Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 07 (23 page)

“How about when he went through the office at the end of the day?”

“He might have gone that way if he had contracts to put on someone’s desk or something like that, but most of the time he uses the stairs right outside my office.”

I heard voices in the background. Amy asked me if she could tell the others. I gave her permission, then said I might call her again and replaced the receiver. Pierce Keswick had been in his Nashville office at four o’clock and had died in Maggody within the next eleven hours. It was a long haul to Nashville, at least ten hours. If he’d driven, he hadn’t wasted any time admiring the scenery.

I made a note to have Harve call the Tennessee authorities and ask them to check with the airlines—and with the state police to see if any speeding citations had been issued to Pierce Keswick. I could do the same with the Arkansas State Police, who were cooperative cooperative if approached with proper deference.

It was nearly four o’clock. The heavy clouds that had moved in earlier in the day hung over the valley, apparently satisfied to remain indefinitely. Rain was more likely than snow. It rarely snowed before January, and I could recall exactly one white Christmas in all my childhood years of listening to carols about winter wonderlands and sleighbells. You can’t build a snowman out of drizzle.

Witnesses were waiting, and by now half the town had experienced Hammet’s unconventional investigative techniques. Some of the tourists had packed up and were rolling out of town in search of other stars shining in the east. They may not have come bearing frankincense and myrrh, but the local merchants would be sorry to see all those gold credit cards leaving.

I was on my way out the door to have a chat with Katie Hawk when one of Harve’s deputies came running down the road. “Chief Hanks!” he called, “Sheriff Dorfer says for you to come back to the souvenir shoppe.”

“Did the duck caller nip him?”

He leaned against my car and caught his breath. “No, he was just leaving when some lady charged into the shoppe, dragging this little boy with her. She was carrying on something awful, but she finally calmed down long enough to say they’d found a man’s body down toward the creek somewhere. Sheriff Dorfer’s waiting for you.”

“I’m busy.”

“You want me to go tell Sheriff Dorfer that, or should I stick my gun in my mouth and save him the trouble?”

“The person he ought to be waiting for is Dahlia Buchanon. Unless this body has a chipped nose and duct tape on his arm, this lady undoubtedly found the body Dahlia was toting around town last night. He must have regained consciousness and staggered into the woods … to use the pay phone to call his office and check for messages.”

“There aren’t any pay phones in the woods,” the deputy said with a pitying look.

“But there is one at Aunt Adele’s Launderette, and that’s the one I’m interested in at the moment. Tell Harve to give my regards to McBeen.”

“Whatever you say, Chief Hanks.”

“I’ll give you a ride back to the souvenir shoppe,” I said as I got in the car, since we both knew that’s where I was going despite my piddling outburst of bravado.

“I prefer to walk,” the deputy said. He turned sharply and headed back up the road.

He was a prime candidate for roadkill, but I drove sedately past him. Harve was waiting by his car, doing his best to talk to a woman who was doing her best to collapse in his arms. The kid in the green cowboy suit was eating a candy bar.

“What is wrong with this town?” the woman demanded as I rolled down my window. “I have never been in a town where there are so many dead bodies just lying around! Haven’t you all heard of funeral homes? In Joplin we have all these funeral homes where—”

“Who is it?” I asked Harve.

“She didn’t stop to ask him his name,” Harve said gruffly. “She has a point about all these bodies, you know. Is anybody else missing?”

“Sure,” I said. “Adele Wockermann has been missing for weeks, and although Patty May’s not technically missing, I can’t seem to find her either. Did you get any kind of a description of this latest body?”

“No, and we’d better get started. If we wait around for McBeen to get back here, we’ll never find it in the dark. They strayed off the path and were lost back in there for at least an hour.”

“I don’t know how we found our way out,” the woman contributed shrilly. “Bernie Allen was so upset that he twisted his ankle and I had to carry him half the way.”

Harve glanced at Bernie Allen, who probably weighed well over a hundred pounds. “He can wait here while we—”

“We? You don’t think I’m going back into that jungle, do you? Bernie Allen saw a snake, and—”

“Tell you what, Harve,” I said as she continued to describe the ordeal, “you give me a ring when the body’s been brought back to civilization and I’ll see if I can find Dahlia. In the meantime, I’ve already got my body.”

“He has a beard,” Bernie Allen announced through a poorly masticated mouthful of chocolate and caramel. “My Uncle Bootie had a beard, too. He got killed by a bus.”

Sobbing, the woman crumpled to the ground. Bernie Allen wadded up a candy wrapper and tossed it at her. Harve folded his arms and stared at me.

Ruby Bee and Estelle stood on the flagstone patio in back of the Wockermann house. The guides had left as soon as they’d been questioned, and Billy Dick had been paid off to drive Dahlia’s squeaky-clean granny back to the county home. Now that just the two of them were lingering, the house seemed empty and kinda spooky, and not much warmer than outside.

“I reckon he’s even more handsome in person,” Estelle said, her hands buried in the pockets of her heavy sweater. She squinted at the clouds, wondering when it would rain. There were still some slivers of broken glass underfoot that must have been overlooked during the cleanup, but a heavy rain would wash them away. The last thing she wanted to do was drag out the broom and the dustpan.

“But he looks older,” Ruby Bee said. “They do something to the photographs so you can’t see all those little fine wrinkles around his eyes. Maybe you couldn’t find his birth certificate at the courthouse because he’s older than the magazine claimed. You were looking in the wrong year.”

Estelle was too dispirited to get riled up. “He’s got a few gray hairs, too. But I still say he’s more handsome in person. When he grinned at me, I felt like I was sixteen and had just been kissed for the first time. I had to go into the kitchen and drink a glass of water before I dared so much as glance in his direction.”

“He glanced plenty of times in Miss Katie Hawk’s direction. She’s a cold thing, and I’m beginning to regret naming the chicken ‘n dumpling special after her. I may just scratch it out on the menu.”

“Think how she’d feel if she found out,” gasped Estelle, her eyebrows disappearing under the row of rigid ringlets on her forehead.

“Oh, I suppose I’ll leave it as long as they’re in town, but I don’t know what to make of her.” She was going to expound, but a movement way across the pasture caught her attention. “Down there by the chicken houses. You see something?”

“I see chicken houses.”

“Behind the one that’s not burned down. I distinctly saw something.”

“If you distinctly saw it, you ought to know what it is.”

Ruby Bee wished she had her bifocals in her coat pocket, even though she never wore them in front of Estelle. But even without them, she knew dam well she’d distinctly seen something. “What’d you think about Dahlia’s claim that she murdered a man and put the body down there?” she asked.

“I thought it was time for her to get her batteries checked. Arly went in there to see for herself. Are you saying that just because Arly couldn’t find Adele, she can’t even find a corpse in a chicken house?”

“No,” Ruby Bee said, still looking across the pasture at the dim outlines of the two structures, one a mess of charred timbers and the other more substantial. “So Raz bought that parcel of land a few years back, did he? Why would he do that? It’s clear on the opposite side of town from his place, and the land ain’t good for anything but making mud pies in the spring.”

Estelle stamped her feet to keep them warm. “I don’t pretend I can explain Raz Buchanon’s behavior. Dahlia’s, either. Maybe they’re getting their drinking water from the same spring. That’d account for Kevin’s having an affair with a Farberville floozy. Everybody up that way, including Marjorie, is acting downright peculiar.”

“I don’t think we ought to dismiss Dahlia’s story as a fairy tale. Lottie said that Eula said there was a man in the supermarket yesterday evening that was quizzing her like a game-show host. She ended up drawing him a map so he could find their house. Dead men don’t wake up in the middle of the night and go home any more than Raz Buchanon throws away money on property he’s got no use for. We ought to go down there and see what he’s up to.”

“And get our heads blown off, Miss Purple Heart?”

“We’re not gonna get our heads blown off if he’s not there,” Ruby Bee said with a smug smile. “And I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts he won’t be there at midnight.”

Miss Vetchling went to the front door of the small frame house and rang the bell. Inside, a dog started barking and she had to wait several minutes before the door opened a scant inch. “Yes?” the woman said, wincing as something clattered behind her.

“I’m the regional supervisor of the Vacu-Pro Home Cleaning Systems, Mrs. Borland. We’re doing a survey. Could I take just a minute of your time to ask a few questions concerning the Vacu-Pro demonstration conducted in your home approximately two weeks ago?”

“Some boy came to the house, but I’d forgotten that the baby had a doctor’s appointment. I told him to call back later but he didn’t. I forgot about it until now.”

“Thank you.” Miss Vetchling made a check next to the first name on the list. “Would you like to schedule an appointment in the future with one of our salesmen?”

“Is it true the vacuum cleaners cost seven hundred dollars?”

“Seven hundred fifty-three dollars, plus shipping and handling.”

“We got a lot of doctor’s appointments coming up,” Mrs. Borland said as she closed the door.

Miss Vetchling returned to the curb, got in her car and consulted the street map, and then drove off toward the second of Kevin Buchanon’s appointments on what she had awarded the sobriquet of “His Fateful Day.”

Ten seconds later a car pulled away from the curb and followed her at a distance carefully calculated not to arouse her suspicion.

“This one is all yours,” I said to Harve, allowing myself the pleasure of chortling as we trudged along the path back to the Assembly Hall. “He’s just a tourist who stumbled and fell into the official Baptism Pool. What a shame little Bernie Allen upchucked all over what evidence there might have been.”

Harve gazed disapprovingly at me. “Carlos L. Tunnato of Chattanooga might not find it all that funny.”

“Everybody would be a sight healthier if the hometown boy had chosen another hometown. Adele would be at the county home, stringing cranberries, and Patty May would be threading the needle for her.” I tore a branch off a bush and stripped it of its leaves. “Mrs. Jim Bob was bawling about all the money she invested in souvenirs. Eula and Elsie are likely to be in bad shape, not to mention Ruby Bee and her shelves of crap. Brother Verber has taken to dressing up as if he ought to be leading a pony at a birthday party. We should have yanked up all the …”

“All the what?” Harve muttered, not sounding all that eager to find out.

I was so overwhelmed with my theory that I had to sit down on a rock and wait for the adrenaline to ebb. “The town limits signs. The county survey map may lay out the town to the last foot, but nobody’s going to get a tape measure and argue with the sign. That sly ol’ geezer …”

“Which sly ol’ geezer are you getting so rapturous about?”

“Raz,” I said. “He thinks that, as long as those chicken houses are outside the town limits, I won’t take an interest in them. Maybe he thinks they’re outside my jurisdiction. Hell, they may be, but so’s Cotter’s Ridge. Surely he’s aware that I’ve been up there on countless occasions to look for his still. Shit, I’ve told him so.”

Harve pulled me to my feet and said, “We need to keep going. We’ve got a corpse back at the creek that needs to be moved before dark.” He gallantly held back a spindly bush for me, then let it whip past and nudged me into step. “Are you saying Raz has his still in the chicken house?”

“No, he wouldn’t risk that. But it’s getting near the holiday season, and he may have decided to use the chicken house as a warehouse. I wouldn’t be surprised if on certain nights there were cases covered with tarps in there. No wonder he was pissed when the sign was moved.”

“The sign was moved?” Harve said blankly.

“Because the Wockermann house was not within the town limits,” I said, so pleased with my deductions that I was waving my arms at Harve and walking backward while I elaborated. This is not always wise in the woods, and only his split-second grab saved me from sprawling over a log. “The Homecoming Committee decided to redefine the boundaries of the town so that they could claim Matt was born in Maggody. Don’t you love it? Other towns go through an arduous process to annex adjoining land, but we just get our shovels and do it in the middle of the night.”

Harve was looking confused, understandable in that I hadn’t gotten around to mentioning the midnight stalkings. After I explained, he said, “All right, but what does that have to do with the bodies that keep turning up—or not turning up?”

“How should I know? I was merely solving one minor puzzle, not auditioning for a role on Mystery. As soon as the Nashville people are gone and things quiet down, I’m going to stake out the chicken house and nab Raz with a truckload of moonshine—and not even Marjorie the Wonder Pig can save him.”

“I’m sure you’ll get a letter of commendation from the revenuers. I’m gonna wait here for McBeen and the boys. I don’t suppose you want to go over to this guy’s motel room in Farberville and poke around?”

“Sorry, Harve,” I said, not even making an effort to sound sincere. I left him in front of the Assembly Hall and walked back to my car in front of the souvenir shoppe. The tablecloth across the window reminded me of how Pierce Keswick had looked when he’d been found, hunched over the guitar, his hands tied in place, the wig hanging over his face. I sat down on the hood of the car and for the first time asked the glaring question: Why?