Old World Murder - Kathleen Ernst [75]
And then the rest of the contents cascaded into her hand. Dozens of innocuous-looking white pills.
Abruptly she clenched her fingers around them. Shit!
She moved her fist over the toilet bowl, sucked in a deep breath. But she couldn’t do that, either.
Finally she let the pills dribble back into the orange plastic container, capped it, and stashed it back in the medicine cabinet.
____
“What’s wrong?” Ethan asked.
“Nothing.” Chloe simply wasn’t capable of talking about Mr. Solberg right now.
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not lying,” she lied. “Really. I’m just feeling down and wanted to hear your voice.”
“Why are you feeling down?”
Chloe wound the phone cord around her index finger. She had to give him something. “I was thinking about my baby.”
Silence stretched across the country as they both digested that unexpected statement.
“I was wondering,” Chloe said, “if maybe I did something that caused the miscarriage.” She stared at the beige curls of plastic looped around her finger.
“What did the doctor say at the time?”
“He said, ‘These things happen.’ If there was anything more than that, my Suisse-Deutsch was insufficient.”
“I don’t know anything about that kind of stuff,” Ethan said slowly. “But it sounds like something just … just went wrong.”
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “Well, enough of that. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
Ethan talked and Chloe listened, clinging to the sound of his voice. When they finally said good-night she felt ready to try to sleep.
But her dreams were full of accusing eyes—the very old, and the very young.
“Next item.” Ralph Petty glanced down at a sheet of notes in front of him. “Chloe.”
Chloe tried to look alert. The Monday morning permanent-staff meeting at Old World Wisconsin was not for the faint of heart.
“What progress have you made regarding the new collections storage facility?”
OK, this one she could punt. “I’m meeting with Leila tomorrow in Madison,” she reminded him.
“Very well. Next item. Stanley.” Ralph zeroed in on the maintenance chief. “The restaurant trash cans weren’t emptied mid-day on Sunday.”
“I’ll check on that,” Stanley said vaguely. “I wasn’t on.”
“Who was on?”
“Well, let’s see … I guess it was Rupert. Rupert Engel. One of the summer hires.”
Chloe felt sympathy for Rupert, who was no doubt in line for another chewing-out. But it was impossible to care about overflowing trash cans. Not with what she’d seen. Mrs. Lundquist—dead. Mr. Solberg—dead. And now, Chloe had no way of getting back into Mrs. Lundquist’s house. No way to check the backs of her photographs for names. No way to search for a letter from a long-lost relative, or a scholar, or anyone else who might have prompted recent events.
“Next item,” Ralph said briskly. “Byron.”
Byron stopped doodling and looked up warily. “Yes?”
“I’ve found a source of shoes for the interpreters.” Ralph slid a catalog across the table. Chloe, sitting next to Byron, saw a red circle inked around an advertisement for “ladies’ costume boots.” They were white, with high heels and pointed toes.
Byron stared at the picture. “I’m not sure,” he said finally, “that these are practical for our site. Being white. And the high heels—well, a lot of our interpreters are middle-aged ladies.”
Ralph’s eyes bore into the younger man. “At the very least, order some for the lead interpreters.”
Byron shifted uneasily. “The leads walk miles every day. And the costume budget is already strained.”
“Four leads, four pairs of boots,” Ralph snapped. “Am I being clear?”
The room was quiet. Stanley picked his fingernails with a tiny screwdriver. The historic farmer had become fascinated with his pen. Research curator Margueritte Donovan was staring out the window at passing cars, and the restaurant manager was surreptitiously making tic marks on an order form on his lap. The visitor center manager had claimed that five hundred school children in the gift shop precluded her attendance, and was conspicuously absent.
“I appreciate your suggestion,” Byron began, “but I’m a little concerned—”
“Oh, for God’s sake!”