Miss Julia to the Rescue (14 page)

“Why, yes,” I said, surprised at the connection. If we kept on, we might discover some kinship. “It’s a wealthy enclave about ten miles outside of Abbotsville. What’s your niece’s name? I might know her.”

“Cheyenne, last I heard.” His mouth twitched. “Real name’s Nellie McAfee, but who knows? She keeps changing it. One of them free spirits, I guess.”

“My word,” I murmured. Then, “There’re a good many of those around these days, but I don’t believe I’ve met her.”

“You’d remember, if you had.” His eyes swiveled to Etta Mae again. “What can I do for you ladies?”

“I understand,” I said, getting down to business now that the niceties were out of the way, “that you have spoken with Sergeant Coleman Bates of the Abbot County Sheriff’s Department, and from that conversation, he tells me that you may be holding a friend of ours, Mr. J. D. Pickens. We have come to take him home.”

The sheriff let a few seconds pass, then he said, “Well, now, that may not be possible. For one thing, we’re not holding anybody by that name.”

“But you are. You just don’t know it. You told Coleman that you have a John Doe, and we think that’s Mr. Pickens. He called me, you see. Or rather he called my husband, who wasn’t home because he’s on a Holy Land tour, and the call got disconnected. Coleman had to track it down, and it led right here. So we’ll identify him for you and take him off your hands.”

“Well,” the sheriff said again, leaning back in his creaky chair and drawing one leg over the other knee so that I saw he was partial to Dingo boots, too. “Fact is,” he said in a lazy sort of way, “we got lots of problems here, which I won’t go into. But because of ’em, I have my doubts that the man I have is the man you’re looking for.”

“But didn’t he tell you who he is? We’ve heard he has a gunshot wound, but it’s not in his throat, is it? He can talk, can’t he?”

“Oh, he can talk,” Sheriff McAfee said, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. “And he’s said aplenty, all right. Lot of ugly talk, not much of which I can repeat, bein’ a church-goin’ man and a gentleman to boot. But I wouldn’t be much of a sheriff to just take the word of a stranger, stripped of any and all identification and found in suspicious circumstances. There has to be an investigation, which is ongoing. We’ll get to the bottom of it sooner or later.”

“Sooner or later” didn’t sit well with me, but I let it go for the time being and tried another tack. “Is the man of whom we’re speaking under arrest?”

“No, ma’am, he’s not. But he is injured and can’t get around too good. So while we’re pursuing the matter, the hospital’s the best place for him.”

“Etta Mae, here, is a nurse,” I said, with a nod in her direction as I elevated her status just a tiny bit. “We can take care of him, don’t worry about that.”

“Look, Mrs. Murdoch,” he said, sitting up straight while the chair complained loudly. “My deputies found this man shot and in shock way up in the hills. There wasn’t a smidgen of ID on him, nothing to tell us who he is or what he was doing out there. When we brought him in, he was cold and wet and not making good sense. Now I’ve got feelers and queries out, and we ought to get confirmation of who he is in a few days. Then we can talk about what comes next. If, that is, you want to stick around that long.” He cut his eyes toward Etta Mae. She ducked her head and blushed.

“But
I
can confirm who he is! I’ve known him for years.”

He shook his head. “No’m, gotta be official. There’s lots more going on than you know about, things he might be mixed up in. I can’t just release a John Doe on your say-so.”

“Well,” I said, thinking furiously, trying to come up with something that would move this stubborn man. “Well, what if I told you that’s his name.”

“What?” he asked, a smile playing around his mouth. “John Doe?”

“Well, we call him J.D. for short.”

Etta Mae’s head snapped around and her mouth dropped open. Sheriff McAfee laughed. “Got me there,” he said, “but it won’t wash. Listen, ladies,” he went on, his face hardening, “you just be patient, enjoy our little town, do a little fishin’ maybe, and give us a few days. We’ll get this straightened out one way or the other, then we can proceed.”

“Proceed to what?” I asked.

“Well, I’ll either arrest him because he’s part of a crew we’re roundin’ up or I’ll release him ’cause he ain’t.”

“And meanwhile,” I said with some asperity, “you’re just going to keep him closed up in that hospital, far from his family and friends, while you go about your business.”

He nodded. “That’s about the size of it.”

“I think that’s against the law, Sheriff.”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am. He’s injured. He needs medical care, and that’s what we’re giving him. Even if he turns out to be an innocent bystander, I’d be remiss if I didn’t take care of a potential witness to a crime.

“Now then,” he said, standing up and reaching for his jacket, “it’s time for church, so I got to be going.”

“One last question, if you don’t mind. We’d like to see if your potential witness is who we think he is. Would you tell the hospital to allow us to visit?”

“Can’t do that,” he said, shrugging into his jacket. “The only way to keep him safe is to keep him isolated. Can’t have any and everybody going in and out over there, and I don’t have the manpower to stand guard.”

That stopped me. “You mean he’s in danger?”

“Could be. Depending on what he saw and what he knows, and if he’s not part of some illegal goings-on, he could be. Let’s just say he’s in our own homegrown witness protection program for his own good.”

None of it made sense to me, except one thing. “What it comes down to, then, is that you don’t believe a word he’s said. You don’t
believe he’s J. D. Pickens or that he’s a private investigator or that he’s as law-abiding as, well, you are. If you are.”

He gave me a frosty smile and opened the office door, indicating that the interview was over. “Just waitin’ on confirmation. Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I have to get to church. I got the scripture readin’ this morning.”

Thinking to myself,
I hope it does you some good
, I stood, feeling completely stymied, and dejected because of it.

Etta Mae, who’d not said a word during the whole interview, sidled up beside the sheriff on our way out and asked, “You a Baptist, Sheriff?”

“Church of God,” he said. “Be happy to have you go with me.”

Etta Mae glanced down at her jeans-clad self, her pointy-toed Dingo boots peeking out at the bottom of her boot cuts, and said, “Well, I’m a Baptist myself, and I’m not exactly dressed for church. Thank you all the same.”

“Looks fine to me,” the sheriff said, ushering us out of his office.

“Maybe another time,” Etta Mae murmured and followed me down the hall to the lobby.

“Whoo,” she said, fanning her face with her hand when we got into the car. “What a man!”

“What a stubborn mule, you mean,” I said, slamming the door. “All that slow, down-home country talk he was doing didn’t fool me. We didn’t get to first base with him, so we’re right back where we started. Which is nowhere.”

Etta Mae cranked the car and, watching carefully, pulled out onto the street. She began to drive aimlessly around the town and, from the look on her frowning face, was giving something a lot of thought. I hoped it wasn’t the sheriff she was mulling over.

“Miss Julia,” she said at last, “what if it’s not J.D.? What if we wait around and finally get in that room and it’s somebody we don’t even know? What if we’ve come all the way up here and we’re in the wrong place?”

I was so sure of the rightness of what we were doing that I hadn’t given that possibility much thought. But I did so then—gave it several thoughts, in fact. “No, Etta Mae,” I said, finally and decisively, “we’re in the right place and it is him. We know that because of the phone call he made to my house, which Coleman was able to trace. And that highway patrolman he talked to pretty much confirmed it. If we start second-guessing ourselves now, we’re in bad trouble. We just have to keep after the sheriff until he lets us in to visit the man he’s calling John Doe.”

And with that and a few more minutes of thought, I had an inspired idea. “Tell you what, Etta Mae. Let’s go to church.”

Etta Mae pinched up a plug of her stretch-denim boot cuts. “Like
this
?”

“Well, I wouldn’t ordinarily approve, although you can see everything in church these days. But I’m not talking about actually going to church, I’m talking about going and waiting for church to be over. See, Etta Mae, we can catch the sheriff again when he comes out, and if he’s ever in a compassionate and amiable mood, it ought to be right after he’s heard a good sermon.” I paused as Pastor Ledbetter passed briefly through my mind. “Let’s hope his pastor has chosen an appropriate text, like visiting the prisoner.”

“Yes, but what’re you going to say that you haven’t already said?”

“I’m going to give him another option. Instead of asking to let us visit Mr. Pickens or Mr. Doe, whichever it is, I’ll suggest that the sheriff go with us and open the door—just crack it a tiny bit—just enough for us to peek in and see what the patient looks like. If it’s Mr. Pickens, why, I’ll tell the sheriff that we’ll wait patiently for the official identification, and if it’s not, why, then, we’ll leave and not bother him anymore.”

“That might work,” Etta Mae murmured, turning down another side street. “Miss Julia, I’ve seen two Baptist churches and one Evangelical Mission Church, but I’ve not seen a Church of God anywhere.”

“Oh, it’s out on the highway, Etta Mae, on the way back to Pearl’s. I’m sorry, I thought you’d seen the sign.”

“Okay,” she said, rounding the block to head in the right direction. “It’s getting close to noon, so we should have time to find a shady parking place to wait, I hope. It’s sure getting hot here in the middle of the day.”

“The mountains are so close that the middle of the day is the only time it
can
get hot. I mean when the sun shines directly down.

“Go slow, Etta Mae,” I went on, leaning forward to watch her side of the road. “It’s a little way past the hospital turnoff. There it is! See the sign?”

Etta Mae turned off the highway onto a gravel road, then stopped to peer at the wooden sign with painted letters. “I’ve never heard of that kind before. Have you?”

CHURCH OF GOD WITH SIGNS FOLLOWING
, I read. “Well, he said Church of God, so this must be it. Except I don’t see a church.”

“I’ll go a little farther in,” Etta Mae said, and eased the car onward. She went a little farther and a little farther, twisting and turning on the gravel road, until I didn’t think we could go much farther without topping the mountain. The only sign of habitation was a cluster of cabins partially hidden by trees and bushes.

“Would you look at that!” Etta Mae said, slowing even more as she pointed at a handwritten sign nailed to a tree.

I gasped as I read:

WARNING!!

DRUNKS WITH GUNS LIVE HERE

YOU LOOT, WE SHOOT

“My word,” I said, stiffening at the possibility of being mistaken for looters. “Move along, Etta Mae. If there’s a church up here, let’s get to it.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if there is.” She eased the car past the sign as gravel from the road tinked against the car.

“That must be it,” I said, as the road ended in a wide level clearing bounded by trees and underbrush. A dozen or more vehicles, mostly pickups, some with camper shells, a few vans, and one dump truck, were haphazardly parked in the gravel lot. Looking for all the world like a neglected tenant house, a small wooden building, painted white, hunkered down on concrete blocks in the middle of the clearing.

“That’s a
church
?” Etta Mae said, as she stopped the car and stared.

“It must be. See, it’s got a big red cross on the door. No porch, though, or steeple. No stained glass windows, either. These are poor people, Etta Mae, and they’re probably doing the best they can.”

“I guess.” She didn’t sound convinced. “Uh-oh, somebody’s coming.”

A thin, almost gaunt, man, wearing dungarees and a long-sleeved shirt buttoned to the neck, walked between the cars and approached the driver’s side.