Aurora 06 - A Fool And His Honey

I didn’t suspect it, but a perfectly ordinary day was about to go spectacularly wrong.

Charlaine Harris’s beloved amateur sleuth, liberated Southern belle Aurora Teagarden, makes her long-anticipated return in this charming mystery about family secrets and small-town intrigue. Everything in Roe’s life finally seems to be going her way. She’s newly and quite happily married to Martin Bartell, happy to be back at her part-time job at the library, and settled into her dream home just outside Lawrenceton, Georgia—and there haven’t been any dead bodies in Roe’s life for quite a while. But when mild-mannered Darius Quattermain goes crazy in her backyard when he should be stacking firewood, it turns out to be just the first in a string of troublesome events.

The next is the arrival of Martin’s flighty niece Regina, who shows up unannounced with a baby no one knew she was expecting. Before anyone can figure out what’s going on, Regina disappears, leaving behind her baby—and her husband, Craig, whose brutally murdered corpse is discovered on the outside steps of Roe and Martin’s home. Now the existence of the baby is only the first question of many—such as, Where did Craig come from? Who went after him with the ax? And why?

Roe and Martin abandon the sunny warmth of Georgia for snowy Corinth, Ohio, hoping that tracing Regina and Craig’s steps will get them some answers. In this fifth book in Charlaine Harris’s series blending mystery, humor, and a hearty helping of Southern charm, there’s just no telling what they’ll find.

Also by Charlaine Harris

Shakespeare’s Christmas

Shakespeare’s Champion

Dead Over Heels

Shakespeare’s Landlord

The Julius House

Three Bedrooms, One Corpse

A Bone to Pick

Real Murders

A Secret Rage

Sweet and Deadly

A Fool and His Honey

Charlaine Harris

St. Martin’s Minotaur New York

For my family
—

my mother, father, husband, and children
—

who sustain me in all that I do.

Without you, it would hardly be worth doing.

Acknowledgments

I thank the cybercitizens of DorothyL for their support, encouragement, and just being themselves, so that day by day I can “talk” to other people who love the mysterious world as much as I do. In the writing of. this book, I particularly laud the Ohio contingent, who answered all my questions so patiently, and often at great trouble to themselves.

The day everything went rotten was the day the woodman went crazy in my backyard.

My mother and her husband, John Queensland, were just leaving when Darius Quattermain rattled up my driveway, his battered blue pickup pulling a trailer full of split oak. Mother (Aida Brattle Teagarden Queensland) had taken a moment from her busy day to bring me a dress she’d bought for me in Florida, where she’d been attending a convention for real estate brokers who’d sold over a million dollars worth of property in a year. John, who’s retired, had come out with Mother just because he likes being with her.

As Darius was getting out of his truck, Mother was hugging me and saying, “John isn’t feeling so well, Aurora, so we’re going back to town.” She always made it sound as though Martin and I lived on the frontier, instead of just a mile out of Lawrence ton. In fact, since there are fields all around our property, on clear days I could see the roof of her house, sitting on the edge of Lawrenceton’s nicest suburb.

I looked at John, concerned, and saw that he did indeed look puny. John golfs, and normally he looks like a hale and hearty sixty-four-year-old. Actually, John’s a handsome man . . . and a good one. But at that moment he looked old, and embarrassed, as men so often are by illness.

“You better go home and lie down,” I said, concerned. “Call me if you need me, after Mother goes back to work?”

“Sure will, honey,” John said heavily, and eased into the front passenger seat of Mother’s Lincoln.

Mother gave my cheek a little brush with her lips, I thanked her again for the dress, and then while they maneuvered through turning around to head down our long driveway, I strolled over to Darius, who was pulling on heavy gloves.

I didn’t suspect it, but a perfectly ordinary day—getting Martin off to work, going to my own job at the library, coming home with nothing more than a little housework planned—was about to go spectacularly wrong.

It began slowly.

“Where you want me to unload this wood, Miz Bartell?” Darius Quattermain asked.

“This area under the stairs, I think,” I told him. We were standing by the garage, which is connected to the house by a covered walkway. On the side facing the house, there’s a stairway going up to the little apartment over the garage.

“You not afraid of bugs getting into your siding there?” Darius asked dubiously.

I shrugged. “Martin picked the spot, and if he doesn’t like it, he can move it.”

Darius gave me a strange look, almost as if he’d never seen me before, which at the time I wrote off as conservative disapproval of my attitude toward my husband.

But he got down to work. After a brief conference, I’d given him the green light to pull the trailer as close as possible, and he began unloading rapidly in the chilly air. The sky was gray, and rain was supposed to start tonight. The wind began to pick up, blowing my long tangle of brown hair into my eyes. I shivered, and stuck my hands in the pockets of my heavy red sweater.

As I turned to go inside, I looked over at the roses I’d planted at the corner of the concrete porch at the back of the house, outside my kitchen. They needed pruning, and I was trying to remember if I was supposed to do it now or wait until February, when a piece of wood flew by my head.

“Mr. Quattermain?” I said, whirling around. “You okay?”

Darius Quattermain, deacon of Antioch Holiness Church, began to sing “She’ll Be Comin‘

Round the Mountain” in a manic bellow. He also kept up with his task, with one big difference.

Instead of stacking the wood neatly under the stairs, Darius pitched split pieces of oak in all directions.

“Whoa!” I said loudly. Even to my own ears, I sounded panicky instead of authoritative.

When the next piece of firewood missed my shoulder by only a foot or so, I retreated into the house, locking the door behind me. After a minute, I risked a peek out the window. Darius showed no signs of calming down, and there was still a lot of wood on the back of his pickup. I was thinking of it as ammunition now, instead of fuel.

I dialed the sheriff’s department, since our house is outside the city limits.

“SPACOLEC,” said Doris Post. “SPACOLEC” stands for Sparling County Law Enforcement Complex. It sounded like Doris was chewing a mouthful of gum. I figured she must be trying to quit smoking again.

“Doris, this is Aurora Teagarden.”

“Oh, hi, hon. How you doing?”

“Just fine, thank you, hope you’re well. Ah—I have a situation here.”

“Is that right? What’s happening?”

“You know Darius Quattermain?”

“The black man who delivers wood? Got six kids? Wife works at Food Fantastic?”

“Right.” I peered out the window, hoping that somehow the situation would have changed for the normal. Nope. “He’s gone crazy.”

“Whereabouts?”

“In my side yard. He seemed just fine when he got here, but all of a sudden he started singing and chunking wood.”

“He’s still there?”

“Yes, he is. As a matter of fact...” I stared out the window in appalled fascination. “Um, Doris, he’s taking his clothes off now. And still singing. And chunking.”

“You locked in that house, Roe?”

“Yes, and I’ve set the security system.” Guiltily, I reached over and punched in the code. “I don’t think he means to hurt anyone, Doris. He just can’t help himself. It’s like he took drugs, or had a seizure, or something. So whoever comes out here, if they could take it real easy?”

“I’ll tell them what you said,” Doris told me. She didn’t sound bored or lackadaisical anymore. “You move away from the windows, Roe. A car’s on the way.”

“Thanks, Doris.”

I hung up and hid behind a curtain, so I could check on Darius from time to time. I needn’t have bothered to hide. I could have been on the surface of the moon for all Darius cared. He was one big brown goose pimple in the chilly breeze as he danced around buck naked, telling the sky that we would have the wedding supper when she came.

I wondered what Darius would do when he ran out of verses.

I didn’t have to wait long. He switched to “Turkey in the Straw.” Darius was having a flashback to elementary school music class, I decided.

He scampered around to his own music with an impressive light-footedness for a staid middle-aged man.

I decided to call my husband.

“There’s a naked man in the backyard,” I said softly, because Darius had stopped singing and was hunting an imaginary deer.

“Anyone I know?” Martin’s voice was cautious. He wasn’t certain how seriously to take this.

“Darius Quattermain. The woodman.”

“I assume you’ve called the sheriff?”

“The car’s here now.” The official car had just pulled up my driveway. I nodded approvingly.

The siren wasn’t on and the lights stopped flashing as I watched. “Jimmy Henske and Levon Suit,” I told Martin.

“Jimmy Henske, huh? Maybe I’d better come home.” And the phone was replaced firmly in its cradle. Martin has no high opinion of the sheriffs department in Sparling County, and Jimmy Henske, who is maybe twenty-five, gawky and diffident, has never inspired my husband with his competence.

But Jimmy’s a nice guy, and Levon Suit (who went to high school with me) is a very controlled deputy who is not only innately more intelligent than Jimmy, but five years more experienced. I remembered that Levon had dated one of Darius’s daughters when we were juniors.

I watched, fascinated, as Levon slowly approached Darius. I was a little surprised the deputy would brave walking right up to him—but then, it was completely obvious Darius wasn’t carrying a weapon. It appeared that Darius had killed the deer and resumed singing and dancing in celebration. In fact, he was so glad to see Levon that he grabbed Levon’s hands and capered off, and for a delirious minute or two Levon trotted right along with him.

With a patience that made me proud, the two deputies coaxed Darius into their car. Jimmy hurried back to pick up Darius’s clothes, which he tossed in the front seat.

“Yessir, we’ll sing along with you all the way into town,” Jimmy was saying earnestly as Martin parked beside the squad car. My husband emerged from the Mercedes looking, as he generally did, immaculate, prosperous, and handsome.

“Hey, Mr. Bartell!” Darius called happily, as Jimmy was shutting the car door. “I brought your wood!”

Martin stood on the covered sidewalk between our house and the garage and saw the pieces of oak scattered around the backyard, which we’d finally, expensively, had rolled and re-seeded to make it smooth and grassy. Quite a few divots had been ripped out of the turf by Darius’s impromptu log toss.

“Thanks a lot, Darius,” Martin said.

I came out after the squad car had departed, all three of the occupants singing away. I mentally filed away a decision to write a letter to Sheriff Padgett Lanier to commend Levon and Jimmy’s restraint and good sense.

Martin was shedding his suit coat and pulling on his own heavy gloves from the toolshed built into the back of the garage. He got the wheelbarrow, too.

Besides my heavy red cardigan, I was still wearing my work clothes, a long sleeveless denim dress over a red T-shirt, but Martin was setting such a good example that my inappropriate clothes were no excuse to be idle. I found my own gloves and helped out. As we worked, we speculated on this bizarre event, and whether Darius, though clearly not in his right mind, had actually broken a law by dancing naked in our yard.