A Violent End at Blake Ranch (3 page)

“You have any idea?”

“Do I have an idea? No, not at all. I mean, I guess one of us would be the obvious suspect, but . . .”

“We'll discuss that directly. Let me get a few details straight. Exactly how long has Nonie been back?”

She puts a hand to her chest. “She came August tenth, to be exact. And today is the eighteenth? Is that right?”

“Yes, it's the eighteenth. Remind me how long it was since Nonie went away?”

“Too long. It would have been twenty years this fall. I hate that phrase ‘went away.' Like she was on vacation.” She's twisting her hands and she sounds like she could cry any minute. “I don't know why people feel the need to tiptoe around the matter and sugarcoat it. We've all lived with Nonie's situation for a long time—too long, if you ask me. I thought she ought to come home, but my parents didn't agree with me.” She tilts her chin up a little, defiant. I remember suddenly how young she is, probably late twenties. Somehow, she gave the impression of being in charge of things, and it made her seem older.

“I'm surprised you were willing to have Nonie back given what she tried to do to you.” Nonie had tried to kill Charlotte by hanging her. Nonie was fourteen and Charlotte was eight.

“We were children when all that happened,” Charlotte says. “Mamma and Daddy sent her to a psychiatrist, and he seemed to think she did it deliberately, but I don't care what he said, I don't believe she really knew what she was doing.”

“Why did they release her after all this time?”

“Mamma said there was some new medication she was taking and they didn't think she needed to be there any longer.”

“How did you feel when you heard she was coming back?”

She gets a funny look on her face. “The fact is, I didn't know she was coming back. She showed up here out of the blue and Mamma said she knew she was coming.”

“Why didn't your mamma tell you? Seems like she would have, given the history between the two of you.”

Charlotte shakes her head. “I know it sounds crazy. Mamma said she didn't know how to break the news to me. She should have known I'd be okay with it. I've made my peace with what happened.”

“You have?”

“Maybe not as much as I thought I had. It's been a little strange with her here.”

“Your brother seemed pretty upset. Had he gotten friendly with Nonie since she got home?”

“They hit it off. I don't think they spent a lot of time together, though.”

“Did anybody else come here in the past week to see her?”

She shakes her head. “Les is the only person who has been here this week. He came by one day, but they didn't have any conversation. He'd just met her. So we're the only people she saw, unless . . .”

“Unless what?”

“I suppose somebody could have visited her after we went to bed.”

“Did she ever go out?”

“Not that I know of.”

We hear footsteps on the stairs at exactly the same time the front doorbell rings. Charlotte jumps up and heads to the door. I hear Doc Taggart's voice. “Craddock here? He wanted to talk to me.”

I go into the entry at the same time Skeeter comes down the stairs. Charlotte goes over and grabs Skeeter's arm and brings him to the front door.

“How you doin', Skeeter?” Taggart says, stepping inside. His demeanor is too hearty, given the situation.

Skeeter grins.

“I'm doin' okay. Except, you know.” He points outside.

I tell them that I'm going to confer with Taggart and that I'll be right back with them.

“We'll wait in the living room,” Charlotte says.

“What in the hell happened?” Taggart says when we're alone. “How did she manage to drown?”

“You didn't look at the body?”

“Bill Odum intercepted me and said you wanted to see me.”

“You'd better come take a look. Somebody bashed her head in before they threw her in the pond.”

Taggart and I head for the pond. The west is full of threatening clouds and heat lightning, and in the late afternoon sun, with shadows from the trees beyond the pond, the air is almost lavender. The mosquitoes are in full force when we get near the scummy water. I slap at my arms and legs.

Taggart stoops down and examines Nonie. “Oh, my Lord.” He blows out a breath. “I guess if it's a homicide, they'll have to take her body over to Bobtail where T. J. can take a look at her.” T. J. Sutter is the county coroner and justice of the peace.

“I already called him and the Rangers.”

“Okay then.” He sighs. “This is a mess. I had heard they let Nonie come back. What made them decide to bring her home now?”

“I'll have to ask them that.”

“I'll bet it went over big with Charlotte having her back here.”

“Charlotte said she wanted to bring her home.”

“After what Nonie did to her?”

“Yes, she said they were just kids and she didn't believe Nonie knew what she was doing.”

“Charlotte doesn't know what the hell she's talking about. Nonie was crazy. Flat out. I wouldn't have trusted her.”

I have no idea how he knows this. He's a country GP, and as far as I know he wasn't trained in psychiatric care. “Did you have a hand in assessing her after she tried to kill Charlotte?”

“No, of course I didn't. They left that to the big cheeses. I forget where they took her. Houston, probably. But I was the family doctor and you could tell from the time she was little that there was something not right going on with her.”

Taggart has always irritated me as being a know-it-all, and this sounds like one of those things he's pontificating about that may or may not be true.

“Who found her?” he says.

“Adelaide's younger son, Skeeter.”

“Poor kid. Has to be a shock.”

“You know anything about John Blake? He seems to be giving the family some problems.”

“He's been going downhill for several years. They used to bring him to me, but they've started going to a specialist in Houston. I told Adelaide they needed to get him into a facility, but she said she married him for better or worse, and she was sticking with it. Poor devil.”

When he says “poor devil,” I don't know whether he means Adelaide or the old man.

He sniffs. “Parkinson's is a rotten disease. I guess you have to admire Adelaide for wanting to take care of him. I knew John when we were kids. Never could figure out what he saw in Adelaide. She never had much to say and when she did, it didn't mean much. She must have been a tiger in bed, is all I can say.”

I'm not quite sure how to reply to that.

“Unless you need me for anything else, I'll go on home now,” he says. “I can't do anything. It's up to the medical examiner now.”

When I go back into the house, Adelaide has joined the others in the living room. She looks like she's at the end of a long, hard day. A couple of strands of hair have escaped from her bun and are trailing over her shoulder, and her face is practically gray. I remind myself that it's her daughter lying out there dead, even though Nonie hasn't lived under her roof for a long time.

“I've had a few words with Charlotte,” I say to Adelaide and Skeeter, “and I need to talk to the two of you as well. But first, I'd like to take a look at the room Nonie was staying in.”

CHAPTER 3

The room where Nonie Blake spent her last few days is small but nicely furnished with an old-fashioned rag rug on the polished oak floor, a double bed with a carved mahogany headboard, and a flowered bedspread. There are a few more antique pieces in this room—the dresser topped with a mirror, a carved nightstand, and a spindle-back rocking chair. The top of the dresser contains a few personal items: a hairbrush, a small photo of a young girl in a cheap frame—maybe Nonie when she was very young—and a cup with a little dark liquid in the bottom. I sniff it and it smells like chocolate.

On the bedside stand there's a worn paperback romance novel called
Heart of Stone
. The cover shows a bare-chested man with a mane of blond hair holding his hand out to a woman dressed in a tight skirt with her chest almost busting out of her bodice. I open it and see a penciled marking that indicates the book was used and cost fifty cents. Next to the book there's a small tube of Jergens hand lotion and a box of tissues.

The closet is tiny but plenty big for the few clothes hanging there—two pairs of slacks, three blouses, and a dress. There are a pair of sneakers and a pair of sandals on the floor.

The top dresser drawer contains underwear, a nightgown, and a couple of T-shirts. There's a small zipper case with a thin chain with a cross on it. The other drawers are filled with household items—linens, candles, stationery, and framed photos, which means the room was used for storage before Nonie came home.

I step into the center of the room and try to figure out what's troubling me. Then I realize her belongings are sparse. Even being in a mental institution, she would have accumulated more in the way of clothing and personal items over twenty years. Maybe she left some items at the facility with the idea of having them sent. I feel like I can't really get a handle on her from the small impact she made on this room.

The bathroom is down the hall from her room. There I find minimal toiletries—toothbrush and toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo and mouthwash, and a few cosmetics. In the medicine cabinet, in addition to aspirin and Tums, I find a prescription bottle, but it's not Nonie's prescription. It's for someone named Susan Shelby, filled at a pharmacy in Tyler, Texas. That's the only medication I find.

I go back into the bedroom and look in vain for the medication Charlotte mentioned that supposedly got Nonie out of the hospital and back into normal life. Maybe Adelaide can tell me.

I consider closing off the room with crime-scene tape, but there's really nothing to see here.

“That's strange,” Adelaide says when I go back downstairs and ask her if she knows where Nonie's medication is. “I don't know that I ever saw it. I assumed she would take it if the doctor said she had to, but I never asked.”

I address Charlotte and Skeeter. “Did either of you ever see her take any pills?”

“Let me think.” Charlotte pauses and then shakes her head. “I don't believe I did.”

Skeeter says the same.

“When I was looking for Nonie's medication, I found some pills in the medicine cabinet with the name Susan Shelby on it. Who is she?”

Adelaide darts a glance at Charlotte.

Charlotte shrugs. “I don't know anyone by that name.”

“I don't know where they came from,” Adelaide says. “What kind of pills were they?”

“It's called Levoxyl. Used for low thyroid, I believe.”

“Yes, I take it myself,” Adelaide says.

“The prescription was filled in Tyler. Anybody visit you recently who lives in Tyler?”

She shakes her head slowly. “I think the last person who used that bathroom was my son Billy, when he was home last time.”

“That's your older son? When was he here?”

“Not in a while. Several weeks. He's out on the rodeo circuit.”

That doesn't explain why he would know anything about the pills. “Is he planning to come home soon?”

“We're trying to reach him,” Charlotte says.

“I guess we can ask him what he knows about the pills when he gets here,” I say.

“Nonie didn't have much in the way of clothing or personal items. Do you know if she had planned to send for some later?”

Adelaide's mouth tenses, and she runs a thumb along her lower lip before shaking her head. “I don't know anything about that,” she says. “I assumed she traveled with her belongings.”

Another assumption that Adelaide didn't bother to ask her daughter about. It doesn't add up. I have an uneasy suspicion that Adelaide is lying, but I can't imagine why. I'll probe a little deeper when I talk to her alone, but first I want to question Skeeter about the details of finding the body while they're still fresh in his mind.

Adelaide protests that she wants to be with Skeeter when I question him, but I confirm he's twenty years old. “He's old enough for me to question him alone,” I say.

I take Skeeter onto the front porch to talk to him, and I see that a highway patrol car has arrived and parked behind the ambulance. It's dusk now, and the porch lights cast a dull yellow glow into the yard. There's always a lot to be done with a crime scene, and people slip to and from the back of the house in the shadows, like ghosts. I tell Skeeter to wait, and I walk over to the patrol car to find out if they know when they plan to take Nonie's body away. I'd as soon the boy not have to see that.

Turns out the medical examiner has come and gone, declaring that it was a waste of his time to come out when Taggart could as easily have pronounced her dead. Before the highway patrol can authorize the ambulance to remove the body, they're waiting for the Texas Rangers so they can decide who has control of the case. I can't tell from the way the patrolman talks whether they want control or if they're itching to turn it over to the Rangers. Could go either way. Jurisdiction in a small-town suspicious death is sometimes murky. Theoretically it's up to the highway patrol to investigate if they determine that the town police force isn't up to the job, but often they hand it over to the Rangers, who have more resources.

When I get back on the porch, I sit down in a wicker chair next to Skeeter. “Skeeter, I'm sorry about your sister. She hasn't been home long, but Charlotte tells me you and Nonie seemed to like each other.”

“She had a funny way about her. Different. Finding her in the pond like that was terrible.”

“I know it was. Tell me, how were things after Nonie arrived? What did you think of her? Did she get along with everybody in the house?”