Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 07 (21 page)

It took two deputies and a solid hour to get everybody arranged to my satisfaction, and by then I felt as if I’d supervised the unloading of a circus train in the dead of nightin a blizzard. The Wockermann house seemed the logical choice to question the group; the PD was too small, and the bar, which I’d utilized in the past, was packed with tourists. I’d banished Ruby Bee and Estelle to the kitchen and the teenage guides to an upstairs bedroom (risky, but I needed to question them) and told Tinker to shoot to kill if the press attacked. Dahlia’s granny had locked herself in the bathroom and, from what we could hear, was taking a bath.

The second deputy was due back any minute with the remaining members of the Nashville party. Ripley, Matt, and Katie knew only that Pierce’s body had been discovered in the souvenir shoppe and that we’d confirmed the ID with his driver’s license. Now we sat in awkward silence in the living room.

“I don’t get it,” Matt said suddenly. “Why the hell would Pierce be in Maggody? I mean, there ain’t any reason for him to be here. This is my homecoming thing, the kickoff for my tour.” He went to the window and waved. “Look at all those folks out there in the road. They came to see me back here celebrating Christmas like a true blue country boy. You think there’d be so much as a dead armadillo out in the road if I weren’t inside this house?”

“Or a dead executive in the souvenir shoppe?” Katie asked in a husky voice.

“Aw, Katie,” he said as he squatted beside the rocking chair. He tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away and rubbed her neck. “Come on, honey, none of this is my fault. You want me to get you a nice cup of tea?”

I cleared my throat. “The kitchen’s closed for the moment. As soon as Les comes back with the others, I’ll question everyone as briefly as possible and have you all escorted back to your rooms. The sheriff’s promised enough deputies to make sure none of you are disturbed by the press.”

Ripley leaned back and crossed his legs. “What have you told the media, Arly? I need to at least call the office and let them know before they hear it on the radio.”

“His identity hasn’t been released. The coroner arrived just as I left, and the boys from the lab will crawl all over the store for several hours. At some point, Harve will have to hold a press conference. I’ll let you make your calls to family members before then.”

“You’re looking at the last of the Keswicks. Our mother, one of the Savannah Grahams, died while Pierce was in the army and I was in graduate school. Father was so distressed that he drank himself himself to death within the month. I’d submitted my dissertation proposal the day before his body was discovered in the library. He’d fallen across the maidenhair fern that Mother brought back on the train all the way from Atlanta. She’d gone to rescue Grandfather Ponder, who’d been put in the state asylum by mistake. To this day I remember what she said to me when she arrived home. She said, ‘Ripley, imagine a world in which you can go fifty miles away and people don’t know who you are!’ The fern that Father crushed never did recover, and I told my advisor I simply could not continue with the influence of indigenous flora on Faulkner’s early works.”

I looked sharply at him, but he was lost in thought and mumbling to himself (or to his advisor) under his breath.

Odd noises came from behind the kitchen door. Neither Matt nor Katie seemed inclined to comment, and I was relieved to see Les pull into the driveway. Tinker was forced to fire a couple of shots in the air, but at last Lillian came into the living room.

She was teary, her lipstick smudged and her face etched with pain. “My god, Ripley,” she said, sinking down next to him. “I can’t believe it. Not Pierce. He can’t be dead. Somebody confused him with someone else, found his wallet by mistake. Pierce can’t be dead.” She fell against his shoulder and began to cry. Ripley put his arms around her and bent his head to whisper in her ear.

I waited for a few minutes in case someone wanted to share secrets with me, then said, “I realize this is a terrible shock, and I’ll do what I can to be brief.” I stopped and frowned at Les, who was admiring Katie from the hallway. “Where are the boys in the band?”

Lillian sat up and took a tissue from her purse. “My fault, I’m afraid,” she said, wiping ineffectually at the smears of mascara on her cheeks. “They never get up until late in the afternoon. I’m not sure what would happen if any of them set foot outside in direct sunlight. They may have seen Pierce at the studio, but I doubt they’ve ever even met him. There’s nothing they could tell you.”

Ripley nodded. “Lillian’s right. They’re just hired help. Pierce could hardly tell them apart.”

“Imagine that,” I said. “Okay, I’ll talk to them later if I need to. Do any of you know when or why Pierce Keswick came to Maggody?”

The ensuing eruption was remarkable only in its lack of consequence. Ripley was sure Pierce had never heard of Maggody until Matt’s relationship surfaced. Lillian admitted she’d talked to him on the telephone in the bus, but he’d said nothing about coming. Matt said Pierce had displayed no curiosity about Maggody beyond strategic photo opportunities. Voices from the kitchen contributed that he’d never called anyone on the committee. Dahlia’s granny broke into a song about a rubber duckie. Lillian began to cry, but Ripley was too engrossed with the ramifications of Faulkner’s flora to provide a shoulder. Katie went to the bathroom door and begged to be allowed to use the facilities. Someone in the kitchen mentioned a second bathroom at the top of the stairs. Someone else asked if there really was a telephone on the bus. I finally put up my hand. “We can’t do anything until I get a preliminary report from the coroner so we’ll have an idea of the time and the cause of death. In the interim, the deputies will take you back to your rooms. Please don’t make any comments to the press.”

They all limped out except Ripley, who stopped and said, “What about that woman’s claim that she put a corpse in the chicken house? Couldn’t there be a mix-up?”

“I’m sorry, but that has nothing to do with this. The driver’s license has a recent photograph. Unless there’s a third Keswick brother …”

He shook his head and left.

I went back to the kitchen, told Lucy and Ethel to do something about Dahlia’s granny before she disappeared down the drain, then remembered I’d left six hot-blooded teenagers in proximity to a bed for better than an hour. I hurried upstairs. For the most part, they were on the bed, but fully clad and playing cards. I’d told them earlier that there’d been a fatal accident at the souvenir shoppe, and they appeared to be disguising their fear of the specter of eternal nihilism with accusations of cheating at poker. All of them, that is, except for the two who were making out in the closet.

“Who was the first to arrive this morning?” I asked.

“Me,” said the dealer.

“When was that?”

“Mrs. Jim Bob said to get over here by eight to turn on the space heaters, pick up trash in the yard, that kind of shit. Nobody else had to show before nine, since tours don’t start till then.”

“I came at eight-thirty,” contributed a mousy girl with braces. “I brought Billy Dick some doughnuts and a carton of chocolate milk from the supermarket.”

“That’s nice. Billy Dick, did you notice anything out of the ordinary when you arrived?”

“Like what?”

“Like I don’t know. I’m asking you.”

“I noticed the living room was colder than a well digger’s ass.”

“And …?”

“There was popcorn scattered all over the porch.”

“Anything else?”

“The front door was unlocked, but I figured one of these other burgerbrains forgot to lock it.”

In response to my look, the accused burgerbrains denied any carelessness. I forced myself to continue pulling insights out of Billy Dick’s head with questions as small and precise as tweezers. “Was anything missing?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Moved?”

“Nah, I don’t think so. I mean, somebody could have switched the candy dishes with the candles, or the pinecones with the holly, but nothing like that jumped out at me.

The girl touched his shoulder. “What about the sign?”

“Oh. yeah,” he said, smacking his head as if to dislodge a stray thought. “That sign that says welcome to Maggody used to be right out front by the edge of the driveway. I dint ever pay it any mind, but Traci here”—he squeezed her thigh hard enough to elicit a whinny of protest— “noticed that it’d disappeared. I went out to the road to see if it was lying in the ditch, and then I saw it. How the hell did it git all the way down by the low-water bridge?”

They all stared expectantly at me.

“Bernie Allen, you stop poking that stick in there. You’re gonna be real sorry when a big ol’ copperhead comes outta there and bites you and you’re dead before I can drag you out of the woods.”

He stood up and reluctantly joined his mother, who was sitting on a log while studying a map. “Ain’t no snake in there,” he said, thinking about poking her to see how high she’d jump. It’d be a lot more interesting than hunting for a stupid creek. “I wanna go back to the camper, Ma. My stomach hurts. I think I’m gonna throw up.”

“Suit yourself.” She ran her finger along a line that was supposed to be the path that started out behind the church and ended up at Matt Montana’s Baptism Pool. The map made it took like it was right handy, but she and Bernie Allen had been wandering for the best part of an hour and hadn’t so much as seen a mud puddle. Of course Bernie Allen had insisted they take a shortcut and had raised such a fuss that she let him lead the way.

She glanced up at the sound of retching from behind a pine tree. “Stop that, Bernie Allen. This isn’t the time for your playacting. If you’re throwing up, it’s because you got your fingers stuck down your throat. Now come out from there so we can find this Baptism Pool before dark.”

He didn’t obey her, but this was so unremarkable that she went back to trying to figure out the map. At least they were moving downhill, so they’d find the creek sooner or later. Bernie Allen had chocolate syrup stains on his shirt, but he was gonna stand right on the edge of the creek where Matt Montana was baptized and he was gonna give her a nice, wide smile. They’d come all the way from Joplin to visit Matt Montana’s Boyhood Home, and she was going home with the slides to prove it.

“Bernie Allen,” she said more loudly, “I said to stop making those disgusting noises and come out from behind there. I don’t want to have to tell your pa about this, but I will if I have to.”

“You might ought to tell somebody,” called Bernie Allen before he resumed retching.

“That’s the third camper to leave,” Earl grumbled as he came into the kitchen and tossed his cap on the table. “At this rate, the field’s gonna be empty by sundown. It ain’t like it was Matt Montana who got hisself killed in the window of Mrs. Jim Bob’s shoppe.”

Eilene hung his cap on the peg by the door. “I wish you’d remember to wipe your feet, Earl. I just finished mopping the floor.”

He waited for her to get him a beer, but she walked right out of the room. “Are you sick?” he called in a real solicitous voice. “I can run over to the deli at the supermarket and pick up some tamales and beans for supper.”

“Don’t bother,” she said from the front room.

Harrumphing under his breath, he got himself a beer and sat back down. She was acting awful peculiar, he thought as he popped the tab. Here he’d offered to go get the tamales and she hadn’t even said, “Thank you for being so considerate, Earl.” She was the one who was big on his being “considerate” and “sensitive to her needs” and was all the time taking quizzes in women’s magazines. He’d found one on the counter that told you how to measure how much sexual magic there was in your bed. The score she’d circled said they needed a postmortem, but he wasn’t about to let any wife of his order something kinky from a catalog. “You talk to the kids today?” he asked, trying to sound like Phil Donahue.

She came to the doorway, her arms crossed and her mouth not so much frowning as set like she was trying real hard not to frown. “I called this morning, but Kevin’d already gone to work. Dahlia was in a hurry because she was supposed to have the Matt-Mobile at the high school at ten, and she wanted to hose down the wagon because some tourist spilled a soda pop on the floorboards. She was afraid Matt Montana might end up with a sticky purple stain on his white britches. I’m real worried about her.”

“We got any pretzels or chips and dip?”

She gave him a funny look before she drifted back to the front room. “She hardly ate any supper last night.”

“Won’t hurt her,” Earl said, determined to keep trying to have a normal conversation. “You know, I’m kinda glad to get those trucks and RVs out of the field. If it rains tonight, their tires will tear it up and it’ll take weeks to get it plowed next spring.”

She came back to the doorway. “Did you hear what Dahlia said this morning down by the low-water bridge?”

“That hogwash about murdering some old guy and rolling him up in a bag? She must have gone home last night and eaten a couple of frozen pizzas, or stopped by Raz’s place to buy some shine. Indigestion or a hangover—one or the other of them was making her crazier than ol’ Typha Buchanon. Remember when he burned down his own house cause he thought he had Mormons in the basement?”

“I wonder,” Eilene said as she once again disappeared.

“You wonder what was making Dahlia crazy—or are you starting to wonder if we got Mormons in the basement, too? For pity’s sake, Eilene, just call her and ask.” He looked at the doorway and almost choked on a mouthful of beer as he saw her standing there. “If you want to, I mean. It can’t hurt to ask her why she was spouting off like that.”

“I spoke to Eula this morning. She was at the supermarket yesterday evening, and a man with silver hair asked her for directions. All he had was the rural route and box numbers, but they got to talking and it turned out he was looking for Kevin and Dahlia’s house. He claimed he was interested in buying a vacuum cleaner from Kevin, but Eula said he looked more like someone trying to sell time-shares in a cemetery.”