Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 07 (12 page)

None of the homeowners in the vicinity of the county home had called me back to say they’d remembered seeing an unfamiliar car. The only one I’d heard from was a widow who reported Papists were training in the woods behind her house. I suggested she contact Larry at the Farberville PD.

The only person left to question was Patty May Partridge. She’d purportedly called home twice and her mother had passed along my messages—a good half dozen of ‘em thus far.

If I’d had so much as a thread of a lead, a stone left to be unturned, an assurance that there was a needle somewhere in the damn haystack, I wouldn’t have bothered with Patty May. If she’d seen anything, she’d have told me at the time or made an effort to call me back. As it was, I drove over to Hasty and rang the doorbell of a nondescript brick house.

A tired-looking woman in an apron came to the door, a hot pad in her hand. The toasty air smelled of cinnamon and ginger, and in the background, falsetto voices belted out a Christmas carol.

“Yes?” she said.

“I’m Arly Hanks, Mrs. Partridge, and—”

“I already told you I don’t have a telephone number for Patty May. She says the agency has a rule that caretakers can’t receive personal calls, even if it’s an emergency. This is a goodpaying job and she doesn’t want to lose it. She’ll call you when she has time.”

I almost pointed out I’d had better luck getting lawyers to return my calls, but I smiled deferentially and said, “I understand that, Mrs. Partridge. The thing is, this is a police investigation, and Patty May could be a witness. Her agency may not be happy if I show up at the doorstep with a warrant.”

“I already told you she never mentioned the name of this agency, either. I got baking to do, Chief Hanks, on account of family coming down from Springfield tomorrow. I’ll remind Patty May how nigh onto hysterical you are to talk to her, and she’ll give you a call.”

“When do you intend to do that?” I asked, not pleased by her offhanded aspersion. I was eager, but hardly hysterical. I’d had a town full of Montanamaniacs for more than a week. I was barely breathing.

The woman ran a flour-streaked hand through her hair. “I’ll be sure and tell her tomorrow evening when she—when she calls. I’ve got your number right by the telephone in the kitchen.” She shut the door.

I headed back for Maggody. Since my regular car radio was broken, I didn’t have to listen to Christmas music or a single rendition of “You’re a Detour on the Highway to Heaven,” which in my mind made the entire trip worthwhile. As I slowed down at the low-water bridge, I noticed the sign was back to its original position across from Estelle’s driveway. I’d pretty much forgotten about its trip (now a round one), and apparently Raz and Marjorie had, too. I didn’t know what he’d been doing lately—beyond peddling moonshine to the tourists out of his truck—but Marjorie’d nearly chewed the leg off one of Perkins’s goats, and bitter threats had been exchanged in front of Aunt Adele’s Launderette.

The Maggody-Matt-Mobile was chugging toward me as I approached the sacred site of its namesake’s birth. Dahlia looked grim, her hat jammed over her ears and her mouth poking in and out like a piston, but she wasn’t clutching a .38 Special. In the wagon behind her, passengers with maps stared reverently at a white wooden cross in the ditch. The cross marked the spot where young Matt had found an ailing dog and carried it home to nurse it back to health. Everybody in town agreed Mrs. Jim Bob was showing more creativity than your regular Buchanon, even though the dog was called Ol’ Yeller.

Traffic was getting into a snarl by the entrance to the parking lot, but I saved myself a headache by turning the other way and driving back to the PD. Once inside, I poured a cup of coffee and opened the yellow pages of the telephone directory. After a frustrating exercise in Southwestern Bell logic, I stumbled onto the pertinent heading, “Home Health Services,” and started calling. No one recognized Patty May Partridge’s name. A sympathetic woman at the last agency (WeCare, Inc.) said that private referrals were commonplace, if not approved by the state licensing board.

I certainly wasn’t having any success unraveling the mystery of Adele’s whereabouts. I went out to my car to see if I could do any better with the traffic.

The bus, leased for the tour and emblazoned on both sides with MATT MONTANA’S CHRISTMAS TOUR, rolled westward like a Conestoga wagon with a kitchenette. Katie sat alone near the front, studying a short but flattering interview with herself in a fanzine. She’d made it clear she wasn’t feeling congenial, and even Matt had given up trying to wheedle a friendly word out of her. He was sitting at a table with three of the boys in the band, playing poker, drinking beer, and smoking cigars and pot. They were very congenial. The driver, the fourth member of the band and also the sound technician, was getting more and more congenial as they sped along the interstate toward Memphis. Out of wary respect for the state cops, he kept the wine bottle in a Burger King sack.

“Charlie came to my office,” Lillian said to Ripley as she sat on the arm rest of the seat across the aisle from him. Despite the urge to grab him by his coat lapels and shriek the words into his face, she kept her voice low. “The divorce was legal, damn it, even if it was done in Tijuana. I was broke, but I wasn’t too drunk to make sure all the paperwork was filed. You had no call to track down that bastard and suggest otherwise to him.”

Ripley put aside a slim volume of poetry. “I merely suggested he review el documentos, Lillian. I would be quite as appalled as you if the divorce turned out to be void. That would mean that your third marriage was bigamous, which then casts doubts on the legality of the clause in Rufus Figg’s will wherein you inherited the agency. It might even imply that the agency contracts are suspect. And as for your current marriage …”

Lillian leaned forward until her face was inches from his. “Did you send him to Matt?” she hissed.

“No, of course not, and I didn’t send him to Pierce, either. This is just my little way of reminding you of your promise, Lillian. None of us wants to see Country Connections go belly-up—at least not until it belongs to someone else. But as long as Pierce thinks he’ll be showing a healthy profit by late spring, he’ll dig his heels in and hunker down for the duration of the cold spell.”

“Keep Charlie out of this, please. I just need a little more time to let Matt get over this … pathetic infatuation, and then I’ll pressure Pierce to sell.”

“You know that I’m simply trying to achieve what’s best for everyone in the long run—you, Pierce, Matt, Katie, even Charlie. If by pure serendipity this coincides with my simple desire to return to a more intellectual life, so be it. A year from now, you’ll thank me.”

“A year from now I’ll be watching my lawyer argue that your death was justifiable homicide!” Lillian went into the bedroom at the back of the bus and slammed the door.

Ripley picked up his book, but was once again interrupted as Katie sat down next to him. The problem with buses, he thought as he smiled wanly at her, was that they offered so little privacy.

“What was Lillian upset about?” she asked.

“Just a bout of pretour jitters. Everybody’ll lighten up when we get to Maggody. It lies somewhere between Green Acres and God’s Little Acre. Did Pierce tell you about this parade they staged while I was there?”

“He said they were gettin’ all geared up for our arrival, but he didn’t mention a parade.”

“The participants gathered in the high school parking lot, and animosity flared up immediately. The owner of the local bar clutched her bosom and accused the mayor’s wife of undermining the diligent efforts of some committee by opening a bed-and-breakfast establishment. The mayor’s wife clutched her bosom and said she’d seen a sign outside the bar that claimed that official Matt Montana souvenirs were available inside. This was a violation of the fair trade agreement, also.”

“Official Matt Montana souvenirs?” she said wonderingly. “Is this town on central substandard time?”

“You may think so when you see it.” Ripley paused to take a sip of bourbon from a bottle in a brown bag, licked his lips, and leaned against the window, propping his slipper-clad feet on the far arm rest. “The two women did not lapse into hair pulling and scuffling in the gravel, to the disappointment of the observers, and eventually agreed to sit together on the back of a convertible borrowed from a used-car lot. Other committee members were obliged to ride in a station wagon driven by a woman with a hairdo that screams of repressed sexual frustration.”

Katie self-consciously tucked her hair behind her ear. “So what happened?”

“The high school band played such a painfully atonal version of ‘Detour’ that a tourist was motivated to attack them with a tire iron. They prudently scattered, but the head majorette was so incensed that she beat the man senseless with her baton. The mayor’s wife and the bar mistress passed by the fracas like twin icebergs in the Bering Strait. Then”—he paused to fortify himself from the brown bag—“we got our first glimpse of the Matt-Mobile. Following that was a flatbed truck with the one and only Matt Montana. They’d dressed up some pimply kid in white, and he was lipsyncing. The tape recorder was in plain sight by his boot, but the tourists were restless and the rumor that it really was Matt swept down the sides of the road like a canebrake afire. I heard the poor chap had to be hospitalized.”

Katie regarded him with a shrewd expression. “I don’t understand why we’re taking this risk. If this town is as manic as you’ve said, then it’s hardly going to provide an idyllic background for Matt’s fresh-scrubbed country boy image. He could really lose it, start busting up the pool hall or staggering down the street like a three-legged calf. What is Pierce thinking?”

“He’s confident Matt will pick up on this nostalgia business and get real mellow. The great-aunt was away when I was there, but she’ll be swaddled in a shawl and ready to reminisce when the time comes. The old house has been cleaned up and festooned with Christmas decorations. We may do a candlelight thing at the church, dress him up in a choir robe and a halo. The school auditorium can handle five, maybe six hundred people for the concert.”

“Have they chosen a recipient?” she asked. If the locals were as Ripley described, she didn’t want to imagine what the proceeds of the concert would go for.

“We don’t have to worry about a thing,” Ripley said, patting her arm reassuringly. “The preacher was scouting around for a photogenic tyke for the concert and said he’d find one shortly. We’re all set, as far as I can tell.” He picked up the book and opened it, and Katie drifted away to a seat to try to sleep.

“I’ve got the Maggody blues,” Matt howled from the back room, hiccuping so that each word had lots and lots of syllables. “The raggedy, jaggedy, Maggody blues …!”

Mrs. Jim Bob banged down the receiver and came storming into the living room. “That Arly Hanks is driving me crazy! She’s had the best part of three weeks to find Adele and bring her back before the bus arrives. Is that too much to ask?”

” ‘Course it ain’t.” Jim Bob pressed the clicker to raise the volume volume, caught his wife’s icy look, and lowered it real quick. “So how’s business at the shoppe?”

She took the clicker from him and turned off the television set. “Not as brisk as I’d hoped, but of course Ruby Bee went sneaking over to Farberville as soon as she heard what I was planning to do and ordered the same things. Now she won’t let her customers out of the bar until they load up on Tshirts and beer mugs with Matt’s face on the bottom. She put shelves all the way across the back of the room, loaded them with all kinds of tasteless, overpriced trash, and hired Joyce Lambertino to sit at a card table with a money box. I hope she’s set aside some time to pray for her immortal soul.”

Jim Bob gazed longingly at the clicker, but he wasn’t foolish enough to so much as mention that the game was down to less than two minutes and the Razorbacks were trailing by a basket. “Me, too,” he said lamely.

“You can just stop vegetating on the sofa and commence to doing something useful for a change. The Mayor’s Mansion needs a cozy fire for the Nashville folks, so go buy a rick of wood and stack it outside the kitchen door. After that, fix up your cot in the utility room.”

“Utility room? Jesus, Mrs. Jim Bob, it’s colder than a well digger’s ass out there, and so cramped I’ll have to put my head in the washer and my feet in the dryer.”

“I will not tolerate blasphemy in this house! Mr. Keswick’ll have your room, and Katie Hawk will sleep in the guest room. I’m hardly the one to sleep out there, am I?” He hung his head. “I reckon not.”

“I’m going back to the store to make sure Darla Jean locked up properly, then fetch Ruby Bee and Estelle so we can see to a small chore.” She took her coat from the hall closet, but came back into the living room in time to see Jim Bob reach for the clicker. “By the way, I was thinking about that girl who works at the SuperSaver, the one with dingy teeth.”

His hand stopped in midair. “What about her?”

“Once business picks up, I might just see if she wants to work for me. Selling souvenirs is a lot more interesting than checking groceries, wouldn’t you say?”

He couldn’t so much as twitch a finger, much less get his hand to cooperate. “Malva seems to enjoy getting to gossip with everybody,” he said in a strangled voice.

“Gossip? Is that what you call it these days?” Mrs. Jim Bob left through the front door.

Jim Bob wasn’t sure if the cold wind filling the room came from outside the house or not. He finally got hold of the clicker, but he was trembling so badly he couldn’t press the right button and the television screen stayed as blank as his mind.

I banged down the receiver and said to no one at all, “Mizzoner is driving me crazy!” I went to the back room to pour a cup of viscous coffee, resumed my seat behind the desk, and gave serious consideration to the idea of catching the next Matt-Mobile to Missoula. “Everybody thought she was at her cousin’s house,” I said in Mrs. Jim Bob’s selfrighteous simper, “but you should have made sure of it two weeks ago. Now stop playing with your radar gun and go find her!”