Old Chaos (9781564747136) Read online

  Rob’s mouth quirked.

  “It’s hard on gay kids here. They feel like they have to leave town, move to Portland or San Francisco. That’s not entirely true, though it is for anyone who aspires to public office.”

  “Inger didn’t leave town.”

  “Maybe I’m wrong. I probably am. My point would be, whatever her sexual preferences, Inger had to deal with her father and this community, not to mention Larry. She kept herself to herself.” A wave of exhaustion swept over Beth. “We’re not getting anywhere. What was it you thought I had to deal with tonight? Oh God, the press.”

  “Yes. You ought to hold a press conference.”

  “I can’t,” she wailed. “I’ve got the whole family here. Why don’t you do it?”

  “You promised me you’d deal with the media, Beth.”

  “Okay, you rat. Tell me what I have to say.”

  “Monday will be soon enough for the conference, but you’ll need to talk to the prosecutor first and probably to Prentiss. Shall I set up a meeting here tomorrow afternoon?”

  Beth nodded, numb with weariness.

  When Rob came home for good, Meg kissed him, fed him, and sent him up to bed as soon as he’d made the inevitable phone calls. Then she sat at her computer and worked on staff appointments. She didn’t want to have to look at Marybeth anymore, much less talk to her. She dreamed up complex and meaningless projects to which a rogue librarian could be assigned as penance. “Microfiche in the Digital Age” was a favorite, with “Virtual Readers for Virtual Books” a close second.

  A tap at the kitchen door brought her out of her sadistic reverie. It was Charlie. He looked as much like the cat that ate the canary as was possible for a man of his coloring and lanky height.

  She put out the cookies, which were evaporating, and poured two shots of scotch, which finished the bottle. Time to replenish supplies. “How goes the courtship?”

  His smug look intensified. He sat and took a cookie, looked at it, and said, “I may be able to cram this in. I just ate dinner at the Columbia Gorge Hotel with Kayla and her mother.” He rolled his eyes.

  Meg smiled. “I know whereof you speak. But what is this? I thought Kayla couldn’t chew. And I thought they weren’t going to let her out of the hospital.”

  So Charlie regaled her with an account of his afternoon. He had driven Kayla to Hood River in the Civic and deposited her with her mother. “She was tired by then and in dire need of pain medication.”

  Meg shuddered, but she had to respect Kayla’s urge to escape from the hospital, any hospital.

  “Dede asked me to have dinner with them.” Charlie grinned. “I didn’t say no.” With a couple of hours to kill, he’d gone to the Hood River public library with its spectacular view of the Columbia and spent the time reviewing for his licensing exam. When he returned to the hotel, he found Kayla’s mother insisting that they eat in the dining room instead of her suite.

  He didn’t think that was a good idea. Kayla was used to being stared at. “But not because she looks like something out of a horror flick.”

  “Charlie!” Meg gasped.

  “Half her face is bandaged or bruised, and her hair’s all uneven. You saw her, Meg. She’s going to adjust eventually, but you can’t blame her for wanting to hide.”

  When he got back, Kayla was still sulking. She had dressed in one of her mother’s outfits. Kayla was not a clinger, but she clung to his arm on what must have been an interminable walk through the dining room to their table. At that point Dede summoned the chef.

  Meg could only gasp again. “What in the world did she say to him?”

  Charlie chuckled. Dede had given the man a brief but colorful account of Kayla’s heroism, explained her difficulty chewing, and assured him she trusted him to come up with a splendid menu for her wonderful daughter.

  “It was a challenge,” Charlie added, “and I’m bound to say he rose to it. I had the prime rib myself, but Kayla let me sample the goodies. I never tasted anything like the dinner soufflé.”

  “Truffles?”

  “Probably. And some exotic cheese. Even the vegetables-squash swirled with parsnips and sour cream. My mother’s squash never tasted like that.”

  “Nutmeg,” Meg murmured. “Cardamom, maybe. I hope the chef didn’t serve her mousse for dessert.”

  “Kayla’s dessert was a real production. The Jell-O folks never made anything like it. It came in a parfait glass with this ruby syrup, pomegranate, Kayla said, and mint leaves. There was a wafer with it, and I thought oops, but she said she didn’t have to chew it. It melted on her tongue.” He eyes twinkled. “The chef came out to take a bow when we were ready to go. I never thought I’d see that little ritual.”

  Meg smiled.

  Charlie sobered. “They quarrel, you know, Kayla and her mother, but Dede’s cool. By the time we went up to the suite again, Kayla had forgotten about people staring at her.”

  Too busy quarreling with Mom, Meg thought cynically. She was glad Charlie liked his putative mother-in-law, but she wondered whether he had a chance with Kayla and, if he did, whether she would be good for him. They inhabited different planets, or maybe universes.

  When he took his leave, he gestured toward the upstairs. “A heavy day?”

  “You could say that.”

  “I heard about the county clerk’s death. He’ll take it hard. I feel bad about the whole mess myself, since I started the ball rolling.”

  “You didn’t cause the mudslide, Charlie.”

  “No, but if I hadn’t raised questions about the hazard warning, nobody would have noticed it was missing. I stirred something up.”

  “Fred Drinkwater was killed before the public heard of the missing notice.”

  “True.”

  “And I suspect the state or the insurance investigators would have discovered the discrepancy eventually.”

  “Maybe.” He smiled at her. “I wouldn’t have your job for the world.”

  “The library?”

  “Your job here. Picking up the pieces.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek and went off, whistling.

  Meg rubbed her cheek. No doubt Charlie meant well but she was not a nanny. She went to her computer, backed out of the frivolous game she had been playing with Marybeth’s career, and logged onto the Internet.

  She called up the county website. Rob had designed it shortly after he returned from California to oversee his grandmother’s care. He had been working as a computer consultant then. The job as deputy had not come open until some months later. He had never explained to her satisfaction why he’d taken it. It wasn’t clear why Inger Swets had been attracted to the county clerk’s position either.

  She had had some legal training, though she wasn’t a lawyer, and her academic degrees (both from Washington State) were in business. She was a CPA. According to the sparse little bio taken from the last voters’ pamphlet, Inger had been elected to the position three times.

  The post carried considerable responsibility and was well compensated relative to what Meg was making. In the state of Washington, the county clerk keeps all records of the Superior Court and has ultimate responsibility for police records as well. Inger also collected court fees and fines. She oversaw the county budget and the investment of trust funds for the court. Among her administrative duties, she was charged with ensuring that the Board of Commissioners hewed to official policies and guidelines. She had three deputy clerks to assist her, and a well-trained staff.

  Though the board had its own clerk to deal with the minutes of its meetings, Inger would have been responsible for its records. That was what it boiled down to. No wonder Lt. Prentiss had gone directly to her office when he looked for a suspect.

  I’m getting nowhere, Meg thought glumly and clicked Home. For some reason, the role of commissioners was not clearly defined on the county website. They had statutory duties, of course, and she could have gone to the state website for details, but she wasn’t in the mood to read statutes. The bios provided were
minimal, with Catherine Bjork’s vaguer than the other two because she didn’t have a day job. Hank was a real estate agent, Karl a dentist.

  The voters’ pamphlet for the special election that had put Cate in office included a concise statement of values that stuck to the Sierra Club line without sounding unduly contentious. She opposed “unrestrained building and population growth,” spoke quite fiercely about clear-cutting and strip mining, and came down on the side of strict enforcement of drug laws.

  She favored the preservation of natural amenities, and “beautification,” whatever that might mean. In the Gorge, the natural beauty was such that it was a little hard to concentrate on other things like going to work and doing the dishes. To invest heavily with a local developer, then turn around and insist that the county restrict building seemed a bit hypocritical, but hypocrisy is a national pastime.

  Cate’s opponent had stressed creation of jobs and universal health care, which were worthy goals, but health care for the uninsured wasn’t a problem that could be tackled locally, and jobs almost always involved the building of large, smelly plants that intruded on one’s view of Mount Hood. Meg had voted for Cate’s opponent, but she hadn’t been heartbroken when he lost. Anyone would have been an improvement over her predecessor, Hal Brandstetter.

  Annoyed, Meg called up the California newspapers and searched the archives for information on Lars Bjork. After all, he, not his wife, had been Drinkwater’s backer. She started fifteen years before, about the time he must have married Cate. Two hours later she had a stack of printouts and was almost out of copy paper.

  “It was self-indulgent,” she admitted at breakfast the next morning.

  Rob slurped hot coffee.

  “I felt like a scandalmonger, reading all the dirt about that divorce. They fought over everything. And Cate was the classic Other Woman. I’m sorry for her, even if she did take the old boy away from his wife. She had to sign a pre-nuptial agreement waiving any claim to his estate. Of course, she got a large settlement first.”

  “All about money, was it?”

  “And power and social position. The ex-wife sounded repulsive. On the other hand, so did Lars. I wondered if he was that nasty on the job, so I checked out the financial news, too. At the time of the divorce he was at the height of his power, the man to go to if you wanted start-up money for a new company or whatever. He was famous for investing in unlikely projects and making out like a bandit. A couple of years later, though, he began to lose his touch. He was senior vice president of the bank. When he turned seventy they forced him out.”

  “Not surprising.”

  “No, but it grates on me that they let him lose pension funds and private savings but didn’t even try to curb him until he lost the bank’s money. And they gave him a golden parachute.”

  “Incompetence must be rewarded.”

  Meg’s coffee was cold. She poured it out and refilled her cup. “As far as I know, he did nothing illegal, but the whole mess stinks. After his ouster, he moved his personal fortune north to Seattle. That’s where he met up with Fred, who was putting in a lot of cheap con-dos for people who worked for Microsoft and Boeing. Some of the structures were built on land that’s threatened by Mount Rainier.”

  “Nisqually.” Rob swallowed coffee and looked at his toast.

  “Oh, you know the territory?”

  He slathered a piece of toast with lemon curd. “If Mount Rainier erupts the way Mount Saint Helens did, pyroclastic flows and mudslides will take out the whole Nisqually River valley and everyone in it. Worst case scenario.”

  Meg shuddered.

  “Lady, you lived in LA.” He chewed. “You know about optimists who build on impossible sites—earthquake faults, hillsides that alternate brushfires with mudslides, eroding coastlines.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Nancy Reagan had it right,” he mumbled through another mouthful of toast.

  “What?”

  “Somebody should just say no.”

  “Then you agree with Cate?”

  He looked over at her. “I thought she was a tad less dishonest than her opponent. I voted for her.” He popped the last morsel into his mouth.

  “You may live to regret it.”

  “I already do.” He wiped his lips, set the napkin down, and told her of Cate’s venture to Two Falls. He’d spent a lot of time with Maddie on Saturday.

  “Museum prices! That’s gross.” Meg scowled at her cooling coffee. “I guess I won’t let the commissioner endow a branch library after all.”

  Rob laughed, as she had meant him to, and stood up. “I’m going to my office. No Sundays for the wicked. I’ll probably find a report from Jeff on my desk with the same information less vividly expressed. Beth and I will confer with the prosecutor this afternoon at my house. Any other tidbits I should know about?”

  “Cate was a P.E. major.”

  He smiled at her. “That’s not a crime.”

  “No. Just a tidbit.”

  He laughed again and left. Meg considered going over to the main branch of the library. Sunday was always a big day, with lineups at the computers and books flying in and out, but none of the branches opened until one o’clock, thanks to budget constraints. She also couldn’t go to the pious liquor store, which was closed on Sunday, thanks to the state’s obsolete blue laws. So she decided to bake oatmeal cookies, with and without raisins.

  She was measuring out the dry ingredients when a thunderous knock sounded at the front door. Nobody thundered at Meg’s house. Nobody kicked the door either, but she heard something horribly like wood splintering.

  She grabbed her cell phone and started to dial 911, then thought of Charlie, who was closer. His cell number was on the speed dial, so she hit that and peered around the arch into the hall that led to the front door. A huge shadow blocked the light from the window in the door.

  After four rings a sleepy voice answered.

  “Help me,” Meg shouted. “Somebody’s breaking in.” Glass shattered.

  “Coming!” He broke the connection.

  She slid out the kitchen door and edged around the house. A very large man was smashing at the front door with his fists and feet. Meg loved her front door. The window was beveled glass. Had been.

  She retreated to her driveway, flipped the phone open again, and called 911.

  As she was explaining things to the dispatcher, Charlie stumbled across the street in jeans and unlaced boots. His shirt was unbuttoned, and he hadn’t bothered with a coat.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  “I think it’s Inger Swets’s husband. He’s a big man.”

  “Drunk? Armed?”

  Meg shivered. “I don’t know. I didn’t get close enough to talk.”

  All along the street, doors opened and people peered out. Tammy and Towser stood on the sidewalk. Marge Barnes emerged from the coffee stand on the corner, where Sunday business was slow, and stood by her solitary patron’s open car window, talking. Beth’s daughter Dany came out as far as Rob’s front gate.

  It was a good thing to have neighbors. Meg’s racing pulse began to slow.

  Larry Swets, if that was who the man was, peered in the broken window, yelling something. Meg heard Rob’s name. As she watched, the man gave the door a last kick, turned to go, stumbled, and fell down on the porch. He must have cut his hand on a glass shard. Meg saw blood. He raised his hand to his face, stared at it, and hunched over with his shoulders heaving.

  Charlie said, “I’m going to talk to him. Stay back, Meg.”

  “Is he crying?”

  Charlie didn’t answer. He walked slowly up to the porch, stood for a moment, then sat beside the shuddering hulk. By the time the patrol car wheeled up with its light revolving, Charlie was holding the weeping man by the shoulders and talking to him quietly. As she watched, Larry gave Charlie something. It looked like a small sheaf of papers.

  Meg went to the patrol car. It was a city car and the young driver got out with exaggerated caution. Meg di
dn’t blame him.

  “I think the worst is over,” she said.

  “You never can tell. Who’s that with him?”

  “Neighbor across the street.”

  “Oh yeah, the geologist.”

  Everybody knew everybody.

  Meg explained the situation as well as she could. The EMT van arrived with a single yelp of the siren. She repeated her explanation. Her phone rang. It was Rob.

  “Are you all right?”

  She explained again. She asked him if he was giving serious thought to the possibility that Larry had killed his wife.

  SHE FIRED ME!” The small man, his hair in a bright yellow crest, perched on Rob’s visitor chair like an indignant parakeet. “After a year and two months!”

  Rob said cautiously, “Mrs. Bjork fired you, so you came to me. Why, Mr. Schwenk?”

  “Because that woman deputy asked me who I worked for.”

  “Sergeant Ramos?”

  “Her. I don’t see why I should do Madame any favors, not now. I’ve worked for her all that time, keeping her husband clean, doling out his meds, sitting with him hour after boring hour, listening to the old fart ramble on about how rich and important he is.”

  “You worked a night shift?”

  “I like working nights. Gives me half the day to myself. I’m a wind surfer,” he added, surprising Rob, but why shouldn’t small men surf? “Well, not now. It’s too cold, but in the season.”

  Rob knew what he meant. The season was nearly eight months of wind and water perfection. It made the Gorge a magnet for wind surfers from all over the county.

  “Early evening’s best for surfing. The wind picks up then. If I get in a good run on the river, I’m all charged up for work.”

  “I see.”

  “Anyways, I come in to work last night like usual, and she tells me she don’t need me no more, she’s found somebody more reliable. By God, she better not say that to anyone else. I’ll sue her for slander, libel, whatever. Sure, I was late once in a while, but I showed up, didn’t I?” He spluttered on, obviously outraged.

  At the first pause, Rob asked him about Lars Bjork’s medications. Schwenk gave Rob the name of the prescribing physician. Rob asked whether quetiapine, the medication which had been found in Drinkwater’s blood, was among the drugs prescribed, and Schwenk frowned, puzzled.