Hush My Mouth (7 page)

We drove in silence the last few miles to the inn. I pulled slowly into the rutted drive and stopped at the bottom of the front steps.

“I want you to find out what happened. I want you to find out why she’s gone. It doesn’t matter what it costs.”

Now I knew she was talking crazy. No client ever said, “No matter what it costs,” not even the well-heeled corporate ones.

“Fran, don’t worry. I know the officer who’ll be in charge. He’s good. We’ll find out all there is to know.” I patted her on the forearm and studied her profile in the dim light.

When she offered no response, I said, “I’ll see you for breakfast in the morning. We can talk about what else needs to be done.”

She unlatched and pushed open the long, heavy car door.

“Call me if you need anything tonight, Fran. Promise?”

She leaned down to look in the car and nodded, solemn, before she closed the door and climbed the steps between the gargantuan white porch columns fronting the inn. I hoped she’d find tea, cookies, and comfort inside—something more genteel and less sticky than the Pasture.

Tuesday Morning

The next morning, I parked my car in the area tucked discreetly at the side of the inn and followed the gravel drive around to the grand front entrance.

Fran hadn’t come downstairs yet, so I picked up a paper from the stack of Monday’s Dacus
Clarion
, dropped some coins in the jar, and sat on a bench in the hall leading to the dining room. At the bottom of the front page, I found the two-paragraph story about the discovery of the body at the overlook.

Noah Lakefield, the
Clarions
’s new—and only—field reporter, quoted a sheriff’s department spokesperson saying the death was under investigation. I’d been skeptical when Noah had first accepted the job in Dacus, and amazed when he’d seen the business that brought him to town finished and decided to stay. With his exuberant hair and his lithe build, he had equal amounts of
charm and bluster, depending on which he needed to get a story. His talent and drive should have taken him on to a larger, more prosperous paper, but he also had a boyish naivete that could be contagious—and seemed unusual for someone who had been a fire-breathing investigative reporter.

The paper comes out midday on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so Noah would be hard at work on tomorrow’s edition. With the death listed as a suicide, he wouldn’t be chasing after Fran. That would violate the editorial policy for both Walter, the editor, and my dad, the paper’s new owner. The thin ten-page paper was filled with high school sports, elementary school science projects, civic group meetings, and yard-of-the-week photos. In a small town, embarrassing personal stories were told elsewhere.

I folded the newspaper when I heard footsteps descending the creaky staircase.

“Avery, I hope I didn’t keep you waiting.”

Fran looked fresh, as though she’d managed to sleep. She saw the paper in my hand, and her mouth tightened. “Is there any mention?”

“Just a small piece about finding her.”

She nodded, her face solemn. After a pause, she held out her hand. I turned the paper so she could see the article, discreet and innocuous at the bottom of the page. She seemed relieved.

“What’s this?” She pointed to another small article in the space above the two paragraphs about Neanna. Before I could read the headline, one of the B and B’s owners greeted us with a cheerful, “Good morning. Two for breakfast?”

I followed Fran to our table, biting the inside of my lip to keep from laughing at the news article she’d pointed out:

ARE YOU HAUNTED?

A group of paranormal investigators from Charlotte, North Carolina, needs your help
.

Does your house exhibit signs of paranormal activity? Do you know places in Camden County where evidence of such activity may be investigated? The group will be conducting investigations in Dacus and Camden County in the coming weeks. Please contact Colin “Mumler” Gaines for information
.

The article included a phone number and an e-mail address.

Fran and I sat, listened to the instructions about breakfast, and ordered tea to drink—iced for me, hot for Fran.

“That’s odd, isn’t it?” Fran said, indicating the article.

I didn’t want to laugh, out of respect for her and her grief, but the ghost-hunter plea struck me as ludicrously funny.

“I wouldn’t want to be answering Colin Gaines’s cell phone for the next several days,” I said. “This will draw out every nut in the tri-county area.” What kind of nickname was Mumler?

Fran nodded with a faint smile. I was glad to see her smile, though it did little to ease the tightness around her eyes. She headed toward the table filled with fresh fruit and berries while I went for the hot food.

I spooned buttered grits onto my plate and chuckled at the thought of what Mumler would find in his voice mailbox. The lady standing across from me shot a glance through her heavily mascaraed eyelashes as if she feared my lithium had worn off. Probably visiting from a big city, where crazy people were scary because she didn’t know them, and only crazy people chuckled to themselves. In bigger cities, maybe the nuts feel they have to straighten up and fit in because all they have is a first impression. In small towns, nuttiness can just hang out in plain view.

I ate my eggs Benedict and let Fran guide the conversation. She talked about the weather and how she hated driving in the traffic on I-85. Maybe she wanted to avoid eavesdroppers in the crowded dining room, or maybe she just needed to pretend life was normal for a while. I couldn’t imagine how much her heart must hurt.

All day yesterday and this morning—and likely in my dreams—Neanna had stayed at the edge of thought, coloring my mood with a sadness I couldn’t shake. I hadn’t known Neanna, but I kept trying to imagine what had been in her head. What drives someone to kill herself? How impotent and angry Fran must feel, thinking she could have done something. How would I feel if I lost my sister Lydia under any circumstances? Especially if I was left wondering what I should have done to stop it.

After we finished eating, I got another pot of tea, and we carried it to Fran’s room where we could talk in private.

Before I could sit the pot down, she said, “Avery, I’ve got to go back to Atlanta. To make arrangements.” She stopped, unsure of her voice.

I poured dark tea into a dainty rose-patterned china cup for her, to give her time.

“Avery, you’ll find out what happened to Neanna. She didn’t kill herself. I—know that. I know I keep repeating that, but I want you to believe it.”

With those last words, her reserve broke. She hid her face in her hands and sobbed.

Nothing I could say would ease her grief or save her from the hurt. This was just the next step: denial, anger, bargaining, depression. Before long, I hoped, some acceptance.

I sat on the arm of her overstuffed chair and put my arm around her. Her tears soaked through the shoulder of my shirt, and I thought the force of her sobs would crack one of her thin ribs.

Eventually, when her tears slowed, I went into the bathroom for the box of tissues and a warm washcloth.

“I’m—so—sorry.” She hiccuped each word as she wiped her nose.

“I’m glad to see you cry. You were worrying me.” She knew what I meant. Her hiccuping breaths slowed as she buried her face in the warm washcloth.

“I want to know what happened,” she said, her voice husky. “I can’t keep wondering, imagining things that. . .”

Imagining things neither of us could express, about what might have been.

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I couldn’t put a name to the number, but it looked familiar. Someone I’d called recently. I stepped into the bathroom to answer it, using it as an excuse to give her some space.

“You need to get someone to staff your office.”

Edna Lynch, my demanding grandmama private eye.

“Before nine in the morning?” I returned her irritation with my get-serious tone.

It didn’t work. “Ever hear of an answering service? Sumbody can track you down? Get you to take your messages?”

She had me there. I hadn’t checked my answering machine since yesterday afternoon.

“You have something?”

“I’m standing in the church parking lot in my choir robe calling you, aren’t I? I found Skipper Hinson.”

“Already?” I didn’t ask what her choir was fixing to sing about on a Tuesday morning.

“Yesterday.” She wasn’t letting up on my laxness. “He’s working maintenance and such at the state park this summer. He’ll be working in the gift shop today. It opens at ten.”

“Thanks, Edna. That was quick.”

She gave my compliment a derisive snort, her way of saying,
Of course. You doubted me?

“The funeral’s starting. They’re waving us in the back door.” The phone clicked off.

She knew where to send the bill.

I stepped into the bedroom. “I know where her hitchhiker is. I can talk to him—”

“Where?” Fran sat up like a bird dog on point. “Can we talk to him now?”

“Um, in a while,” I said. “But don’t you have to go—”

“I can still make it to Atlanta by midafternoon. How far is it? I just need a few minutes to pack.”

“Not far—about twenty minutes. Um, I’ll let you pack. Be back in a few minutes to pick you up.”

“I’ll be ready.” She carried the mascara-stained washcloth into the bathroom.

I needed to change shirts. No need to wear a tear-soaked shirt around all day, and I’d just noticed an eggs Benedict blotch.

True to her word, she was pacing in the side yard when my Mustang tires pulled onto the gravel drive twenty minutes later.

I backtracked to Main Street and turned left. The road quickly began the climb into the southern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“You have any music?” Fran indicated my in-dash AM radio, standard equipment in 1964.

“Some bluegrass is all.” I had wired a portable CD player and updated the primitive speakers in my vintage Mustang—my grandfather’s late-life splurge pulled out of mothballs for me by my dad, when I’d left my large Columbia law firm and my leased BMW.

“That would be nice.”

Fortunately the song that came on was “Foggy Mountain
Breakdown,” a banjo number, lively and optimistic. Neither of us needed to dwell on a mournful mountain ballad. As a Texas friend of mine had once observed, mountain folk music is full of murder and dying. I tried to argue otherwise, offer a defense of my people. But after listening to some CDs with her ears, I had to admit she was right. Lots of murder and dying. Too much for Fran—or me, right now.

Today, though, the banjo music and the thick green, sunspeckled shade, and the car’s eagerness to gobble the curvy road provided some buoyancy. At least for me. Even though the edges of my mind kept asking
what if
and
I wonder why
questions.

I turned into the state park and eased slowly toward the campground store. Waves of nostalgia hit me. Summer day camps, school and church picnics, weekend square dances. I hadn’t been here in years, but the weathered wood buildings, thick trees, and narrow, rough asphalt lanes hadn’t changed.

Finding Skipper wasn’t hard. In the shotgun-long store that served the campground with everything from charcoal and milk to diapers and ceramic toothpick holders stamped
SOUTH CAROLINA
, he was the only lanky, bored-looking clerk. In fact, he was the only human being inside the store.

He was younger than I’d expected, probably college-aged. He showed that lack of interest in anything not playing on a computer or game screen, traits indigenous to guys his age. But he was clean-shaven, with buzz-cut hair, and his khakis were neatly creased.

“Skipper Hinson?”

“Uh—yeah.” He raised an eyebrow in surprise.

“I’m Avery Andrews. This is Fran French. She’s Neanna Lyles’s sister.”

“Oh.” An uptick in interest thawed some of his bored expression.

“You and Neanna rode up from Atlanta for the Nut Case concert? You went to the concert together?”

He nodded, his wariness growing with his interest. “I rode with her. A bunch of us went to hear the band.”

I cut to the chase. “Neanna died over the weekend, and we’re trying to learn everything we can about what happened after she left Atlanta. I’m sure you understand, so her family can know.”

His gaze flitted to Fran and back to me, maybe not wanting to see too clearly the questions in her eyes.

“What happened?” He looked me in the eye, his brows knit together.

“She—” I took a deep breath. That wasn’t my news to share.

“We don’t know what happened,” Fran said with finality.

His eyebrows met in a wrinkle and his jaw was slack, as if he’d been hit in the stomach. I felt bad cornering him at work with the news. He was just a kid, but he was also the last one who’d seen her.

“What kind of mood was she in?”

He shrugged. “Fine. We talked. I mean, I didn’t know her. We hooked up on this ride board. Online. I had this job that started this week. And the concert. She seemed fine. She was really funny. We just talked.”

“When did you last see her?”