were approaching the boy. “This is not a particularly swift kid, you know? Words are not his thing. But go ahead and ask him, if it’s worrying you.”

“It’s not worrying me. I was just wondering.”

John had reached the boy, who was standing at the ready, tongs in hand, having just served Julie. “How’re you doing, Vinnie? Let me have that one on the side there.”

“It’s pretty well-done.”

“Great, that’s the way I like ’em.” He held out his plate. “And my associate here has something he wants to ask you.”

What he really wanted to ask him, Gideon thought, was why so many kids walked around with their baseball caps on backward, a fashion that had mystified him since the first time he’d seen it. Instead he said: “I understand you’re the one who left the linens at Cottage 18.”

The boy regarded him suspiciously.

“I understand you said you couldn’t see anything through the window.”

“That’s right. You want a steak? I’m not supposed to be talking to the customers.”

Gideon held out his plate while Vinnie dropped a huge T-bone into it. “What did you mean when you said you couldn’t see anything? You must have been able to see something.”

“I already told him,” Vinnie said, indicating John. “I didn’t look. There wasn’t no point.”

“Why wasn’t there any point?”

“Because,” Vinnie said, showing a streak of adolescent impatience with slowminded adults, “the blinds were down. I already told him that.”

There was a moment of startled silence before John said, “Uh, actually, I think you missed that little detail.” “Well, they were,” Vinnie said sullenly.

“You’re absolutely positive?” Gideon said. “They were down?”

“Well, jeez, I know what blinds look like.”

“All the way down?” John asked.

“Yeah, all the way down. I gotta go back to work. There’s more people.”

“Why all the fuss?” Julie asked as the three of them moved away from the pit. “Why is it so important that the blinds were down?”

“Because,” John said, coming to a standstill, “they were up when we found him. And if he really was dead when Vinnie was there, that means somebody must have come back later—before we found him—and raised them. Is that the way you see it too, Doc?”

“Mm.”

“Oh,” Julie said, chewing gently at her lip. “But that doesn’t make any sense. You mean somebody wanted the body to be found?”

“Looks like it,” John said.

“But then why not take down the do-not-disturb sign too?”

“You got me.”

“And why would the killer want the body to be found anyway? Wouldn’t he want to put it off as long as possible? Don’t all those gruesome pathological clues get harder and harder to figure out as time goes on?”

“Yeah, they do,” John said thoughtfully. “Everything does. You know, maybe it wasn’t the killer. Maybe—maybe what?”

John and Julie looked at each other and shook their heads. “Gideon,” Julie said, “you’re being awfully quiet.”

Gideon was being quiet because his mind was racketing along another track entirely, one that hadn’t even vaguely occurred to him before.

“I was just thinking…” he murmured. “What if those blinds didn’t really have anything to do with keeping people from seeing in? What if…I don’t know; I don’t quite have it worked out…”

“Hey there, you three,” Miranda called from a few feet away, “we can squeeze you in here if you don’t mind consorting with known suspects.”

And indeed, there they all were, lined up at a single table: Miranda, Callie, Les, Leland, Nellie, and Frieda.

“Thanks,” John said, “but I’ve still gotta talk to my compadre about a couple of things. You guys go ahead.” He headed for the next table, where Farrell was sitting.

Callie slid over so Julie had room next to her. Gideon sat around the corner from Julie, on her right, next to Leland. Frieda and Nellie were across the square table from him, with Les and Miranda on the fourth side.

“We have been driven to band together,” Leland said, “by the unrelenting scrutiny of our peers.” He looked sourly across at Callie. “We are now hard at work providing each other with a caring, nurturing environment in which to initiate the mind-body healing process.” Something in his voice suggested that the glass of white wine at his elbow was not his first.

Callie glowered briefly at him. “Do you suppose we could get the potato salad started around, please?”

Julie began to cut into her steak, then stopped and touched the back of Gideon’s hand. “Everything all right?” she asked quietly.

“What? Yes, fine, I was just thinking.” He sliced a wedge from his steak and began chewing.

The blinds, the blinds. Down shortly after Harlow’s death, up twenty-four hours later when he and John had found the body. All the way up, letting the sun pour in…

Julie passed him the big blue bowl of potato salad. “Thanks,” Gideon said absently and put it down without spooning any onto his plate.

The blinds—yes, sure, the blinds could have fooled them all; especially with a little help from the air-conditioning. But what about those Calliphora eggs? Surely there was no way to fake them, no way to alter the—

“Hey, if you’re not going to have any of that stuff, cover it up, will you?” Les said to him from the other side of Leland. “The flies are having a field day.”

“Oh—sure,” Gideon said. Mechanically, he began to tug at the plastic wrap that still covered half the bowl, pulling it down over the rim.

And then, suddenly, he was on his feet, almost upsetting the bench and Leland with it. “Plastic wrap!” he blurted.

Faces at nearby tables as well at their own turned toward him with varying expressions of astonishment.

“What did he say?” Frieda asked.

“I believe,” Miranda replied drily, “that he said ‘plastic wrap.’ I may be mistaken, however.”

But it was Callie that Gideon was looking at, and Callie who stared rigidly back at him, her long face frozen and waxy, her nostrils pinched. For a second their eyes locked, and then she was up too.

“Oh, no,” she said. “No, no, no. No, no, no.”

Even while rising she had been groping in her shoulder bag, and when her hand came out, it was clutching a squarish, compact handgun of dully gleaming black metal.

“This won’t do,” she said wildly, but not so wildly that she forgot to slide back the safety. “I can’t have this.”

The pistol’s muzzle swept the table erratically. A wave of flinches followed in its wake. Leland made a peeping noise, either of outrage or fright.

Callie said something unintelligible. The pistol came up a few inches, sleek and wavering, like the head of a snake homing in on its prey.

My God, Gideon thought, she’s going to kill herself. Right now.

“Callie, this is a bad idea,” he said calmly. He didn’t feel calm. His pulse was thumping in his temples. “This can be worked out, believe me. Just put—”

“Goddamn you, shut up!” she screamed. The pistol jerked spasmodically at him. Gideon, who hadn’t flinched before, flinched now.

Christ, it’s me she’s going to shoot, he thought, dry-mouthed. From five feet away the muzzle’s trembling aim fluttered from his throat to his chest. His mind groped sluggishly for action, for words.

“Callie, look—”

“Oh, you bastard,” she said. Her arm extended the gun closer to him, quivering but aiming directly at his left eye. He tensed himself to make a grab for her hand. It had to be now. The gun was four feet from him. He coiled, his stomach muscles tightening. Now—

Without warning, Julie, sitting on Callie’s right, brought her hand sharply down on Callie’s forearm in a concise, chopping movement. Callie’s fingers flew open. Her hand hit the table with a thump and bounced up, the pistol dangling by its trigger guard from her forefinger. With a grunt she tried to force it into her hand again, but Gideon had already launched himself over the table, arms extended, scattering plates and glasses.

His hand swooped down on the pistol, snaring it on the fly, like a brass ring on a merry-go-round, and flinging it away in the same motion. The other hand caught Callie at the base of the rib cage, and down she went like a bowling pin, hooked behind one knee by the bench. John, with one of those bursts of speed with which he sometimes amazed Gideon, was behind her the moment she hit the grass, hauling her roughly to her feet, practically on the rebound.

“What the hell is going on here?” His grip solidly encircled her upper arm. Somehow he’d picked up the pistol too, holding it not like a gun but like a parcel or a book, in his other hand.

Callie glared back at him, ashen-faced and twitchy, her lipstick askew. She said nothing.

An anxious Honeywell had appeared at the table, somewhat twitchy himself. “What is it? What’s going on? What’s happened now, for God’s sake?”

“Lieutenant, you’ll want to put Dr. Duffer here under arrest,” John said brusquely.

“Why?” the agitated Honeyman demanded. “What charge do I use? What the hell happened?”

“Hell, carrying a concealed weapon, ADW, intent to commit bodily harm, I don’t know; you come up with something.” He held the gun out to Honeyman, who looked as if it were the last thing in the world he wanted anything to do with, but took it anyway.

“And check her bag,” John said. “She might have another one stowed away.”

“But what the hell happened?” Honeyman asked. “What was this all about? All I saw was—I don’t know what I saw. What did I see?”

“Just do it, okay, Farrell? Trust me, I’ll explain later.” He glanced sideways at Gideon. “When I know what the hell happened,” he said under his breath.

When the dubious but eventually cooperative Honeyman began to read Callie her rights, before a subdued, growing crowd, John gestured with his chin toward the open lawn, away from the others. “Let’s go someplace where we can talk. My cottage.”

Gideon and Julie followed him there, Gideon wiping potato salad from the sleeve of his shirt. He caught Julie’s hand. She turned to look at him.

“Thanks,” he said.

She laughed, her face flushed and excited. “I’ll never complain again about having to take a forcible-restraint class. Oh, boy, my heart’s still in my mouth.”

John smiled at her. “You did good, Julie.”

“We all did pretty good,” she said, laughing.

Nobody said anything else until they got to the cottage. Then John closed the door behind them and studied Gideon for several seconds, his hands on his hips, head cocked.

“Plastic wrap?” he said.