“Well, it was Mary Maude Baumgartner for about five years, and now it’s back to Plummer,” she told me, sniffing a little. Mary Maude had always been emotional. I had a clenched feeling around my heart. I had a lot of memories of this woman.
“You never called me,” she said now, looking up at me. She meant, after the rape. I could never get away from it here.
“I never called anyone,” I said. I had to tell Mary Maude the truth. “I couldn’t face doing it. I had too hard a time.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “But I’ve always loved you.”
Always right to the emotional truth, no matter how uncomfortable. Could this be why I’d never called Mary Maude after my Bad Time? We’d let go of each other, taken a step back.
I remembered another important truth. “I love you too,” I said. “But I couldn’t stand to be around people who were always thinking about what had happened to me. I couldn’t do it.”
She nodded. Her red hair, almost to her shoulders, turned under in a neat curve all the way around, and she had heavy gold earrings in her pierced ears. “I think I can understand that. I’ve been all these years forgiving you for refusing my comfort.”
“Are we all right?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling up at me. “We’re all right, now.”
We both gave a little laugh, half happy, half embarrassed.
“So, you’re getting boxes for Varena?”
“Yeah. She’s getting her stuff out of the cottage. The wedding’s day after tomorrow. And after the murder last night . . .”
“Oh, right, that’s the place Varena rented! You know, the husband, Emory, works right here, with me.” And Mary Maude pointed at the door from which she’d issued. “He’s the sweetest guy.”
He would certainly have been aware of Christopher Sims’s presence in the alley in back of the store.
“So, I guess you knew this guy was living back here, the purse snatcher?”
“Well, we’d caught glimpses. Just in the two days before the police got him. Wait . . . my God, Lily, was that you who kicked him?”
I nodded.
“Wow, girl, what have you done with yourself?” She eyed me up and down.
“Taken karate for a few years, worked out some.”
“I can tell! You were so brave, too!”
“So you knew Sims was back here?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. But we weren’t sure what to do about it. We’ve never had any problem like that, and we were trying to decide what the safe thing to do was, and what the Christian thing to do was. It’s tough when that might not be the same thing! We got Jess O’Shea down here to talk to the man, try to see where he wanted a bus ticket to, you know? Or if he was sick. Or hungry.”
So Jess had actually met the man.
“What did Jess say?”
“He said this Sims guy told him he was just fine right where he was, he had been getting handouts from some people in the, you know, black community, and he was just going to stay in the alley until God guided him somewhere else.”
“Somewhere where they had more purses?”
“Could be.” Mary Maude laughed. “I hear Diane positively identified him. He told Diane at the police station that he was an angel and was trying to point out to Diane the hazards of possessing too many worldly goods.”
“That’s original.”
“Yeah, give him points for a talent for fiction, anyway.”
“He say anything about the murders?” Since Mary Maude apparently had such access to the local gossip pipeline, I thought I might as well tap in.
“No. Isn’t that a little strange? You’d think on one hand he’d be too deranged to understand that the murders are so much more serious, and yet he’s saying that he never saw the pipe until the police found it stuffed behind his box, you know, the one where he was sleeping.”
I noticed that Mary Maude had come to check me out without a coat on, and she was shivering in her expensive white blouse and sweater-vest embroidered in holly and Christmas ornaments. Our reunion had its own background sound track, as the loudspeakers positioned around the square continued to blare out Christmas music.
“How do you stand it?” I asked, nodding my head toward the noise in the square.
“The carols? Oh, after a while you just tune them out,” she said wearily. “They just leach the spirit out of me.”
“Maybe that’s what made the purse snatcher deranged,” I offered, and she burst into laughter. Mary Maude had always laughed easily, charmingly, making it impossible not at least to smile along with her.
She hugged me again, made me promise to call her when I came back to town after the wedding, and scampered back into the store, her body shaking with the cold. I stood looking after her for a minute. Then I threw a couple more boxes into the car and drove carefully out of the alley.
Within a block of turning out onto the side street, Macon, I passed Dill’s pharmacy.
I had a lot to think about.
I would have given almost anything to have had my punching bag.
I returned to Varena’s place and packed everything I could find. Every half hour or so, I straightened up and looked out the window. There were lots of visitors at the Osborn house: women dropping off food, mostly. Emory appeared in the yard from time to time, walking restlessly, and a couple of times he was crying. Once he drove off in his car, returning in less than an hour. But he didn’t knock on the cottage door again, to my great relief.
I had carefully folded Varena’s remaining clothes and placed them in suitcases, since I didn’t know what she’d planned on taking on the honeymoon. Most of her clothes were already at Dill’s.
Finally, by three o’clock, all Varena’s belongings were packed. I moved all the boxes into my car, except for a short stack by the front door that just couldn’t fit. And of course, there was the remaining furniture, but that wasn’t my problem.
I began cleaning the apartment.
It felt surprisingly good to have something to clean. Varena, while not a slob, was no compulsive housekeeper, and there was plenty to do. I was also actively enjoying the break from my family and the alone time.
As I was running the vacuum, I heard a heavy knock on the door. I jumped. I hadn’t heard a car pull up, but then I wouldn’t have over the drone of the machine.
I opened the door. Jack was there, and he was angry.
“What?” I asked.
He pushed past me. “My room at the motel got broken into.” He was furious. “Someone came in through the bathroom window. It looks out on a field. No one saw.”
“Anything taken?”
“No. Whoever it was rummaged through everything, broke the lock on my briefcase.”
I had an ominous sinking somewhere in the region of my stomach. “Did you find my note?”
“What?” He stared at me, anger giving way to something else.
“I left you a note.” I sat down abruptly on the ottoman. “I left you a note,” I repeated stupidly. “About Krista O’Shea.”
“You signed it?”
“No.”
“What did it say?”
“That she hadn’t been to the doctor in weeks.”
Jack’s eyes flickered from item to item in the clean room, as he thought about what I’d told him.
“Did you call the police?” I asked.
“They were there when I pulled in. Mr. Patel, the manager, had called. He had seen the window was broken when he went to put the garbage out behind the building.”
“What did you tell them?”
“The truth. That my things had been gone through but nothing had been stolen. I hadn’t left any money in my room. I never do. And I don’t carry valuable things with me.”
Jack felt angry and sick because his space, however temporary, had been invaded, and his things had been riffled. I understand that feeling all too well. But Jack would never talk about it in those terms, because he was a man.
“So now someone knows exactly why I’m here in Bartley.” He’d cover that violated feeling with practical considerations.
“That person also knows I have an accomplice,” he continued.
That was one way to put it.
Suddenly I stood, walked over to the window. I was crackling with restless energy. Trouble was coming, and every nerve in my body was warning me to get in my car and go home to Shakespeare.
But
I couldn’t go.
My
family
kept me here.
No, that wasn’t completely true. I could have brought myself to leave my family if I felt threatened enough.
Jack
kept me here.
Without a thought in my head, I made a fist and would have driven it into the window if Jack hadn’t caught my arm.
I rounded on him, crazy with jolts of feeling that I wouldn’t identify. Instead of striking him, I ran my arm around his neck and drew him ferociously to me. The stresses and strains on me were almost intolerable.
Jack, understandably surprised, made a questioning noise but then shut up. He let go of the arm he was gripping and tentatively put his own arms around me. We stood silently for what seemed like a long time.
“So,” he said, “you want to talk about whatever this is that’s got you so upset? Have you run out of tolerance for being in your parents’ house? Has your sister made you mad? Or . . . have you found out something else about her fiancé?”
I pushed away from him and began to pace the room.
“I have some ideas,” I said.
His dark brows flew up. I should’ve kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to have the whole conversation: I’d tell him I would get in the houses, he’d tell me it was his job, blah blah blah. Why not skip the whole thing?
“Lily, I’m going to get mad at you,” Jack said with a sort of fatalistic certainty.
“You can’t do the things I can do. What’s your next step now?” I challenged him. “Is there one more thing you can find out here?”
Sure enough, he was looking angry already. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and glanced around for something handy to kick. Finding nothing, he too began pacing. We shifted around the room as if we were sword fighters waiting for our opponent to give us an opening.
“Ask the chief if I can go in and look at those files at Dr. LeMay’s,” he suggested defiantly.
“It’ll never happen.” I knew Chandler: He would go only so far.
“Find whatever the murderer was wearing when he killed the doctor and the nurse and Meredith Osborn.”
So Jack had decided, as I had, that the killer had worn some covering garment over his clothes.
“It’s not gonna be in the house,” I told him.
“You think not?”
“I know not. When people hide something like that, they want it to be close but not as personally close as their own house.”
“You’re thinking carport, garage?”
I nodded. “Or car. But you know as well as I do that’ll put you in a terrible position legally. Before you do that, isn’t there anything else you can try?”
“I’d hoped to get something from Dill. He’s a nice guy, but he just won’t talk about his first marriage. At least his attic has a good floored section now.” Jack gave a short laugh. “I thought about going back to reinterview the couple that lived next door to Meredith and Emory when they had their first child,” Jack said reluctantly. “I’ve been reviewing what they said, and I think I see a hole in their account.”
“Where do they live?”
“The podunk town north of Little Rock where the Osborns lived before they came here. You know . . . the one not far from Conway.”
“What was the hole?”
“Not so much a hole, as . . . something the woman said just didn’t make sense. She said that Meredith told her the baby coming was the saddest day of her life. And Meredith told her that the home birth had been terrible.”
That could be significant or just plain nothing more than what it was, the outpourings of a woman who’d just experienced childbirth for the first time.
“She had the second baby in the hospital,” I observed. “At least, I assume so; I think someone would have mentioned it before now if she’d had Jane Lilith at home.” But I made a mental note to check.
“Why would Meredith have to die?” Jack said. “Why Meredith?” He wasn’t talking to me, not really. He was staring out the front window, his hands still in his pockets. Seen in profile, he looked stern and frightening. If I mentally lopped off his ponytail, I could see how he’d looked as a cop. I would not have been afraid of being beaten if I’d been arrested by him, I thought, but I would have known I’d be a fool to try to escape.
“She babysat the other two girls,” I offered.
Jack nodded. “So she knew them all physically. She’d have an opportunity, sooner or later, to see each girl naked. But the Macklesby baby didn’t have any distinguishing physical marks.”
“So who do you think sent you the picture?”
“I think it was Meredith Osborn.” He turned from the window to look at me directly. “I think she sent it because she wanted to right some great wrong. And I think that’s why she was killed.”
“What were you really doing the night she died?”
“I was on my way to ask her some questions,” he said. “I’d driven past the Bartley Grill and I saw her husband and the kids inside. The baby was on the table in one of those carriers, and he and Eve were chattering away. So I knew Meredith was home by herself, and I thought she might know more about the picture.”
“Why?”
“Roy had brushed the picture and the envelope for fingerprints. There weren’t any on the picture—it had been wiped—but there was one on the envelope, on the tape used to seal the flap. It was a clear print, very small. You’d told me how little Meredith was. Did you ever notice how tiny her hands were?”
I never had.
“I’d hoped to get some fingerprints of hers to compare. I planned on ringing the doorbell, telling her that I was a detective in town on a job as well as being your boyfriend. I was going to hand her a photo, ask her to identify it. When she said she didn’t know the subject, I would put the photo in a bag and later test it for fingerprints.”