Murder Among Us (A Kate Austen Mystery) Page 10

  Not that I minded. My heart wasn’t into shopping. The news of Julie’s death had settled over me like a damp gray fog. I was grateful for Sharon’s company and the semblance of activity. But I didn’t much care what direction it took.

  “How’d you manage to free yourself from mother-in- law duty tonight?” Sharon asked, pausing to hold a mauve and black print silk scarf against her skin. “What do you think? Are the tones right for my coloring, or do they make me look washed out?”

  “It’s good.”

  She picked up the same print in emerald green and draped it over my shoulder. “Take a look in the mirror, Kate. This is you. It looks terrific with your eyes.”

  I love the way scarves look on other women, but I can never wear them myself without feeling like I’ve been gift-wrapped. Nonetheless, Sharon was right about the color. And the material was luxurious—lightweight and soft. I checked the price tag and gagged.

  “This is definitely not me,” I told her.

  “You have to pamper yourself sometimes, validate your own worth.”

  “You could pamper a starving village for what that scarf costs.”

  Sharon sighed. “You’re hopeless.”

  “Just impoverished.”

  She held up the mauve scarf again and frowned. “So tell me how come you’re not home cooking something for Faye to turn up her nose at?”

  “She wasn’t hungry. I shamed Andy into taking her out to lunch today.”

  Sharon returned the scarf to its hanger. “That’s an oxymoron. Andy’s beyond shaming.”

  “In any case, he took her to lunch. Did it up royally, from what Faye said.”

  “Well, the last part doesn’t surprise me. Was Andy always such a no-account?”

  “Probably, but it took me a while to see past his good looks and charm.” And I still wasn’t entirely immune to them. Not that I had any regrets about divorcing Andy. But I sometimes thought separating from him would have been easier if he’d been a bit more of a scoundrel. Bottom line is, Andy’s a decent person—as long as it doesn’t put him out any.

  Sharon glanced at her watch. “Are you up for a quick stop at the shoe department? I need a pair of comfortable heels in something other than black.”

  “Comfortable heels. Talk about an oxymoron.”

  We made our way past purses and jewelry to women’s shoes, where the merchandise most prominently displayed looked anything but comfortable. I nodded to a rack of platform sling-backs with thick, block-like heels. They reminded me of the shoes Miss Grundy wore back when I read Archie comics as a kid.

  “How about these?” I asked.

  Sharon snorted. Instead, she picked up a stylish gray suede pump and was immediately approached by a smiling salesman.

  “I’d like to try this on,” Sharon said. “Seven and a half, narrow.”

  As soon as the man was out of earshot, I leaned closer. “That was Dennis Shepherd,” I whispered.

  “Who?”

  “The girl who was murdered, Julie Harmon? He’s the son of the couple she was living with.”

  “The one who brings his laundry home for Mom?”

  I nodded, remembering that Dennis had said he worked at Macy’s. Nonetheless, the women’s shoe department was a surprise.

  Dennis returned with a stack of boxes. “We don’t have that particular shoe in your size,” he explained. “I brought an eight in the shoe you liked, and if it’s close, I can always add a wedge in the back to make it a little snugger. I’ve also brought out some similar styles that we do have in your size.”

  He set the boxes at Sharon’s feet and gave me an odd look. There was a flicker of recognition in his eyes, coupled with uncertainty. “You look familiar,” he said after a moment. “Have I waited on you before?”

  I hesitated, then shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  Dennis frowned. “I never forget feet, but I’m not so good with faces.” He flexed his knees and squatted at Sharon’s feet. “I could swear I’ve seen you before though.”

  Sharon cleared her throat, bidding for his attention. “Let me try the suede pump first.”

  He obliged by slipping off her loafer and delicately positioning her foot in the pump. He took his time, adjusting the fit. “There, how’s that feel?” he asked, pulling himself upright.

  She stood. “A little loose.”

  “It’s the wrong shoe for you anyway,” Dennis said, straightening his tie. His white shirt was no longer crisp. It pulled at the shoulders and across his middle, and was damp under the arms. “You have a classic foot. Slender, high arches, long toes. Not bony, not too full. Let me show you a shoe that will give you a better fit.”

  Sharon sat down again and Dennis bent over her foot like Prince Charming with the glass slipper. “There, give that a try.” He looked up at me. “You sure I didn’t sell you that pair of patent-leathers with an ankle strap?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t worn patent leather since grade school.”

  Sharon took a few steps in the shoe he suggested, then slipped on another pair. Dennis was polite and helpful, an ardent sales representative without being pushy. And he certainly knew shoes. But his manner made me uncomfortable.

  When he trotted off to fetch a different size, Sharon whispered in my ear. “Aren’t you going to talk to him about the murder?”

  “What’s there to talk about?”

  “The guy’s a little weird, don’t you think?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So don’t you want to get his reaction?”

  “I can’t just bring it up, out of the blue.”

  Dennis returned with another stack of boxes. He cradled Sharon’s ankle, lifted her foot to his knee, and slipped off the too-tight shoe. Sharon leaned forward, then made a production of reading his name tag.

  “Dennis Shepherd,” she said slowly. “Now talk about familiar. I know I’ve heard that name recently. You didn’t just win some big sales award, did you?”

  Dennis looked bewildered. “No.”

  Sharon scrunched her nose and brows in thought. “Shepherd . . . Shepherd.” She paused and then her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh my God, how crass of me. It was in connection with that poor girl who was murdered. It’s not the same family, I hope.”

  Bewilderment gave way to embarrassment. “My parents. She lived with them.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. My mouth just goes off before I think.”

  “That’s okay. She wasn’t really part of the family or anything.”

  “I seem to remember that she was a relative.”

  “What I meant was, we hardly knew her before she moved here.” He scratched his neck. “She was a nice kid though. I’m going to miss her.”

  Nice kid? Miss her? This wasn’t the picture he’d painted last week.

  Sharon murmured sounds of sympathy. “Do you think they’ll find her killer?”

  “Who knows? Me, I’m not holding my breath.” Dennis smoothed his fingers against the toe of the shoe and then across the instep. His face was flushed. “How do these feel?”

  “Great,” Sharon announced. “I think I’ll take them.” Once we were outside, she turned to me. “Well, I’ll say one thing for your friend Dennis, he knows how to fit shoes.”

  “He’s not my friend.”

  She clucked her tongue. “Figure of speech, Kate.”

  “Just don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

  Sharon ignored me. “You do have to wonder, though, about a guy who sells women’s shoes for a living.” She paused to grin. “Maybe it’s a Freudian thing—straddling those shoe department benches, women’s feet pointed at your crotch all day. Talk about job satisfaction.”

  “Only you would come up with an observation like that!”

  “You have to agree that Dennis is into feet. He even said so himself. Wasn’t so good with faces but never forgot a pair of feet.”

  From the depths of my subconscious came the ghost of a thought. Muted and only half-formed, it squiggled slo
wly to the surface. Feet. Women’s shoes. A history of emotional problems. Perhaps Dennis was simply devoted to his job, but maybe there was more to it.

  “Julie Harmon’s shoes were missing,” I told Sharon.

  “What do you mean, missing?”

  “When she was murdered. She was fully clothed but her shoes were missing. Her toenails were painted and her feet were encased in plastic wrap. The same with Cindy Purcell. There’s been speculation that the killer has a foot fetish.”

  Sharon’s expression was grim, as though I’d just pointed out a worm in her apple. “Are you suggesting that the man who just spent half an hour fondling my foot might be a . . . a murderer?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything, simply making an observation. And I’ll make another one as well. When Michael and I talked to Dennis less than a week ago, he told us that Julie was a stuck-up brat. Today he says she was a nice kid.”

  “Terrific,” Sharon said. “I finally find a pair of shoes that feel like they were made for me, and now I’m going to feel the shadow of death every time I wear the damn things.”

  I tried reaching Michael when I got home, but he wasn’t at work and he wasn’t at Don’s apartment. I grumbled under my breath. Bad enough that I missed the pleasure of his company, I was discovering that having him live elsewhere was also a major inconvenience. It struck me how easily I’d grown accustomed to the routine of our life together. What I didn’t know was whether that was a mark of true love or merely testimony to the fact that I’m a creature of habit.

  Anna and Faye were in the living room playing Chutes and Ladders, a game that severely taxes my patience. Max had been relegated to the laundry room; Libby had chosen to retreat to her bedroom. I decided to take advantage of the quiet, and curl up in bed with a book.

  I stopped by Libby’s room on the way there. She pulled the headphones from her ears and looked up.

  “Did you and Skye have a nice dinner?” I asked.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Lobster Thermidor. From freezer to microwave to table in under fifteen minutes. It tasted like that gluey macaroni and cheese that Anna loves so much.”

  “How’d it go with the piece on Julie the two of you were going to write?”

  “We got through a rough draft, sort of.” Libby hit the pause button on her disk player. “Skye isn’t much of a writer. It would have been easier to do the whole thing myself.”

  “I didn’t know that she and Julie were friends.”

  “They weren’t. Not close friends, I mean. But the last couple of weeks they started to kind of pal around together. It didn’t make a lot of sense since they’re so different. They didn’t even have any classes together.” Libby paused, looking grim. “All I know is that at the time I was happy to see Julie latch on to someone besides me.”

  This last was said with remorse that pained me. I took a seat on the bed next to her. “You are not responsible for what happened to Julie. You were asked to show her around, to be there in the beginning as a familiar face. Nobody expected you to be her constant buddy.”

  “Maybe if I’d asked her to come to the game with us, though, this wouldn’t have happened. I knew she didn’t have any real friends of her own.”

  “There are always ‘what ifs,’ honey. It doesn’t take much to have twenty-twenty hindsight.”

  Libby rocked back against the wall and circled her knees with her arms. “I don’t understand how it could have happened. A person couldn’t just drive up and snatch her away. It would have been light still, and there are always people on that stretch of road. Julie wouldn’t have taken a ride with a stranger, either. She was probably more cautious than most of us.”

  I’d found myself bothered by the same thought. Yet it had happened to other women; women older and more experienced than Julie. “Sometimes all it takes is a moment of letting your guard down,” I told her.

  “That’s what Skye says. That things change in a flash, in ways you least expect.”

  “Or maybe Julie really did decide to leave home, and she ran into trouble later, somewhere else.” Or maybe, I added silently, she’d taken a ride with someone she trusted. “Did Julie ever mention the Shepherds’ son, Dennis?”

  Libby thought for a moment, frowned. “The name’s familiar so I guess she did. But I don’t remember what she said. It must have been one of the zillion times I tuned her out.”

  There was only so much I could do to talk Libby out of the hair shirt. This time I passed. “Do you remember the general context of the conversation? Like whether Julie was complaining about Dennis or sounding friendly towards him?”

  Libby shook her head. “More like he was just there. I mean, he wasn’t really. He lives in Berkeley. But I got the feeling he was around a lot. Why?”

  “Sharon and I ran into him tonight when we were shopping. He’s a shoe salesman at Macy’s.”

  “Yeah, now I remember. We saw him once at the mall. Julie pointed him out to me.”

  “And?”

  She looked at me blankly. “And he was selling shoes. What did you expect?”

  It was apparently a rhetorical question because Libby seemed satisfied with my noncommittal shrug.

  I left Libby to her homework and her music, and settled in with my book. Half an hour later Anna came to say goodnight, and Faye trundled off to bed not long after.

  Even though I felt exhausted, I was awake long after the house was quiet. And when I did finally drift away, it was to a world steeped in the shapeless illogic of dreams.

  Julie had the lead role. The images flashed, one after the other. Sometimes distinct, sometimes blending layer upon layer.

  Julie’s lifeless remains transmuted before my eyes into a black-cloaked skeleton. Julie and Mario with heads bent, speaking in a foreign tongue. Julie alone, slouching before me, her blue eyes serious and somber.

  She gives me a painting of herself, a work of remarkable insight and talent. A modern-day Mona Lisa that seems to vibrate with enchantment. And then, like melting paraffin, the eyes and nose and mouth lose their shape and blur to nothingness. The featureless face slides from the page. Finally, all that remains is a single hand, reaching into the blank sheet of paper, like a hapless soul drowning at sea. From behind me, Libby calls out, “Help her, Kate. Grab her hand and pull her back.” I turn to search for Libby, who is nowhere to be seen. When I look back at the painting, the hand is gone as well.

  And then Julie is beside my bed, a shadow without form. “Can I talk to you, Ms. Austen?”

  “Maybe later,” I tell her, although my mouth does not move. “I’m busy, can’t you see.”

  The shadow ignores my response and climbs into bed anyway.

  The stirring of warm breath on my neck pulled me from slumber. Although the sky was still black, the birds had begun to sound the coming day. I awoke to envelop my daughter as she snuggled against me.

  Chapter 14

  Michael returned my call later that morning. I was in the kitchen making Anna’s lunch and caught the phone on the second ring before it could wake Faye.

  “Did you speak to Gates yet?” I asked, shooing Max away from the slice of jam-slathered bread he’d been eyeing. “About Dennis Shepherd, I mean.”

  “How about a ‘Good morning, honey, did you have a nice evening’?”

  “Did you?”

  “No. An old girlfriend of Don’s was in town, so I tried to make myself scarce. Sat through three dreadful movies, then crept home in the dark and practically broke my leg tripping over the coffee table they’d moved.”

  “I don’t suppose you ever thought of coming home for the night?”

  “In retrospect,” Michael grumbled, “it might have been the better choice.”

  Max circled the table and approached the bread from the other direction. I gave him a stern look and a rap on the snout. “About Dennis,” I said to Michael, “have the Berkeley police questioned him yet?”

  “I left a message for Gates yesterday, right after you talked to me. I doubt he’s h
ad time to do much about it. And to be honest, I don’t know where he’ll go with it. A history of emotional problems, alleged emotional problems in fact, hardly qualifies as evidence.”

  “There’s more,” I told him. “Sharon and I were at Macy’s last night. And who do you think waited on us?”

  Michael sighed. “Dennis? He told us he worked there, remember?”

  “Yes, but you’ll never guess which department.” I paused for emphasis. “Dennis works in women’s shoes.”

  “You were shopping for shoes?”

  “Sharon was, but that’s not the point.”

  Michael hesitated. “Guess I’m missing something here.”

  He certainly was. I pulled myself up straight. “Don’t you think it’s a strange coincidence that we have two recent murder victims with their shoes missing, and the cousin of the most recent victim is a shoe salesman with a history of emotional problems?”

  “It’s a coincidence, all right,” Michael conceded. “But you’re making an awfully big leap in logic.”

  “If you could have seen the way he talked about shoes, the way he handled Sharon’s feet. Dennis Shepherd is definitely not your average, apathetic shoe salesman.”

  “Maybe he’s simply good at his job. Look, Kate, I know you’re trying to help. And I’m grateful, honestly. But if I call Jim Gates with this, he’s going to be pissed. I already told him about Dennis’s background. I’m sure he’ll look into it.”

  “You seem to have more faith in Gates than you did yesterday.”

  “I never said I didn’t have faith, only that we don’t always see eye to eye.”

  I sighed. Arguing the point would get me nowhere. I knew that if Michael actually thought the connection was significant, he’d have been willing to incur the wrath of Gates and anyone else who needed convincing.