Honeymoon With Murder (10 page)

The cabin door to number 6 opened and Mavis Beeson stepped out, holding a chunky toddler with curly brown hair The little boy jiggled in her arms, repeating exuberantly, “Ding dong. Ding dong. Ding dong.”

His mother stared apprehensively at the tent city and at Billy Cameron, glowering at Henny. Then her son reached up and tugged on her hair. “Ding dong, Mommy!” When she looked at him, her entire face changed, lightening, glowing, warming, the way a stark landscape brightens when sunlight emerges from a cloudbank. She held him up and nuzzled his tummy, then rained kisses lightly up his arm and behind his ear and on top of his head. He wriggled with delight.

“She looks like a good mother,” Annie said.

“Spoils that kid rotten,” Adele snapped, a lifetime of jealousy glistening in her dark eyes. “Minute she gets him home from the nursery, they’re out in the back, digging, making mud pies, messy and noisy. I told her once no good comes of letting children think it’s all right to be dirty. Children have to learn what’s what.” Outrage quivered in the thin voice. “Well, she knows all about dirt, I’d say.”

Annie felt grateful for the hum of noise from the searchers, returning for lunch. An appetizing smell of vegetable soup rose from a steaming cauldron. She would have hated for Mavis to hear Adele’s ugly comment.

But Adele wasn’t finished. “Bet it was Jesse that painted that scarlet A on Miss Mavis’s mailbox. Couldn’t miss it
when I got my mail yesterday. Maybe Miss Mavis saw it and decided to shut Jesse up.”

Mavis felt their eyes upon her. Her head swung toward them. Unsmiling, she pulled Kevin tightly to her, whirled around, and darted back into the cabin.

“Scared to death. Serves her right.” Adele gloated. “I told Ingrid she ought to boot our little Mavis out. Shouldn’t put up with that kind of behavior. But Ingrid was just a fool about people. Why, it turned my stomach how nice she was to that nasty Duane Webb. The man drinks like a fish. And he butchered his wife and daughter. I told him that one day when he came outside, drunker than a lord.” Her face turned an ugly saffron. “Do you know what he had the nerve to say? He said, ‘What’s it to you, you old bitch?’ But Jesse got to him, all right. I don’t know how Jesse found out.” Mild curiosity lifted her voice, then sour surmise dropped it. “Probably at Ben Parotti’s dirty old bar. He liked to drink there. Surprised he’d spend the money, but maybe he enjoyed the smell.” She cackled perhaps in admiration of her own wit. “Ben sells beer and bait, and I don’t know which stinks the most.”

“Duane Webb killed his wife and daughter?” Horror buffeted Annie. Surely not even St. Mary Mead ever hid beneath its seemingly placid surface as much drama and despair and dark emotion as existed behind the pink-stuccoed exterior of Nightingale Courts. “How?”

“Driving drunk. After a Christmas party. People said they’d tried to talk him out of driving, but he wouldn’t listen. Not the kind of man to listen. Well, he paid for it that time. Didn’t see the stop sign and came out onto the highway and a semi smashed in the passenger’s side. Wife killed instantly. Daughter died two days later. Christmas Day.”

The self-righteous voice droned on, but Annie could hear only the crash of glass and the rending of metal and the high silver bells of Christmas carols and see a head bent in misery in a darkened room.

“Jesse Penrick told you this?”

“Oh, yes. He told all of us. Made him mad, I guess, that Duane wouldn’t beg him to keep it quiet.” She glared across the courtyard toward Webb’s cabin. “Jesse liked to
see people squirm. They had to dance to his tune. Duane wouldn’t do it. Should have seen him the day Jesse put a toy car, one that was all crushed and dripping with whisky, on Duane’s doorstep. Christmas gift.”

“Oh, my God,” Annie exclaimed.

Those unfeminine shoulders hunched impatiently beneath the plaid shirt. “You’re just like Ingrid, feeling sorry for him. How about his wife and daughter?”

They weren’t in pain, Annie thought. Not in the raw, scalding pain that seared Duane Webb’s days and nights, until he drank himself into oblivion. Something of the sickness that must have swept Webb that Christmas morning swirled inside her.

“What a dreadful man,” Annie cried.

“Drink leads men into—”

“Not Duane, Jesse! What a monstrous thing to do!”

The colorless lips twisted. “You, too. Just like Ingrid. Well,
I’m
not weak enough to be taken in by a man like Duane Webb. He couldn’t turn my head!”

Annie didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking. But Posey would probably come this way, too. Reluctantly, very reluctantly, she asked, “Was Ingrid interested in Duane?”

“Crazy as a sixteen-year-old girl with her first crush. Always carrying meals to him, and him mostly too drunk to care. I told Ingrid she was making a fool of herself.”

Crazy in love. It was possible. Love doesn’t count age or circumstance. Love springs to life like desert flowers, thriving on the thinnest sustenance, the rockiest ground.

Posey would claim that Ingrid hated Penrick for his treatment of Webb, that she’d quarreled with him in the early morning and that, facing him at the end of a day, she’d struck out violently when goaded too far.

Not Ingrid. Not gentle, almost frail Ingrid with her no-nonsense briskness that masked such a gentle, kindly nature.

Surprisingly, Adele was echoing her judgment. “Ingrid wouldn’t have stabbed
anyone
. She may have been a lovesick fool, but she would never hurt anyone. Not even Jesse.”

But Posey would listen to the last and discard the first.
Annie almost warned Adele Prescott to keep quiet, if Ingrid were her friend. But even as her heart urged her to do so, her head argued that she would be making a grave mistake. If Posey learned that Annie had interfered in any way with his witnesses, it would absolutely cinch his conviction of Ingrid’s guilt. No. Annie’s only hope was to find out more than Posey and do it fast.

“Did you see Jesse yesterday?”

Adele flashed her a sharp, suspicious look. “No. I always go to the flea market in Savannah on Saturdays. I set up and sell knickknacks I’ve picked up during the week. I didn’t even get back to the island till after dark. The last time I saw Jesse”—her eyes widened—“why, that’s funny. I stopped at Jerry’s Gas ’N Go Thursday night to pick up a quart of milk, and I spotted Jesse in the phone booth!”

“What’s funny about that?”

“Jesse using the phone. I never knew him to ever make a phone call. At least, I never saw him do it.”

“Why wouldn’t he make a phone call?”

“Oh, he didn’t have a phone. Wouldn’t spend the money for one. So far as I know, he didn’t have a friend in the world. Who would he call?”

Annie tried to imagine living without a telephone and failed. “How did he make appointments or take care of business?”

“Business?” Adele snorted humorlessly. “Jesse Penrick didn’t have any business. Except to snoop around. He was retired, lived on Social Security, just like me and Ingrid and Duane.”

“Is everybody here”—Annie’s hand swept the semicircle of cabins—“retired, except for Mavis?”

“Mavis and Tom Smith.” The square hand pointed at the last cabin.

“What does he do?”

“Makes miniatures for doll houses. He’s good at it.” There was no warmth in her voice.

Annie looked at her curiously Apparently there was no one Adele liked very much.

“What’s he like?”

“Wears his hair in a ponytail.” The thin voice dripped
disdain. Adele had all the right vibes to be a Gestapo inquisitor in an Alistair Mac Lean novel.

Annie suddenly had enough. She met Adele’s sour eyes squarely and said, “So did Max, when I first met him. I thought it was the most damnably attractive thing I’d ever seen, so I walked up and introduced myself and asked him out.” With the pleasure of seeing that formidable jaw drop. Annie wheeled around and marched down the steps and wondered what in the hell she was going to say to her short-haired—always—husband when the story made its rounds back to him, as it inevitably would. But Max had a wonderful sense of humor. Usually.

Sunday afternoon

Unaware that the history of his hair length and its galvanizing effect upon Annie was about to become a topic of interested and occasionally ribald speculation in island watering holes, Max jammed an ink-stained hand through his short locks in complete frustration.

“Damn.” He leaned back in his chair, which was still vibrating cheerfully but hadn’t done a thing to ease the crick in his back from his extended—and fruitless—telephoning. He propped his tassel loafers on the desk—who cared if it had once been owned by a cardinal?—and flicked a second switch to add heat to the vibrations.

Easy does it, Maxwell, he told himself. Go with the flow. Remember? Surely he couldn’t be catching Annie’s intensity? He breathed deeply, thought briefly of his mantra (Laurel did mean well, and a woman’s only son couldn’t refuse a little thing like a mantra; it would be rudeness of the worst sort), and began to relax. He didn’t bother to analyze what turned the trick—the heat, the added oxygen, or the chant.

But he was beginning to feel like himself, which was, of course, laid back, comfortable, unstressed, and mellow. It wouldn’t add to his meager stock of information to attack the telephone like a Type A personality. He entertained himself for a moment, thinking of a number of interesting variations on possible expansions of the letter into descriptive summations, such as Airhead, Antbrain, and Asshole, all of which, in his view, aptly delineated people who threw
themselves through life without a passing glance at, much less a sniff of, the flowers.

Except for Annie, of course, his delightful, opinionated, high-strung, easily irritated, quickly angered, very sexy Annie. He beamed at her photograph. All the charm of a hedgehog, but much prettier.

Then he sighed. His dear little hedgehog was not going to be pleased at his unproductive afternoon. And Annie had such respect for his investigative abilities. (Of course she did.)

Besides, it was thwarting even to someone of his easygoing nature to throw out a net and come up with zero. Almost. Oh, he had a few facts, but not nearly enough. Always before, he’d found it easy to track down peoples pasts. Thoughtfully placed calls to banks, insurance companies, police, credit bureaus, employers, local societies, and former neighbors (especially former neighbors), plus quick scans of newspaper files, reference books, and yearbooks could retrieve the damnedest information imaginable. Birth dates. Marriages. Divorces. Family. Schools. Organizations. Jobs. Gossip, both kindly and not so kindly.

Not this time.

Once again, he tugged in exasperation at his short, thick hair, and the phone rang.

He dived for it. Maybe something was going to pop.

“Max, my dear, what
are
you doing
there?”

He blinked. “How did you know I was here, Mother?”

“I divined it, my dear.” A sigh. “And I must say I’m disappointed.” Laurel’s husky voice fell away like a distantly heard train whistle in the night.

Max had been dealing with Laurel for almost thirty years. Now he tilted his chair almost to horizontal and tried to sound suitably serious. “I’m sorry to hear that, sweetie. What can I do that will fill you with parental pride?”

There was a thoughtful pause. For once, Laurel seemed to be at a loss for words. That
was
astounding.

Finally, delicately, she said, “Although I know you and Annie are most concerned about Ingrid’s disappearance, and I respect that and understand it, I do believe—and I’ve had a good
deal
of experience—that a marriage must have a proper
beginning.”
Pause. “Maxwell, one must
cleave
in marriage.”

Now Max was at a loss for words. Could Laurel, could his mother—Yes. She could. And was. Although in his heart he agreed with her absolutely—and that was rare enough to be remarkable—he scarcely felt this was a suitable topic for discussion. But, obviously, some response was necessary.

“Uh,” he began, and knew it lacked both resonance and pizzazz.

“Not that I would dream of interfering.” The golden tone was a little hurried. “You know that I would
never
presume to impinge upon the lives of others.”

This was so patently untrue that it distracted him for a moment.

“Oh. Do hold on, my sweet. Another line is ringing. I’ll get right back to you.”

Max cradled the receiver between his ear and shoulder, determinedly refused to think about his mother’s well-meant (as always) but outrageous probing and stared pensively at the ceiling. What other avenue could he explore to find out something—anything—about the damn moles who lived at Nightingale Courts? Now, he had unearthed quite a bit on Ingrid. There’d been a nice story in the
Savannah News
when she retired after thirty-four years as a librarian there, and he’d found plenty on Duane Webb. Poor bastard. But astonishingly little had come to light about Jesse Penrick, Ophelia Baxter, Adele Prescott, and Mavis Beeson. As for Tom Smith—Max glared at the legal pad on his desk—the inhabitant of Cabin 7 was apparently invisible. No voters registration, no bank account, no insurance policies, no—

“My dear boy,” Laurel resumed reassuringly, “I want you to understand that I am with you in spirit. Actually, I would be gravely concerned. But—you
are
my son.”

That had never been disputed, so far as Max knew.

“Therefore”—and she trilled with relief—“I know that you will take care of first things
first
. And, of course, we shall all bend every effort to bring this to a rapid conclusion, both for Ingrid’s sake and—”

Max interrupted firmly, though he would forever after wonder just how his mother might have intended to complete that sentence. “Mother, it is the most singular
thing—I’ve had a sense of other spirits burning to aid us in our quest.”

He almost felt a moments shame, because Laurel was
thrilled
.

“Maxwell, how wonderful! I always knew that you, too, were one of us.”

He had a vision of hundreds of oatmeal-robed figures and shuddered.