Morgan James - Promise McNeal 01 - Quiet the Dead (9 page)

The Market, yes that was it.
I’d seen sweetgrass baskets of all sizes and shapes woven by local artists at the Market, Gullah artists: men and women retaining a culture handed down from West African slaves brought to South Carolina to work the rice, indigo and cotton plantations along the coast. And, if my memory served me correctly, St. Helena was one of the places still inhabited by Gullah descendants. So, Boo Turner was possibly Gullah. How interesting. But how does that relate to Stella? Was Boo Turner’s birthplace and the origination of the doll a coincidence? I thought not. In my opinion, coincidences are, well, hardly ever coincidental. Though even if the two were connected, even if Turner were still alive and living back on St. Helena, why would he want to threaten Becca by sending the doll? The man would be over eighty years old by now. Sending voodoo dolls hardly seemed a likely pastime of the elderly. Besides, the doll didn’t even really have the originality of a West African voodoo doll. Not that I was on a first name basis with many voodoo dolls, but this one was more like a baby doll from the forties, made to look like Becca with the recognizable pink suit. Not very scary really, once you got past the crushed in face—sort of a wannabe voodoo thing. You certainly didn’t need to be a card carrying Gullah descendant to buy an old doll like that at a thousand flea markets around Charleston, or Atlanta, for that matter. Still, the Becca doll
was
shipped from Charleston.

My mind was following a maze of disjointed thoughts, and whenever it turned a corner, I saw Stella Tournay hanging by a rope over Howell Creek. I felt in my bones Boo Turner knew something about, or had something to do with, her murder. I retrieved a yellow pad from my briefcase and began to organize what I knew. Filling one side of the page with information didn’t help with any conclusions. Next I drew one circle with Stella inside, another her grandson, another with Becca, one with Paul, Stella’s husband, and another with Boo Turner. Maybe, I considered, Stella’s death and Turner are connected; but the trust is another matter entirely, not related to Stella. After all, there wasn’t even a trust when Stella was killed, or when they probably knew each other during the war. The nagging question was the source of the trust. Had Tournay gotten lucky with the stock market? He certainly didn’t accumulate five million dollars by teaching at USC in Columbia; and it didn’t come from Stella’s family, since they suspected him in Stella’s death. Further more, I doubted the money came from Tournay’s family in France, because if they had money, Tournay would have run with it before the Germans occupied Paris. Ah, the Nazis. What a shameful gang of miscreants they were. My mind went round and round with possibilities.

I studied my circles again, trying to focus on one issue at a time. Stella’s death was what had drawn me back to Atlanta, and it was the mystery of her death that I felt compelled to solve. I thought about what Sherlock Holmes might do under the circumstances. What would he tell Watson? He would probably say to stick with who had opportunity and the means to commit the crime, rule out the impossible and what is left, no matter how improbable it may be, is the solution. That advice wasn’t much help since hundreds of people had the opportunity to enter the Tournay house that day and kill Stella; after all, it was a hot summer day, no air conditioning, she had the windows and doors open…and even though the newspaper articles reported there was no sign of a struggle at the house, I knew in my gut she was killed there and moved to the creek.

Looking again at the yellow pad of scribble, my circles screamed childish efforts and were less than helpful. I was in over my head and I knew it. I decided to focus on the more immediate issue of who sent Becca the quasi-voodoo doll. I could construct many more useful questions about the doll than Stella’s death. I turned to a fresh page and made a list of questions. Who knew Becca was in town, and at what hotel she could be found? If Turner were alive, could he know that? Who could tell him? If Turner doesn’t gain by Paul keeping the trust, who does? How about Mitchell Sanders? Paul told me Mitchell had asked him many times about the amount of the trust. Paul probably told him about his mother being in town. Could Mitchell have sent the doll? Another circle with Mitchell Sanders’ name inside was added to my pad. I needed to know what Paul and Mitchell fought about, why Paul had told him to leave. If Mitchell was trying to garner the trust for his own use, he probably would not have started an argument with Paul and stormed out of the house. That meant Paul must have initiated the confrontation with Sanders.

Just because I had nothing to lose, I picked up my cell phone and called Paul. It was only nine-thirty. He was an actor, a night person; surely he would be awake. Drawing a swastika on the pad while my phone made annoying traveling sounds of locating my party out there somewhere in the great beyond, I fished deep into my memory bag of college European history to Paris during the Nazi occupation. As I recalled, the French Vichy government considered their options and cooperated with the Germans, agreeing to pay an enormous per diem to finance the German war effort. Paris’ glitzy nightlife went on as before, with more Germans than Frenchmen as customers, while ordinary citizens stood hungry in long food lines. Ninety thousand French Jews were exterminated; corruption and black market commerce was the order of the day. Paul finally answered on the fifth ring. His hello sounded irritated. “Oh, Paul, hello, this is Dr. McNeal. I’m sorry, I must have caught you are a bad time. Should I ring back tomorrow?”

He cleared his throat a couple of times; making little choking noises as though he’d sucked a piece of dry peanut down the wrong way. Finally he spoke. “Dr. McNeal, yes, hello. Sorry. I mean no, no need to call back tomorrow. I was just on another call.” He paused, “…..with a friend. I’m finished now. It’s fine. Has something happened about my house? Don’t tell me you want to return the cats.”

“No, no,” I replied cheerfully. “Nothing like that.” I could easily guess the identity of that “friend” and threw out my baited line. “Mitchell trying to kiss and make up, is he?”

“Why Dr. McNeal,” he retorted sarcastically. “I do believe you must be psychic.”

I ignored his remark and trolled a little deeper. “Doesn’t sound as though you are ready to make up. Too early to forgive and forget?”

Paul jumped to the bait. “Pleaseeee! I will not do either for that man. Just let me tell you, today is Tuesday, right? Well, Sunday night, I stopped off at Lucky’s, down in midtown, with some actors from the theater for dinner—after a rehearsal mind you, I was working, not playing. One of the guys, Jack, came back from the men’s room and said to me, ever so catty-like, ‘Paul, leave that steak right where it is, you must take a potty break.’ I had no idea what he was talking about. So he gives me a nudge and says, ‘Go now. You will not believe it.’ Everyone at the table was looking at me, so what could I do except head towards the john. And who did I see, huddled off in a back booth, but Mitchell, head to head with some gorgeous lissome black girl with legs from Peachtree Street to heaven, and long hair all done up in those braid things with beads all twined through it. What are they called?”

“Corn rolls, or rows, I think. How do you know Mitchell wasn’t there on business, just as you were?”

“Business! Give me a break! I know when two people are lovers and when they are not. He was stroking her hand like it was a silk purse, for God’s sake. I have never been so humiliated in my life. Jack and everyone else at my table sat in utter silence when I came back and sat down.

“Anyway, I left the restaurant and came home. Mitchell came dragging in sometimes in the wee hours of the morning. I pretended I was asleep to give myself time to cool off. When I confronted him, he lied of course, at first, and then promised on his mother’s grave he didn’t care about
that person
and wouldn’t see her again. Can you believe that? On his mother’s grave! What a worthless pile of monkey pooh! We went round and round about it all day and last night. Finally, I told him to pack his things and leave. He still didn’t believe I was serious until this morning when I began packing for him. That’s when you arrived at the house. So no, in answer to your question, I am most certainly not going to forgive and forget. Do you know how humiliating it is to be cuckolded for a girl?”

I wanted to tell him that yes, I did know, but it was Paul’s time to whine and not mine. “Predictably, he is now calling crying like a baby. God, I hate when grown men cry. Wants us to move to San Francisco so we can get married. Can you believe that? I told him I wasn’t buying his sorrow, sorrow wasn’t enough, and besides I believe he just wants to come back because he smells Grandfather’s money. He even asked me tonight if you were over here about the trust, so I told him you and I talked about it, and I’m giving it to Mother. Then he hung up. Gold digger!” Winding down from his anger, Paul’s voice returned to his normal lower range. “If a girl thing is what he wants, then he needs to take his show somewhere else.” He finished sadly, “I mean really, what would you do?”

Poor Paul. I had a good idea of how he felt. I remembered when I had to face the reality of my ex’s infidelity I was so hurt I couldn’t even yell at him. All I could do was cry. Paul was silent on the other end of the line. He seemed to be waiting for an answer from me. For about two seconds I considered a professional counselor’s response, then thought, oh hell, I’m retired. So I said instead, “Sweetheart, been there, done that, and got the tee shirt to prove it. When I caught my ex-husband cheating, he actually tried to convince me it was really my problem because, as he maintained, men are not biologically designed to be monogamous.”

“Well, there’s a depressing observation.”

“Don’t believe that for a second. That was just his excuse for bad behavior. Men are, by and large, smarter than swans, for cripes sake, and swans mate for life. Believe me, Paul; you deserve someone better than Mitchell, that’s all. And no, I wouldn’t take him back either. When I finally stopped bawling, I kicked my ex’s butt out in the front yard, along with his clothes and precious collection of Jimmy Buffet tapes, and then filed for a divorce.”

By Paul’s subdued laugh, I could tell he didn’t envision mousey me kicking anybody’s butt. Course, I left out the part about me being depressed for six straight months after I threw Randall Barnes out. Paul certainly didn’t need that small bit of information. At least Paul knew now he wasn’t alone with his misery. Neither of us said anything for a few seconds.

“Well, thanks for letting me vent. You are a good person, Dr. McNeal. I think we will become friends, you and I.”

“I would be honored,”

“So, why did you call?”

Our conversation answered my questions about Mitchell, and earned him the top spot on my suspect list of doll senders, but I wasn’t ready to tell Paul what I suspected. “Right, well…” I floundered, trying to think of some excuse for my call other than to pry about Mitchell Sanders. Then I wondered who else might still be alive who would remember anything about Stella’s death. No one else seemed to be concerned about how and why she was murdered, not even Paul. Yet I couldn’t get it out of my mind. “I’ve been thinking about the Chandless-Bennett side of the family,” I said casually, “Can you think of anyone from that side who would want to frighten your mother by sending that awful doll? Anyone who might not want her to have control of the Tournay trust?”

“Why would any of them care about Grandfather’s money? They all had money of their own.”

“Yes, I see your point. Who do you know from your mother’s family?”

“Nobody really. It’s like I told you this afternoon. After Grandfather and Mother moved to Columbia, I don’t think the Bennetts or Chandlesses made any attempt to contact them. Maybe they were so upset about Grandmother they preferred to erase any remnants of her. It has always seemed strange to me. But what can I say? I have a strange family. I think Mother inherited some of the Chandless money when her grandmother died. I was a teenager then and Mother made a point of telling me she was going to start her own business and prove to Grandfather she was smarter than he thought she was. And of course, she has done well with her dance studios. I do admire her for that. Well, now that I think about it, there may be one Bennett left out there somewhere. I remember when I first moved back into Grandfather’s house, one of the neighbors mentioned she had gone to high school with Howell Bennett, a cousin of Grandmother’s, I believe. She said she’d heard he was a professor at Brenau College, and then asked me to give him her regards, if I ever saw him, which I didn’t. See him that is. I don’t know the man, or if what she said was true. Mother never mentioned any of them.”

“Okay,” I said, “It was just a thought. I know it’s late, Paul. I’ll let you go. Have a better night, and stand your ground with Mitchell. You really do deserve better. And by the way, I left my business card on our luncheon table in your living room; please call me if you need a friendly ear.”

I hung up, took a hot shower, and made a cup of Chamomile, thinking maybe the herb tea would calm my jumping bean mind down enough to sleep. I snuggled down on Luke’s sofa, wrapped in a wedding ring quilt I’d given him the year before… a motherly hint for him to find the right girl, get married, and produce me some grandchildren, and sipped the warm liquid. What to do next? Garland had made it plain he considered my job finished. Becca gets the money, Paul gets the house, and he gets a fat fee. Good solution for all, so why was I not satisfied? Maybe because I sensed Stella was calling me from my dream for reasons other than resolving who got the Tournay trust.
What do you want from me, Stella? I’m only a middle-aged listener to other people’s pains. I don’t even solve their problems; I only show folks what they already know. The big secret is they heal themselves, you know.
Mamma cat left her sleeping babies and jumped delicately up on the sofa to curl between my ankles. Even as skinny as she was, her warm body was a soothing comfort through the quilt, and we both nestled down into sleep.