Morning Glory Circle (22 page)

“Then I’ll stop,” she said, but she was smiling.

Scott spent the afternoon following up on the twelve names on Sadie’s list. Eight of the letters had been accounted for. The recipients he was able to speak to were appalled to realize Scott knew about the letters, but quickly understood there was nothing to be gained by denying any knowledge of them. Ed’s letter was still unaccounted for, so that left three letters.

After he parted with Maggie, Scott drove up Pine Mountain Road toward the state park and then out Rabbit’s Fork Road to the home of Lieutenant Colonel Harlan “Mean” Mann, who worked for District One of the State Division of Natural Resources Law Enforcement Section. The locals just called him “the game warden,” but not within his hearing. Scott was all for the protection of wildlife and the conservation of natural resources, but Mean seemed to take a special delight in torturing the lawbreakers he caught before he arrested them. Scott was dreading the prospect of finding out Mean had received a letter telling him Cal Fischer had been hunting out of season.

Scott found Mean cutting firewood out behind the modest A-Frame log home he lived in.

“What in the hell brings you out to this neck of the woods?” Mean asked Scott by way of greeting. “I figured you’d have your hands full over there in Thornytown. I heard that witch in the post office got herself killed.”

“Hey Mean,” Scott said. “You get any anonymous letters this past week?”

Mean narrowed his eyes and leaned on the handle of his ax, the blade of which was embedded in a thick log.

“I did,” he said. “How’d you know about that?”

“Seems Margie sent some hate mail before she died,” Scott said. “What did yours say?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” Mean said. “Somebody sends me a letter with a typewritten address and no return address and it gets tossed directly on the fire. No telling what kind of terrorist nonsense might be inside.”

“You get a lot of death threats, Mean?”

“I get my share,” he said. “I’ve had my mailbox shot through more’n once, and someone set fire to my porch just before Christmas.”

“Did the sheriff look into it?”

“The sheriff would be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t want me dead,” Mean said. “I take my job seriously even though most of the people in these parts don’t think the laws apply to them. The sheriff sent that little gal out here to ask around, but nobody’s gonna tell her nothin’. She’s a pretty little gal, that one is. I wouldn’t mind to take her out back and…”

“Anyway,” Scott interrupted, “that’s all I was really interested in knowing. Thanks for your help.”

“You tell that Malcolm Behr I said he can kiss my ass,” Mean said as Scott walked away. “He thinks I don’t know he shot a deer out his bathroom window last month, but I got people tell me things. I ever catch him red-handed he’ll go to jail.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Scott said, and waved as he left.

Scott’s next stop was the Roadhouse, where Phyllis Davis was living out back in one of a string of small, shabby rooms they rented out. She was so drunk she could barely stand, but was sober enough to tell Scott she hadn’t picked up her mail in Rose Hill in almost a month.

“Did I win the lottery or somethin?” she asked him.

“No, I just think you might have received someone else’s mail by mistake,” he said.

“You wanna stay and party with me?” she asked him.

Her eyes were straining to focus, and Scott imagined she was seeing more than one of him in the doorway. The room smelled like cigarette smoke and rotten food. Scott could see an unmade bed and a blaring TV in the background behind her.

“No, thanks anyway,” Scott said.

Sadie was aggravated to see Scott and refused to open Phyllis’s post office box without a search warrant.

“I can’t do it,” she said. “It’s against the law.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow with a search warrant,” he told her. “Just don’t let Phyllis have her mail until I get there.”

“I can’t do that either and you know it,” Sadie said. “Is this some kind of test?”

“No,” Scott said. “I’m sorry I asked. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Scott parked in front of the Eldridge Inn and walked up to the entrance. It was a grand looking Edwardian mansion built to complement the style of the college president’s former home, now Gwyneth’s, which was next door. Scott rang the bell and innkeeper Connie Fenton answered. Her face was drawn and pale, and when she saw Scott she immediately said, “Why are you here?” in a very unwelcoming tone.

“I need to ask you about a letter you may have received last week,” Scott said.

Connie’s face flushed and she stepped outside, pulling the entry door shut behind her.

“How do you know about that?” she asked.

“Margie sent letters to several people, and your name was on a list. Can I see your letter?”

“I’ve misplaced it,” she said. “I’ve looked everywhere for it but I can’t find it.”

“What did it say?”

“Gossip,” Connie said, “filthy gossip that no one would believe. I certainly wasn’t worried by it.”

“Would you care to share that gossip with me?”

“Certainly not,” Connie said. “I don’t traffic in filth, and I wouldn’t lower myself to repeat it.”

“Margie has been murdered,” Scott said. “Your letter may give me a lead on her killer.”

“Well, I didn’t do it,” Connie said. “When did it happen?”

“Monday night.”

“Well, then,” Connie said. “It couldn’t have been me. I took Lily home from the Winter Festival committee meeting and my car got stuck in her driveway. Curtis couldn’t tow it out until the next morning so I stayed all night out there. Ask her, she’ll tell you.”

“Thanks, Connie. I’m sorry to have to bother you.”

Connie slammed the inn door as she went back inside, and Scott walked back to the squad car with a weird feeling about their conversation. After thinking about it for a few minutes, it occurred to him that Connie’s reaction was odd. Instead of protesting that she couldn’t possibly kill anyone, she seemed more eager to establish an alibi for the time of the murder. With a sigh over a day that seemed like it would never end, Scott headed out to Lily Crawford’s farm to check Connie’s alibi.

At 8:15 p.m. Hannah and Maggie were in Margie Estep’s attic bedroom, having gone over every inch of the house without finding anything.

“This is discouraging,” Hannah said.

“If she was blackmailing someone,” Maggie said, “she had to hide the goods somewhere.”

They pulled out every piece of furniture, but there were no doors into the crawlspace under the eaves of the attic.

“That seems odd,” Hannah said.

“What?”

“We have an attic room at our house, and so do your parents, don’t they?”

“Yeah, so?”

“We keep all kinds of junk under the eaves, and there is a little door to get in there,” Hannah said. “It’s the same at the Rose and Thorn. We keep the extra paper goods up there.”

“So there should be an access door here somewhere,” Maggie said.

“But there isn’t.”

“Maybe they just didn’t put one in.”

“Maybe Margie hid it.”

They went from one corner of the low wall to the next, all around the small room, examining the paneling that covered the wall, picking at the seams. Every panel appeared to be securely nailed to a two-by-four stud behind it, until they got to the panel behind the chest of drawers. There were no nail heads in the paneling. Hannah helped Maggie pull the dresser further out and Maggie found the seam where one piece of paneling met the next piece exactly. To the naked eye and touch, it looked and felt almost seamless. When Maggie hooked a fingernail behind it and pulled, however, she discovered the whole panel was held in place with hook-and-loop tape attached to both the panel and the two-by-four studs behind it. When Maggie gave it a firm tug the whole piece came away from the wall with a scratchy ripping sound, and there was a dark, empty space behind it.

Maggie felt the hairs rise up on her arms.

“This is creeping me out,” Hannah said.

Maggie and Hannah pushed the chest of drawers completely out of away so the ceiling light would shine into the room.

“I see stuff in there,” Hannah said.

Maggie brought a lamp over from Margie’s bedside table and plugged it into the nearest outlet so they could see inside the crawlspace.

“Bingo,” Hannah said.

With the light from the lamp she was holding, Maggie could see another lamp sitting just inside the crawlspace. She crawled in and turned it on, illuminating the area.

Hannah crawled in behind her, and they both sat cross-legged in the small space.

“Jiminy Christmas,” Hannah said.

The crawlspace was filled almost completely with stacks and stacks of envelopes, periodicals, and packages.

“This is twenty years worth of stolen mail,” Maggie said.

“There doesn’t seem to be any kind of organization,” Hannah said, looking at a few envelopes nearby. “The dates and names are all different, and they’re just stuffed in here any old way.”

“We’re not going to be able to get through all this tonight.”

Just then Maggie heard someone coming up the pull-down stairs to the attic, and looked frantically at Hannah, but her cousin was paralyzed with fear. There was nothing they could do, and no way to hide. The footsteps crossed the room, and both women held their breath, eyes wide. Maggie’s heart was pounding so hard she was sure whoever it was could hear it.

“I guess if I wait long enough in any murder investigation, you girls will do all the hard work for me,” Scott said as he stooped down at the entrance to the crawlspace.

“Oh, thank God,” Hannah said.

“Sarah’s not with you, is she?” Maggie asked him.

“No, lucky for you, it’s just me,” Scott said.

He looked all around the crawlspace and whistled low.

“I should be embarrassed I didn’t find this first,” he said. “But then Sarah doesn’t have to know I didn’t.”

“You’re not mad?” Maggie asked him.

“What’s the point?” Scott said. “I’ll just have to remind myself in the future to keep a closer eye on you two every time someone’s murdered. You’re better than a pair of bloodhounds.”

Hannah crawled out past Scott, not trusting this sanguine attitude to last.

“I think I hear my mother calling,” she said, and was quickly gone.

Maggie was still not convinced Scott wouldn’t haul her to jail just to make some point. He was looking all around at the stacks and stacks of envelopes, padded mailers, and boxes of every size.

“I’ll have to get Skip and Frank down here to take all this to the station,” he said. “It’s going to take days to go through it all.”

“Will you return it to the intended recipients?”

“It’s all potentially evidence right now,” he said. “I’m not going to think any farther ahead than that.”

Scott backed out of the crawlspace, stood up, and offered Maggie a hand up as she crawled out. He pulled her to her feet, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her soundly for a long while.

When Maggie finally wriggled loose, she felt dizzy and disoriented.

“What’s wrong, Maggie,” he asked her, grinning.

“We shouldn’t do this here,” she said a little hoarsely, heading for the ladder steps.

Scott just laughed.

“Chicken,” he called after her, and then followed her down.

Ed and Tommy were playing Scrabble while Mandy put three frozen TV dinners in the oven and then set the table. Ed was beating Tommy, but the young boy was quickly getting the hang of the game.

“Hey,” Mandy said. “Mr. Barrett met our new neighbor today.”

“An old lady and a baby,” Tommy said.

“No,” Mandy said. “It’s a man. Mr. Barrett said he helped him shovel out all the walkways this morning after he got home from workin’ the night shift at the power plant. Mr. Barrett said he was real friendly.”

“Mr. Barrett works at the power plant, or the new neighbor works there?” Ed asked.

“Mr. Barrett does. I don’t know where the new guy works. He didn’t say.”

“He’s staying in Phyllis’s trailer?”

“Yeah, he said he’s renting it.”

“What color hair does he have?”

“What?” Mandy asked him. “Why?”

“Did he have long red curly hair and a beard? An earring?”

“I don’t know, he didn’t say. What’re you talkin’ ‘bout?”

Ed told Tommy and Mandy about the man that tried to take Timmy.

“I couldn’t stand that Brian,” Mandy said. “He was always flirtin’ with me in a way that made me feel like I needed a shower afterward.”

“He might have come back to try and get that money Theo left Ava.”