Marcie's Murder (26 page)

She carried a lot of native work but took on a number of other artists from the area. She particularly liked young people just starting out, trying to make a name for themselves, and she didn’t limit herself just to oil paintings and watercolors. She took in wood and stone carvings, prints, even drawings from a young woman in town who does extraordinary things with colored pencils. It was wonderful for the community. She hosted events
and held showings
, made connections with some of the staff at the college
,
and featured the work of their students from time to time
. F
or a
year or two
,
she
had something exceptional going.
I caught a bit of the spillover, being next door, so I thought it was great, too.
But
eventually
the novelty wore off
,
and people stopped coming in. This area’s
not exactly a cultural hotbed.

She and Billy went through a rough patch
,
and she went for days without opening the store, which didn’t help business very much, either. She came in here instead, but even that didn’t go
too
well. She’d sit for a minute and then would head for my washroom in the back room to vomit her guts out. It was obvious she’d been out all night drinking and didn’t want to go home to face Billy. I’d make her a cup of tea to settle her stomach and try to get her to eat something, then send her home. It was very sad.

She had several problems that were
eating
her
alive
. After I’d been here long enough to become plugged in to the grapevine
,
I began to hear a lot of negative things being said about her. People made fun of her looks and the sexy way she always dressed
,
and at first I thought people were ridiculing her ethnic background. That’s what I meant about our relationship being based at first on a false assumption on my part. I thought originally that people were discriminating against her because she was so obviously Melungeon. It took me a while to get over my own
fixation
with ethnicity and to realize that hardly anyone in Harmony gave a second thought to Melungeons, Cherokees, Saponis
,
or any other such thing.
The way they treated Marcie around here didn’t have anything to do with her dusky complexion or her family lineage.
I’d originally become obsessed with Marcie because I identified with her Melungeon heritage. It took me a while to realize that I was fascinated by her more because she was a tragic figure, a larger
-
than
-
life train wreck happening in slow motion right in front of me.

Because she was the wife of the local
c
hief of
p
olice she had a certain social standing that many people resented. I often heard people mak
e
fun of things she did in the community, charitable events she hosted or
participated in with Billy
. People would whisper that she was really a piece of hillbilly trash who liked to put on airs and pretend she was something better than she really was. It was very cruel and not
at all
accurate. For all her beauty, grace
,
and intelligence she was one of the least egotistical people I’ve ever met. You could tell
that beneath her smooth, elegant surface
she had very little self-confidence. She tried hard to please Billy, to be a proper wife of the
c
hief of
p
olice. It took everything she had to keep up that façade, more than she had in the end, really.

She wasn’t an idiot
. S
he knew what people were saying about her. She kept turning the other cheek, taking everyone’s garbage
,
and trying not to let it show how much it hurt her. Even people she thought were her friends
made
jokes at her expense that had a certain edge to them
which
couldn’t be covered over.

Her relationship with Billy was her other main source of despair. I guess it pretty much had its roots in the loss of their daughter
. I never met Lucy, who passed away eight years ago, but people have told me she was a very sweet child, dark and beautiful like Marcie, very quiet and loving.
It was a difficult
pregnancy and when Lucy was born
,
the obstetrician told Marcie she should
n’t
have
any more
children because it would likely kill her. She doted on Lucy, and when they learned that
the girl
had leukemia
they were
devastat
ed
. She was only twelve years old, a perfect angel, and they couldn’t understand why
it
was happening to them. The poor thing fought for three years before she finally passed away. If it were true that giving birth to another child would have killed Marcie, it was equally as true that losing her only child killed something inside her almost as precious as her own life.

She began drinking heavily and she fought constantly with Billy. It was a mess. Billy had an affair with a woman
who was the dispatcher
at the station
at the time
,
and everyone knew about it. It lasted about two months until Marcie
made a scene and put an end to it
. Her neighbor, Mrs. Cully, saw the whole thing. Mrs. Cully was out in her garden after lunch when Marcie c
a
me out the front door of the house with a broom in her hand. She began to sweep the front porch. Mrs. Cully called over to her but Marcie didn’t seem to hear. Marcie swept the front porch and then swept the cement walk from the porch up to the sidewalk. When she reached the sidewalk
,
she just swung the broom up over her shoulder and kept walking. They live
d
about five blocks from the station. Mrs. Cully followed because she was a nosy busybody and she
knew
something was going to happen. She followed Marcie all the way to the station. Marcie walked into the station, went through the little swinging gate, went right up to the dispatcher
,
and started flailing at her with the broom. It took a few moments before people realized what was
happening
, and another few minutes to decide they’d better do something about it. Marcie was very popular among Billy’s staff, you see, and the dispatcher wasn’t. They let Marcie get a few extra whacks in before they grabbed the broom and got her settled down. Billy came out
of his office
,
and she tried to go after him. He wanted to take her home but he couldn’t get near her because
all
she
wanted to do was
scratch his eyes out. One of the older officers took her home and sat with her for a couple of hours, just talking her down. Billy wisely got himself a hotel room for a couple of
nights
,
and the dispatcher quit her job and moved out of town.

It took Marcie a while to let Billy come back. I don’t like him very much, but I have to give him credit for making a big effort to win her back by becoming a model husband. He started keeping regular hours and always called to let her know where he was.
They
saw a marriage counselor in Bluefield for a while.
He bought her flowers
all the time, on the spur of the moment
. On the sex front
,
he walked the straight and
narrow;
he had a vasectomy so she wouldn’t be at risk of getting pregnant again and told her straight out that she was in charge of the bedroom. What she said, went. She told me all about this, you see. I was her confidante for a while,
maybe
her closest friend
. S
he had so few people to talk to
and
she
needed
to explain things to someone,
so
I was it.

Anyway, he did everything he could to win her back, because the fact of the matter was that he really loved her and couldn’t stand the idea of losing her. She told him she was going crazy alone in the house without Lucy to look after, so he bought the
building
next door when she started talking about opening a business of some kind. He just bought the damned thing, just like that, and
told
her she could do whatever she wanted with it. So she took a couple of business courses at the college and started off with the tea room.

Having her own business wasn’t the solution to her problems, though. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to understand that she felt overwhelming guilt
over
Lucy’s death, as though somehow it had been her fault, and sometimes that’s a problem
which
can’t be solved. You can’t bring your child back to life, you can’t undo what’s happened to them, and it’s particularly difficult when you didn’t do anything
wrong
in the first place
. If you
’
d actually done something that
caused
their death
,
then it would be a matter of atoning for your actions and somehow finding a way to forgive yourself in the long run
. B
ut if it wasn’t your fault, then there’s nothing to make atonement for, but a part of your mind will never accept that
. For some reason you
never let you
rself off the hook.

So you’re constantly trying to solve an emotional problem that can’t be solved. It nearly drove Marcie insane.

20

“She was so beautiful, so magnetic, and so very unhappy
,” Betty said, looking at
Hank
earnestly. “It was very sad to watch her struggle.”

“Did she talk to you this past year about
being involved with
someone?” Hank asked.

“No. She closed the gallery a year and a half ago, and Billy had to sell the property because of the economic downturn. He couldn’t afford to keep it, and he really took a bath on it. Pre
ss
Blankenship bought it, actually, at a fraction of what it cost Billy. Anyway, Marcie hasn’t been around very much since the gallery closed. I know she was taking a photography course at the college for a while, and she was considering reopening next door as a photo studio or something before Billy had to sell the place. Other than that
, I never heard about her being involved with anyone.”

She looked at
Louise
. “What about you
, dear
? Did you hear anything?”

Louise
pushed out her lower lip and shook her head solemnly.

“Did you know she’d had a few injuries in the past year?”
Hank asked.

“Yes,” Betty replied. “I know she broke her wrist a few months ago. I saw her when it was still in the cast. She said she fell down the stairs.
H
ad a bit too much to drink.”

“She also suffered a cracked jaw in the past year,
” Hank said,
“
and about three months ago she had a separated shoulder. Did you know about those injuries?”

“No. I saw her a couple of months ago with a swollen cheek, but that was from an infected tooth.
She went to the free clinic to see
a call-in
dentist there, she said, beca
use her dentist was out of town
.
” Betty’s eyes fluttered. “Oh,
G
od.
I get it. All those things happening to her. He was beating her, wasn’t he?”

“Who was beating her?”

“Billy. Is that what you’re saying? Was he beating her?”

“I don’t know,” Hank said.

“Oh my
G
od, I can’t believe I didn’t see it, I didn’t understand the pattern. Oh my
G
od. Did he kill her? Is
that
where this is going?”

Hank held up his hand. “No
no,
not at all, I’m just asking questions.
Don’t
jump to any conclu
sions
.
D
id you notice her in the company of any other men at any time in the last year?”

“No,” Betty said
.
“She took that photography course
, like I said
. Maybe she met someone there. She was bar-hopping a lot, though. In Bluefield, other
towns, at the Mullins
dump. People talked about it. She might have been picking up guys, I don’t know. She didn’t tell me if she was, because as I said, I didn’t really see her very much any more.”

Hank stood up. “All right. I appreciate your help.
” He stopped short. “
I wanted to ask you about family. Did she have relatives around here?”