I haven't seen her or heardfrom her.
I guess she finally got the message.
A case like this one didn't need to be solved; even Seat Thomas could have told you exactly what had happened after a single look at the crime-scene through his trifocals. It had been kitchen implements instead of duelling pistols at dawn, but the result was the same: two bodies in the morgue at K.V.H. with autopsy Y-cuts in them. The only question was why it had happened. He had had a few questions, a few vague disquiets, but they would no doubt have blown away before Wilma and Nettle had been seen into the ground.
Now the disquiets were more urgent, and some of them (I guess she finally got the message) had names.
To Alan, a criminal case was like a garden surrounded by a high wall. You had to get in, so you looked for the gate. Sometimes there were several, but in his experience there was always at least one; of course there was. If not, how had the gardener entered to sow the seeds in the first place? It might be large, with an arrow pointing to it and a flashing neon sign reading ENTER HERE, or it might be small and covered with so much ivy that you had to hunt for quite awhile before you found it, but it was always there, and if you hunted long enough and weren't afraid of raising a few blisters on your hands from tearing away the overgrowth, you always found it.
Sometimes the gate was a piece of evidence found at a crimescene.
Sometimes it was a witness. Sometimes it was an assumption firmly based on events and logic. The assumptions he'd made in this case were: one, that Wilma had been following a longestablished pattern of harassment and f**kery; two, that this time she had chosen the wrong person with whom to play mind-games; three, that Nettle had snapped again as she had when she'd killed her husband. But...
I haven't seen her or heard from her.
If Nettle had really said that, how much did it change? How many assumptions did that single sentence knock into cocked hats?
Alan didn't know.
He stared into the darkness of Polly's bedroom and wondered if he'd found the gate after all.
Maybe Polly hadn't heard what Nettle had said correctly.
It was technically possible, but Alan didn't believe it. Nettle's actions, at least up to a certain point, supported what Polly claimed to have heard. Nettle hadn't come to work at Polly's on Friday. she'd said she was ill. Maybe she was, or maybe she was just scared of Wilma. That made sense; they knew from Pete Jerzyck that Wilma, after discovering that her sheets had been vandalized, had made at least one threatening call to Nettle. She might have made others the next day that Pete didn't know about. But Nettle had come to see Polly with a gift of food on Sunday morning.
Would she have done that if Wilma was still stoking the fires? Alan didn't think so.
Then there was the matter of the rocks which had been thrown through Wilma's windows. Each of the attached notes said the same thing: I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONE. THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING. A warning usually means that the person being warned has more time to change his or her ways, but time had been up for Wilma and Nettle.
They had met on that street-corner only two hours after the rocks had been thrown.
He supposed he could get around that one if he had to. When Nettle found her dog, she would have been furious. Ditto Wilma when she got home and saw the damage to her house. All it would have taken to strike the final spark was a single telephone call. One of the two women had made that call gone up.
Alan turned over on his side, wishing that these were the old days, when you could still obtain records of local calls. If he could have documented the fact that Wilma and Nettle had spoken before their final meeting, he would have felt a lot better. Still-take the final phone-call as a given. That still left the notes themselves.
This is how it must have happened, he thought. Nettle comes home from Polly's and finds her dog dead on the hallfloor. She reads the note on the corkscrew. Then she writes the same message on fourteen or sixteen sheets of Paper and puts them in the Pocket of her coat. She also gets a bunch of rubber bands. When she gets to Wilma's, she goes into the back yard. She Piles up fourteen or sixteen rocks and uses the elastic bands to attach the notes. She must have done all that prior to throwing any rocks-it would have taken too long if she had to stop in the middle of the festivities to pick out more rocks and attach more notes. And when she's done, she goes home and broods over her dead pet some more.
It felt all wrong to him.
It felt really lousy.
It presupposed a chain of thought and action that just didn't fit what he knew of Nettle Cobb. The murder of her husband had and the balloon had been the outcome of long cycles of abuse, but the murder itself had been an impulse crime committed by a woman whose sanity had broken.