Assumption

~ ~ ~

Ogden checked in at the station and then drove to Mrs. Bickers’s house to continue his so-called investigation. He stood in the middle of the parlor, slapping at his sleeves in the cold, and wondered where he should start. He watched his breath condense and float away from him and decided he should begin with a fire. He brought in wood and got a fire going. Still cold, he again sifted through the uninformative papers at the old woman’s bedside. He sat on the edge of the bed and then stood immediately. The bed was unmade and it felt like a block of ice. He had been sitting at the kitchen table with Mrs. Bickers, knowing that something was wrong. He wondered if she had been trying to tell him something that he had been simply too dense to understand. He should have gotten up and kicked in the bedroom door, but he hadn’t known enough to even consider it, much less do it.

He went to the desk in the parlor and sat. He found some trashy celebrity magazines and some back issues of Time and starts of letters that didn’t say much and the old woman’s address book. In the Bs he found three other Bickerses listed and one of those had been scratched out. The woman’s purse was on the floor beside the desk. Her identification revealed that her maiden name was Robbins. The bag also contained two hundred dollars and change. In the address book he found one Robbins, a Lester G. in Tempe, Arizona.

He went through the desk twice and found nothing out of the ordinary and nothing of any particular interest. There were some payment-due bills from the clinic, some through-the-mail insurance offers that the old woman had saved in a stack, and a deed to a parcel of land that was identified by quadrant number and all Ogden could determine was that it was in the county.

He went again into her bedroom and stood there awhile. He opened a dresser drawer. He moved her underwear around and looked behind her blouses. He searched behind her socks and stockings, nightgowns and sweaters. Nothing.

He walked into the room with the television and stood next to the open trapdoor. He looked at the space under the house and then lowered himself into it. He squatted and looked around in the dark a bit before switching on his little flashlight. The old woman’s impression was still in the dirt. He wouldn’t know a clue if it jumped up and bit him on his pecker. But he had known that something was wrong. He’d known and hadn’t done a single thing and now Mrs. Bickers, as objectionable and miserable as she was, was dead. Detective or not, he collected himself and scoured the ground for anything the other cops might have missed — a hair, a broken-off fingernail, a wad of gum, a signed confession with an address, anything.

The front door opened with a complaint from its hinges. Ogden stood and saw legs in tights.

“What can I do for you?” he asked. He pulled himself to sitting on the wood floor, brushed off his clothes.

“I’m Jenny Bickers,” the woman said. She was in her mid-thirties, maybe older. She looked around the room, at Ogden, and into the hole.

“I’m Deputy Ogden Walker.” Ogden stood.

“Where’s my mother?”

Ogden’s stomach fell hollow and cold against his back. The woman didn’t know.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

It was a reasonable question. Ogden knew he had to provide an answer. “Miss Bickers, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Your mother is dead.”

The woman became unsteady. Ogden was berating himself for not suggesting that she sit first. She didn’t move.

“Where’s my mother? What’s going on?”

“You mother is dead,” he said again, realizing that there was no softening it. He reached out and helped the woman balance herself as she took a seat on the sofa.

Ogden stood beside her. “I’m very sorry.”

“Are you sure?”

“She was killed,” he said.

“Murdered?” the woman cried.

Ogden didn’t say anything. He sat next to her while she cried. He moved to put a hand on her shoulder, but decided that that might seem patronizing. He went to the bathroom and brought back some tissue.

“I don’t understand,” she said. Her face was twisted. She was beginning to hyperventilate.

“Take deep breaths,” Ogden said. He watched her for what felt like several minutes and then said, “We don’t know who killed her. I’m very, very sorry.”

She continued to try to breathe deeply.

Ogden resolved to say no more. He certainly wasn’t going to tell her how they believed her mother had died or that her cat had been crushed in the killer’s hands or that he had been sitting in the house with the woman minutes before she had been murdered.

“How?” Jenny Bickers asked.

“The sheriff will tell you everything. I’m going to call him now, okay?”

She nodded.

Ogden went to the phone in the parlor and called Paz. He told him that the old woman’s daughter had shown up and that he’d had to tell her the news.

“How is she?” Paz asked.

“What do you think? I didn’t go into any details with her. I’m about to bring her over.”

“Okay. How about you? You all right?”

“See you in a few.”

Ogden hung up and turned to Jenny Bickers. “I’ll take you to the station now.” He helped her up and they walked out.

“Murdered,” the woman said to herself as Ogden turned to padlock and tape the door.

Ogden repeated the word in his head as they walked to his rig. It was a bad thing, no matter how you said it.

Ogden walked Jenny Bickers past Felton and right into Paz’s office where she fell into a chair without an invitation. Paz wasn’t there, so Ogden stood silently by while the woman massaged her temples. It seemed her crying had given way to a headache.

Paz walked in and moved directly to the woman, very businesslike. “I’m Sheriff Paz.” He shook her hand. “I’m very sorry about your mother.” He moved to the other side of his desk. “Let’s see if you can help us find out who killed her.”

She sat up, squared her shoulders.

“Where do you live, Ms. Bickers?”

“Santa Fe.”

“And can you tell me when you last spoke to your mother?” the sheriff asked.

“Two days ago. Tuesday morning.”

“You come up often?”

“Not really.”

“This might sound like a stupid question, but did your mother have any enemies?”

“She was an old woman,” Jenny Bickers said.

“I know. Still,” Paz said. “She ever mention any fight or disagreement she’d had with anybody?”

“No.”

Paz offered a tired glance toward Ogden, then asked, “Did you come up here for any particular reason?”

“No, not really. I hadn’t been up to see her in a month or so,” the woman said.

Paz nodded. He leaned back and looked at Ogden. “You find anything?”

“Nothing. There’s still some papers to go through.”

“Well, get over there and finish up,” Paz said to Ogden. He looked at Jenny Bickers. “I know this is difficult, but I can’t allow you to stay at your mother’s house. It’s a crime scene.”

“I can’t say when I’ll be through,” Ogden said.

“I wouldn’t be able to sleep there anyway,” she said. “I’ll get a motel room. I don’t really feel like driving back to Santa Fe.”

Paz looked out the window. “Deputy Walker will take you back to your car. If there’s anything you can think to tell us or that you want to ask us, just call.”

Jenny Bickers pushed herself to her feet and walked out of the office ahead of Ogden.

“Ogden, I want you to give me a call when you get back to the house,” Paz said.

Sitting beside him on the way back to her car, Jenny Bickers couldn’t contain herself. “Was that man trying to insinuate that I had something to do with my mother’s death?”

“No,” Ogden said.

She didn’t believe him and stared out the window. “Did you know my mother well?” she asked.

“No, just in passing. To tell the truth, I don’t think she liked me very much.”

“She was surly.”

Ogden looked at her angular face, masculine, handsome, not pretty. “You grow up in Santa Fe?”

She cleared her throat. “I don’t know why my mother moved up here in the middle of no place. No offense.”

“None taken. I like the middle of no place. It beats the far edge of no place.” Ogden examined the gray sky. “Sisters, brothers?”

“No.”

“I’m an only child, too,” Ogden said.

“Listen, do you mind if I come in and look around with you?” she asked.

“No can do. You’d be better off getting some rest anyway.” After a brief silence, Ogden asked, “So, what do you down there in Santa Fe?”

“I’m an assistant manager in a copy shop.”

“Like it?”

“I’m an assistant manager in a copy shop,” she repeated.

“Gotcha.”

“I moved to Santa Fe after my divorce.”

When he stopped she got out and went directly to her car. He climbed out and jogged to catch her before she pulled off.

“Ms. Bickers,” he said, “may I recommend a place to stay?”

She looked at him.

“My mother’s house.”

“I couldn’t,” she said.

“It’s cheap.” He paused. “I mean to say it’s inexpensive. If you consider free inexpensive. My mother wouldn’t like me calling her house cheap. That way I won’t have to track you down if I find something and need to ask you questions. What do you say?”

“How will your mother feel about it?”

“She’d be mad if I didn’t offer.”

Ogden called his mother.