A Killing at Cotton Hill (6 page)

“We've all got our burden about that,” I say. And then I confess to him about his grandma's phone call to me last night. I hadn't planned on telling him, but I want him to understand he's not the only one to dismiss her fears. “My question to you is, can you think of anything unusual that happened in the last couple of weeks? Anybody call, or come by here? Or did she go somewhere she usually didn't go?”

His mouth drops open. “She did go somewhere! She went to Houston!”

“When was this?”

“Two, three weeks ago, I don't remember exactly.”

“But it couldn't have been all that unusual for her to go to Houston.”

He scowls. “That's true. The difference was, usually she took me with her, 'cause she was worried about driving that far alone. But this time she just asked me if she could bring me anything from the art supply store.”

“Did you ask her if you could go?”

He blinks at me a couple of times, thinking. “I did, but she said she needed to go by herself. The thing is, she seemed kind of excited, like she had a secret mission. I was pretty annoyed because I would like to have gone with her to pick out some supplies.” He shakes his head, his mouth grim. “And to top it off, she forgot to get the stuff I asked her to bring.”

“She forgot? That doesn't sound like Dora Lee.”

“I couldn't believe it! I asked her why she'd bothered to ask me for a list if she wasn't going to get it for me.”

“What did she have to say about that?”

“She said she was sorry, that she had something on her mind.” He frowns. “And I didn't ask her what it was because I was so mad.” His leg is jittering and he's frowning so hard that I figure he's holding something back.

“I expect the argument didn't end there.”

He shakes his head. “We had words. I said I was ready to move out right away, that I was sick and tired of having to depend on her.”

“She probably got upset about that.”

His face is bright red and his eyes snap fire at me. “I had been telling her I needed to move on. Her forgetting my supplies was kind of the last straw.”

“It lit a fire under your tail.”

“That's right! I'd figured out that if I was going to ever get out of here, it might as well be sooner rather than later.”

“You think Dora Lee had the money to send you to school, but she held out because she didn't want you to leave?”

Greg is suddenly still, as if he understands the drift of my questions, that I'm trying to find out just how desperate he was to get to art school. “Sometimes I thought so, but if you think I killed my grandma so I could get her money, you're wrong.”

He gets up and starts stacking the dishes, clattering them in his anger.

“Sit down, son. I'm not accusing you of anything, but I need to know exactly what went on between the two of you. Some folks will be quick to accuse you, and the best way I can help you is if I know all the facts.”

He eases back down, but keeps a wary eye out. “What else do you want to know?”

“Dora Lee paid for lessons for you a while back.”

He sneers. “For what they were worth.”

“You didn't think much of your teacher?”

He shrugs. “He thought he was a lot better painter than he was. He bragged that one day he would make it big time as an artist. Any fool could see he didn't do anything but paint pictures of cactus and bluebonnets.”

“He taught you some things though. You have some basics under your belt.”

“Sure he taught me some basics. But I outgrew him.”

I'd met a few artists over the years when Jeanne and I were buying art, and I had seen Greg's arrogance before. I wonder if a person has to have a bit of that cocksure streak to get anywhere as an artist. But it had to be hard on a teacher who nurtured a kid, when he turned his back on you.

Greg stands up again and picks up a handful of dishes. “Besides, Grandma said he charged too much.”

I help him carry the things into the kitchen. “Do you think that's why she wanted you to stop taking lessons?” I say to his back.

He puts the dishes in the sink and turns, cocking an eyebrow. “She never liked Mr. Eubanks. She thought he put ideas into my head. I told her I had enough ideas on my own and didn't need somebody like him to tell me what I could do.”

“If she had been able to continue paying for lessons, would you have wanted to keep on?”

He shrugs. “I guess, but it didn't matter much to me. It was a big deal to him, though. He came out here and pitched a fit with her.” He hooks his thumbs in his pants and looks down at the floor, shaking his head. “She didn't take a thing off of him. He left with his tail between his legs.”

He looks up, his eyes wet with the memory and we smile at each other, remembering how Dora Lee could get her feathers ruffled.

I've still got work to do this evening, so I send Greg to his cabin, telling him that I'll wash up tonight, but that after this it's his job again.

The whole time while I wash the dishes, I'm trying to think what Dora Lee was up to in Houston. Naturally, my thoughts go to M. D. Anderson, the big cancer hospital where Jeanne and I spent too much of our time the last year of her life. I wonder if Dora Lee had something wrong, and she wasn't telling anyone. But Greg said she seemed excited, which doesn't sound like somebody facing bad health.

Which brings me to what I've got to do tonight. I'm awfully tired, but I know tomorrow is going to be full of chaos. People will be calling and bringing food and dropping by to nose around. There will be funeral arrangements to make and people to contact. So if I'm going to have a quiet time to poke around for clues as to what might have happened to Dora Lee, it will have to be tonight.

My knee is throbbing from a day of unaccustomed activity, so I swallow a couple of Tylenol, make myself a cup of coffee, and tackle Dora Lee's spare room. She kept her business correspondence in a massive rolltop desk that's so battered it looks like someone used a baseball bat on it. Her laptop computer is shoved to the back of the desk. I expect she used it about as much as I do mine, which is hardly at all, so I'll look at it later. I feel funny messing with her papers, but I finally settle in and get down to work.

I sort the papers into a pile for bills, another for business correspondence, one for personal letters, and still another for ads and notices. I suppose I could throw the last pile away, but for now it's best to keep it all. I learned that the hard way after Jeanne died, when I threw away something that looked like an ad but turned out to be a stock certificate. You haven't lived until you go through a week's worth of garbage looking for one thin piece of paper.

Another stack is for business cards, which Dora Lee collected in abundance, and another for bank statements. I have resolved not to read the contents of any of the pieces of paper. It's better to get it all sorted first. But on a bank statement from last month, my eye falls on the balance, $2,600. I have a couple different accounts myself, keeping only a small balance in the one for everyday expenses. I replenish it when it gets low. I expect Dora Lee did the same thing.

It takes me until almost eleven o'clock before I've emptied the drawers, an accordion file, and all the little cubbyholes of the desk. It pleases me that I don't find any bills or correspondence from M. D. Anderson. So she didn't have cancer. Then I realize how silly it is to think that. Either way, she's gone.

I expected to find three things that are nowhere to be seen. I haven't located a will. And I haven't seen the letter Greg said came from Dora Lee's daughter Caroline. But the most worrisome is that I haven't found statements from any other bank, nor evidence that she had any other funds. No stocks or bonds, no savings accounts, and no CDs. It makes my blood run cold to think that Dora Lee was down to $2,600.

By midnight I have scoured her papers, and it's clear she was barely solvent. The only money she had coming in on a regular basis besides her social security was a pittance she got for renting her pasture out. And that ended early in the summer when the man renting it sold out his herd and moved to be near his daughter. Besides that, she sold the occasional quilt, but that didn't amount to much.

I found the deed to her place in a drawer at her bedside, and apparently before Teague died he mortgaged it to the hilt. She's paid down the mortgage over the years, but it has broken her back to do it. I'm ashamed that I never thought twice about her financial security, as lucky as I've been on that score.

It was only after I married Jeanne that I realized her family had more money than they let on. Not by big city standards, but for someone growing up in a small town as I did, it seemed like a lot. She had a nice little trust fund from her grandparents, and when her younger brother died with no family, he left us another chunk. If we'd had to depend on my salary as chief of police and then as an oil and gas landman, there's no way we could have been able to buy the pieces of art that we were so partial to.

And here is evidence that my friend Dora Lee could have used a hand. Not that she would have accepted me giving her money, but I could have made her life easier by arranging a loan to be paid back “someday.”

I have one more task to complete before I can quit. I go looking for Dora Lee's purse and find it stowed on a side counter of the kitchen near the telephone. Sure enough, like every woman I've ever known, Dora Lee kept a tiny little address book. Like Jeanne's, it's dog-eared and worn, filled in with tiny print and crossings out that make it practically illegible. But I manage to put together a list of people I need to call to let them know what happened. And I wonder if someone on this list is the person who decided to end Dora Lee's life.

I had wondered if I could stand to sleep in Dora Lee's bed, but there's no good alternative. The single bed in the room she used as an office is piled high with quilting gear, and I don't have the energy to move it.

I'm normally an early riser, but when the phone rings the next morning, it wakes me up and I see that I've slept until eight o'clock. I know before I answer the phone that it's Loretta, acting as if nothing unhappy passed between us yesterday.

“How did you know I was out here?” I ask.

“I went by your place to drop off some cinnamon buns and Truly was just leaving. He'd been there to see to your cows and said you were going to be out at Dora Lee's.”

“I guess it's all over town that I sprung Dora Lee's grandson out of jail.”

“Rodell is fit to be tied, but since you had that Jenny Sandstone with you, he couldn't do anything about it.”

I tell Loretta I could use help if she has the time. She can't get off the phone fast enough. I figure I have just about enough time to take a shower before she gets here.

Sure enough, I've just wiped the shaving cream off my face when I hear Loretta yoo-hooing at the back door. She has brought a plate of fresh-made cinnamon rolls that are still hot.

“You want me to knock on that boy's door and tell him there's rolls?”

She doesn't really want to, or she'd have just gone on and done it. Loretta is a generous soul, so if she has feelings against the boy, that means many others will take against him in town. I'll have to go to work on that.

I tell her to let him be. If he's asleep, he needs the rest, and if he's awake, he's probably painting, trying to make up for lost time. He's too young to know that never happens.

By the time I finish a couple of Loretta's cinnamon buns and a pot of coffee, I'm ready to get to the business of the day, and not a minute too soon. Two ladies have already shown up with casseroles and curiosity. It's going to be an asset to have Loretta here. She gives them enough information to satisfy them, and yet manages to whisk them out the door in just a few minutes.

Pretty soon I see the Baptist minister, Howard Duckworth, coming up the back steps. Duckworth is about the least godly man I ever knew. When he's not strutting himself in church, he's got a foul temper and a foul mouth and can't keep his hands off any female in his congregation under forty. I've made it my business not to be in the same room with him any longer than I have to for fear I'll say something I'll regret. I'm not religious. If the Baptists want to pay Duckworth to tell them what's right and wrong, it's their business. I happen to know that Dora Lee was part of a church group that was planning to run him out on a rail. The very idea that he will speak at her funeral irritates the hell out of me.

I leave Loretta to handle him, telling her I've got telephone calls to make. I sequester myself in Dora Lee's office. The first thing is to find out when the county will release her body so we can plan the funeral. When I reach the county morgue, they tell me that because Dora Lee was murdered her autopsy went to the head of the list and is being conducted even as we speak. The body should be ready to release by late this afternoon. Today is Friday, which means the earliest the funeral could be is Sunday afternoon, which I doubt will sit well with the Baptists. I say I'd like to talk to whoever is doing the examination of the murder weapon. The woman asks me who I am, and I tell her I'm working with Rodell. She's satisfied with that lie, because she doesn't really care who I am, as long as she gets an answer. She says she'll have the investigator get back to me.