Casket Case (29 page)

“What did you do?” he asked.

“I took off my makeup. Apparently, I’m having a reaction to it as well as the remains of bruises from the accident.”

“Accident? From what I’ve heard, it was an
attack
.”

“Yes, I guess so,” I agreed.

“Come on in the living room. Sheriff Harmon is here to talk to us.”

The sheriff gave me a shocked look, but didn’t comment on my face. He was sitting on the couch scratching Big Boy’s ears.

“I went to the B and B in Beaufort to see Mrs. White and talk to Mr. Carter. She was intoxicated and couldn’t tell me where he is. The most I got from her was that her fiancé had to leave town ‘on business.’ She really wasn’t making much sense other than that you had started some trouble for George. Do you know what she’s talking about? You didn’t confront him, did you?”

“No. I told you what the cookie lady said about him, but I haven’t talked to him. Don’t you remember? Mrs. Counts said she told Pearl that she was me. George saw us together at Dr. Melvin’s funeral, and Mrs. Counts tried to get him to admit that he’s Sean Gunderson. She thinks he’s after Pearl’s money. She also thinks he killed some of his other wives and that he came after her last night while she was at church.”

“Callie, you know that could have been who tossed your apartment.”

“What about Pearl?” Jane interrupted. “Her last living relative was Melvin Dawkins. You can’t just leave her drunk in a rented room in Beaufort. What if he thinks of something that will make her a threat to him? Or what if he comes back for her and marries her while she’s drinking? Then he could kill her and inherit. She never had any children.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Sheriff Harmon said. “She seemed dehydrated, so I called an ambulance and had her transported to the hospital. After a talk with the Beaufort sheriff, Pearl White is not only hospitalized, she’s under protective observation.”

“Whew! I just don’t want anything bad to happen to her,” Jane said. “She’s been really good to me until that Lucas woman tried to buy her out.”

“I don’t want anything to happen to any of you,” said the sheriff, “and I’d just as soon you ladies not stay here by yourselves until we’ve located Sean Gunderson, aka George Carter.”

Frank grinned. “I can stay here with them.”

“I think it would be better if all of you go over to your father’s place.”

If looks could kill, Jade County would have had a dead sheriff.

“You know how I feel about that,” I said.

“Look what I’m dealing with here,” Sheriff Harmon said. “I still don’t know if Melvin Dawkins died a natural death or someone helped him along. I’ve got a lot going on. Someone beat Dorcas Lucas to death. I’d been afraid that Jane pushed her off the steps. That could have been an accident, but beating someone is homicide.” Jane frowned at him.

“You know Jane couldn’t beat anyone to death,” Frank said.

“I could if I wanted to!” Jane protested.

“Are you admitting you beat Ms. Lucas to death?” the sheriff asked.

“No, just saying I could if I wanted to. I’ll bet there have been blind murderers. I’m just not one of them.”

I had never seen it before. I roll my eyes sometimes when I’m not thinking, but I’d never seen a man do it. Sheriff Harmon rolled his eyes as well as any woman I’ve ever known. “I have no doubt,” he said, “that you can do anything you put your mind to, Jane.

“The point I’m trying to make here,” he continued, “is that I’ve got all of that plus a possible serial killer loose in this town, and I don’t want to have to worry about Callie Parrish sticking her nose somewhere it doesn’t belong and getting herself hurt or in trouble.”

To the affronted look on my face, he responded, “Pearl White said George Carter was all upset about
you.
He thinks you and Mrs. Counts talked to me about him. Mrs. Counts has disappeared, and I suspect Carter will come after you unless he’s skipped town.”

He grimaced. “Add to that the facts that someone tried to kill you on the road, someone was in your apartment, and someone’s been sneaking around in your yard, probably playing Peeping Tom.” He paused. “I think that’s enough, don’t you?”

“Enough for me,” Frank said. “I suggest we pack up some clothes for you gals and head back to Pa’s. He’ll welcome both of you.”

“How about supper?” Jane said. “I was going to make spaghetti. We bought groceries.”

“We’ll take them with us,” Frank said. “Big Boy can come, too. He loves playing at the farm.”

I didn’t like the idea at all, but I was clearly outnumbered. Frank and Jane packed the food into the Jeep. They wanted me to ride with them, but I insisted Big Boy and I would follow in the Mustang. Sheriff Harmon helped me get Big Boy locked into his special seat belt. As I drove off, I saw the sheriff back at the front door, double-checking that I’d left it locked.

“Big
Boy,” I said, “do you ever wonder how we wind up in all these situations?”

He didn’t answer, not even a bark, but I could imagine what he would tell me if he could. “Callie,” he’d say, “you need to get a life.”

If I had a real life, lived for the day as Jane said, I wouldn’t have time to get mixed up in everything that happened in St. Mary. If I had a real life, if I lived for the day, I’d find myself a job that didn’t throw me right into the middle of every death in town, especially the ones that weren’t natural. A job that didn’t send me to a graveyard to watch a ten-year-old coffin come out of the ground and give me nightmares.

I looked over at my dog again. His tongue was hanging out of his mouth, flopping around, but his ears stood straight up like they should on a purebred Great Dane. It had cost a small fortune—in my budget anyway—but cropping his ears had given him a much better look.

“Want to ride convertible, Big Boy?” I asked.

I didn’t wait for an answer, just pulled over to the side of the road and put the ragtop down.

Big Boy grinned. Well, maybe not everyone would know his expression was a grin, but I did. I was still frightened, scared, and curious. What was going on? Why so many mysterious deaths at one time in a town the size of St. Mary?

Both Dr. Melvin and Pearl White thought they’d found true love on the Internet.

“Do you think I should try looking for love online?” I asked Big Boy.

He gave me a
What kind of fool are you?
look and rolled his eyes. I know it sounds impossible, but it’s the truth. I promise. My dog rolled his eyes at me!

“I guess not,” I said. “Neither of those turned out too well. Dr. Melvin’s dead, and we don’t know why or if his wife did away with him to inherit from him. Pearl White’s gotten herself involved with a man who might be a serial killer, and she’s started back drinking.”

Vanessa crossed my mind. I had submitted the profile, but no one could ever trace that back to me. Or could they? Computer geeks can do all kinds of things. What if someone traced it? I laughed out loud. If they traced my entry, it would lead back to a mortuary. I didn’t think anyone would be eager to come looking there.

Since Big Boy was now gazing around, not paying any attention to me, I stopped talking to him and thought to myself,
Thank heaven Pearl hadn’t yet sold all of her property and given the proceeds to charity, thinking Georgie would take care of her the rest of her life!

Ms. Dorcas Lucas had been the biggest witch with a
b
that I’d ever encountered my whole life. Bad enough the sheriff had thought Jane pushed her down the steps. Now he was convinced from the autopsy that someone had beaten her to death. I couldn’t swear—well, I try not to swear anyway—that Jane wouldn’t push someone away and that person couldn’t fall down the steps. But I was positive that Jane wouldn’t have beaten even Ms. Lucas to death with a two-by-four.

I really didn’t have anything to do with those events, so why was I being harassed? Why did someone try to kill me on the road? Why break into my apartment? Why peek in my windows and leave notes for me? It was too much, just too much, to all be coincidental. There had to be a connection.

Big Boy was looking at me like, “Why’d you stop talking to me?”

“Don’t you agree?” I asked him. “There has to be a connection. Dr. Melvin and Pearl were cousins and both found romance on the Internet.” I stopped talking again.

Romance could have come to me through the Internet, too. Indirectly. The Internet had enabled Roselle to find her half brother Levi. Then the Internet had led her to Melvin here in St. Mary, and Levi had followed her. If I hadn’t run Levi Pinckney off, I may have had a relationship from online. Jane and I hadn’t had a chance to really talk, but I’m sure she would think I was crazy to tell Levi I wasn’t interested in chemistry.

I could tell from their actions that Jane and Frank had worked their problems out. I wondered if Jane had convinced him she needed her job, or if he’d convinced her she needed him more than she needed the work.

Someone, I think it was Sherlock Holmes, said something like, “When you rule out all the impossibles, what’s left is the solution.” That wasn’t doing me much good since I couldn’t identify the impossibles. I decided to think about probables instead of possibles.

From what Mrs. Counts said and from what the sheriff told us, it was more than probable that George Carter was an alias for one of those men who marry and murder over and over for profit. If that were the case, he’d never loved Pearl White. He would have married her, moved her to Florida, and seen to it that she met with an accident that left him rich.

If.
There was a big
if
involved. He’d told Pearl that they didn’t need her money. She’d taken him at his word and put everything on the market, planning to donate the proceeds to her favorite charities to help people with vision or hearing impairments. George Carter wouldn’t inherit a thing if Pearl liquidized and donated her proceeds to charity before he married her.

That was the connection!

Dorcas Lucas wasn’t killed for personal reasons. She hadn’t been murdered because she was such a horrible person, though she truly was an awful being. She’d died because of her job. Because if she negotiated the sale of Pearl’s property and Pearl donated the proceeds to charity before her wedding, there’d be nothing left for George Carter to inherit after he killed his new bride.

From what I’d read, blunt force trauma was a much more masculine than feminine way of murder anyway. Females were more inclined to kill by poison, smothering, or some other less combative means. Of course, Jane said she could beat someone to death if she had to. I didn’t believe her, but I feared Sheriff Harmon did. I wondered if he’d figured out the motive for Ms. Lucas’s death. If he’d figured out that George Carter had beaten her to death.

Good grief! George Carter could have killed Dr. Melvin, too. Maybe he feared that Pearl would leave some money or property to him since he was her only relative. If the toxicology reports showed something had been slipped into food or drink to cause Dr. Melvin’s death, I’d put my money on Carter as the culprit.

But why would Carter try to run me off the road? And why would he be peeking through my windows and plundering through my apartment? Those questions would take more thought, but I felt like I was on the right track. I reached for the cell phone to call Sheriff Harmon.

Dalmation!
I’d left it home again. I know sometimes I give Big Boy credit for more human-type intelligence than he can possibly have, but when I turned toward him, I promise he gave me a
What now?
look.

When we reached the apartment, I opened the door and let the dog in, then remembered I’d left my purse on the seat. I went back for it, then returned and entered.

George
Carter stood at my kitchen sink with Big Boy sitting on the floor right beside him, the dog looking up like he was Scooby-Doo and Carter was Shaggy. I could see them from my front door.