Smarty Bones (29 page)

Every impulse told me to do something—anything. Not talk, but action. Yet Cece and Coleman both counseled me to question Twist. What could she possibly know about Graf’s abduction? It was time to find out.

“Okay. Five minutes. Max.”

We marched up the courthouse steps like the Fantastic Four—DeWayne brought up the rear. When we were in the sheriff’s office, Coleman motioned me to the cells. “Find out what she knows. DeWayne and I will round up Jeremiah and Buford.”

“Watch yourselves.” Cece gave them each a quick hug.

“Will do.” Coleman’s gaze flicked to me. For a moment I saw his worry and determination, and then he walked out with DeWayne at his side.

“Should we call in reinforcements?” I asked.

“I don’t think cavalry is stationed in Mississippi.” Cece kept glancing at the door. I didn’t have to read her mind to know she was hoping Tinkie would arrive.

A sudden question made me grasp Cece’s elbow and pull her around. “If Olive has information about Graf, why isn’t Coleman here to dig it out of her?”

A vein in Cece’s temple pulsed with every beat of her heart. “She won’t talk to Coleman.”

“Why not?”

“We’re wasting time.” She pulled free. Her long stride carried her to the jail. I had no choice but to follow.

16

Olive prowled the cell like a caged lioness. If she had a tail, it would be lashing back and forth. Pluto came to mind and I wished he were with me. His interrogation techniques were simple and to the point. Claw first, and bring the suspect to her knees. Completely efficient. Too bad I couldn’t wring her scrawny neck until she squawked. I was in no mood to play patty-cake with the historian.

“Good of you to drop by,” Olive said.

I wanted nothing more than to wipe the smirk off her face, preferably with a Brillo pad and Red Devil lye. “Where’s Graf?”

“I should think you’d ask how you can get me released. You are my employee, after all.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, you haven’t paid me a penny. There isn’t enough money in Fort Knox to get me to work for you. The fact that Tinkie and I even considered taking your case makes me question our sanity.”

“Good to know, but I don’t believe a word.” A grin stretched her lips. “You might not like it, but I suspect you’ll work for information. Especially information about a certain actor.”

The jail cell was locked, which was the only thing that protected her. “If you know something, you’d better tell me now.”

Perhaps it was because I gripped the bars so tightly my knuckles were white as bleached bones. Maybe it was Sweetie’s bared fangs. Or it could have been Cece’s flip remark, “Tell her or I’ll open the cell. She’s going to snap you like a twig.”

Whatever—something loosened the hinges of Olive’s jaw.

“You and Tinkie were buttering up Webber in the bar. Cece left to walk home, and you sent Graf to give her a ride.”

But Olive hadn’t been in the bar; how did she know? “You’re not psychic, so that means you—”

“I set up a camera in the bar.” She shrugged. “So sue me for invasion of privacy. Which you can’t do. The bar is a public place. There’s no expectation of privacy.”

I wanted to pull her vocal cords out through a hole in her neck. “What else did you record?”

“I also installed cameras around the grounds. I wanted to catch the person who firebombed my room, and it didn’t seem the good sheriff was equipped to suss out the perp.”

“They don’t call them perps, and Coleman doesn’t suss,” Cece said. “Suspect would be the word you’re seeking. For an educated person, you sure don’t know much—”

“Did you see who abducted Graf?” I reached through the bars and caught Olive by the bib of her butt-ugly pink and gray blouse depicting what had to be a Martian sunset. Polyester. Like bad seventies fabric. “Tell me now.” Her face squashed against the bars. Her wide feet flailed for purchase on the floor.

Cece jumped into the fray and was trying to break my grip. “Sarah Booth, let her go! She’s Coleman’s prisoner. You can’t hurt her.”

“Oh, I can. And I am. And I’ll enjoy doing it. Where’s Graf?” I locked onto Olive and pressed my face to hers. Only the bars separated us. My intentions were easy to read.

“I don’t know. But I saw what happened to him.” She struggled to breathe.

I eased up a little. If she passed out, it would take time to splash water on her and wake her up. “What happened?”

“He left the bar and hesitated, like he heard something. Then he disappeared from camera range for about five minutes. After that, I got a clear view of him on the path between those big oaks. He was walking to the parking lot, maybe eight minutes behind Ms. Falcon. He was walking fast, like he was in a hurry to get somewhere, and he had his cell phone out and was dialing someone. Then this dark shadow came out of the bushes. The person was dressed all in black and ran up behind Graf. It looked like Graf was stabbed in the neck with a syringe of some kind. I couldn’t be certain because the picture was grainy and not clear. But it looked like his attacker drugged him.”

“And you’ve known this how long?” Judas jumping candlesticks, I had to kill her. It would be a civic duty. The woman needed to die.

She flipped her dark hair over her shoulder and struck a senior portrait pose. “Awhile. But I had to keep you focused on what I needed.”

Cece karate-chopped my wrist before I could drag Olive back against the bars and beat her. I was forced to let Olive go. She slumped onto the cot. “Honestly, you don’t have to get so irrational.”

“What happened after he was injected?” Cece asked. Her tone told me she was as fed up with Olive as I was.

“He sort of crumpled to the ground. Then my camera went on the fritz. A very expensive camera, I might add.” A little moue of disinterest settled around her mouth. “I don’t know anything else. I was going to check on the camera when Coleman brought me here and locked me up.” She spat the last sentence.

“Describe the attacker,” I held no hope that Olive would give any reliable details, but I had to try.

“Average height and build. A little stocky. Moved with speed.”

That ruled out Jeremiah, who was tall and slender. And the “moving with speed” ruled out Buford. He was out of shape and slow. But it could be any of their minions. Jeremiah had at least half a dozen men searching the fields for me. And there was no telling who was on their membership roster.

“Let’s go.” I motioned Cece from the cell.

“Hey! Hey! What about me?” Olive asked. “I haven’t been charged with anything. You can’t hold me here. This is a lawsuit waiting to be filed. I’ll own every inch of this ratsuck little hellhole town.”

“We aren’t deputies,” Cece said. “We have no authority to release you.”

Olive lunged at the bars, but we were already moving back to the sheriff’s office, where I’d left the tablet. We had work to do.

Cece took over. She was quicker and more proficient at button pressing. Jeremiah had compiled a number of files, and among them was a neatly typed list of members of the Heritage Heroes. Telephone numbers were helpfully included.

With her superior skills, Cece accessed the sheriff’s office printer, and in a moment we both had a hot-off-the-press copy of the membership. I read the baker’s dozen names twice, wondering if Graf languished in confinement—or worse, injured—in the hands of one of these men.

There were no women on the list, I noted. Jeremiah and Buford’s club of haters allowed none of the “weaker sex.” I would show them what brains and determination could do. I’d thwart them and save Graf.

I cross-checked the names with Cece, marking the handful of familiar ones with an X. Half the names we didn’t recognize—a few were people I knew in passing. Folks who had recently moved into Sunflower County and I’d met in the grocery store or at some political function. In fact, I realized many of the men had injected themselves into the actions of Sunflower County’s governing bodies. I could only assume they had moved to Sunflower County to join Jeremiah’s Internet madness. Mayan calendar, the Rapture, sunspots, whatever it took to feed the fear. The people on the list had a desperate need to believe the world was coming to an end and they would be the chosen ones, the survivors. To me, it seemed like a form of mental illness, and I could never forget that out of those thought processes martyrs were born.

Using a county map, we plotted where each member lived. I urged Cece to ditch the sheriff’s office and hit the road with me for a safari, hunting members of the militia group, but she refused. Tinkie was due any second, and Cece wouldn’t consider confronting Jeremiah or his henchmen without a lawman, a search warrant, and a loaded weapon.

I thought the search warrant unnecessary, but there was no budging Cece. While we waited on Tinkie to arrive and Coleman to return, we perused the other files on the tablet. Cece kept up a barrage of constant chatter, an attempt to keep my mind off Graf and the ticking clock. I would thank her later, but at the moment I had visions of a ball gag.

When we got to the file on Tilda Richmond’s history, Cece plopped into DeWayne’s chair and I hovered over her shoulder. We skimmed the paragraphs. Much of it was what Oscar had already revealed. Tilda was a Richmond relative who ran away from home at the age of sixteen to avoid an arranged marriage. No news there.

She went to Washington, D.C., where she worked as a serving girl in a tavern near the Capitol for several years. She engaged in heated political debates with the customers, a fact that got her discharged, but not before she came to the attention of a newspaperman, William French.

Tilda’s passion for freeing the slaves—couched as traitorous sentiments by the author of the article—but keeping the union intact appealed to French. He hired her to ghostwrite articles for his newspaper and introduced her to the political circles of D.C. She left behind the tavern and became a member of the fourth estate and the political elite.

In 1855, at the age of twenty, she met Montgomery Blair, a man destined to be Lincoln’s postmaster general. In the next years, the Kentucky lawyer brought her into the circle of men who were Lincoln’s political adversaries and who, in a brilliant political move, would later become his cabinet. It was a world where Tilda’s sharp perception and understanding of the Southern mind-set was greatly appreciated.

Cece began to read aloud. “Tilda and Blair, an avowed abolitionist though his family owned slaves, became friends, an odd couple in the Washington political circles. It was in this friendship that Tilda drew up a plan for the federal government to buy the slaves from slaveholders and preserve the Union. It was a bold proposal, and it met with much resistance from all sides, though Lincoln strongly supported the idea.

“A friendship was forged between the President and Tilda, which we believe escalated beyond the boundaries of professional to personal. Tilda Richmond can reliably be called a traitor and a whore.”

Cece looked up and frowned. “Could they do that? I mean, just buy the slaves and free them? Would it have worked?”

“I have no idea if it was a viable plan, but it sure would have saved a lot of anguish and lives.” It had never occurred to me to consider such a thing. Could the war have been averted had the idea of a twenty-five-year-old woman been taken seriously? Would the Southern states have gone along with it? The Civil War remained a huge scar on the consciousness of the nation, and the South had never completely recovered from the shroud of defeated nation.

Cece returned to the tablet screen. “After the Southern states seceded from the Union, Blair arranged for Tilda to meet Secretary of War Stanton. A keen animosity developed between them. Stanton allowed that no woman had a role in government, but it was after Lincoln’s assassination that Stanton turned vicious toward Tilda. He told her that soft sympathies for the Confederate states would be punished as treason. There is documentation he told Tilda she should have swung beside Mary Surratt.”

“This is incredible. It’s almost easier to believe Twist’s version—that Tilda was involved in an assassination attempt on Lincoln.”

“Women weren’t even allowed to vote.” Cece massaged her neck to relieve the tension. “This is amazing stuff. No wonder Twist and Webber are at each other’s throats. This really could be a great book. A barn burner of a plot with bigger-than-life characters—a bestseller as Twist predicted. I wonder why they don’t just collaborate?”

“That’s like asking why two pit vipers tied in a sack can’t get along.”

Cece laughed. “They put the gloss on the shine of professional jealousy.” She pushed the tablet my way. “You read. I’m hoarse.”

I perched on the edge of the desk and found the place she’d stopped. “The proposal to buy the slaves was rejected as too expensive. No action was ever taken. Throughout the war, the traitorous Tilda traveled back and forth from Washington to the Southern states. At times, she carried messages between Lincoln and President Jefferson Davis. She used her status as the daughter of a respected Southern plantation owner and supporter of the Confederacy to move fluidly among Southern society and politicos. The damage she may have done to the Cause is unfathomable. Her death on Egypt Plantation put an end to her meddling in the affairs of men and the destruction of the nation she betrayed.”

I had to stop reading before my blood pressure shot off the charts. The writer’s tone was arrogant and condescending. I didn’t doubt Jeremiah put fingers to keyboard to write this, but I was curious where he acquired his research. The whole thing was preposterous, but I didn’t think he’d made it up. His imagination wasn’t that good. He’d found this material somewhere.

And he’d tell me where before this case was over.

“Do you think my brother wrote this?” Cece asked.

“Yes. At least some of it.”

“What happened to Jeremiah, Sarah Booth? He hates women. It’s so clear. Do you think it’s because I became a woman?”

I went to my friend and tipped her chin up. “Absolutely not. Jeremiah hates everyone. He’s an equal opportunity hatemonger. What you did or do with your life shouldn’t impact your brother’s worldview. He’s not only a misogynist, he’s also a racist, a survivalist, and a kook. For whatever reason, he adopted hatred as his religion. Free will allowed him to chose, and he took the dark path. It’s eating him alive, but he can’t park any of this at your door.”