TheCart Before the Corpse (17 page)

Hiram either had been caught unawares or had trusted his assailant enough to turn his back on him. Or her. A woman could crush a man’s skull with a baseball bat. Laying out the man’s unconscious body and dropping the wheel on him took time, but not a lot of strength.

Geoff got down on hands and knees and went over the wheel spoke by spoke searching for fingerprints. Nothing. Either the assailant had worn gloves or wiped the wheel clean. He was about to give up when he noticed several places on the spokes where the dust lay thinner. Flat on his stomach, he gently brushed the top layer of dust aside.

He took a second to realize what he was looking at. The print of the toe of a trainer or athletic shoe. Medium size. Hard to say whether it belonged to a man or a woman. He wasn’t certain he could pick up the impression, but he pulled his tape out of his case and lifted what was there. With luck he could bring up the shoe print and identify tread and size. He brushed fingerprint powder over it and took several photos.

He sat back on his heels. Looked as though he had knocked Hiram out, arranged his unconscious body, dropped the wheel so that the rim fell across his throat, and then
stood on the spokes
close to the rim to increase the pressure until the hyoid bone was crushed.

The throat wound had bled, but that alone had not killed him. He had essentially been strangled, although he might well have died from his crushed skull.

Callous bastard, whoever he was.

So who had Hiram trusted? Peggy Caldwell. If Merry Abbott had showed up early in the storm or the middle of the night, he would have welcomed her. Jacob Yoder. Hiram had perceived no physical threat from whoever struck him.

By the time Geoff had crisscrossed the room foot by foot and reached the two carriages along the back wall, his knees ached, his back ached, and his head throbbed from the toxic fumes. He should have used a respirator.

He checked the carriages only so that he could say he’d done it. He was about to give up when he looked at the carriage shaft from the doctor’s buggy. It was six feet long at least, but when he touched it, he discovered it weighed much less than he’d suspected. He sprayed along its length and used the light.

Nothing.

Where was the second shaft? He found it under the carriage in two pieces, but the break in the wood looked old.

He knelt and pulled the two pieces out, then sprayed them and clicked on the light.

Five inches of the thick end piece lit up like a bottle of lavender fireflies.

“My, my.” He left the piece untouched, brought his camera from his bag, packed the Lumalight and Luminol spray and picked up his brushes and fingerprint power.

The other shaft was extremely dusty, but streaks along this one showed it had been wiped clean within the last three or four days. “Can’t win ’em all,” he said. A nice set of fingerprints would have been helpful.

He slipped the wooden piece of shaft into paper evidence bags one from the top, one from the bottom so that they met in the middle. He didn’t have a single bag long enough. He taped them together, signed and dated his makeshift package, then sealed it. Amos could send it down to Atlanta to the lab for confirmation of the blood and DNA typing to prove it came from Hiram.

He called Merry’s number, but received no answer. He figured she’d be upstairs with Peggy, so he swung by anyway. By the time he reached the Caldwell house and knocked on Merry’s door it was dark, he was hungry, achy and grimy from crawling all over Hiram’s workshop. He was also very late.

He was about to knock a second time when he heard the chain rattle. A moment later Merry opened the door and walked away from him into the small living room.

“You look like hell,” he said when she turned to face him.

“So do you.”

“I’m just dirty. You’ve been crying.”

She curled up in a corner of the sofa. “You bet. And raging against the dying of the light.”

“Got any teabags?” He opened cabinets in the small kitchen.

“I have no idea. I’m supposed to make you tea? Sorry, I’m fresh out of crumpets.”

“Here we are.” He ran water in the sink, soaked the teabags and wrung them out, then handed them to her in a paper towel. “Lie back and put these on your eyes.”

“So I can’t watch you plant evidence?”

“So tomorrow morning you don’t look like a fighter after ten rounds with Mike Tyson.” He shrugged. “Even with your eyes wide open I could still plant evidence. You’d never catch me.”

She snorted, leaned back and laid the teabags on her eyes. “What were you intending to plant?”

“If I knew that I’d do it.”

She sat up and dropped the teabag into the palm of her hand. “You haven’t talked to Amos recently, have you?”

He came instantly alert. “Not since before I drove out to your farm. Why? What’s happened?”

She pointed to the leather chair across from the couch she sat on and told him.

Halfway through he came to his feet and began to pace. “I ought to toss you and Ms. Caldwell both into jail.”

“What have
we
done?”

“At least you’d be safe.”

She waved him away. “I’ve been searched, Peggy’s been searched. I’d guess Hiram’s barn was searched. We’re probably safer here than we’d be in that bread box of a jail where we’d be sitting ducks, thank you very much.”

“So leave town.”

She fell back against the sofa and began to laugh. “Even if Amos or the sheriff of Bigelow County would let me, which I doubt, I’m not going anywhere until after Hiram’s funeral, and maybe not then. Hiram was never there for me when I needed him. I intend to be here for him now.”

“That makes no sense.”

She shrugged. “Makes sense to me. I’m here until Hiram’s killer is caught, or until I run out of money, whichever comes first.”

“Talk with your eyes closed.”

She slid the teabags back into place, and leaned back.

”When you were burgled Sunday evening, could you tell if anything was stolen?” he asked.

She shook her head without disturbing the teabags. “Who knows? We found old driving magazines, some bills, some junk mail . . . ”

“Personal letters?”

“I would have remembered, or maybe I wouldn’t. I was pretty wasted by that time. Peggy came down and straightened up Monday morning while I was down at Amos’s with you.”

“So she could have removed anything that incriminated her?”

She sat up, peeled off the teabags and frowned at him. “Why would she write him when she could bang on his door?”

“Well . . . ‘I hate you and never want to see you again. Get out of my apartment.’ Easier to do on paper than face to face. Safer, too.”

“Get real. Hiram wasn’t violent. They didn’t fight.”

“Who told you that? Ms Caldwell? Where was he planning for you to sleep? Was he planning to bunk in with her?”

“Peggy has offered
me
her guest room, but this sofa makes into a queen-sized bed. I suspect he would have given me his bed and slept on the couch. We’ve both slept on a bunch worse. He never mentioned he would move out while I was visiting, certainly not upstairs.”

Geoff sat in the club chair across from her. “My father and I have gone through some rough times, but we still talk to one another at least a couple of times a week.”

She laid the teabags on her eyes again. “If that is your subtle way of asking me whether we were estranged because he abused me when I was a child, you can forget it. I adored him when I was little. Hiram was not God’s gift to marital fidelity, but he liked his women rich, beautiful, adult, and preferably married.”

“You don’t just drift apart from a parent. What caused the estrangement?”

“Why is that any of your business?” Merry asked. He was getting into tough territory.

Good. He waited. Few people could endure silence.

She couldn’t. She folded her arms tight across her chest, oblivious to the damp teabags that fell onto her polo shirt. “I didn’t realize how low my mother and I were on Hiram’s totem pole until I was a teenager. After her accident and the divorce, I went with her to St. Louis to live with my stepfather. Hiram was in Virginia or North Carolina or Florida most of the time. He had no facilities to look after a teenager. I couldn’t visit, and he seldom came as far west as St. Louis.

“The couple of times he did come to town and take me out to dinner, he tried to act like the authoritarian father.” She rolled her eyes. “He didn’t know a damned thing about me. He certainly had no right to tell me what to do with my life.”

“What accident?” he asked. Something in her tone had alerted him. Maybe Hiram had hurt her mother. On purpose.

“She fell off a carriage I was driving and nearly lost her leg.”

“So he was not responsible?”

“Depends on your point of view. He wasn’t around, if that’s what you’re asking. I walked away from driving and even gave up horses completely for a while until I realized I couldn’t bear life without them and went back to working with them. I’d probably still be married and a damned sight richer if I hadn’t. Seductive beasts.”

“Why do you call him Hiram?”

“Started as a put-down, then became a habit. Saying he wasn’t really my father.”

“Did he resent it?”

“If he did he never mentioned it.”

“Okay. Put the teabags back. I’ll be quiet while I search.”

“Leave my stuff alone, please. It wasn’t here when Hiram lived here, so it’s not part of your crime scene or whatever you call it. What’s not hung up is still in my suitcase at the foot of the bed.”

“No problem.” She’d never notice a quick check. He knew how to search.

An hour later he had found nothing of interest, no personal correspondence, no files, nothing to give him an inkling of why anyone would want to kill Lackland. Whoever had burgled the place either found what he was looking for and took it, or didn’t find what he was looking for because it wasn’t here.

He turned off the light in the bedroom and saw that Merry had fallen asleep on the couch with the teabags over her eyes.

He hoped she wasn’t guilty of anything, and that Peggy Caldwell wasn’t guilty of anything either. Merry needed a friend she could trust. She seemed completely alone.

He went back into the bedroom, pulled the quilt off the bed and draped it over Merry. She’d have a sore neck in the morning, but he couldn’t see disturbing her. He let himself out quietly and made sure the door locked behind him.

As he walked up the driveway to his car, the back door of the house opened and Peggy walked out on the stoop.

“Good evening,” she said. “Could I interest you in a glass of iced tea and a sandwich? There’s something you need to see.”

Geoff’s stomach gave a mighty growl. His watch said ten o’clock. His stomach said he hadn’t had anything to eat since noon.

“I don’t plan either to poison or seduce you,” Peggy said. “I might even run to a piece of homemade apple pie. Or pumpkin if you’d prefer. I have several.”

“With cheese?”

“Melted cheddar with ice cream.”

“Consider me seduced.” He stopped on the stoop. He pointed to the open space now covered by a square of aluminum foil. “Is this where they broke in? Merry told me what happened.

“That’s what you need to see.” Four cats met him in her kitchen. Peggy introduced them.

“I wish I could take credit for the pie,” Peggy said. “It’s from one of the members of the garden club.”

“I don’t want . . . ”

Peggy laughed. “I have much more than Merry and I can eat, Agent Wheeler. It is Agent Wheeler, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“I saw you at Amos’s, but we weren’t introduced. Is Merry all right?”

“She’s asleep on the couch.”

“Poor child hasn’t had a minute’s peace what with the funeral arrangements and the lawyer and the horses and I don’t know what all. I’ve been helping as much as I can, but I can’t do anything for the horses, and I can’t make decisions for her.” She brought him a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of iced tea on a tray. “The pie’s in the warming oven. I’m ready for another piece myself. Merry took sandwiches down with her, but I don’t know whether she ate them. She’s exhausted and grieving. So far she’s carried it off with that flip attitude, but deep down she’s hurting. At some point the dam is going to burst.”

“It burst tonight. She’s been crying.”

“Good.” She busied herself apportioning the pie.

“Were you sleeping with him?” he asked.

“Good Lord, no!” The pie server clattered against the plate. “We were friends.”

“In amazing health for a man his age, if you count his medications. Only aspirin and Viagra.” He felt a thud against his thigh and looked into the moon face of the large gray tabby.

“Shove him down,” Peggy said. “He’ll climb onto the table if you let him.”

Geoff reached down and scratched behind the cat’s ears, then gently removed his paws from the thighs of his pants and lifted him onto the floor. He looked up to find he’d been served enough pie for three men plus the cat. “About the Viagra?” he asked. “Great pie.”

“He didn’t use the Viagra on me, but I can’t vouch for the rest of the ladies in Mossy Creek.”

”Would you know the possibles?” He finished his pie as Peggy finished her much smaller slice.

“In Mossy Creek? Probably. In Bigelow or the other towns within easy driving distance, probably not.”

“Was he often gone overnight?”

She rinsed the plates and put them in the dishwasher. “I didn’t keep tabs on him. If I looked out in the morning and didn’t see his truck, I assumed he’d already left for the barn.”

“But you went looking for him on Saturday.”

“That was different. He was supposed to come up for breakfast Saturday morning, after which we were going antiquing. He was always on the lookout for old buggies or carriage lamps or horse brasses and such like. I knew he’d been on his mountain Friday night, and I couldn’t get him on his cell phone. What else could I do but go hunting for him? At our age, we learn to check on our friends when they aren’t where they’re supposed to be. How about some coffee? At this hour, it’s decaf.”

He nodded. He wanted to keep her talking, and this seemed an easy way to do it. “What time did you find him and what did you think had happened?”