The Outrage - Edge Series 3 (26 page)

‘Where?’ Her tone was brittle. ‘Which Springdale woman wrote that disgusting filth to me?’

He was briefly uneasy about his offer to take her with him when a stark image flashed into his mind, triggered by the barely controlled rage in Sarah Farmer’s voice. And he had a clearly defined mental picture of this woman with her hands fastened around the throat of the writer of the poison pen letters, squeezing more tightly by the moment and deaf to all pleas to stop. But that was a stupid concern, he acknowledged. If the two women were alone maybe it could happen. But not if he were around and as he swung up into his saddle he told her:

‘Okay, Sarah, it’s Muriel Mandrell.’

‘My God!’ She almost choked on the words.

‘You want to come show me where she lives?’

Now she knew the name she had been so desperate to discover and had voiced the harsh toned response she was suddenly almost calm. And she nodded dumbly before she swung up astride her horse. ‘Out on Hill Road.’ She gestured along the street. ‘How did you find out it was her?’

He instinctively glanced down at the scratches on the back of his hand. ‘I caught her when she tried to make a second delivery to me.’ He wheeled his horse and heeled it into a walk.

She moved her mount up alongside. ‘God, that must have been awful.’

‘It sure was for her. I had to hit her and she went down hard. It knocked her out for awhile. And then she took off and I’d guess she’s hiding at home. Scared to have people see her face which is maybe in a mess.’

As if she wanted to imprint deeper into her mind an image of the woman who wrote the obscenity-laced letter Sarah spoke the name like it had an acid taste in her mouth:
‘Muriel
Mandrell!’

‘She told me she found the first one when she went to do her cleaning chores at the Quinn house this morning. Awhile later I surprised her pushing the second one under the door.’

She shuddered and grimaced. ‘She must have delivered mine to my place before you caught her in her despicable act. I was at school all morning then at the bakery in the afternoon. And didn’t get home until this evening so . . . ‘ She shrugged. They rode across the intersection and were aware of being the objects of disapproving scrutiny. And then many of those Sarah had nodded to – most of them women but some men

– found it necessary to look sharply away to mask the depth of their ill feelings for her.

‘My God, there are some narrow-minded bigots in this town, Edge,’ she said when they had run the gauntlet of reproving attention and were riding slowly northward along the mostly darkened length of First Street. ‘It could have been any one of a dozen women who wrote that salacious rubbish to me, you know. That many and more are entirely capable of it.’

‘I’d have thought most Springdale women were too strait-laced to know that kind of language,’ he said.

She shook her head and scowled. ‘Don’t you believe it. Pushed hard enough by their sanctimonious thoughts there are an awful lot of them who wouldn’t stop short of writing that kind of disgusting smut.’

‘You know them a whole lot better than I do,’ he allowed evenly as they rode beyond Nancy Quinn’s café on the corner of the Old Town Road and she signalled they should angle across the street.

‘I certainly do. And I’ve always got on well with most of those people who just now glared down their noses at me back there,’ Sarah said bitterly.

Then she turned on to a road that spurred off First Street to the right a couple of buildings short of the start of a trail. This was Hill Road that was on a slight upward slope and dead ended at a stand of timber after a hundred yards or so. Sarah Farmer reined in her horse alongside a freshly painted picket fence out front of a neat two-story fieldstone house that looked old enough to have been one of the first to be built in Springdale.

‘You want me to wait outside?’ she asked. ‘While you talk to that evil-minded woman about other matters? More important than her opinions of my morals?’

Her tone was brittle and allied to the subject she spoke of it caused Edge to peer hard at her face in the scant light of the moon while they both remained in their saddles. And after a few moments he saw the change of expression when she realised she had allowed a streak of selfishness to surface. Suddenly a brand of shameful contrition showed on her attractive features. And she emphasised her regret by reaching out to touch his arm as she murmured:

‘I’m sorry. But this hideous business really has disturbed me, Edge.’

He asked: ‘Do you want to wait here?’

‘I’d much rather come inside and face up to that – ‘

‘Let’s go then.’

They dismounted, hitched the horses to the fence and went through a silently opening gate. Moved up the cement walk between narrow, flower filled borders and squares of neatly trimmed lawn to where a timber porch smelling of newly applied creosote shadowed the doorway. The freshly treated porch timbers and the neatness of the front yard conjured up in Edge’s mind an image of Muriel Mandrell as an excessively house-proud woman keeping herself frenziedly busy every waking hour as she strove to combat her corrosive loneliness. A narrow crack of yellow light to one side of a heavily draped window to the right indicated somebody was probably at home.

In the pungent smelling darkness he located a heavy metal knocker and the dull thud it made on the striker plate seemed to reverberate over long distances in the surrounding stillness of the dimly moonlit night. Not even the gentlest breeze stirred the trees that grew thickly on the sloping land behind and to one side of the house. Which had thick walls and a door that was of stout timber. So few ordinary everyday sounds would enter or leave it and there was certainly no padding of approaching footfalls before the rattle of a key turning in the lock. Then a widening crack of low lamplight stretched across the porch step as Muriel Mandrell opened the door and complained sourly:

‘How many times I got to tell you to take your key with you when you go out, girl?’

Then she recognised her callers and gasped: ‘Oh, no! Not – ‘

She made to slam the door into the frame but Edge slid his foot forward and turned his shoulder sideways to block it. He was surprised by the woman’s fear-prompted strength as he rasped:

‘Need to talk to you, lady.’

‘This is my house!’ she snarled. ‘And no one comes inside unless I say they can! You get away from my place, you hear me you two!’

‘No sweat, lady,’ Edge said as he continued to prevent her closing the door. ‘We can talk on the step if that’s the way you want it.’

‘You’re in my yard! On my property! That’s trespassing! And you got no right to do that, I tell you!’

‘Be reasonable and we can – ‘ Sarah began.

‘I’ll have the law on both of you! Coming to a defenceless woman’s house at this time of night for the Lord knows what reason!’

‘You’re a filthy minded, foul-mouthed poison pen letter writer, Muriel,’ Sarah accused harshly. ‘And I’m willing to bring Vic Meeker into this matter. Press charges against you unless – ‘

‘You’ve got no proof!’ Her voice was getting shriller with every new challenge she made.

‘It’s your word against mine!’

‘Let it be, Edge.’ Sarah’s tone was as hard as before but a brief change of expression suggested she did not mean for him for him to take what she said at face value. ‘We’ve got the letters. Why don’t we just show them around town? At the hotel and the saloon? And pin them up on the board at the meeting hall? Let everyone in Springdale read them if they can stomach what Muriel wrote to us?’

‘No!’

Edge was unbalanced when the door was suddenly jerked away from the shoulder he had pressed heavily against it. But he remained upright as he and Sarah stood on the fringe of a faint light that spilled out into the unlit hall from a doorway to the right. Muriel Mandrell, wearing a shapeless grey dress, was silhouetted against the same yellow glow, tightly fisted hands on hips, her slender body ramrod stiff, her head held high. Then the tone of her voice provided a perfect match for her confident stance as she claimed:

‘I’m not admitting nothing, you hear me? Not to nobody else! And if you try to make me I’ll fight you for slander of my character to the highest court there is in Texas!’ She held the rigid attitude for a few moments more as if she expected a forceful response to her empty challenge. But when none came her shoulders sagged, she stepped to the side and motioned with her free hand to usher them into the house. And Edge said evenly:

‘Much obliged, lady.’

Sarah’s tone was far less amiable. ‘That’s much more sensible, Muriel.’

‘Go through to the parlour. But you’ll have to excuse the state its in.’ Just a tremor of tension in her tone undermined the matter of fact quality she strove for and almost achieved. A familiar aroma of polish had been discernible behind the predominant smell of creosote at the front door of the house. And this was much stronger as the visitors entered a small room that had a low ceiling, white washed walls and a fireplace where a log fire had almost died to grey ash and blackened embers. It was over full with old, substantial, mismatched pieces of mostly pine furniture: worn and scarred from workaday usage over the years but carefully, evenly lovingly cherished. The untidiness for which she had routinely apologised in advance comprised of an open needlework basket on the centrally placed oak table and a floral print dress that was draped over the back of an armchair to one side of the hearth. Where she had been engaged on making a repair before the unexpected callers interrupted her.

As she followed them into the room Muriel Mandrell invited in the same almost unruffled tone as before: ‘Sit yourselves down wherever you’ll be most comfortable.’ She went carefully to remove the dress from the chair then closed the needlework basket and placed both of them on the floor. And only now did Edge notice in the light from the ornate kerosene lamp on the table a dull coloured swelling below her right eye. Her dyed yellow hair concealed any sign of the bruise she received when she banged her head on the hallstand at the Quinn house. She sat down and stiffed disdainfully before she said: ‘I usually offer my guests coffee but I don’t suppose you two would want any?’

‘That is absolutely right!’ Sarah continued to stand beside the unmatching armchair on the other side of the fireplace.

To Edge who remained standing at the closed door the room with three people in it seemed claustrophobically small as he said: ‘I figure in the circumstances we can skip the social niceties, lady.’

The seated woman made a loud throat-clearing sound as if she felt slighted by the response. But after she glanced between Sarah’s grim set face and the folded sheets of paper Edge drew from his shirt pocket she was suddenly nervous. ‘I wanted to get the letter back from Miss Farmer’s house after you caught me at the Quinn place,’ she said quickly. ‘But I couldn’t figure out how to do that.’

‘We’re not here to talk about what might have happened,’ Sarah said as Edge removed his hat and sat on a straight backed chair on the other side of the table from the woman. Muriel Mandrell nodded and clasped her hands tightly together, perhaps to keep them from shaking. Then she swallowed hard and said in a crestfallen voice that bore no resemblance to her earlier defiantly aggressive tone: ‘I’ll be obliged if we could get the talking over and done with quick, mister.’ Then she glanced up at Sarah and found what it required to include her in the request. ‘And you, Miss Farmer.’

Sarah said: ‘I can understand why you’d want this matter to be finished with as soon as possible, Muriel. You must be eaten up with embarrassment now you’ve been caught out.’

The discomfited woman corrected: ‘It’s that, too. I’ll never get over the shame of it. But Blanche is likely to come home at any moment and I wouldn’t want her to know about this awful business.’

‘Lady?’ Edge said.

‘Yes, sir?’ She found the necessary will to meet his steady gaze. Edge held up the letters. ‘These are the proof, so best you quit making threats concerning slander or anything else.’

She nodded and he placed the two sheets of paper on the tabletop, unfolded them and ran a hand firmly over each in turn to flatten out the creases.

Sarah said: ‘And I think enough people in this town will recognise your handwriting, Muriel. After all those checks for coffee and cake orders you’ve written for customers at Nancy Quinn’s café?’

The unnerved woman seemed suddenly resigned to her fate as she sighed: ‘Sure, I suppose that’s so.’ She touched fingertips gently to the bruised eye area on her elfin-featured face. ‘I should’ve realised the consequences full well when I was caught red-handed at the Quinn place. But I haven’t been able to think straight about anything. I just stayed in the house here trying to keep busy and worrying myself sick.’

Edge shifted his impassive gaze from Muriel Mandrell to Sarah and drew a nod that he should go ahead. Then he looked back at the woman in the other chair and said coldly: ‘So, lady: if you don’t give me straight answers to the questions I’m going to ask there’ll be a lot more lonely days and nights for you. But if you tell it like it was I’ll burn the letters in the fire right here.’

Muriel Mandrell looked at him with relief that was quickly replaced by incredulity. And then she sounded and looked apprehensive when she claimed: ‘I don’t get your meaning, mister. What questions? What can I tell you about? Except why I wrote that awful stuff and .