Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 07 (27 page)

A knock on the door startled her, and it took her a minute to unclench her fingers from the cushions and go to the door. She opened it, then gasped as she found herself regarding a sheriff’s deputy in a khaki uniform. He pulled off his hat. “Sheriff Dorfer is conducting an investigation into an accidental death down by Boone Creek. We’re asking folks if they saw the man around town or were down there in the last twenty-four hours.”

“I heard about that.” Mrs. Jim Bob took the photograph of a bearded man, studied it briefly, and handed it back. “If he came into the shoppe, I didn’t notice him. Why would Sheriff Dorfer think I have time to go waltzing around the woods?”

“I’m supposed to show the picture to everyone in your house, so if you could …”

“Ripley Keswick has gone off to the high school gym and Jim Bob’s not here. I’ll fetch the woman.” She grudgingly told him to come inside, then went upstairs and knocked on Miss Katie Hawk’s room. “There’s a deputy to speak to you,” she said, aware she was delivering the message in a manner that might alarm those with guilty consciences.

Katie didn’t look all that guilty as she came out the door, but Mrs. Jim Bob was still seething over how she’d refused to come down for supper, so she went back downstairs without another word of explanation. The deputy repeated his request to Katie and handed her the photograph.

“That’s—that’s the fellow I talked to yesterday in the launderette. You say he drowned in the creek?”

The deputy wasn’t expecting any positive replies to his inquiries and therefore had no idea how to proceed. “You’d better wait here until I find Sheriff Dorfer and see what he says, Miss Hawk,” he said at last.

Mrs. Jim Bob went to the breakfast room to call Eula and tell her how risky it was to open your own home to strangers. It didn’t matter if they were famous. The next thing you knew, the silver’d go missing, there’d be coffee stains on the place mats, and they’d get drunk and scatter cigarette ashes on the bedspreads.

She felt much more cheerful.

Hammet, who’d not been allowed to bring home the catch of the day, sulked in silence on the way back to Maggody, which allowed me to think about everything Patty May had told me. It fit in with what I’d learned from the interviews with the Nashville people and even with what I’d seen and heard—and failed to appreciate. Pure and simple greed seemed to be the primary motive behind everyone’s behavior, from Matt Montana right down to Raz Buchanon. There was room in between for a lot of folks, including the local entrepreneurs. If my theory was correct, Hizzoner headed that list. It remained to be seen if the evidence remained to be found in Adele Wockermann’s attic.

I stopped in front of the antique store and said, “Go upstairs and watch television until I get back, okay?”

“Yeah, I ‘spose,” Hammet said, his tone making it clear that I was asking a lot of him. “What’s gonna happen after this concert tomorrow night?”

“I don’t know if there will be a concert. I’m beginning to understand understand some things, but I still don’t know who’s responsible for Pierce Keswick’s death.”

“Is it Matt Montana?”

“It could be,” I said. “He had a reason, and he was roaming around town last night. Then again, so were plenty of other folks. I’m going out to see if I’m right about certain things. I’ll be back in half an hour.”

He wasn’t pleased to be excluded from the investigation, but he slouched upstairs to my apartment. I drove back down the road and turned on County 102. It wasn’t all that late, but it was dark and there was no light in the attic. I could have waited until morning to test my theory, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep despite the fact that it had been, as I’d predicted with the precision of a Delphian oracle, one helluva day.

I parked beside the house and took a flashlight from the glove compartment. Rather than charging up to the attic, however, I went to the patio behind the house. There was a vague discoloration on one of the flagstones, but Harve would have to send out the lab boys to determine if it was blood. A few splinters of glass glittered in the light. I turned the flashlight toward the attic and located a broken window almost directly above the patio.

I couldn’t tell if the window had been broken the previous night or the previous decade when numerous other windows had suffered from rock-flinging vandals. I went around the house to the front porch. The key was where Ruby Bee had said it would be, above the door and therefore in the very first place anyone who grew up south of the Mason-Dixon line would try (if there wasn’t a doormat). I went inside and paused in the doorway of the living room to shine the light on the unadorned Christmas tree. What a cozy scene it had been—the fake heirlooms, the fake relatives, the fake memories shared by those present. An artificial tree would have been more appropriate.

I went upstairs and continued up the squeaky steps to the attic. It had not been ransacked by any means, but several boxes had been pulled away from the wall and a wardrobe door was open. Bread crumbs were scattered on the floor, as if Hansel and Gretel had passed through on their way to the witch’s house. A greasy bag indicated they’d also stopped by the Dairee DeeLishus; it looked as if it had been put through a food processor.

Congratulating myself on my brilliant deductions, I went to the back of the attic. An empty box sat under the window, surrounded by stacks of books. A briefcase had been knocked over. I righted it and took out a Methodist hymnal with a warped cover and brittle yellow pages. Also inside the briefcase were documents with the letterhead of Country Connections and some correspondence addressed to Pierce Keswick. Nothing seemed to relate to Maggody or to Matt Montana, and I replaced them to read in a less hostile environment. The thick layer of dust on the windowsill had been disturbed. I looked more closely and found two crescent marks that very well could have been made by the heels of shoes-if someone had stood on the sill while facing the interior of the attic. The edges of the broken windowpane were clean. Thirty feet below was the discolored flagstone.

I sat down on a box and regarded the room from a perspective eight or ten feet lower than someone teetering on the windowsill. Katie Hawk had called Pierce with information that sent him racing to the Nashville airport and ultimately to Maggody. The signs on the main road would have led him to the house, and even the most architecturally impaired among us can find an attic. It was impossible to tell if he’d found anything more entertaining than a Methodist hymnal before he climbed onto the windowsill and fell backward to his death.

If he’d arrived around eleven, Dahlia might have been chugging past, although he certainly could not have seen her by standing on the sill behind me. I went down the trunk-lined passageway to the front of the attic and looked out at the road. She’d knocked out poor Mr. Dentha at nine, she’d said, then sat in the living room and considered what to do for most of an hour before she put him in a sleeping bag, carried him out to the Matt-Mobile, and drove out to the chicken house. There are no great distances within the town limits of Maggody (unless someone had gotten real carried away with sign relocation), but she’d come a couple of miles at a turtlish pace.

I went to the side window, rubbed a circle in the dusty glass, and stared until I could make out the oblong shapes of the chicken houses by the creek. A third shape was discernible, a shape suspiciously like that of a truck that belonged to an ill-tempered moonshiner moonshiner who thought he was so damn clever. How damn clever would Raz have been if he’d arrived with a load of whiskey and found a body? Even love-besotted Dahlia had realized it would be difficult to explain the presence of one in her bedroom. Raz would have faced a similar problem. He hadn’t killed (or even beaned) anyone, but he would be forced to explain what he was doing in the chicken house after dark—and why’d he bought the property to begin with. Even if I couldn’t prove he was using the chicken house for illegal purposes, I’d keep an eye on it and he’d be out of a warehouse and whatever he’d paid for it.

So what had he done? He’d moved the body, then cleared out the whiskey temporarily. Now it looked as though he was bringing the whiskey back. I waited. Light flashed as a door opened for a moment. A figure moved toward what I was sure was a truck, disappeared, and shuffled back slowly, carrying a load with the care of a grave robber.

If Pierce Keswick had been in the attic, heard the Matt-Mobile pass by, and then come to this window in time to see Dahlia unload a body and carry it inside, or even taken a break an hour later and seen Raz Buchanon load it into his truck … what had he thought? Could he have been so bewildered that he’d not heard a squeak as someone came up the steps to the attic?

I say this because I heard a squeak.

I climbed over a trunk, dropped to my hands and knees, and crawled down the narrow space below the eaves until I was jammed behind a wardrobe with a canoe paddle stuck in my side. A hatbox fell on my head. Dust swirled into my eyes and nose, and airy strands brushed my face. I’d turned off the flashlight while watching Raz out the window. Now my hand was so sweaty that I could barely hang onto it, but doing so was high on my list of priorities. Real high.

Two more squeaks were followed by profound (as in when you can hear your hair growing) silence. I listened intently, forcing myself to breathe through my nose and battling not to sneeze as decades of dust and mold tickled my sinuses. At the last second I clamped my nostrils together and imploded a sneeze that reverberated through my ears and made my head throb.

Another squeak indicated the intruder had not heard the muffled sound—or was coming to investigate. One of these days I’d learn to bring along my gun, I thought, as I peered futilely around the edge of the wardrobe. There was no utility pole near the property, no moonlight, no hazy diffusion of light from the big city in the distance. I’d been in caves that were better lit.

I became aware of wheezing as the squeaks became more frequent. The intruder was asthmatic or sadly out of shape, I told myself, as if this were information that would be invaluable when I battled for my life. I realized I was reacting as Dahlia had when she found Mr. Dentha in her house, allowing my imagination to run hog-wild. Just because the squeaks were twice as loud as the ones I’d made coming upstairs, and just because the intruder raled like an incubus (or a succubus—gender was not yet established), there was no cause for alarm.

The squeaks were now coming from the floorboards of the attic, not more than fifteen feet away from me. The wheezing was interspersed with low growls. An earthy, fetid smell found its way to my hiding place. The squeaks continued toward the window, passing by the opposite side of the wardrobe with such tentativeness that I suspected I too was putting out a tattletale smell that announced my presence.

A new sound was added to the cacophony of squeaks, wheezes, and thuds from my heart. This one was best described as a plop punctuated with a sputter. Abruptly the smell was so gawdawful that my eyes watered and my stomach convulsed. Acid shot up my throat. Breathing through my nose was impossible, but I was afraid that I’d retch if I removed my hand from my mouth. All in all, this was not a scene from a genteel traditional mystery novel, where fragrant sherry mingled with the aroma of scones baking in the oven.

“Shit!” I said, standing up so recklessly that I banged my head on a rafter. I switched on the flashlight and straddled the trunk beside the wardrobe. There it was in all its organic glory: plump, moist, steaming on the floor. Its producer had lumbered away at the sound of my voice, but to another part of the attic rather than down the steps to the second floor.

I continued over the trunk, careful not to place my feet in a regrettable location, and swung the flashlight as if it were a gun. I certainly wouldn’t have minded pork chops for dinner and ham for breakfast.

“Marjorie?” whimpered. a voice from the second floor.

“She’s up here!” I shouted. “Hiding in disgrace behind a trunk, I guess. Come get her before I”—no explicit threats came to mind, obliging me to make a generic one—before I think of something to make both of you sorrier than you already are!”

I turned the flashlight toward the top of the steps. Raz’s face appeared, his eyes screwed up as the glare caught him and his cheek bulging in alarm. Droplets of sleet dotted his greasy hair and whiskers, but he looked more like something from a Himalayan mountainside than from Santa’s workshop. “Is that you, Arly?” he said as he tried to block the light with a shaky hand.

“Just get your damn sow.”

“Ye might oughtta not rile her,” Raz said, still whimpering and looking as panicky as I’d felt earlier. “Mebbe ye should jest come down here and let her leave when she’s of a mind.”

“I am conducting a murder investigation. I am not going to allow a damn sow to snuffle around the scene of the crime until she gets bored or deposits another load of evidence.” I walked toward the window, shining the light into the crevices between the trunks and boxes. “I don’t know what the hell she’s doing up here,” I continued irritably, “but I’m not about to …”

Marjorie charged out from behind a trunk, her pink eyes flashing savagely. Her wheezing had been replaced with snarling, slobbering, and grunting. Four hundred pounds of fury thundered across the attic at me.

“Watch yerself,” Raz called helpfully as I leaped onto a trunk, lost my balance, and scrabbled to hang onto a rafter, my feet skittering because I’d misstepped in my haste. I still had the flashlight; it bobbled and jerked, adding to the madness of the moment.

Marjorie snapped at my ankle, and for the first time I realized how powerful her jaws were. This was not the sort of pig that tricked huffy-puffy wolves or went wee-wee-wee all the way home. This was a pig possessed with a lust for blood. I kicked out at her head, then decided I was in danger of losing the piggy that went to market, if not the ones that stayed home and had roast beef. I resumed my slippery tap dance on the top of the trunk as splinters dug into my hand.

“Do something, dammit!” I called to Raz, managing to point the flashlight at him as if he could pull out a police manual and read the directions for a rescue mission. As if he could read.