Wild Orchids Read online

  When I saw the name I drew in my breath. Jacquelane Amarisa Cole Landreth. JacqueLANE. As in Harriet Lane, the president’s lovely niece.

  Leaving my office in a rush, I went down the stairs so fast I nearly slid. Jackie’s bedroom door was still closed, so I tiptoed down to the entrance hall. There on the little table by the door was Jackie’s handbag. Every man on earth knows that the ultimate taboo is looking inside a woman’s handbag. It ranked right up there with cannibalism. A woman might have her purse stolen, but everyone knew that only a real sicko would actually go through it.

  I had to take a couple of breaths before I slid the zipper open. As much as Pat and I had shared, I’d never gone through her handbag.

  Considering what I was doing, I used as much courtesy as I could muster and pulled her wallet out with just my thumb and forefinger. I told myself I wasn’t really snooping. I only wanted one thing: her driver’s license.

  It was on top, in the little see-through compartment of her wallet. I held it up to the light and looked. Jackie’s whole name was Jacquelane Violet Maxwell. JacqueLANE. As in Harriet Lane, the woman her father had a crush on. And Violet was, no doubt, for Miss Lane’s violet eyes.

  I sat down hard on the chair by the hall table. Congratulations, Newcombe, I told myself. You just found out what you didn’t want to know. The woman you hired was almost certainly an eyewitness to a murder. And worse, she probably saw her own mother, as well as her grandfather, commit that murder.

  I sat there for a long time, holding Jackie’s driver’s license, glancing at it now and then, and trying to think about what I may have done. My snooping may have put someone’s life in danger. Jackie may have been very young when she saw the murder, but it was obvious that she could remember a lot from the time she was in Cole Creek.

  She remembered every inch of the old house I’d bought. Two days ago I’d found her tapping on a wall in the kitchen. I didn’t bother to ask what she was doing, but stood in the doorway and watched. After a moment, her tap sounded hollow and she said, “Found it!” She often knew where I was, so I wasn’t surprised when she turned and looked at me.

  “I went to put the olive oil on the shelf but the shelf wasn’t there,” she said as she picked up one of the knives I’d bought. It had a serrated blade and the ad said it could cut aluminum cans in half. (It could, too, because Tessa and I had cut through six cans before Jackie made us stop.)

  I watched as Jackie felt along the old wallpaper, then began to cut. After about ten minutes of feeling and cutting, she peeled down a big square of wallpaper to reveal a mouse palace. Insulation (probably illegal asbestos), dirt, globbed-up paper, threads, lint, and hair of what looked to be four shades, were all matted together with many years of mouse pee and millions of little black droppings.

  Behind the nest were boards so greasy they made my uncle Reg’s car repair shop look clean. That’s why the shelves were covered over. If it’d been me, and I’d been given a choice between cleaning those shelves and wallpapering over them, I would have definitely wall-papered.

  “A good place for food storage,” I said.

  Turning to me, Jackie made a wicked face while rubbing her hands together. “Mr. Hoover will now do his work,” she said as she ran to get the vacuum.

  By the time I came down to lunch, the shelves were clean and shiny, and the kitchen smelled like the bleach Jackie had used to clean them.

  I didn’t bother to ask Jackie how she’d known the shelves were there. And she seemed to take her knowledge for granted. As she dished up some kind of shrimp thing and four steamed vegetables, she ranted on and on about what kind of lazy idiot would board up a closet rather than remove a beehive, and who would cover over shelves just because they had about a hundred years of grease on them.

  I put my head closer to my plate.

  So, anyway, I knew that Jackie’s memories of the time she was in Cole Creek, no matter what her age, were clear. I doubt if any court would convict people for murder based on what Jackie remembered, but then I’d never thought that murderers were logical people who would stop to reason out what they were going to do.

  On the other hand, based on what I’d seen on the Internet, everyone who had been involved—or who I thought was probably involved—seemed to have died soon after the woman did.

  I put Jackie’s license back in her wallet and her wallet back in her handbag just where I’d found it, then zipped her bag closed and went back upstairs.

  The search service had found one more name. Miss Essie Lee was the sister of, and the sole surviving relative of, Icie Lee Shaver who had died in yet another “freak” accident. Seems Icie Lee had been walking in the woods and fallen into an old well. She’d been buried to her neck, but the rotten timbers of the old well had held enough that she’d been able to breathe. Eventually, after a day or two, her struggles to free herself had caused the walls to collapse on her.

  “Crushed,” I said aloud. As they had all murdered, so they had died.

  I shut down my computer and went to bed, but I didn’t sleep much. The images from the words that had come up on my computer screen haunted me. The words “as they lived” kept running through my head.

  At three A.M. I gave up trying to sleep, put my hands behind my head, and stared up at the fan on the ceiling. It was going full speed and I stared at the little wooden end of the chain as though it were a hypnotist’s sphere.

  As the first ray of sun came in through my window, I thought that if I wanted to know who had crushed that woman, I should read all the obituaries for the year after her death. Based on what I’d found so far, whoever had died by being crushed had probably participated.

  When I had things sorted out a bit in my mind, I began to relax and finally fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until noon. When I saw the clock, I felt a sense of panic. Where was Jackie? She was so industrious that I could always hear where she was, but the house was absolutely silent.

  I found Jackie sitting at the kitchen table playing with one of the neatest gadgets I’d ever seen in my life. It was a tiny Hewlett-Packard color printer, and beside it was a little camera with a door open on its side.

  I’m ashamed to say that, as I sat down at the table and watched that little machine make a perfect print, I forgot all about who got crushed and why. When I started playing with the two pieces of equipment, Jackie didn’t say a word, just got up from the table and began scrambling eggs.

  The printer was very simple to use, and by the time Jackie put the eggs in front of me, I’d made two 4 x 6 enlargements. One was of roses on a fence, and the other was a photo of a red and white tablecloth, a wine bottle, and half a loaf of bread.

  “This what you did yesterday?” I asked, smiling. A picnic by herself?

  But my question seemed to disturb Jackie because she snatched the little disk out of the printer, stuck it back in the camera, pushed some buttons, then put the camera back on the table. I knew without a doubt that she’d just erased the two photos of the picnic. As for the photos I’d printed, she burned them in the flame on the stove.

  Of course I was dying to ask questions, but I didn’t. Besides, Jackie gave me a look that said that if I asked anything, she’d make me sorry.

  That was okay, I had my own secrets. I never even considered telling Jackie what I’d found out on the Internet. I also wasn’t going to tell her that Harriet Cole’s daughter had the same unique spelling of her name that Jackie did.

  For the next two days, all I can say about Jackie’s behavior is that it was odd. She didn’t act like herself. Not that I’d spent masses of time with her, but after the Sunday I spent with Dessie, Jackie seemed to change. It was as though her mind was elsewhere. She cooked three meals a day for me, and she answered the telephone, and she even told Nate what to do in the garden, but there was something different. For one thing, she was quiet, hardly ever saying a word. And for another, she wasn’t moving around much. Three times I looked out my office window and saw her just standing there, staring int