“Most people can’t still
wear
their clothes from the sixties.”
Rayna laughed, and I did, too. We were all on edge, and teasing one another took some of the jitters away. Not all of them, though. The closer we got to Miranda Watson’s darkened house, the higher the hairs on the back of my neck and my arms stood up. I probably looked like a cat, all fluffed out and ready to jump.
We approached the house by the back way. Overgrown bushes almost hid a wire fence that marked the boundaries of the yard. Since the fence was low, I was able to bend the wire down and hop over it with only a little trouble. Rayna managed it as well, and that left Bitty.
She eyed the fence, stuck the toe of her shoe into one of the wire squares, and did her best to get over it. Unfortunately she was too short and her jumpsuit was too tight. All she did was get hung up. The fence was flimsy, one of those ancient livestock wire things that had probably been put up in the thirties. Every time Bitty tried to climb over it, wire sagged and threw her off-balance, and she hung precariously. The back and forth motion of the wire made it look as if Bitty was trying to ride a wild mustang.
Rayna and I tried to help, grabbing her arms to lift so she could get traction with her feet. It didn’t help. Bitty is heavier than she looks. And despite her claim of being the same size she was in the sixties, she feels at least twenty pounds heavier.
“Good god, Bitty,” I puffed as I strained to keep her aloft, “have you got bricks in your pockets?”
Between wheezes, she retorted, “No . . . pockets!”
“Then your outfit must be made of lead, not leather, Catwoman.”
A giggle escaped Rayna as she struggled with Bitty’s other arm. The fence post wobbled, the wire vibrated, Bitty weaved back and forth with one leg half over the top. It was a recipe for disaster. I could see it coming, but couldn’t stop it.
Rayna and I both tried to hold on to her, but our efforts failed. Leather sleeves slipped through our hands as if greased. Bitty flailed her arms over her head like she was trying to fly, her entire body teetered, her right foot stuck fast in a four inch wire square, her left foot caught on the top, and then she went backward and down.
A loud shriek accompanied her landing in the bushes. So much for stealth.
Next door, a back porch light flashed on. Rayna and I hit the ground.
I have to say, Rayna is a really fast study.
Cupping her hands around her mouth, she meowed like a cat in heat. Obviously, it isn’t a sound that’s unfamiliar to her. If there were any tomcats within a three mile radius, they were no doubt headed our way. With Bitty flopping around in the bushes and trying to get her foot unstuck from the fence, it probably sounded like a crowd of cats. Pride of cats? That collective noun thing briefly flashed through my mind right before I was smacked on the head with a stick.
“Owww!”
I said. Rayna immediately drowned me out with another long moan like a love-starved feline. Bitty hit me with another stick.
“Get me loose!” she hissed, and since I was already crouched on the ground and almost eye-level with her foot, I obliged by yanking off her shoe. It had the desired effect of releasing her, and she disappeared into the tangled undergrowth. There was some thrashing around before she popped into sight again. Still on the other side of the fence, of course. She pressed her face against the wire squares and glared at me. “Not like that!”
“How else was I supposed to get you loose?” I hissed back at her.
“You could have thought of something!”
“I did! And it worked.”
Bitty threw a clump of leaves at me and missed.
“Bitty,” said Rayna in a whisper, “stop playing around and get over here!”
“I’ll go around,” I heard Bitty say, then bushes rustled and she disappeared.
Rayna's ruse of being a lovelorn cat must have worked. The porch light next door went out. We were left in the dark again. A dog barked not far away, and I felt the sudden need for a potty break.
Impossible, of course.
In the years of following my ex around the country to random jobs, I had found that with enough training, it’s possible for me to go long periods of time without having to visit gas station toilets. Perry believed it vital to get to our destination with as few stops as necessary, although we did have occasional differences of opinion on what constituted necessary. Thus, I learned that the longer I could wait and the fewer gas stations we had to visit, the less stress I endured. I put that lesson to good use now.
Rayna and I crept toward the back of the house, keeping to the shadows as much as possible. Crickets stopped chirping, then started up when we passed them, and birds muttered sleepily in tree tops. There are a lot of old trees in Holly Springs. Every year a few are lost to wind and storms, but there are still plenty left in the neighborhoods.
Bitty reappeared farther down the fence. Instead of trying to climb over again, she opened the wire gate and stepped through. She met us at the concrete steps leading up to the back door. Twigs and leaves sprouted from her head like horns, and she tried to brush them away with one hand.
“We could have just come through the gate,” she whispered sulkily. “I think I got all kinds of creatures in my hair.”
“A good wash will get them out,” I comforted her. “If the peroxide doesn’t kill them first.”
“My hair color is natural!” she insisted as she followed us up the back steps.
Rayna turned on the top step and looked at us. “Will you two be quiet? I’d be amazed if the entire neighborhood hasn’t heard us by now!”
“Sorry,” I said. “Nerves.”
Bitty nodded agreement. “We do this.”
“Well, please stop! You’re making me a nervous wreck.”
When Rayna turned back to the door, Bitty and I just looked at each other and shrugged. Apparently not everyone has mine and Bitty’s ability to remain cool under pressure. It must be a Truevine talent.
After a few tense moments of feeling around the top of the door frame, Rayna's fingers brushed a key and it tumbled through the air. She managed to catch it before it fell into the flowerbed next to the house.
“How did you know to look up there?” I whispered when we were inside the house.
“Someone has to be feeding her cats. I took a chance.” Rayna clicked on the long flashlight and played it around the kitchen. It looked fairly neat. Either someone had been in to tidy it up, or the struggle between Miranda and her assailant hadn’t gotten this far. I couldn’t help a shudder at the thought of her being attacked so brutally. It must have been a terrible shock.
“Do you think it was someone she knew?” I asked as we tiptoed from the kitchen toward the front rooms. “Surely Miranda wouldn’t invite just anyone inside, and certainly not the person she was going to betray in her column. Would she?”
“She can be really smug,” Bitty said from behind me. We were creeping single-file down a hallway. “She might have thought she could handle the situation. Or maybe it was someone who didn’t have anything at all to do with the other murders, but just took a dislike to something she said.”
“I got the impression she intended to publish something startling in her column,” said Rayna. She paused at the door to the living room to turn and look at us. “Didn’t you, Trinket?”
“Well, yes, but I thought maybe it was just an apology to the Divas. That would have been pretty startling.”
Bitty snorted. “It would have been pretty miraculous. Miranda Watson has never apologized to anyone about anything she’s put in her nasty little gossip column. She has all the manners of a sump pump. Bless her heart.”
The last was added in a “knock on wood” spirit, since Bitty obviously didn’t want any bad luck to come back on her for disparaging a woman in a coma.
Rayna swung the flashlight beam toward the living room. “I’ll see if I can find those papers I saw, while you two check out the dining room.”
I hadn’t even thought about bringing a flashlight, and when I looked at Bitty, I saw that she hadn’t, either. Rather than admit our lack of foresight, I returned to the kitchen to look for a candle, or matches, or anything that would be better than alerting the neighbors by turning on the lights. As I felt my way along what I thought to be a walnut cabinet, I heard someone right behind me.
“Just wait there, Bitty,” I said softly. “I’m looking for a light of some kind.”
She didn’t answer, but I could hear her breathing as I searched around on the top of the cabinet, then on one of the kitchen counters. I saw where Miranda had one of those old wrought iron match holders hanging on her wall, the dark shape unmistakable even in the dim kitchen light. I reached inside it, but instead of matches, she had a Bic lighter. It would work just as well, I figured.
“I’ve got something,” I said to Bitty as I turned around, but she’d already gone back to the hallway.
When I reached her, she grabbed my wrist. “Where did you go?”
“You know where I went. To get a light. Here. I have a lighter. No candles, though.”
“You should have told me. I looked around and you were gone.” She shivered. “I think one of the cats is hiding in that doorway. I keep feeling it looking at me.”
I flicked the Bic, and we both squinted toward the doorway she mentioned, but the cat was gone. The tiny light flickered and danced right above my thumb. Holding the plastic tab to keep it lit wasn’t as easy as I thought it’d be. Every time my thumb slipped, the flame went out and I had to restrike. Still, it was better than no light at all as we made our way into the dining room off the hall and next to the kitchen.
An eerie silence shrouded the house. I wanted to call out to see if Rayna had any luck, but didn’t want her to fuss at me again for being loud. Bitty grabbed hold of the back of my football jersey and walked so close behind me she stepped on my heels twice.
Papers were stacked on the dining room table. Several books, a bowl of artificial fruit, a Christmas wreath, vase of wilted flowers, and ceramic statue of a cat cluttered the surface, too. I went to the stack of papers, and held the Bic close enough to make out the words. It was a column from
The South Reporter
, but it wasn’t one by Miranda. This one had to do with a ladies’ softball team.
“What does it say?” Bitty asked right in my ear as she peered over my shoulder. “Is it the one naming the killer?”
“No, and to be honest, I don’t think we’re going to find anything like that here. If the police left anything like that behind, they’re slipping.”
“Maybe they just took one copy of it. That would be all they would need.”
“Why would Miranda print out more than one copy? I thought people did all that kind of stuff by the Internet these days, anyway.”
“Oh, I don’t know. To proof read or something, I suppose. Here. Give me the lighter. I see something on the buffet table.”
I passed over the Bic quite gladly. Holding down that plastic tab made my thumb ache. The circle of light it made was small, and while Bitty examined stuff on the buffet, I stood in the dark and waited. A mirror hung over the buffet table, and the flame reflected back in a bright circle that illuminated the leaves and twigs stuck in Bitty’s hair. She’d suffered for our cause, I thought to myself with a grin. Usually it’s me who ends up with ungodly debris in my hair, on my face, and stuck to the bottom of my shoes. The fates were smiling more kindly on me tonight.
“Trinket,” she whispered excitedly, “I think I have it! This is it!”
“What?” I was stunned. This had all seemed like a wild goose chase until now. “Let me see that. Are you sure?”
“As I can be. It has next week’s date on it, and here it says . . . oh, let me see . . ..”
I made my way around the end of the oval dining room table toward Bitty. She held up the sheet of printer paper, and as she did so, the Bic caught her thumbnail on fire.
Flame shot into the air as her long, curved thumbnail blazed nicely.
“Drop the lighter, Bitty,” I couldn’t help shouting. “Drop it!”
Bitty dropped the lighter, but her thumbnail still burned. It smelled terrible. She waved her hand frantically in the air, but that only made it burn higher.
“Stop, drop, and roll, Bitty!”
From the next room I heard Rayna telling us to be quiet, but it seemed to me we had a bigger problem on our hands than disturbing the cats. I did the only thing I could think of. I grabbed the vase of flowers from the dining table and dashed the water over Bitty. Of course, the wilted flowers went, too, and daisy petals scattered in her hair and on the dining room rug. The fiery thumb went out, and Bitty just stood there looking at it in the dark as water dripped from her nose and chin, and from the ends of her hair.
Then she said, “At least these are acrylic nails.”
Relieved at her calm tone, I nodded. “I’m sure DJ will be glad to work you into her schedule tomorrow.”
I heard Bitty sigh. “I’ve been trying to save money by going once a month. She’ll be surprised to see me.”
“Where’s the Bic?”
“Where’s the what?”
“The lighter, Bitty. Did you drop it?”
“Oh. Yes. It’s on the floor somewhere—oh, and the paper! It’s down there, too. I’ll get it.”
We both bent at the same time, and in the dark, bumped heads. I put out a hand to steady myself and luckily, found the lighter.
“I’ve got fire, Bitty, so be careful,” I said as I flicked the Bic. It was a good thing I warned her; she was so close her hair would have been in flames if she moved an inch. I held the lighter up a little higher and saw the paper on the wood floor. When I tried to pick it up, it clung soddenly to oak. Uh oh. This was not at all promising.
“Be careful,” said Bitty a little anxiously. “I think it got wet.”
Flickering light wavered erratically and the Bic went out. I relit it briefly. Enough to see that it was going to take steadier light to accomplish recovery of the paper without ruining it.
“We need Rayna's flashlight. I hope this paper is what we need and all our efforts aren’t wasted.”
Bitty said thoughtfully, “My leather jumpsuit is shrinking. We better hurry.”
“Good lord, Bitty.”