Murder Crops Up by Lora Roberts Read Free Book Online

point exactly.” Bruno looked up at him. “She couldn’t have been in the plot, or we would see the impressions of her shoes.” He nodded at the soles of Rita’s high-top aerobic shoes. “And we would see loose dirt on her soles.” He moved around the plot to put plastic bags over Rita’s shoes, taking them off her feet with all traces and clues safely bagged. I wondered if he knew that Lois had been shaking one of those feet, maybe shaking clues right off it.
    “Maybe the rake was in the path.” The uniform wouldn’t give up.
    Bruno got his head right down on the ground, looking across the surface of the path. “She stood here.” He touched the fresh bark that covered the path. “This does not take good footprints. But from her position, she was facing away from the trench. She fell backward; might have hit her head on the edge of the trench and so broken her neck. But what made her fall?”
    “Or was she pushed?” The uniform shrugged. “Hard to say at this point.”
    “I think we will find something in the postmortem.” Bruno stood up. “Have the pictures been taken? Good. You can remove her now.” He stood beside the trench, his face sober, while the paramedics bundled up Rita and wheeled her away.
    Turning, he saw me. “Liz. Of course, you have a garden here. Do you know anything about this?”
    “I don’t know what happened, but there has been some tension this morning.”
    “Of course.” Bruno sighed. “Why don’t you come over here and tell me about it? Then I can let you leave.”
    “Maybe you won’t want to, after you hear what I say.”
    He stopped in the middle of pulling his laptop out of its case and looked at me sharply. “What are you saying, Liz? You pushed that woman into the trench?”
    “No. Nothing like that.” I waited until he got the laptop steady on the nearest fence post, his fingers poised expectantly on the keys, and then I started talking about the visit from Lois the day before, with its vaguely threatening tone. “She said if I didn’t come to the work day, I’d be sorry. I would have thought it was a joke, but she didn’t laugh.”
    He stopped typing for a moment and looked at me seriously. “So you came?”
    “Yes. She gave me a really hard task—to dig all these postholes. And she was—triumphant, as if she had me in her power somehow.” I glanced across the garden. Lois and Carlotta stood together. They were talking, both frowning. I wondered at their alliance.
    Bruno wrote down the rest of the story—Carlotta’s strange harassment, the revelation of my previous suspect-hood. There were certainly worse things about my life Carlotta could have chosen to reveal. I thanked my lucky stars she wasn’t much of a researcher. I wouldn’t have wanted my relationship with my ex-husband spread all over town, or the stint I served in prison for trying to kill him before he killed me. He had lived through that, and for a number of years thereafter, and I wasn’t sorry that someone else had finally induced him to leave this world.
    But his death, added to those other bodies that kept tumbling into my life, might have made even a well-wisher stop to think. Certainly they had made me wonder.
    Bruno looked at me, his hands on the keyboard. I hurried to finish my story. “Then I went out to my bus to put away my veggies, and when I came back everyone was over at Lois’s plot, looking at the body.” I shivered. “Do you think it might have been an accident?”
    Bruno typed a little more before he answered. “At this point I do not think. I merely record.” He closed the laptop. His brown eyes were liquid with sympathy. “I am sorry, Liz.”
    I felt even colder. “Sorry for what?”
    “For the pain this woman brings you by dragging up that past history.”
    I studied him, and he looked away. “There’s more to it than that, isn’t there? You will have to bring up the past history as well. In other words, I’m a suspect again.”
    “I would not say