Stella dropped the plastic loops on the floor and flexed her wrists a few times. She couldn’t see much out of the minivan’s windows other than the occasional treetop or power line. With her hands free, she found she could focus a bit better, and she thought about the fact that it appeared to have been Doraleigh all along who’d been behind the killing spree.
All, presumably, over a man—and not just any man, but the spectacularly unimpressive Salty Mingus. Sure, it was bound to piss a woman off if her man kept mooning after his old girlfriend. And no doubt, it complicated things when you were staying home bringing up his children. But honestly, Stella couldn’t quite get her mind around the idea of a woman taking a long look at Salty and finding herself stirred to passion strong enough to make a killer of her.
Stella twisted to get a better look at whatever was cinching her stomach and discovered with surprise that she was wearing a Home Depot giveaway canvas tool belt, the kind they handed out at vendor demos. The ends had been wrapped around twice and knotted securely, if a little snugly, at her waist. More interestingly, the handy tool pockets bulged with lumpy objects—heavy sons of bitches that were pressing down in the neighborhood of her bladder and her kidneys and whatever else was located at that latitude. The tops of the pockets had been clamped shut with big heavy-duty binder clips.
So it was another drowning that Doraleigh had in mind to keep Stella quiet. She nodded to herself: a beginner mistake. Novice criminals tended to find something that worked for them once, and stick to it, rarely thinking to branch out and expand their repertoire until they were a lot further down the criminal path. Just like a man who hit his wife with an open palm to reduce the risk of bruising was liable to do it to the next gal he hooked up with, and the next.
Still, she doubted Doraleigh would be using Adriana’s pond again, and she made a quick mental inventory of likely ponds, lakes, and reservoirs in the county. Depending on how far Doraleigh felt like driving, there were lots of possibilities. If it was up to Stella—if it were she who was hoping to send a body to a watery and hopefully permanent grave, she’d probably go for one of the old limestone quarries up near Picot, which went nearly a hundred feet deep in some places.
Of course, a quarry was a funny place. With a stone bottom and walls, it wasn’t as friendly to aquatic life, to plants rooting on the floor and critters eating algae and so on up the food chain, as was, say, a farm pond. Stella had gone swimming in the old quarries as a teen, and it was downright creepy how the bottom, as it sloped away from the walls to unknowable depths, was covered with only a thin layer of greenish brown slime, with not even a school of guppies for company. A body left in such a place would bump about the bottom, where the sun couldn’t reach without even a catfish for company. The thought made her shudder.
“Are you wakin’ up back there, Miz Hardesty?” a voice came from the front. A full head of striped curls leaned around to look at her.
“Doraleigh Wall,” Stella said. “Or I suppose I should say Mingus, now. How long you and Salty been married, anyway?”
“Three years in June, not that you’d care.”
“What do you mean? Why wouldn’t I care?” Stella demanded, mystified. “I’m as big a supporter of matrimony as the next person.”
“Yeah, well, the way you been chasing around trying to figure out what happened to that no-good homewrecking stuck-up bitch Priss Porter, when
she’s
the one gone and, and, and made a
mockery
of my marriage—so I can’t even hold my head up high in the grocery store—”
“Are you saying folks knew about Salty seeing Priss? It was common knowledge?”
“What would you call it, when your husband doesn’t bother to come home from his so-called business trip to the city until midnight even though he
knows
it’s your bunco night? Oh, you can bet all the girls in the neighborhood know about that.”
Because you told them,
Stella thought. Doraleigh didn’t strike her as the kind of woman who’d suffer in silence. “Did you kill her, Doraleigh?”
“Only ’cause she didn’t leave me no choice! It was self-defense! I mean, it was self-defense of Salty, but that’s like my own personal self-defense ’cause we’re married and all.” Doraleigh’s voice had gone all high and thin and wobbly.
“Which is why he’s still tied up to a two-by-four and you’re driving the getaway car,” Stella muttered.
There was a suspicious pause. “You making fun of me, Stella?”
Stella sighed. “No,” she said tiredly. “Just trying to get the facts straight.” She felt the lumpy objects tied to her waist through the canvas and figured them for river stones, the kind of rocks that people liked to line their driveways with. Had she seen them at the Mingus’s place? She couldn’t recall, but there had certainly been a bounty of building materials lying around in back.
“Well, you might as well quit that. I hate to say it, but you might want to stop worrying about mine and Salty’s differences and start makin’ your peace with Jesus with the time you got left.”
“Me? What do
I
have to be confessin’ over? Wouldn’t that be more on you, seein’ as you’re fixing to drown me like a bag of cats?”
“Only ’cause I was
provoked,
” Doraleigh insisted in that same thin and reedy voice, and Stella realized there would be no talking sense to the gal. Denial put folks in a weird state, one where you might as well let them just spin their wheels because nothing you said or did was going to reach them anyway.
“What about Keller? Did you kill him, too?”
“Who?”
“The guy in Priss’s trunk?”
“Oh,
that.
Of course not. Why would I kill a perfect stranger? You’d have to ask Priss why she done it.”
“Priss killed him? You’re
sure
?”
“Well, I mean, she didn’t say she did, exactly—but there she was sitting in
my
living room asking
my
husband to get rid of a body, I’d say it’s pretty clear she done it.”
“Wait. Priss came to your
house
?”
“Well, yeah.” Doraleigh’s voice trembled with bitterness. “She comes to
my
house and knocks on
my
door, and when I open it I know right away who she is, of
course
I knew from all those pictures Salty hides in the bottom of his sock drawer, and I couldn’t even
believe
she had the nerve after I’d caught Salty sneaking up to the city last summer—”
“So you knew all about the affair.”
“Yes, but I didn’t know how far she’d go to hang on to Salty. She was an evil, scheming woman, Miz Hardesty, you got to see that.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty evil, forcing herself on Salty that way,” Stella muttered under her breath.
“And I made him
promise
it was over, or I told him he could just stay up there and forget coming home.”
Stella didn’t say it, but she’d lay odds Salty would’ve taken that deal, if Priss had been the one to offer it. He was one seriously smitten man. For the umpteenth time, she marveled at the hold Priss seemed to have on such a variety of men.
“So when she sat her skinny little ass down in
my
living room, and Salty told me to go to our room and give them time to
talk alone
…” Doraleigh’s voice was finally cracking, sniffling hiccups punctuating her speech. “Well, I went down the hall but I was listening, of course I was listening to her and she wasn’t even all that
nice
about it, Miz Hardesty. It was like she thought she could just waltz in and wind Salty around her little finger and get him to do whatever she wanted—with our own two
babies
sleeping down the hall from her—and she wanted him to help her get rid of a dead body in the trunk of that fancy car. I mean, of all the nerve, she says it won’t take him but an hour out of his evening and he had all the equipment and tools and what-all and didn’t he think he owed her after all the time they’d been together?”
“So that’s when you decided to kill her?”
“No, not then, not quite I didn’t. I waited until I just couldn’t stand it no more, and then I came into the living room and I told her to get the hell off my property and then, and then—” Doraleigh’s sniffles turned to choked sobs, and Stella felt almost a little bit sorry for her. “—and then Salty tells me she’s in a hard place, couldn’t we just help her this once, and I see that she won’t quit until she’s got every bit of him poisoned with her evil desires.”
“Here’s the thing I don’t get, Doraleigh—you’re not a real big gal. How the heck did you get all three of them bodies into Adriana’s pond?”
Doraleigh made a sound of disgust that was half snort and half ragged cry. “I wasn’t gonna kill anyone at all. That’s the crazy thing. After Priss left, Salty had him a couple a tall boys and passed out in the living room and the whole time I was just getting madder and madder. The kids were down for the night and I just thought, well, I’ll go and I’ll reason with her, woman to woman. You know?”
“Uh … yeah. Sure. What time was this?”
“I don’t know … maybe one thirty or so by the time I made up my mind. Anyway, when I got there Priss was so wound up, I couldn’t get a word in, she told me
forget
Salty, she said we’re a couple of
resourceful
women, we can take care of things ourselves, and the whole time I’m like whoa, wait, bitch, I’m here to call you out and then she’s waving her checkbook around, saying if I just help her get this dead guy into the Wolforts’ pond, she’ll pay me five thousand dollars and if I don’t, she’ll make it look like Salty did it anyway.”
It was almost refreshing to know that Priss’s shamelessness knew no bounds, but Stella was perplexed. “How would she have done that? I mean, it wasn’t like she had, you know, Salty’s prints or DNA or anything to connect him to the body.”
Doraleigh fixed her with a toxic gaze. “Stella. We’re talking
Salty,
here. Who knows what she had of his?”
“Uh…” Stella considered trying to explain elementary forensics to the woman, and realized she was out of her depth. “Okay. So … you helped her?”
“I made her put the plastic in the van,” Doraleigh said with a trace of satisfaction. “Them captain’s chairs? Why, they just pop right out and we moved them back and made a nice big area back there. With two of us, it didn’t take much work to get that—that
man
in here, and then we went in to have a stiff drink to get ready, which was
her
idea, Miz Hardesty, before we went over to the pond.”
“Weren’t you curious about why she had a dead guy in the first place?”
“Miz
Har
desty,” Doraleigh said with considerable dignity. “That was
not
my business. All I meant to do was come to an understanding and get home to my
family.
”
“Er … okay. So you’re having a drink…”
“And there’s all this thumping around from the bedroom and we can hear Liman talking on the phone and Priss is like,
Oh shit, he’s not supposed to be awake,
and she’s all,
Don’t worry, don’t worry,
but then he comes busting out of there like I told you, like some kind of lunatic—”
“I think she drugged him,” Stella said. “So he’d be asleep when you-all were doing the body disposing.”
Or, more likely, she’d drugged him much earlier, before Stella herself had visited, and after Salty had turned her down. Priss was just full of contingency plans, Stella noted with grudging admiration.
“Well, maybe. All’s I know is he tears out of his room all crazy like it’s the Second Coming or something and Priss hits him with that thing—”
“Beer stein,” Stella interrupted helpfully.
“That’s what you keep saying, but have you ever in your life seen anyone drink a beer out of one a them things?”
“Uh…”
“No, ma’am, and you won’t, either. Not when you can get a frosty mug, it ain’t even a contest. Anyway, Priss hits him and he goes down all twitchy and then it got a little weird for a while because I’m like uh,
Maybe he needs a doctor,
and she’s all,
Shit, shit, shit,
and by the time she made up her mind, he was kind of, like, you know, dead.”
“
Kind of
dead? Did y’all check?”
“Hey, that was
her
thing, I figure
she
hit him and besides it was
her
brother, not mine, but she seemed sure, yeah. And she stares at him a minute and then she says, well, how about if I add a couple thousand bucks, we can get rid of two as easy as one, and what am I going to do? I mean I’m already toting around one body, what’s another? And so we dragged Liman out there, too. And that was almost worse than the first one, Miz Hardesty. I mean on account of he was still kind of warm and all. And his head kept bumping on the ground when we dragged him.”
Hysteria, definitely, Stella figured. “Just one little thing I don’t get. Where, in all of this, did
Priss
end up dead?”
“Oh.
That.
So we get Liman out to the van and Priss is like, I’ll take the hands and you get the feet and we’ll just put him up on top of, you know, the other guy. And I’m like, are you sure, it’s your
brother,
your kin, and that guy’s not fresh, if you see what I’m saying. I say, just let’s get some more plastic from the shed, because Liman had plenty in there, I think they were drop-cloths, they had paint on them. I said we’ll put some plastic on the other guy and it’ll be more, um, sanitary or whatever. Because I don’t care what you say, at the end of the day, it’s still your blood kin, you don’t want to go disrespecting that.”
Stella figured the
disrespecting
line had been crossed somewhere before Priss had actually killed her own brother, but she kept the thought to herself. “I take it she didn’t agree.”
“So get this,” Doraleigh said, twisting in her seat to look Stella in the eye, momentarily oblivious of the road. “She tells me, why don’t I leave the thinking to her. We haul Liman up into the van and she goes and gets some bungee cords from the shed and kind of wraps the plastic around them two and then I’m like, well, let’s get this done so we head out to the Wolforts’. Only the whole time I’m just thinking about what a bitch she’s always been. And not just to me, to everyone.
Leave the thinking to me
—don’t that sound like something she would of said back in school?”