Dying to Call You by Elaine Viets

“I’m reading the parts of the murderers and the son. You’re doing Lady Macduff, right?”
    “Right.” Helen guessed that’s what Laredo said. “Born to be Wild” was playing on the restaurant sound system. Steppenwolf’s wail drowned out the words.
    Savannah started reading in a stilted monotone. “First murderer: ‘Where is your husband?’ ”
    Laredo spoke next. Helen could hear the fear and defiance as she said, “I hope, in no place so unsanctified where such as thou may find him.”
    Damn. Steppenwolf was running over Laredo’s words.
    Helen couldn’t tell if she recognized the voice. She wished Laredo would say more. Instead, she heard Savannah’s flat voice: “Thou liest, thou shag-eared villain!”
    With absolutely no change of tone Savannah said the murderer’s part: “What, you egg! Young fry of treachery! Stab!
    Stab!”
    Savannah read the son’s dying declaration like a grade schooler with a primer: “He has killed me, Mother. Run away, I pray you.”
    Finally, Laredo’s voice again. Her emotion overwhelmed the tape recorder’s tinny little speaker: “Murder!” she cried.
    “Murder!” There was an unearthly scream.
    Helen knocked over her coffee. “It’s her,” she said.
    “That’s the woman on the phone.”
    “I knew it,” Savannah said with satisfaction, as she mopped up Helen’s spilled coffee. “Now tell me what you know about my sister’s death.”
    Helen told her everything. Savannah did not cry. Her sorrow seemed beyond tears.
    “Have you seen this Hank Asporth?” Helen said. “Was he big and strong enough to hurt her?”
    “My sister was just a little bit of a thing. It would be easy.
    She didn’t even weigh a hundred pounds.” Helen noticed Savannah was talking about her sister as if she was dead.
    “The police think I heard a movie,” Helen said. “But I heard her say ‘Hank,’ twice, and then I heard her scream—like the scream on the tape only more real. I know that was no movie. But the cops searched the place and found no body, no blood, no sign of a struggle, no sign of a woman.
    The only cars in the garage were registered to Asporth. They don’t believe she was killed. I know she was.”
    “I do, too,” Savannah said. “I knew the moment he did it.
    It felt like someone reached in and ripped out my heart.
    “I want the man who did this to her. I want him dead.”
     

Chapter 5
    A cold wind hit Helen in the face when she left The Floridian. The temperature was supposed to drop down to sixty degrees tonight. She hunched her shoulders against the sharp breeze.
    A bare-chested guy in shorts and sandals staggered past her, his arm around a tipsy brunette in a strapless dress.
    Tourists. The cold didn’t bother them. You could always tell.
    Sixty felt warm after the brutal winters of New York, New Jersey and Quebec. In St. Louis, where Helen used to live, sixty would have been a spring day. But she had been in Florida for more than a year. Her blood had thinned.
    Another gust of wind sent a beer bottle rolling down the street. She shivered, glad she was almost home. It felt warmer around the pool at the Coronado Tropic Apartments.
    The swooping cream-white curves of the old building blocked the winter wind. The lights on the purple bougainvillea gave the pool a warm glow. The box of cheap wine gave the party around the pool its own glow.
    “Hi, there,” Peggy said.
    “Awwk,” said Pete, Peggy’s parrot.
    Both Peggy and Pete were exotic-looking, with elegant beaks. Officially, the Coronado had a no-pets policy. Etiquette required that Helen ignore Pete when their landlady, Margery, was around. He patrolled Peggy’s shoulder restlessly, until she gave him a pretzel to settle him down.
    “Pull up a chaise longue,” Margery said. Her purple shorts set was the same color as the night shadows. The darkness had smoothed out the wrinkles on her sun-damaged face, and Helen caught a glimpse of a younger woman.
    She studied Helen with shrewd old