Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 09 (18 page)

“Maybe he petitioned the court to change it. Where’s the car?”

“About two hundred feet down a logging road in a clump of scrub pines. You have to get right up to it before you can see it. It’s a good thing those youngsters happened to take that way to the creek.” He took out a cigar and spent forever fiddling with it; I could have blurted out a bunch of questions, but I waited silently. “There’s a blond woman in the car,” he said at last. “We didn’t find a driver’s license in her purse, but there were all sorts of credit cards and a photograph of her and the preacher on a stage in a football stadium. We’re damn near certain it’s Seraphina Hope.”

“Natural causes?”

“What do you think?” growled Harve, then set off down the weedy road, obliging me to choke on his smoke as I followed him. One of these days I was going to report him to the EPA.

“McBeen’s on his way,” he went on as we arrived in a clearing crowded with deputies and the crime squad, “but we don’t need him to tell us she was strangled. For starters, there’s a leather thong cutting into her neck.” He took the cigar stub out of his mouth and studied it as if it were a significant clue in a dog theft. “There’s a whistle on the thong. The only folks I’ve met that wear them are coaches. You may be on to something with this Cory Jenks.”

I took a quick look through the passenger’s window, then backed away as the photographer moved in. “I was told that she was last seen at a quarter after twelve. The story is that she delivered Chastity to the RV and drove away to be alone for a while. Earlier today both Malachi and Thomas mentioned that she did that kind of thing fairly often, and I can’t say I blame her. I’d get tired of breathing secondhand air and bumping into a wall every time I turned around.”

“It beats getting murdered,” Harve said. “Could there be a connection between her and either of the coaches?”

“Not that I know of,” I admitted. “There was definitely something between the coaches, and they were both at the revival. I don’t see where Seraphina Hope fits into any of this, though. Cory could have seen her drive by on her way to the RV or on her way to wherever she was going afterward. He claims he arrived home a little after twelve, but he also claims he didn’t leave his house. As soon as we have an approximate time of death, I’ll talk to him, maybe bring him in to your office for questioning.”

“It was cool last night, but it’s been hot as blazes all day. McBeen’s not gonna be happy about this particular corpse. He gets all riled up when he has to count maggots.”

A young deputy covered his mouth and darted into the thicket. There was a lot of that going on, it seemed. And I was tempted to join him.

—==(O)==—

“We don’t take credit cards,” the assistant manager repeated, but with hesitation. The customer had already reduced one clerk to tears, and she was showing no signs of remorse. “We can take a check now, or put aside the merchandise if you’d like to come back later. Your total is twenty-three hundred and eleven dollars and fortyseven cents. We won’t charge you for delivery.”

Mrs. Jim Bob slapped down a checkbook.

—==(O)==—

Ruby Bee glanced up from her magazine as Estelle came clattering across the dance floor like a flamenco dancer. “I thought you were gonna be back here at four,” she said, letting her eyes fall back on an advertisement for a state-of-the-art food processor that came with so many attachments it could chop, mince, shred, slice, dice, and do everything short of wrapping a birthday present. “Just get me a glass of sherry,” Estelle said as she sat on her stool and took a napkin from the dispenser to dab her forehead. “You will not believe what just happened. I swear, it was like an X-rated movie. It was all I could do not to faint right there on the porch.”

“Whose porch?” asked Ruby Bee, setting down the glass of sherry.

Estelle took a gulp and shuddered. “Cory Jenks’s porch. You’d think in the middle of the afternoon folks would know better than to engage in that kind of tomfoolery, but I saw what I saw with my own two eyes!” She made sure Ruby Bee was appropriately attentive, then continued. “I went to Eddie Joe’s house and found out that Kirsten was on the telephone at the time we figured Norma Kay called her boyfriend.”

“I thought you said you were on Cory Jenks’s porch?”

“Do you mind letting me tell this my own way? I’m the one who had the misfortune to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, while all you were doing was reading a magazine.”

Ruby Bee sniffed. “I was reading this magazine because I was back here at three-forty-five. Fergie’s still a suspect, but Lewis Ferncliff is in the clear on account of him and Besseya having left Saturday morning to visit their son in Muskogee. Eula watched them load their car, and she said they were arguing so loudly she could hear every word from her kitchen window. I thought we’d said that it might not be smart to have a word with the two bachelors until we came up with a plan.”

“Maybe so,” Estelle said, taking dainty sips of sherry like she was perched on a bar stool in Buckingham Palace exchanging recipes with the queen—or at least the head chef. “If you must know, I came up with a plan all by myself and decided to carry it out without asking for your permission. It’s not gonna do Arly much good if we’re still working on the list of suspects when Dahlia goes into labor, is it?”

“Would you get on with your story? Folks will start showing up for happy hour any minute.”

“Well, I drove to the house where Cory lives and knocked on his door. When he didn’t open it, I kept right on knocking because his truck was parked in the yard. I was feeling like a redheaded woodpecker by the time he came to the door. He had jeans on, but his shirt was unbuttoned and his feet were bare. He pretended to be pleased to see me, but I could tell right off the bat he was real pissed about being interrupted. I jumped in with my story, and he was just standing there scratching his butt and staring at me when a door behind him opened and out waltzed Chastity Hope.”

“Could be she went by to borrow a cup of sugar,” Ruby Bee said, “or to find out what’s gonna happen to the girls’ basketball team.”

Estelle gave her a pitying look. “I don’t think they were discussing basketball. She was naked as a picked chicken except for a shirt that looked like it came off his floor. Her makeup was smeared and her hair was all tousled, too.”

Ruby Bee was so stunned that she poured herself a glass of sherry and drank half of it without realizing what she was doing. “Why, she can’t be half as old as he is.”

“You could have knocked me over with a feather. Cory snapped at her to get back in the other room, but she sauntered right over and gave me a smirky smile. My plan went clean out of my mind, and I sputtered something and made a beeline for my car. My hands were shaking so hard I could hardly get the key in the ignition.”

“And her being a preacher’s adopted daughter. After seeing her last night in that white gown, I’d have thought she would behave better than a common strumpet.”

“You didn’t think that when Sagina Buchanon played the angel in the Sunday-school Christmas pageant three years back,” Estelle pointed out. “You were muttering so loudly I was embarrassed to be in the same pew with you. Anybody can get dressed up like an angel. Or undressed, as the case may be.”

Ruby Bee put her glass in the sink while she tried to decide what this meant in terms of the murder in the gym. “If Cory was having an affair with Norma Kay, he didn’t take her death real hard. He was a conceited sort back when he was in high school, always strutting around like he was being recruited left and right to play for one of those professional teams. His mother and I used to be in the same county extension club, and she told me he was so grateful he liked to have cried when some little college finally offered him a scholarship. I heard he had to beg Bur Grapper for three days straight to get a job at the high school and get paid less than seventeen thousand dollars, and I don’t recollect him in any television commercials for overpriced athletic shoes.”

Estelle reached for a basket of pretzels and carefully selected one that wasn’t broken. “If he was having an affair with Norma Kay, maybe the only reason he was doing it was so she’d help him get the head coach’s job. Once she was dead, he wouldn’t have any call to keep pretending he was smitten with her. He was free to take up with the first strumpet that came along, and it happened to be Chastity Hope.”

“That could be,” Ruby Bee said, wishing she could make better sense of everything that had happened in the last two days—or the last seven days. She had a feeling that no matter how long and hard Malachi prayed, he wouldn’t be able to coax Jesus into curing her of her confusion.

And it might take a miracle to keep Arly in Maggody.

I parked by the tent in what was becoming a familiar spot and went over to the RV to deliver the deplorable news. Chastity came to the door and gave me a sullen stare, clearly more than willing to kill the messenger (meaning me).

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“I need to speak to Malachi.”

“He’s not here. He and Thomas went to Farberville. I’ll tell him you were here.”

She tried to close the door, but I caught the knob and kept it open. “Then I need to speak to you,” I said as I forced my way into the RV. “You’d better sit down.” Once she’d done so, I told her about Seraphina, but without the storm trooper kind of description I’d used to jar Darla Jean.

“Murdered?” she said as her eyes filled with tears. “But who …?”

“I don’t know.” I went into the bathroom to get a box of tissues, then sat down and waited until she’d finished crying and blowing her nose. I was a little bit surprised at her display of what appeared to be genuine distress; our previous encounter had not suggested she was devoted to her sister. “I know this is a bad time,” I said, “but I need to ask you a few questions about last night.”

“Oh, God,” she said, her face wrinkling with a second bout of distress, this time approaching anguish, “the last thing I said to her was that I hated her. I didn’t hate her, though—I was just mad at her. I slammed the car door and went inside without so much as looking back at her.”

“I’m sure she knew you didn’t mean it.”

“All I ever did was gripe at her about how she took me away from my friends and dragged me all over the country. I stole money from her purse every time I got a chance. Last month someone gave her a kitten, and one night when she and Malachi were gone, I took it out in the desert and dumped it. She suspected what I’d done, but I swore I’d left the door open by accident. I tore up the only photograph she had of our mother and flushed the pieces down the toilet.” She doubled over as if she’d been punched in the gut and began to moan. “How could I have been so goddamn awful?”

By this time, I had no doubt her reaction was genuine, but nothing in my training had covered handling a spontaneous effusion of guilt and I was relieved to hear a car drive up and stop. I watched out the window as Thomas went into the tent; seconds later, Malachi halted in the doorway of the RV, staring first at Chastity and then at me. “What’s going on?” he said. “Is she in trouble with the law?”

“We found Seraphina’s body near Boone Creek. There’s evidence of foul play,” I said.

Malachi’s knees buckled, and he barely made it to a chair. He bent his head, clasped his hands together, and began to mumble under his breath. I couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders were twitching and his breathing was labored and erratic. Chastity stared at him, then rose unsteadily and went into the bathroom.

Some days it’s mildly entertaining to be a cop. This was not one of them. “I have to ask some questions,” I said apologetically. When he looked up at me, pale but composed, I added, “We need to move quickly to catch this person.”

“The same one who killed Norma Kay Grapper?”

“It’s possible. I’m trying to find a link between the two victims. Did Seraphina ever meet Norma Kay or talk to her on the telephone?”

Malachi thought for a moment, then frowned. “If she did, she didn’t mention it to me. I told her about what happened in Norma Kay’s office last week, of course, and we discussed how to handle the situation. It would not have been wise to alienate the property owner’s wife. On the other hand, previous scandals involving evangelists have made it clear that there should be no hint of impropriety, which is why I initially decided not to meet her at the gym.”

“Did Seraphina know you changed your mind?”

“She knew nothing about it. I didn’t have a chance to tell her about the note before the revival, and once the revival began, I completely forgot about it. The spirit of the Lord is a powerful and mysterious force that prevails over earthly concerns. Only after Seraphina had left to find Chastity and I was changing clothes did I rediscover Norma Kay’s note in my pocket. I couldn’t leave her sitting sitting alone in her office, waiting for me.”

Despite the gravity of the moment, I allowed myself the petty indulgence of a digression. “The spirit of the Lord didn’t do much for Lottie Estes’s driving skills. It seems you cured her last night and told her she wouldn’t need her glasses anymore. Today she ran down an old woman in the road.”

“How unfortunate,” he murmured. “Her faith must not have been as strong as she professed it to be. Tell her to come tonight and I’ll pray again for her.”

“Tonight?”

“I can’t ignore the Lord’s work because of a personal tragedy. I have a calling to bring lost souls back from the brink of the abyss and provide them with the opportunity to experience prosperity and inner peace.”

“Your wife was murdered early this morning, Mr. Hope. Surely the Lord will give you the night off.”

“I am in great pain, Miss Hanks, but I cannot turn people away or ignore their needs. The Lord allowed job to lose his property and his children and be afflicted with boils in order to test his faith. Perhaps this is my test—to continue the Lord’s work while struggling to understand why this dreadful thing happened.”

It was impassioned, but I suspected it was motivated by the less lofty goal of raising cash for the corporation. “At the moment, I don’t have a reason to close you down, but rest assured that I will the first chance I get. Please tell me everything you did after I left you this morning.”