Authors: Shannon Hill
I put the peanut butter cups in a drawer. Not the locked one. “Anyone know about the insulin?”
“Not to hear them talk,” she said after she’d thought it over. “I haven’t said a word, not to anyone.”
“Neither have I,” said Tom, who’d come in early to help finish up paperwork. “How about you, Davis?”
Davis, reading a home decorating book, said, “Like Jeff, I have no one to tell.”
Even in jail in bile green scrubs, the guy was a smarmy SOB. Made me want to wade right out of the human gene pool.
“Good,” I announced. I ate a peanut butter cup, and tossed one to Tom. Boris, who’d been feigning sleep, leapt from my desk and batted it around like a hockey puck. It vanished under the sofa, and Boris went squirming after it. Twelve pounds of cat sticking out of a three-pound crack is always good for a giggle, so I watched him try to flatten out while I set up the scene in my head. A big showy revelation of who the mushroom almost-killer was, all expository in the best Sherlock Holmes way, and then drop the bomb that in fact it was insulin that had done in Vera Collier. Normally I’d have recoiled from the mere notion, but these were the Colliers. Melodramatic confrontation should show me the cracks in the clan’s conspiracy.
“Oh Lord,” said Tom, reading a fax. “Lil, they don’t believe us. They think there is no such town as Crazy.”
I let my feet thud down to the floor. “Send it to Harry Rucker. He knows how to convince them.”
Tom grumbled at the fax machine. Kim scrolled through e-mails. Davis read. Boris gave up on his peanut butter hockey puck and sharpened his claws on his condo. I pondered whether or not I should speed things up at State by calling an old college roommate. She still feels she owes me for the time I socked her drunken boyfriend in the nose after he’d kicked in our door and penned her up under the bed in one of his rages. And for the time I took her to the ER when he caught her alone. And the time I hauled her to a counseling center to convince her it wasn’t her fault. And… Well, it had been an eventful year. But I hate to call in favors I might need for something more important than the state of my nerves.
The telephone rang. Kim answered lazily, “Crazy Sheriff’s Department. Oh, hi, Maury. What?” She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Lil, you better take this one. It’s Bobbi again.”
Swear to God, she’d given me more vexation these last two months than she had in three decades of friendship. “Now what?” I asked, slapping my hat on my head and clicking my tongue at Boris.
“She’s in a screaming match with Ruth Campbell, Maury can hear it out his office window.”
Ruth’s back yard happens to share a few feet of boundary with Morse Sanitation and Disposal’s back yard. The part that isn’t full of equipment, that is. “How does he know all the yelling isn’t just Ruth giving God a good telling-off?”
Kim relayed the question, and gave me the answer with an impressively straight face. “He’s pretty sure Ruth wouldn’t call God a drunken slut.”
***^***
Ruth Campbell’s house is the last on its side of Fifth Street, on the more or less west side of Main and just far enough from Elk Creek to prevent flooding but close enough for a lovely view of it. A few strategic trees hide the sanitation plant downstream where Crazy’s waste is rendered hygienic, and I’ll say this for Maury and even Delbert. When they were done, you might have a pretty steep bill but you knew you could swim and fish without fear downstream of the plant.
Too bad I couldn’t put them to work on Bobbi’s mouth.
They’d moved the screaming match into the shade. I could tell where it started by following Ruth’s discarded watering can, gardening gloves, and finally her big straw hat with the orange ribbon.
As I came around the corner of the house, I heard Bobbi hollering, “Who gives you the right to tell me how to live you old bitch! You ain’t God!”
“You stop cussing at me you whore!”
I didn’t bother with an air horn. They wouldn’t have heard it. I went for the garden hose coiled neatly on its reel. “Watch out, sweetie,” I told Boris, and cranked the spigot as far as it would go. Then I pulled the trigger lever on the nozzle.
Two near-identical high-pitched screams of outrage hit my ears at once. Bobbi stumbled back, spitting, while Ruth stepped away, sputtering. For a second there, the two were uncannily alike. Then Bobbi rushed up to me. “About time someone arrests that…”
I hastily overrode her. “That’s enough. I mean it. People can hear you halfway to Charlottesville.”
Bobbi didn’t care. “Do you know what she did?”
“No more than your own parents should’ve done!” snapped Ruth. I don’t know what kind of hairspray she used, but her hair didn’t droop a bit. Soaked as she was, that coiffure was intact. I mean the water just beaded up on it like it was a waxed car.
“How about someone tells me what that is?” I suggested, keeping myself between them. That’s the hell of being me. I even have to protect and serve Ruth Campbell.
“She got the reverends to say I can’t be married in church! Either one!”
I opened my big mouth. “I thought you wanted a civil ceremony.”
Bobbi screeched. I’d heard a noise like that once when I’d stepped on Natasha’s tail. “That’s not the point!”
“Someone has to keep your filthy…your…” Ruth couldn’t find a word, had to settle for “dirty kind out of our churches!”
I wouldn’t have believed it, but Bobbi could actually go higher and shriller. “Dirty kind?!”
I lifted my hand. “I still have the hose, ladies.”
Bobbi shut up, simmering. Ruth didn’t. “Marrying a
heathen
isn’t enough, oh no, she has to marry him right in front of
Jesus
!”
I glanced around for Boris. He was lounging under a bush washing his paws. Great. The one time I want him to tear someone to pieces, he decides he’s a pacifist.
“Mrs. Campbell, Dr. Vidur’s not a heathen.”
“He’s not Christian!”
I started to point out that technically heathen in Old English just meant “not Christian
or Jewish
” and can also mean someone who isn’t Christian, Jewish or Muslim, but that wasn’t going to help. And if I told her it often also meant, in the modern world, someone who was irreligious or uncivilized, I wouldn’t be getting anywhere I wanted to go. Instead, I dug myself a good deep hole by saying, “That doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.”
Ruth Campbell went to slap me. For a woman her age, her reflexes were fast. I don’t know how I got my arm up in time to block her.
I heard a low, yowling snarl down around my ankles.
Boris was crouched by my feet, tail lashing. His eyes were huge, his ears were back, and I could count half of his teeth.
“Mrs. Campbell,” I said softly, so as not to set off the feline bomb, “put your arm down very slowly. Okay?”
She put her arm down, very slowly. She was barely daring to breathe.
“Now back off a few feet. Just a few. Slowly.”
She backed off about ten feet. Her hand went to her throat. “That
menace
…” she started.
“Is doing his job,” I interrupted. I knelt to touch Boris on the head. “Easy, sweetie,” I crooned, then returned my gaze to Ruth. “You don’t want to hit a cop. Trust me on that. Now. Bobbi.”
She was standing as if mesmerized by Boris’s rhythmically swishing tail. “Hmm?”
“Go back to work and stop worrying what she does. Okay?”
Bobbi shook herself. Like a dog coming out of water. “She has no right, Lil.”
Ruth didn’t know when to quit. “I have no right?
She
has no right! It’s bad enough we let those people in this country, bringing all their heathen ways with them, contaminating us! But she’s going to
marry
one and have his mongrels!”
I had a hand on Bobbi’s shoulder before Ruth finished talking. Later on, Bobbi would call me to tell me I’d left a bruise. I couldn’t be too sorry. Preventing murder is part of the job. “Mrs. Campbell, you should be quiet now. You really should be quiet.”
“It’s being quiet that’s got this country in such a mess!” Ruth railed, a little hoarsely. “Evil only triumphs if good people do nothing, and we have a duty to keep this a Christian nation! One nation under God, it says so in the Constitution!”
I kept one hand clamped on Bobbi. If I let her go, I’d murder Ruth myself. I drew several deep breaths, the yogic kind that are supposed to be cleansing. Didn’t work. The damn heat was getting to me.
“Ruth,” I retorted, “I’d tell you to read the Constitution and show me where the hell it says ‘Christian nation’ but that’d mean you’d have to actually open your mind instead of your mouth.”
“Are you insulting me?”
I don’t lose my temper on the job very often, but Ruth was a special case. “I’m promising you. Every single word you’ve said? I’m telling Aunt Marge. And if that doesn’t scare you, you’re dumber than I thought.”
Bobbi laughed. I gave her a hard shake. “And the both of you, just avoid each other, will you? There’s been enough killing around here!”
I dragged Bobbi to her car by force. Boris trotted after me, not keen to be left near Ruth and a garden hose. “You really telling Miz Turner?”
“Every word, outta both your mouths,” I told her. She flinched. I stood glaring until she had gotten into her car and was driving meekly back to her salon. Then I took out my cell phone. There’s no point making promises unless you’re going to keep them, and I could dream of no better punishment for either of them than Aunt Marge on a rampage about true Christian values and appropriate behavior.
***^***
Rounding up all the Colliers and their spouses required some thinking and some conniving, and it required Punk Sims. He was so happy to be wearing a deputy’s badge I don’t think he’d have cared if we’d ordered him to arrest Godzilla. The prospect of bringing in the Collier clan for more questioning delighted him.
It didn’t thrill Tom, who was still pretty sure we’d be shot. At least Tanya Hartley wouldn’t be angry that he didn’t tell her what he was up to. She wasn’t my pick for Public Defender of the Year, but she knew the drill well enough to get there are some things cops and lawyers have to keep to themselves.
We took over Littlepage Elementary again, but this time, I set up shop in the cafeteria. It was small, depressing, and with the big metal grates down over the kitchen area for the summer, the only doors in and out were the ones to the hallway. Easy to guard. Sure, someone could try to dive out the windows, but they were old-fashioned, multi-paned, and set high. It’d take work.
This time, we rounded up the Colliers one by one. Less strain on my nerves and our resources. We went for the men first, most of them out of the hollow at work. Tom rounded up Ken and Rob together at their aunt’s convenience store in Gilfoyle, grabbing coffees; I snagged Army down in Lynchburg, and picked up Hal Lynch on the way back. Punk took on May Payne and Gloria Shenk, catching them at the grocery store. Thanks to Harry, I was able to find Seth Tyler fixing a water heater in the tiny village of Brown. Then we headed into the hollow, rounding up Eileen, Lynne, Laura and Honey in a big sweep right after lunchtime. Like all the rest, they got the choice of coming along with us voluntarily or in handcuffs.
Punk was standing guard in the cafeteria. Harry had driven up, and had supplied a cooler of drinks and an array of snacks, like it was a picnic. Kim had brought the video camera and was fussing with it. As I’d asked, Jeff and Davis were present, studiedly ostracized by and ostracizing their siblings and in-laws. Except for Donna—reportedly sleeping off a drunk and disorderly in Nelson—the whole gang was there.
I took a quick survey. The only Colliers not openly or subtly worried were Jeff and Davis. It’s strange, but it hit me hard all of a sudden that just about all these people had colluded and conspired to cover up Vera’s murder. It wasn’t only a testament to how little Vera was loved. It was a monument to how poorly she’d raised her kids.
I clapped my hands. Not necessary. I already had all the attention the Colliers could give, which right then felt like a few tons more than I wanted. I wished I didn’t have to stand. I could have used Boris cuddling on my lap. But I did lightly tap the table on which we had set several boxes—most of them closed so no one saw they were full of old magazines—and Boris jumped up to sit where he could be seen, and, more importantly, petted. I rubbed his ears once, for luck, and hoped I was right about that tail of his.
“I know you’d all rather not be here right now,” I said by way of greeting. “But we’ve learned a few things and I’d like to have it all out in the open.”
Nobody looked more nervous than anybody else. Well, I was just starting.
“First off, we know about the mushrooms that were found in Davis’s office at the café. We had an expert take a look at them.”
Ken scoffed. “You don’t got the budget for that.”
I smiled sunnily. No need to tell him I’d paid the consulting fee out of my own pocket. “The species of mushroom found in Davis’s office turns out to be
Amanita phalloides
.” I got the pronunciation right that time. I’d had Tom’s cousin coach me. “The death cap, it’s called.”
Some arms crossed. A few legs did, then uncrossed. I was very glad we’d had them all sit at three tables pulled close together. Their group reactions were going to be as important as their individual ones, at least as far as I was concerned.
“Thing is, whoever harvested the mushrooms didn’t do a great job of cleaning them first. There were some bits of dirt and leaf litter attached.”
It was Eileen’s turn to act as official voice of dissent. “This isn’t
CSI
.”
“No, it’s not, and the dirt turned out not to matter, because it’s the bugs, pardon me,” I corrected with exaggerated care, “
insects
that tell us what we need to know. A fungus gnat is not always just a fungus gnat.”
Harry beamed at me. I winced inwardly. Damn. He was rubbing off on me.
“Ever hear of
Lycoriella auripila
?
Lycoriella solani
?” I waited a full minute by the clock on the wall. Nobody flinched, but I saw sweat starting to gather on Rich Shenk’s upper lip. Despite the weather, it wasn’t that warm in the cafeteria. We had fans going.