Miss Julia Lays Down the Law (24 page)

I wasn’t about to explain Presbyterianism to Mildred at that particular moment. I had more pressing matters to tend to.

“Think!” I urged. “They have to be in the house somewhere. Where could they be?”

Ida Lee’s face lit up. “The elevator,” she whispered.

“Yes!” I said, turned to take up the hunt, then stopped. “Where is it?”

Mildred led us around behind the staircase, then pointed to a door that looked normal enough except for the call button on the wall beside it. The three of us stood looking at it.

“Is it up or down?” I whispered.

“It’s down,” Ida Lee whispered back. “We would’ve heard it if it had gone up.”

I stood back. “You do the honors, Mildred. Push it.”

She did. A motor hummed and the door opened with a jerk before sliding smoothly back. There stood Pastor Ledbetter with Emma Sue pushing away from him.

Mildred, always the thoughtful hostess, said warmly, “Oh, there you are. Look, Julia has come over for a visit, so we can have a nice little chat. Would anyone care for tea?”

The pastor cleared his throat, ushered Emma Sue out of the elevator, and, without a glance at me, said in ministerial tones, “Emma Sue’s had quite a fright. She needs to lie down. Come, Emma Sue, I’ll help you to bed.”

Emma Sue didn’t come. The pastor put his arm around her and urged her toward the door. “Larry,” she said, shaking him off, “will you please stop pushing me around!” She stared at me. “Julia?” She gave a tentative smile, then began to laugh. “I don’t mean to laugh at you, but you don’t look anything like yourself.”

“Oh, she doesn’t mind,” Mildred said, leading Emma Sue to a chair in the sunroom. “I laughed at her, too.”

I didn’t care. I was staring at Pastor Ledbetter, waiting to get him alone to have it out with him.

“Then,” he said, drawing himself up, “I’ll leave you ladies to it. I’ll be working on my sermon for Sunday.” And he began to walk away.

“As I’m sure you’ve heard, Pastor,” I said, giving him every chance to have a private discussion, “I’ve been wanting to speak with you.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Julia. This is just not a convenient time. The weather, you know, and Emma Sue’s condition. Why don’t you make an appointment for sometime next week when my schedule permits? Norma will make one for you.”

He was trying to put me off
again
.

“No,” I said, preparing to lay him low. “We’ll talk right here and right now if that’s the way it has to be. I’ve been trying every way I know how, Pastor, to tell you that the promise I made to you is no longer in effect, so take note here and now. That promise has gotten me in more hot water than I can stand, and it’s put me in a position of withholding evidence in an official investigation. So I’m through. I’m not going to remain silent any longer. It’s only fair—even though you’ve not been fair to me—to warn you so you can go in for an interview before I start talking. After that, you may or may not have a chance to confirm what I’m going to tell them, because they’ll hunt you down like a dog, and do it a lot better and a lot faster than I’ve been able to do.”

The pastor looked pained, and lowering his voice, he said, “Please don’t upset Emma Sue. She’s not well.” Then in a normal tone, he went on. “My goodness, the weather has us all on edge, hasn’t it? I suggest we talk about this later.”

“Later? Later, when you’ve had time to run and hide like you’ve been doing ever since Connie Clayborn’s body was found?”

Mildred perked up. “What?”

“Larry?” Emma Sue said, looking from him to me and back again.

Pastor Ledbetter patted the air with his hands. “Not now, Miss Julia. It’s not a good time.”

“Actually it’s the
only
time, because it’s the first time I’ve been able to hem you up. Now, here’s what you’re going to do. You are going
first thing in the morning
to see Detective Ellis at the sheriff’s department, and you’re going to tell him the reason I went to visit Connie Clayborn.”

“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Miss Julia. That’s a matter for prayer for both of us.”

“Good! You have all night to pray about it, but you better get yourself down there in the morning and set things straight. Because, Pastor, that’s what I’m going to do. I am going to tell everything I know. And if you’re not there to back me up, I will not only tell Detective Ellis, I will tell everybody else, including LuAnne Conover—and you know what that means—that
you
sent me to Connie to get her to apologize to Emma Sue, whose condition was reflecting badly on you. It’ll be all over town by nightfall.”

“What?” Mildred asked again.

Emma Sue looked up at her husband. “Why, Larry? Why would you send Julia to see that woman?”

“It was for you, Emma Sue,” he said. “All for you. I asked Miss Julia to act as a mediator to reassure you, to make you feel better. The Clayborn woman had undermined your self-confidence so much that you were suffering a spiritual crisis. I thought . . .”

Emma Sue sprang to her feet, her hands in fists by her side. “You’re
always
making plans for me. And now you thought by going behind my back and setting up some
intervention
that you’d fix things, didn’t you? What else were you planning for me? A group session where you would
facilitate,
just as you always do? Wouldn’t that be a feather in your cap.”

“No, Emma Sue,” I said before the pastor could speak. “You have it wrong. He didn’t want anybody to know how deeply you were affected by Connie’s criticism. Your reaction showed that he couldn’t rule his own house—First Timothy, chapter three, verses four and five, as cited to me. Look it up. He was protecting you, that’s true, but he was also protecting his reputation. He wanted your reaction to Connie’s criticism kept quiet, and I foolishly went along with it, thinking I was being helpful. That’s why I had to promise not to tell anyone, and that’s why I’m now in big trouble with the law.”

Emma Sue swung around to stare at her husband. Her face reddened and she seemed to grow in stature. “You were
ashamed
of me? That’s what it was, wasn’t it? And still is, isn’t it? That’s why you wouldn’t listen to that doctor in Winston-Salem who recommended a psychiatrist. That’s why you brought me home and said that the Lord would deal with me. And what else did you plan for me, I ask you? A quiet stay in an institution where I wouldn’t embarrass you?”

“Emma Sue . . .” the pastor began. “You aren’t thinking straight. You don’t understand.”

“Oh, yes, I am, and oh, yes, I do. You think more of what other people think than you do of me. Well, let me tell you something.” And she walked right up to him and got in his face. “I’m through being your assistant pastor, through with committee meetings, and teaching Sunday school, and covering dishes, and calling on the sick, and volunteering for everything you dream up, and being in church every time the doors are open. All I want to do is plant flowers and dig weeds and prune and mulch and fertilize and watch things grow. That park is my Garden of Eden, and there’ll be no snakes in the grass there, whether it’s Connie Clayborn—bless her heart—or
you
.

“And another thing,” she said before he could get a word in edgewise, “I
am
going to see a counselor—I’m going so I can learn how to live with you. And furthermore, I’m going to let everybody know what I’m doing.” She swished around and began to walk out of the room. Then she stopped and turned back. “And furthermore than that, you’re going to pay for every session I have. And I intend to have a lot of them.” Then she left, and we heard her stomping up the stairs.

I wasn’t the only one laying down the law.

 • • • 

I stood outside Mildred’s house on my way home. I’d just gingerly gotten myself down her wide steps onto the snow and ice of the lawn and was hesitating before striking off across it. The sconces beside her door—powered by the generator—lit the porch and cast a golden semicircle across the front yard.

I stood there thinking over the scene I’d just left, wondering why I wasn’t feeling better about finally confronting Pastor Ledbetter.

I hadn’t wanted to do it in front of Emma Sue, much less in front of a member of another church, but he had refused to talk to me alone. So it was his own fault.

Well, maybe not. I’d been so hot to tell him off, especially after chasing after him for days, only to find him hiding in Mildred’s residential elevator, of all places. It beat all I’d ever heard.

But I hadn’t brought up my niggling suspicions about someone using the access road before I got to the Clayborn house by way of the main road on that fateful day. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it. I would leave that to Detective Ellis, if it occurred to him.

But I still didn’t feel good about what I’d said, spilling it all out before an audience. A small one, but still. A Christian minister deserved respect, and I had withheld it. By the time Emma Sue had flounced off, the pastor was left looking bereft and deflated.

Then I mentally shook myself. He was going to look worse than that by the time I got through, come morning. It was going to be every man for himself, or, in my case, every woman for herself. I was tired of holding back important information concerning the death of another human being. If Detective Ellis wanted to know why I visited Connie, I was going to tell him, from
a
to
z,
exactly why I did, including my own eagerness to tell Connie off.

But I’d given the pastor fair warning, so I just wasn’t going to feel bad about it any longer.

I started walking, avoiding Mildred’s paved drive, which would be slick with ice, by picking my way along the side of it. The snow seemed mushier, and my feet in Hazel Marie’s boots broke through the underlying ice with little trouble—a good sign, it seemed to me. So, rather than pushing my way back through the way I’d come, I headed for the sanded street, where walking would be more secure. The temperature might have been rising, but the sky was lowering and the afternoon was fast growing dark.

As I got to the road and stepped over the mounded snow and ice left by the snowplow, I realized I was hearing the rhythmic thuds of a runner’s feet on the gritty street.

Oh, Lord, the night runner was out early. Well, I’d about had enough of him, too. So, with the comfort of having a sheriff’s deputy nearby—even if he was asleep—I kept walking toward home. No more cowering in the bushes, too afraid to stick my head out. I was just before clearing the air, coming clean, ratting out my pastor—whatever you want to call it—to Detective Ellis, so I might as well take on the night runner, too.

He turned the corner without slowing down and headed not to the other side of the street, as he usually did, but straight toward me. I stopped and waited as he came closer. My first impulse was to scream my head off and hope Coleman wasn’t a sound sleeper.

Wearing one of those all-over latex suits like a scuba diver or a luge racer, the runner’s lanky frame ate up the yards, the feet, and the inches until he stopped, breathing heavily, right in front of me.

I looked him in the face and saw nothing but deep-set eyes and wet wool rings around his nose and mouth. My breath caught in my throat as he pushed up his ski mask.

“Well, Mrs. Murdoch,” Stan Clayborn said, his chest heaving as he caught his breath. “Did you find what you were looking for at my house?”

“How did you . . . ?” I started, then stopped, determined not to let him put me on the defensive. He had a lot to answer for, himself. I drew myself up, felt Sam’s pants slide from under my belt, and clamped my elbows against my waist.

Lifting my head in defiance, I said, “I certainly did. Did you?”

“It’s my house. I had every right . . .” He stopped, just as I had, realizing that he’d given himself away.

“That’s quite possible,” I agreed, “unless your house was still an active crime scene. And assuredly it was because the SBI hasn’t been there yet. And I remind you, Mr. Clayborn, I was not
in
the house, messing with or destroying evidence, as apparently you were. And,” I continued in case he had messing with me in mind, “I remind you that a patrol car is parked right over there and the driver of same is within easy earshot.”

He turned his head to glance at Coleman’s patrol car, then looked back at me. “I was there,” he said quietly, all belligerence gone from his voice, “to commune with Connie, to reconnect our harmony one last time. I’ve been distraught without the connection we had. But I have to accept that she’s joined that great River of Time, and the positive energy she’d left in the house would soon fade away in its flow. I had to be there before it was gone. The Universe was calling me.”

“The what?
How?
”

“Never mind,” he said, shaking his head at my ignorance. “You wouldn’t understand.”

He was right. I couldn’t think of one Bible verse that had to do with such a phenomenon—trees that clap their hands, yes, but not a vocal universe.

But then, returning to his first question, he asked, “So it
was
you out there, creeping around my house. What did you expect to find that nobody else had found?”

“Don’t belittle my efforts, Mr. Clayborn. I had to take matters into my own hands because the investigators had me in their sights. I had to see if someone could access your house by coming in on that fire lane. In other words, get there without being written up by the gatekeeper. And anybody could. In fact, I expect that’s the way
you
came in Saturday night, otherwise you couldn’t have been there to do any kind of communing, no matter who was doing the calling.”

Still breathing deeply, he had nothing to say, so I went on. “And I’ll have you know that I had no intention of going near that house when we first got there. It was only when we saw that strange glow in the back room that we decided to check it out. What was it, anyway? A computer you left on?”

He nodded. “I heard your car and saw you come down the hill. I didn’t know who you were—thought somebody was breaking in after seeing the obituary. I waited in the hall to catch you at it and didn’t think about the computer.”

“Well, see, if it hadn’t been for that light, we would never have come so close. So it was you who drew us there. All we were interested in was if it was possible for somebody—
anybody
—to have gotten to Connie unseen. And they could’ve.” I stopped, waiting for a response that didn’t come. “That was the way you came in, wasn’t it? So there’d be no record of it?”

Looking down, he nodded and, in a choked voice, said, “That night, yes. All I wanted was one last word with her.”

You poor thing,
I thought. If he was hearing voices from the universe pouring out through a computer, he was certainly deserving of pity.

Then he lifted his head, that ski mask pushed up above his eyebrows, and looked at me. “But, Mrs. Murdoch, I did not kill my wife.”

“Well,” I said, hitching up Sam’s pants again, “that’s between you and Detective Ellis. But, Mr. Clayborn, tell me this. I’m interested in just how you use a computer to commune with someone who’s gone on before, even with the universe involved. I know that modern means of communication can reach people around the world, but it’s news to me that it can reach someone in
the other
one.”

His mouth twitched in a semblance of a smile. “I don’t use a computer for that. It was Connie’s laptop and I was checking her e-mails to see if they would tell me anything. They didn’t—she’d just gotten it—which is why the cops didn’t take it, I guess.

“But,” he said grimly, as he drew himself up a few more inches. “Who was with you? You keep sayin
we
, and I thought I saw someone else sneaking around. How do I know the both of you weren’t trying to break in?”

“Because I just told you we weren’t. I was there on a purely fact-finding mission, so don’t get on your high horse with me. Detective Ellis will soon know all about it, including not only who was with me—a man, by the way, who is well known in law enforcement circles—but that you also were there doing who-knows-what. So be prepared.

“And,”
I went on, feeling myself on a roll, “while we’re clearing the air, why do you find it necessary to be running and skiing around
my
house? I don’t like it, Mr. Clayborn. I don’t like seeing someone half-dressed pounding down my street every night that comes around. What’s so interesting? What’s on your mind? Are you checking on me? Are you trying to intimidate me into making a confession? Well, if you are, let me tell you something—
I
didn’t kill your wife, either, and you can just find yourself another place to run.”

Just then the power came on. Up and down Polk Street, the streetlights lit up, as did all the houses around us.

“Well, hallelujah,” I said, looking around.

Stan Clayborn looked around, too. “People will sleep warmer tonight. We should all be thanking the Universe for putting things right.”

“I’ll thank Duke Power, if you don’t mind, since they’re the only ones I’m in touch with. Now I’ve got to go inside. It’s cold out here. But, Mr. Clayborn, I don’t want to see any more sprints past my house from now on. You worry me.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to cause you any concern. I’m staying with a coworker not far from here until they let me back in the house. I run this way because I like this street. The grand old houses are beautiful—the kind that I admire. Connie and I spoke often of this street, although she,” he said, with no undertone of criticism, “preferred a more modern style of architecture.”

“I know she did,” I said with more understanding than he knew. “She told us all about it at that lovely coffee she had last week.”
And gave us her plans for demolition and reconstruction of our grand old houses while she was at it
. I thought it, but kept the thought to myself. By this time, I’d been laying down the law right and left to anybody who needed it, and I was tired.

 • • • 

I slipped back into the house through the front door, heard the sounds of activity throughout the house, and hurried as fast as I could up the stairs and into my bedroom.

Closing the door behind me, I quickly came out of my cold weather garb, including Sam’s downward-creeping pants and Hazel Marie’s toe-crimping boots. I had just slipped a cardigan on over my dress when Hazel Marie knocked on the door.

“Miss Julia? I hate to wake . . . oh, you’re up. The power’s back on, and I’m going to take my crew on home.”

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you want, Hazel Marie. Maybe you should give your house a chance to warm up.”

She grinned. “I’ll just have to keep the girls bundled up until it’s warm. They’ve gone through all the diapers I brought, so I’d better get home before accidents start happening. Oh,” she said, turning her head to look down the hall, “Coleman’s up, and I think Binkie and Gracie are leaving, too.”

“I’m coming,” I said, and then as if I’d just noticed them, I went on. “I found your boots in here. One of the children must’ve been playing with them.”

“Probably so. I think they’ve played with everything else in the house.”

 • • • 

By another hour or so, I’d seen them all off to their homes and I was left by myself in an empty house. Lillian and Binkie had moved chairs back to their places and put away toys and games, while Hazel Marie had folded up pallets and put sheets in the washing machine. I kept telling them to leave it all, that we’d straighten the house later, but Binkie said, “We made the mess, we’ll clean it up.”

I’d much rather have gotten her off to myself so I could tell her what I’d learned and what I intended to do come morning. All I’d been able to do in the midst of bundling up the children and getting things ready to leave was to tell her that I wanted to speak to Detective Ellis first thing in the morning.

“Not a good idea, Miss Julia,” she’d said. “Let’s don’t volunteer anything. The SBI will surely be here tomorrow, and when their report comes back, you’ll probably be called in. Let’s wait and see.”

“But, Binkie,” I’d said, starting to tell her that I was ready to come clean. I didn’t get to finish. Gracie was crying because she didn’t want to leave, and Coleman was calling for Binkie to hurry because he had to go on duty.

But maybe it was better that I kept it to myself for a while longer. I had the night to consider exactly what I would do. As I sat alone in the library, I thought over the events of the afternoon. I’d cornered the pastor, renounced the terms of my promise, and told him to be prepared because it was all coming out. My obligation to him was over.

And I’d also stood up to the night runner, who turned out to be exactly who I’d suspected. And I had come to the conclusion that anybody who was getting messages from the universe was too far off in the stratosphere to take up arms against his wife. Daft people are usually too preoccupied to engage in vicious crime.

I suddenly sat up straight, though, as it occurred to me that he and Connie had not been in as perfect a harmony via the music of the spheres as he would have me believe. He valued old buildings; she wanted to bulldoze them. Could a man get mad enough over architectural designs to bludgeon his wife? It didn’t seem likely, but I’d certainly pass my thoughts along those lines to Detective Ellis. Whatever he thought of the Clayborns’ bones of contention, I would be out of it. All I wanted was to clear my name and erase it from his list of suspects.