Muletrain to Maggody (31 page)

Although this particular battlefield lacked resounding cannon fire and smoke, bodies were falling every which way as people skidded on Jim Bob’s finest produce and bottles of designer water. The drunken fraternity boy bellowed as a hoof came down on his knee.

Jack drew Harriet and me away from the escalating chaos. “What was that kid’s problem?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Whatever it was, it just got a whole lot worse. The Confederates are hot on his heels, and the cavalry is charging. Dahlia’s the only one I’m not worried about. The Buchanon blood, you know.” I looked at Harriet. “Which one of them slipped away?”

“Sweetpea, I’m sorry to say. She’s had time to go back to Jim Bob’s house and collect the rental car. I didn’t see her drive by, but I might have missed General McClellan and all seventeen thousand of his troops marching down the road. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything quite like this. Is this what you expected?”

“Welcome to Maggody,” I said with a faint smile.

I told Harriet I’d keep her informed, then Jack and I walked down the road to Ruby Bee’s. She and Estelle were standing in the parking lot.

“What in blazes is going on?” she demanded. “It sounds like one of those riots you see on the news.”

Estelle raised her artfully drawn eyebrows. “Shouldn’t you be doing something?”

“I was thinking Jack and I should order a pitcher of beer,” I said, “but we can always go over to my apartment if you two prefer to stay out here and rubberneck.”

Ruby Bee shot me a look that hinted of blistering lectures in the future. “No, I reckon I can fix you up with beer and pretzels, or maybe even some popcorn. It ain’t any of my business, but it seems to me you and this fellow here have been spending more than enough time in your apartment lately. Folks are beginning to talk.”

“Beginning?” I echoed.

“Well,” she said, squirming, “some of them have been wondering just what his intentions are, him being from out of town and all.”

“A fascinating question.” I looked at Jack. “Do you have any intentions, honorable or otherwise? Be specific, please, so that Ruby Bee can put all those inquiring minds to rest.”

He grinned. “My apologies, but I’m fresh out of intentions at this time. I may have some back at my office in one of my desk drawers. If I find any, you’ll be the first to know.”

Ruby Bee was harrumphing as she stalked into the bar.

“You aimin’ to tell us anytime soon what happened down at the SuperSaver?” asked Estelle as we followed suit. “I ain’t heard such a ruckus since the Lambertino boy set off a box of Roman candles at the Fourth of July picnic last year and Elsie McMay’s straw hat caught on fire.”

“When I get it sorted out,” I promised. I told Jack to make the big decision between pretzels and popcorn, then went over to the pay phone and called Harve. The dispatcher substituting for LaBelle put me through without a fuss. I wished the substitution would be permanent, but Harve could never fire LaBelle without incurring the wrath of Mrs. Dorfer, who was some sort of cousin.

“Sweetpea,” I told him. “You have someone there waiting for her?”

“I saw to the details, myself. The companion agreed to invite whoever showed up to go right upstairs to Wendell’s office. Mrs. Streek doesn’t have what I’d call a real firm grip on things. She’ll most likely offer her guest tea and cookies.” He paused to light a cigar. “Guess you made the wrong call on this one, Arly.”

“At least I made a call, while you sat around assuring me you’d take over the case as soon as I did the dirty work. I want four deputies on Saturday morning, Harve, starting at five-thirty. There’s going to be some real bad blood between the two sides, some of it possibly being shed right now. Call me back once Sweetpea’s in custody.”

I joined Jack at a booth, where we had both popcorn and pretzels. “How’d you pull that off?” I asked him.

“I told her she looks more like your sister than your mother.”

“She does not,” I protested, but very quietly. Said topic of discussion was watching us from behind the bar, and Estelle from her usual roost.

“I was hungry.”

“You may have to fill up on carbs. I’ve got so many loose ends to tie up before I call it quits that I may be indulging in macramé until midnight.” I took a swallow of beer. “Sheriff Dorfer accused me of making the wrong call, but both options were possible. Sweetpea had her family name and family fortune to defend. On the other hand, Corinne might have recognized Hadley Parham’s name when Wendell first mentioned it, but Wendell stated unequivocally that Hadley was an only child—and therefore not anybody’s great-great-granduncle. Corinne did know that Sweetpea’s insistence on coming here was questionable. A low-budget documentary isn’t likely to lead to a Hollywood blockbuster—no matter how talented the cameraman is.”

“So Sweetpea already knew about the connection?”

“I’m sure her family talked about it after the children were sent to bed. Hospiss wouldn’t have recognized the Yarborough name, but she certainly knew the Parham name from the entry in the family Bible. She might have known the name of the plantation if it had been passed along in the family lore, and sent her letters there. I’m sure her claim of consanguinity caused quite a ruckus, as Estelle would say.”

Jack waited silently, allowing me to keep sorting through what I knew and what I’d theorized.

“Corinne wasn’t worried about the Yarborough fortune,” I added. “She knew that the passing of the estate to Felicity Louise was irrevocable. She must have done research about that sort of thing for some of her novels. She probably didn’t know the child was illegitimate, with a mother who was a slave. Sweetpea did, though, and she knew it would cause no end of crude jokes at the country club. The Yarborough family would never have engaged the services of a genealogist to produce a flowery family tree.”

“But along came Wendell,” Jack murmured.

“Wendell, with plenty of free time to search out every tedious detail about every last Confederate soldier at Cotter’s Ridge. He’d already tracked down the certificate of baptism. He knew it would make more than a dry little footnote. And with the journal to be made widely available in the next few weeks, he might have nurtured hope that his literary effort might attract some attention. A reporter drawn to the romance of buried treasure might have come across the family link between the genteel Yarboroughs of Charleston and the mutant Buchanons of Maggody. We still may see Sweetpea’s photo next to Hospiss’s on the cover of a tabloid.”

“But did you make the wrong call?”

“No,” I said, nibbling on a pretzel. “I just let Harve think I did so he’d feel magnanimous when I demanded two more deputies on Saturday. I knew for sure when Sweetpea came up with her second round of defense, the tryst with Andrew. Hammet didn’t see her until late in the morning, and frankly, they would have been hard-pressed to keep Ruby Bee from vacuuming the room. Sweetpea was scrabbling for an alibi; innocent people don’t bother.” I looked back at Ruby Bee. “Where’s Hammet? I thought he’d come marching down the road this afternoon, banging his little heart out.”

“I told him the truth,” Estelle said, “which was there wasn’t any drummer boy in the script. He was pretty sore.”

“I liked to wash his mouth out with soap,” added Ruby Bee. “You never heard anything like the vocabulary he has.”

Estelle rolled her eyes. “But then he calmed down, and the last we saw of him was when he came to get some cheese-burgers ’cause he was playing checkers with that sickly boy out back.”

Jack squeezed my hand. “You sure you’ll be tied up tonight? Beginning tomorrow, I’m going to be working almost as hard as you. After I get the footage in the morning, I’ll drive back to Springfield and take a look at it in case I need more. Then I’ll drive back here and steel myself to get up at five on Saturday morning.”

“I wish I could,” I said, “but I need to tell Corinne and Simon where Sweetpea will be residing until her rich daddy gets her out on bail. I’ve got to go to both camps and make sure we won’t have any midnight raids. Oh, and I’ve got to see a man about a mule.”

“
I
just have no idea what to do,” Corinne said to Simon as they came in the back door. “Should I call Sweetpea’s parents, or let her do it? I did not accompany her as a chaperon, so I don’t feel responsible. Perhaps you should be the one to call them, Simon.”

“Let’s ask Mrs. Jim Bob to do it, since she’s a distant cousin. Why, the whole clan could come to South Carolina for a family reunion. We can have pork rinds and chitlins.”

Corinne swatted at him. “You’re absolutely hopeless.”

“But the perfect product of my upbringing,
ma petite mère.
Shall we have wine on the patio—or would you prefer a jar of moonshine?”

“Wine, I think. I wonder where everyone is. Kenneth mentioned he might take a nap. It’s too bad he missed the spectacle in front of the supermarket. If it hadn’t been so ludicrous, I could have used it in a novel. But, alas, it was stranger than fiction.” She went to the doorway into the hall. “You open the wine and take it and some glasses out to the table. I’ll see if Mrs. Jim Bob might want to join us and hear what happened. She must know some of those involved.”

Simon smirked. “But you’re not going to rouse Kenneth. Oh, wait, you did that earlier this afternoon, didn’t you? Aroused him, to be more precise. Don’t you think you should show some decorum at your age? I could hear the two of you from my bedroom.”

“Don’t be impertinent,” Corinne said. She went into the living room and stopped. “Simon! Come here!”

When he came into the room, they both stared at Mrs. Jim Bob, who was sprawled on the sofa and snoring boisterously. An empty wine bottle lay on the floor.

“She’s snockered,” Simon said, awed.

Corinne crept closer. “And wearing a most peculiar dress, as if she’d planned to go to a fancy ball this evening. The material is some sort of heavy brocade. Really most attractive, although likely to be oppressive in this weather. When she has recovered, I believe I’ll suggest she use something similar for drapes in this room. The effect would be quite lovely.”

Harriet was in the bedroom, debating whether she could swallow enough of her pride and make the phone call. At last she picked up the receiver, glanced at the number she’d carefully recorded, and dialed it.

“Lydia,” she began, “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about Wendell. I know you and he were looking toward some very happy times together. He seemed so enthusiastic and self-confident his last few days.” She listened for a moment. “That’s very kind of you, Lydia. Wendell and I were dear friends for quite some years. I do think the society should have some kind of memorial service at the Headquarters House in the next few weeks. Wendell would have liked that, don’t you think? How is Mrs. Streek holding up? Has the shock been hard on the dear old thing?” She once again listened, this time with a faintly impatient expression. “We’ve all been busy, Lydia. Please let her know that I’ll come by Saturday afternoon, and stay with her until her son arrives to see to her future care. I may offer to stay with her indefinitely—unless, of course, Lydia, you’re planning to do that. After all, she might have been your mother-in-law.”

I called Harve from the PD. “Everything go smoothly?”

“Like an oil slick. She knocked on the door, introduced herself, and offered some glib reason why she needed to fetch a few documents from Wendell’s office. Once she’d loaded a stack of them in her arms, Les and Swilly stopped her in the hall and transported her here. She’s down the hall, denying everything. I ain’t sure how she’s going to explain away the notebook, files, and family Bible in the trunk of the rental car. Guess she was planning to toss ’em all in a Dumpster on her way back to Maggody. I just don’t understand how a pretty little thing like her could be so cold-blooded as to murder two people, both of them harmless senior citizens.”

“Even cold blood’s thicker than water, Harve. I’ll come in to your office tomorrow and help you write up the reports, this having been your case all along.”

He wheezed for a moment. “I reckon we can stick your name in somewheres.”

“Thanks,” I said, then hung up and drove out past the bridge to the Confederate campsite. None of the soldiers sitting around sipping whiskey seemed unduly bruised or battered.

“We shore got started off with a bang, didn’t we?” the biker-in-another-life cackled as I walked past him. “Ol’ Snag-gle here got so excited he damn near had a stroke, and that Yankee peed his pants when I took a rope and tossed it over a branch. ’Course we weren’t really gonna hurt him, not with all the tourists watching. Besides, that woman he was chasing laid into him and liked to break his nose before we could haul her off of him. God, I love these weekends.”

I found Jeb sitting a goodly distance away from them, no doubt fearful of farb contamination. “We aren’t going to have any more trouble today, are we?”

“Nah, they’re all too fat and drunk to bother. One of ’em brought chips and dip.”

I sat down next to him. “Were you and Waylon down past the low-water bridge yesterday afternoon?”

He turned as pink as his pallor would permit. “Yeah, the dumb fuck left his canteen, so I took it to him. We got to talking, and he said he’d seen some of my fine bloating at Chattanooga a couple of years back. He wanted me to teach him how to do it, as if I hadn’t spent years perfecting it. I told him to shoot me, so he did and I took the fall, gulped in as much air as I could, and then focused on forcing my abdomen to expand. He tried, but it was a pitiful thing to watch.”

“You given up on finding the gold?”

Jeb looked at me from under his bushy eyebrows. “Until it’s found, you can count on seeing me every now and then. Or maybe not, unless you look real quickly.”

“Oh,” I said, then went back to my car and went to see a man about a mule.

The man, and that was a polite designation, was Raz Buchanon. I knocked on his door and waited, but he did not appear. His truck was parked at the edge of the road, indicating he wasn’t up on the ridge supplementing his income by preparing to sell ’shine to the reenactors. Even Jeb might buy some, since it was, after all, authentic.

I walked down to the barn. The door was partially open, and I could hear Raz grousing and cussing. He came to the doorway and blocked me.

“Whatta ye want?” he demanded, puffing up like a bullfrog.

“We need another mule for the reenactment tomorrow morning.”

“I ain’t got a mule, and iff’n I did, it wouldn’t be in the barn.”

“Raz,” I said with a pained sigh, “you and I know that you stole Perkin’s mule a while back. I don’t see it in your field.”

“It ain’t in the barn. Now git off of my property afore I fetch my gun, Arly Hanks. It’s time somebody taught you some manners.”

I pushed past him and went into the barn. “Where’s the damn mule, Raz? You can have it back Saturday…” I slammed to a halt. “What have you done, you sumbitch? You get your sorry ass in here and untie Brother Verber before I—I take Marjorie down to the rebels for their pig roast! Do you hear me?”

“I ain’t gonna let him loose till he eats ever’ mouthful of that ham he brought right to my front door. Marjorie was so tored up that she came close to cryin’. How’d you feel if I chopped up Ruby Bee and brought you her hind leg as a present?”

Brother Verber looked up at me with piteous eyes. His face was smeared with grease and flecks of white fat. “Help me, for God’s sake.”

“Raz!” I said. “You are in bad trouble. I don’t know what the charges will be, but I’ll think of something. Start hacking at those ropes if you want to live long enough to go to court!”

On Saturday afternoon, Jack and I at last found time to escape to my private sanctuary on Boone Creek, far away from where the Confederates were packing up their gear and congratulating themselves despite their loss. I presumed the Yankees were equally cheerful, if not more so. In this case, there were no spoils to go to the victors, but they’d had a fine time popping up and down in the pasture to take shots at their enemy.

“Tired?” said Jack.

“More than that,” I admitted, resting my head on his chest. “Do you think the documentary will come out well?”

“It’s hard to say, but with Terry’s and Hammet’s help, we got as much footage as possible. I have a feeling Simon won’t show up in Springfield to do the auditory, but Frank can do it as soon as he can walk again. That was one helluva a nasty bite that horse took out of his…buttocks.”

I took a tamale out of the sack and offered it to him. “Enough about this madness, okay? I just want to lie here for a week and listen to the water ripple by. Maybe I should have gotten more tamales and beer.”

“Tell you what,” he said, sounding as lazy as I, “let’s stay here until it starts getting chilly, then go back, get cleaned up, and have a nice dinner in Farberville. Tomorrow I need to get back and prepare for the more mundane work that pays the bills.”

“Planning to come back here?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Good idea. Are you going to bring any intentions with you?”

He held the tamale so that orange splotches dripped on my belly. “Do you want me to?”

I thought about it for a moment. “No, not yet. We’re both locked into our present situations for the time being. You can’t uproot your kids, and I’m not ready to abandon Maggody just yet. Then again, you’re self-employed and I might as well be, considering how much I’m paid. Surely we can arrange some vacation time.”

“In Branson?” Jack asked as he began to lick up the mess he’d made.

I tried not to giggle, but it was impossible to keep my composure. “Okay, but let’s not tell Hammet.”

Jim Bob’s throat was tight with anxiety as he crept toward the cannon. All the damnfool reenactors and their families and the houseguests had left town, and if any of ’em had stayed around, they wouldn’t be wandering around at midnight. Mrs. Jim Bob had locked herself in her bedroom long about the middle of the afternoon, and he doubted he’d see her for another day or two. He was the only one next to the bridge, and he was relying on moonlight instead of a flashlight that might attract attention.

He knew where the gold was, or he was damn close to sure he did, anyway. The private, Emily or whatever his name, had been so scared of snakes that he wouldn’t have gone very far up on Cotter’s Ridge, looking for a cave. There was as many copperheads and rattlers up there as there was acorns, along with harmless blacksnakes and even little grass snakes. No, the boy’d skedaddled back down and stuffed the gold in the cannon for safekeeping. He probably figured they’d turn everything around and whomp the damn Yankees, and be able continue on their way to Farberville, pulling the cannon with them.

Jim Bob swallowed, then started to stick his arm in the cannon, aware that he was likely to have to dig past spider-webs and maybe critters that had gotten trapped and died. But it was gonna be worth it.

“Don’t bother,” said a voice from the shadows. “It ain’t there. Well, it ain’t there anymores.”

“Raz?” croaked Jim Bob. “What the hell are you doing here, and where do you get off sneaking up on me like that?”

“I jest came to see if any of you slick ol’ boys might come lookin’ for the gold.”

“You said it ain’t there anymores,” he managed to say in a more neighborly voice. “Where is it?”

“I collected it ’long about Thursday night. There weren’t all that much, but I reckon it belongs to me all the same. I took it to a coin dealer in Farberville, and the feller liked to split his britches. It weren’t millions, if that’s what you’re thinkin’. Then again, it weren’t peanuts, neither. Mebbe I’ll buy a fancy new truck or two, and one of those satellite dishes so Marjorie and me can watch movies all night. If I weren’t so fond of makin’ ’shine like my great-grandpappy, I could retire. Mebbe I’ll look into condos on a beach somewheres so Marjorie can wallow in the sand. She’s pedigreed, ye know, and has a delicate nature.”

Jim Bob tried to make him out in the shadows under the tree. “Why are you sayin’ the gold belongs to you, you old coot?”

“On account of how all those long years ago when the rebels showed up, they stole a pig from my great-great-grandpappy. I’ve been hearing the story of how he watched the soldier boy put the gold in the cannon since I was knee-high to a polecat, but nobody knew where the cannon was till now. Now they’s paying for the pig. You got a problem with that?”

Jim Bob heard the sound of a shotgun being cocked. “No, Raz, I reckon I don’t.”