Dead in Hog Heaven (A Thea Barlow Mystery, Book Three) Page 13

  "Thea, I'm sorry. I don't know what to do."

  "You don't need to do anything. I just want some sympathy," I said into his shoulder, being only partly facetious. His arms felt good around me, but it didn't last long enough.

  He turned me loose and strode to the phone. "I'm calling Rusty." His voice deepened in agitation. "This has got to stop. I'm not going to let them harass you."

  It took five frustrating minutes to finally get Rusty on the line. By that time Max was in quite a state. His brusque demands quickly led to a one-sided conversation. Not Max's side. More quietly he asked about Ronnie Mae, and if Rusty knew about my house being broken into.

  When Max finally replaced the receiver, his usually somber face had turned even darker and more disturbed. He gave me a bleak look and ran his fingers through his hair. "He's playing his cards close to his chest. The rumors about Ronnie Mae are true, but that's all he'd say, 'There is evidence of foul play.' He wants to see both of us at his office tomorrow at one o'clock. Sounded official to me. I suppose it's this Ronnie Mae thing," he added gloomily. "And he said to leave the house as much 'as is' as possible so he can get a look at it himself, but he can't do it until tomorrow. He did seem concerned about the break-in."

  "So I'm going to be questioned again?"

  "Me too," Max said gently, trying to soften the blow, make it seem less threatening.

  But I wasn't fooled. I was still right up there at the top of the list. I headed toward the bedroom. Regardless of what the sheriff said, I needed to restore some order, get rid of the snaky feeling of invasion that was so upsetting.

  But Max stopped me. "No, wait a minute, Thea. Come and sit down. Let's try to figure this thing out. Who could have ransacked the house? And why? What was the purpose?"

  "Isn't it obvious?" Wearily, I joined him on the sofa. "The people here hate me and want me out of town. Remember those kids last night, the two older ones on bicycles? This would be right up their alley, and that mess in the kitchen smacks of kid vandalism. What else could it be?"

  "I don't know, but it seems to me that if it had been kids, or one kid, he would have run when you surprised him, particularly since he got your face covered with the quilt. Those rabbit punches," he said, darkly, "imply a more serious intent."

  I hadn't thought of that, nor could I argue the point. I had felt that awful strength and deadly intent; only the confined space and awkwardness of the cumbersome quilt had prevented him from succeeding.

  "But what else could it be if we eliminate burglary and malicious vandalism?"

  "Mmm," Max threw his head back and thought a moment.

  Which was more than I did. My mind was functioning like a giant hairball.

  "Could the guy have been looking for something? Something specific?" he said with as much disbelief as I felt considering the idea.

  "Well, of course he could have been, but what? What could I have, or what could anyone possibly think that I have that they would want so desperately?"

  "Beats me. I don't know. Let's look again."

  We took another dismal tour of the trashed rooms, staring at the tiny drawers from my jewelry box overturned on the dresser, the ravaged cubbyholes in the office, and the ungodly shambles in the kitchen, as if we were expecting enlightenment from a drying slice of rye.

  "I don't care what the sheriff says, I can't stand this mess." I slid the bread, crackers, wrappers and empty boxes into the wastebasket. The jars of mustard and mayonnaise had as much of their contents on the outside as the inside. I contemplated them and the disgusting knife and decided to leave them where they were. They might well have useful fingerprints on them.

  Max studied the room with a bemused look.

  I picked the sugar bowl lid up from the floor, replaced it, and put the bowl back in the cupboard where it belonged. "I don't know, Max, I don't think we can make anything more out of this than..." I stopped and stared at the tiny piles of sugar I was about to scoop off the counter into my hand, then reached up, got the bowl back out and set it on the counter again. It was nearly full. I stuck my finger in the sugar and stirred it around as if feeling for something. Little streams of sugar dribbled over the rim and formed the same kind of tiny piles that were already on the counter.

  "Look at this, Max."

  Max came over to stand by my side. "What?"

  "I think the guy was looking in the sugar bowl for something." I moved the bowl, demonstrated again and pointed to the evidence. "And if he were," I said thoughtfully, "it had to be a very small something."

  "All right, " Max crowed. "You've got it. That's what's been bothering me in this room. I knew we were missing something." He opened the cupboard doors and refrigerator and began pulling out items. "Look. The only things he tampered with were already open. He didn't bother anything that was sealed, because nothing could be hidden in them."

  "He thought something could be hidden in the mustard?"

  "Yes, or in with the crackers, or," he pointed to the sink, "frozen in the ice cubes. He must have used the knife to probe in the jars."

  "But what? What could he have been looking for?"

  "We'll figure it out. At least we're making progress." He gave me a quick kiss, then raised my face with a finger under my chin. "You've had a rough day, haven't you? Let's take a break." He took an unopened round of cheese from the refrigerator and tossed it to me. "Do you have any more crackers? I'll be right back." He went out to his truck and returned with a bottle of wine.

  "This was going to be a peace offering," he said a bit sheepishly. "Still is."

  This morning's rather heated tiff had completely lost its importance as far as I was concerned, but that didn't stop me from enjoying a bit of intense making up, complete with enough mea culpas on both sides to last a lifetime, or at least until the next argument. But the respite was short. We took the crackers, cheese and wine into the living room and spread them out on the table in front of the sofa. Max downed half the cheese, a fistful of crackers, and a glass of wine while I still nibbled on my second cracker. His boundless appetite was a constant source of amusement and amazement for me.

  "Okay, Thea," he said, relishing the program and anxious to get on with it. "Just sit back and relax. I want you to try to re-live every minute since you got here. Somewhere along the line we should get a clue as to what this character is looking for."

  A daunting project, but the wine helped. After a hesitant start, it became easier as I went through everything that happened from my first stop at Hog Heaven, to the City Hall visit, the wake, or whatever that was, at the sheriff's house, bringing us up to yesterday, a day I really had no desire to relive.

  Reluctantly, with a few more sips of wine to bolster me, I began. "Clyde was leaving just as I got to Hog Heaven. He waved and told me that Opal was waiting for me, or expecting me, I can't remember which. I assumed he meant in their house, and that's where I went. Come to think of it, I'm sure Clyde saw me heading in that direction. He must have thought Opal was there, too, or surely he would have told me to go somewhere else."

  "But she wasn't there," Max said, prodding me along.

  "No." I told him how I had called out to Opal and waited awkwardly inside the front door. "Then I knocked over this bowl of rocks that was on a table by the door."

  "Rocks?"

  "Polished stones. You know, agates, quartz, obsidian. Tourist stores usually have bins of them that they sell for a few cents apiece. I can never resist running my fingers through them. It was pretty embarrassing. They scattered all over the floor and I had to get down on my hands and knees to pick them up, along with the other stuff."

  "What other stuff?"

  "You know how it is with bowls that sit out for awhile. Other stuff gets dumped in them. There were a couple of paper clips, rubber bands, and some wadded-up gum wrappers. I put the stones back in the bowl, the rubber bands and paper clips on the table, and looked for a wastebasket to dump the wrappers, but I didn't see one, and about that time I finally realized that Opa
l wasn't in the house."

  "So what did you do with them?"

  "What?"

  "The gum wrappers."

  "Well, I don't know. I..."

  "You didn't find a wastebasket?"

  "No. I guess I just dropped them in my pocket."

  "Do you still have them?"

  "I suppose they're still in my pocket. You can't think they have any significance. It was just trash, Max."

  He shrugged. "Well, so far it's the only thing that you've picked up or taken since you got here that hasn't been food. Maybe something is written on one of the wrappers," he said dispiritedly. He had lost his exuberance in all the minutia. "Let's take a look, anyway."

  The pile of dirty clothes from the back of my closet was scattered across the bedroom floor. I wasted a few minutes looking for the shorts, before I saw the beige slacks with the elastic waistband. "I forgot," I said, picking them up. "The sheriff impounded my clothes, but I think I switched some stuff from my pockets."

  "He let you clean out your pockets? Some search."

  "It wasn't like that," I said, remembering the nerve-wracking ordeal. "It wasn't him, anyway. It was Rhonda. It just kind of happened, I guess." I pulled the crumpled tissue, change, and—yes!—the wadded-up gum wrappers from the pockets. I held them up. "They're here."

  "Good." Max urged me back into the living room. I think he found the violated room as uncomfortable as I did.

  We sat back on the sofa and put our pitiful treasure on the coffee table. Max straightened out one of the gum wrappers, I took another. He looked at both sides of the paper and threw it down, disgusted. "So much for that," he said.

  "This has something in it." I expected to find a hardened wad of used gum, but a pale chunk of glass dropped into my hand. Vaguely rounded with one flat side, it could have been a chip off the lip of a Coke bottle, except the surface was roughened with tiny bumps. "Piece of glass," I said, and dropped it in Max's palm.

  He turned it with his fingers, took a jackknife from his pocket and tried to mark it with the blade. Switching on the lamp beside the sofa, he stood and held the piece between his thumb and forefinger directly in the light, peering closely.

  "Shit, Thea," he said excitedly, "this isn't a piece of glass. It's a diamond!"

  Chapter 15

  "A diamond!" I said. "Are you sure?"

  "Not absolutely, but I'd bet a small fortune on it. Come look. I'd stake my life that these bumps are striations, marks of crystal growth. Do you have a magnifying glass?"

  I shook my head.

  "What we really need is a microscope, anyway."

  "See if it will scratch glass."

  "Everyone thinks that's a test for diamond, but it's not. Glass isn't high enough up on the hardness scale for diamond. Diamond will scratch glass, but so will quartz, topaz and all the corundum's, like sapphire. Nothing will scratch diamond except diamond, and diamond will scratch all the others."

  "What about the knife? Was that a test?"

  "More force of habit than accurate test. It's the same problem. The knife blade isn't hard enough. It didn't mark this stone, but there are a lot of others it wouldn't have marked either. The most important thing is that the stone's shape is right, Thea." Again, he held it directly in the light. "Crystallography was never my strong point, in fact that's probably one of the reasons I went into petroleum geology, but some things stick in your mind, anyway. I do remember that diamonds can form in cubic shapes, others as well, but cubic is one of the easier crystal shapes to identify."

  I peered over his arm. The stone was, indeed, a small squarish lump. About the size of my middle fingernail, it was also dull and, well, glassy looking, but when he turned it under the light, brilliant flashes of color leaped from the bumpy surface. I caught my breath.

  "Wow, Max, is it worth a lot of money?" Panic set in. "I mean, I took it. Someone could say I stole it. That's all I need now. Oh, no! Do you suppose it could be twisted into a motive for me killing Opal?" I felt physically sick with apprehension.

  I motored on, all my anxiety pouring out my mouth. Visions of death row and me in an orange jumpsuit danced through my head. I paced the floor. "I need to return it. I could give it to Clyde. Or the sheriff? Or maybe I can just sneak it back into that bowl of stones. Clyde invited me out to see him. He wants me to sell that article on hog ranches, and I could just sneak it back in the bowl and—"

  "Hang on, Thea," Max said. He grabbed my shoulders, stopping me mid-pace, then slid his hands around and massaged the nape of my neck. "Just hang on a minute." I was actually wringing my hands. He sat me back down on the sofa and poured some more wine.

  "First off, we don't know positively that it's a diamond. If it is, it could be worth a lot, or very little. Depends if it's gem quality or not, and a lot of other things. Either way it seems strange that it would be wadded up in a gum wrapper and stuck in that bowl, don't you think?"

  "Unless someone wanted to hide it." His reasonableness calmed my rattled nerves, and I got interested in the puzzle again.

  I took the stone from Max and put it on my palm, bouncing it a bit to view all the angles. For something with such an exalted name, it didn't look like much, but I knew from my previous experience with jade that what might be ugly on the outside could, with a bit of cutting and polishing, be gloriously beautiful on the inside. Something humans and the mineral kingdom had in common.

  I rolled the stone a few more times, thinking potential. Small, I thought, if one were considering cherries or kumquats, but as far as diamonds go... If it were gem quality, and too much didn't get lopped off in the cutting and polishing, to my eye, it would still make a big honker of a ring, at least for my pocket-book. Elizabeth Taylor would have sneered at it, I'm sure. But what were we talking about? Two, maybe three carats?

  "And you think this is what our ransacker was after," I said, more as a statement than a question.

  "Seems like a good bet if we were right in our deduction that he was looking for a small object. Our man did seem to concentrate his search on smaller hiding places: your jewelry box, drawers, cubbyholes."

  "Mustard jars and sugar bowls." I was getting a lot of good ideas about where to hide my jewels if I ever needed to—if I ever had any, except, of course, this particular burglar knew all the tricks, too. "And the diamond would have disappeared in a cloudy ice cube, without the wrapper, that is." I looked up, struck with a flash of intuition. "He didn't know about the gum wrapper, Max, so he wasn't the one who hid it in the bowl of stones. It must have been either Clyde or Opal."

  "Because it was in their house? Could have been Dan, he's probably in and out of there pretty often."

  "Or Ronnie Mae," I added, "depending on how long the diamond has been in the bowl. I guess almost anyone with the opportunity could have put it there. What we really need to know is who's searching for it. I can eliminate Clyde because he was at the restaurant with me."

  "And Opal is dead."

  "And Ronnie Mae."

  We were silent for a moment.

  "That leaves Dan," I said. I tried to remember what it had been like wrestling with the unknown man, the quilt drawn tightly over my head. Had I seen, felt, heard anything that could help identify him? Could it have been Dan?

  Max watched me closely, as if reading my thoughts.

  I sighed. "It could have been Dan, or any one of a hundred other people. I honestly don't remember anything other than fear. But that doesn't rule him out. And don't forget my car," I added, just remembering it myself. "Someone tossed my car, too. That could have been Dan. In fact, it had to be either him or the mysterious other person in a truck that Clyde claims to have seen. No one else was there. Was he looking for the diamond then, too?" I pondered this a moment. "What I really can't understand, Max, is why Dan, or whoever this person is who likes to throw my belongings around, thought I had the diamond in the first place. I mean, I didn't know I had it. Why would he think that I, a stranger, who had only been in town a few days, had his precious diamo
nd? And be right?"

  "Mmm," Max said, muddling along with me. "Proximity? Because you were at Hog Heaven? You were in Opal's house?"

  "Or," I said slowly, trying to think it through objectively, "maybe he doesn't believe I'm just an innocent 'stranger.' Maybe he thinks I came to town with an agenda, or some other purpose." The thought drifted away like an expiring wisp of smoke. I couldn't quite follow it through.

  Silence descended. Nothing made sense to me. We were trying to think something through when we didn't have a clue. Or at least I didn't. I needed something more to eat, I thought.

  I went to the kitchen, opened the cupboards and stared blankly at their contents, then opened the fridge and stared at its contents, but my brain wasn't about to switch to culinary objectives. I settled for peanut butter and jelly bagel sandwiches for two and brought them to the sofa. Max didn't blink an eye, just ate as if it were gourmet fare and contentedly washed it down with wine. I dearly loved the man.

  "My problem, Max," I said, returning to our previous conversation, "is I don't know what we're really talking about. Are we saying that all of this is directly involved in Opal's death? That the same person who killed Opal ransacked my house and maybe my car, too, looking for the diamond? If so, was Opal killed because of this miserable piece of stone? And what about Ronnie Mae?"

  I struggled with another bite of the incredibly chewy bagel. "I mean, we're not talking about the Cullinan, or the Heart of India, or whatever those humongous rocks in the crown jewels are called. Even if this diamond were top quality, it wouldn't be worth enough to kill for, would it?"

  Max had been leaning forward, arms braced on his legs, head in hands, deep in thought. Finally he raised his head and stared at me. "It depends on the purpose of the stone. As is, if the quality is there, a nice specimen, worth hundreds, maybe. I don't know prices, but at the most, I'd say only two or three thousand. But if this stone's existence means there's a potential diamond mine on the Bodies' land, then it could be worth millions. Lots of millions."