When Will the Dead Lady Sing? (30 page)

I pushed back my chair. “You don’t need an outsider around right now. If somebody could push me across the grass and help me get the chair in my trunk, I’d be grateful.”

Edward stood. “I’ll do it.” I didn’t flatter myself that he wanted to. His tone made it clear he was willing to do the dirty work to spare the others.

Burlin waved him back to his chair. “I brought her. I’ll see her on her way.” He offered me a tear-damp hand to help me down the step. As he pushed me toward Annie Dale’s gate, he murmured over my shoulder, “I feel like I’ve just been poleaxed.”

“I could not be sorrier for you,” I told him. “I liked Binky a lot. But you’d better be ready to face the police. That’s Chief Muggins’s car parking beside mine right this minute.”

Chief Muggins stepped back to let us out the gate, wearing a smile that strengthened my conviction that some of his ancestors were chimpanzees. “Joe Riddley better put a leash on you.”

“She is, unfortunately, devoted to the old geezer,” Burlin told him, wheeling me toward my car. “I can’t make a dent in her affections, no matter how hard I try. She just dropped by to visit the family and offer her condolences. I’m seeing her off.”

I gave him a startled smile of thanks as he held my door.

As he pushed my chair to the trunk, he told Chief Muggins in a low voice, “I appreciate your coming so quick. Or haven’t you heard that we’ve had another tragedy?”

Chief Muggins grunted. “I heard on my way over here. That sort of thing tends to happen when the judge is around.” It took every charitable cell in my body not to drive over him on my way out.

I pulled into my parking space at the store and used my cell phone to ask for an employee to fetch the chair and wheel me in. Joe Riddley came himself. “You’re gonna be thinking you’re the Queen of Sheba by the time you get that cast off,” he warned as I opened my door, “but don’t expect this royal treatment to continue.” Then he saw my face and squatted down so his head was level with mine. “What’s the matter?”

“Binky Bullock. She—she died.” I laid my face against his broad chest and sobbed.

He held me until I felt able to face the world again. Then his hand touched the top of my head like a benediction. “We’re unloading cattle feed in the back. I’ll take you to the office, but I’ll come back in a little while to take you home for dinner.”

I couldn’t concentrate on taxes. I kept getting swamped by wave after wave of sadness. For Sperra, I had grieved only for a stranger who died too soon. Now I grieved for a fierce, earnest little girl whose dreams got overshadowed by life and for the woman who, in my office four days before, had been so alive and happy, Hubert’s name warm on her tongue.

I could shake Hubert for hurting her. Once he and Georgia went for a walk, he never looked back. How dreadful was that for Binky? As hard as it was for me to cast Hubert as the male lead in a romantic tragedy, she may have viewed him as her last hope. She could even have come to care desperately for him in their two days together.

Hubert?
demanded that voice that lurks somewhere in my head.
Rubbish. It’s a lot more likely that Binky left Annie Dale’s Monday night and killed Sperra, and that she was filled with remorse.

Nonsense,
I disagreed.
Binky would never have crept up behind somebody with a rusty pipe. She’d have shot them down in the street. Besides, she wrote me a note asking me to help find the killer. She didn’t kill Sperra, even if she did kill herself.

“That’s Charlie’s problem,” I muttered, startling a poor deputy as he walked in.

“Beg your pardon?” he asked. “I have this search warrant—”

He and I both knew a search warrant wasn’t Chief Muggins’s problem. “I was talking to myself,” I said crossly. “A person has to have an intelligent conversation sometimes.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He shuffled his feet and didn’t quite meet my eye.

“Let me see what you’ve got.” I held out my hand.

What he had was a warrant to search the home of a young man, just eighteen, suspected of possessing the computer, television, and brand-new stereo system removed from his classmate’s home the previous weekend. “I figure he wanted the stuff for himself, rather than to sell,” the deputy said as I scrawled my signature. “I think we’re gonna find every bit of it in his room.”

I wished Sperra’s murder were that easy to solve.

Chief Muggins thinks he’s got it all wrapped up,
the voice reminded me.
He thinks Lance did it. He isn’t going to be out looking for other suspects.

I sighed.
Even Charlie isn’t dumb enough to think he can arrest Lance on Hector Blaine’s word. Anybody knows Hector would lie like a rug to get his hands on a reward.

I hate that voice. I never know if it’s my conscience or what Martha, with all her psychology training, calls my shadow. It certainly seems to shadow me at inconvenient times.

My head was beginning to ache with all its chatter, and I’d had enough coffee and iced tea that morning to need a visit to the ladies’ room.

As I maneuvered myself into my wheelchair, the voice had one more question.
So if Lance is innocent but Charlie’s convinced he did it, who’s gonna look for the real killer?

 

“I need a mental-health break,” I told Joe Riddley as he drove me home.

“You stayed home the whole afternoon you sprained your ankle,” he pointed out.

“That doesn’t count. I want to pile up on the couch and read that mystery I bought a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t even started it yet.”

Clarinda, of course, had other ideas. “You can finally get to those boxes in the guest room.” Before I knew it, she’d settled me in a chair with five boxes in easy reach and a sharp knife for cutting tape, then returned to the kitchen. I tediously sorted through junk I’d thought I couldn’t live without a month before. Now I wondered whether anybody but me would ever want Ridd’s first bib, yellow with drool, or the fuzzy wool letter from Joe Riddley’s high-school baseball sweater, and where could I put them in the meantime?

Clarinda looked in from time to time, hands on her hips, to make disgusted noises. “This room looks worse than when you started.”

“I’m getting there,” I insisted. “You have to make a mess to create order.”

“Well, I’m not goin’ home until we get this mess cleaned up, so you keep working.”

Figuring out who killed Sperra Bullock turned out to be a whole lot easier.

As I disengaged my brain and filled my hands with busywork, pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. By the time I’d unpacked the last box and decided where to put the various pieces it had held, I knew who the murderer was. I just didn’t know what I could do about it. I looked at the clock beside the bed. Two thirty. I hopped to our bedroom and the bedside phone.

“Isaac,” I said when the assistant police chief came on the phone, “let me tell you a story. See what you think.”

“What I think,” he said when I finished, “is that you better sit tight and not let anybody in until I’ve had time to sort this out. And keep Clarinda there until Joe Riddley comes home.”

I wasn’t sure what he thought Clarinda could do to protect me, but I promised him on both counts. I even had to admit I felt safer with Clarinda around.

I hopped toward the couch with my mystery. “I’m finished,” I called. “I’ve made a list of where everything goes. Now I’m going to sit down with a good book, and I don’t want to be interrupted. But can you stay until Joe Riddley gets home? I’m feeling a little jumpy today.”

“I’ll be here,” Clarinda rumbled. “I’ll be lucky to get home by midnight, with all this to clear up. You made a bigger mess than the one you started with. Who ever taught you to unpack, I don’t know . . .”

Her mutters were a familiar background as I settled comfortably against one end of the couch with my feet propped on a pillow and turned to chapter one. Clarinda moved around in the back of the house, putting away things on various closet shelves.

I was in the middle of chapter two when the doorbell rang. By the time I’d realized I hadn’t warned Clarinda not to let anybody in, she was already opening the door.

“The judge is a bit incapacitated,” she greeted the visitor, “but come on in. I know she’ll be glad of company.”

Renée came in with that combination of big-boned awkwardness and grace that made you want to keep looking at her. She was spectacular in gold linen pants and a white silk shell with a gold disk hanging from a chain around her neck. “I’m sorry to bother you, but Lance wanted me to bring you something.”

Reluctantly, I closed my book and set it on the coffee table. Renée started fumbling in her huge purse. Clarinda paused on her way back to the guest room. “You all want some tea and cookies?”

“Oh, no,” Renée assured her. “I’m fine.” She waited until Clarinda trudged away, then repeated, “Lance wanted me to give you these.” She held out two old photographs. “Abigail had them in her briefcase. She showed this one to Lance earlier this week and told him she’d looked for it as soon as she knew we were coming to Hopemore, in case you still lived here. Lance didn’t think you’d want the police to find it, so he went to get it while Burlin was talking to the chief.” She handed me one of the pictures.

I couldn’t help smiling as I saw what it was. It had been taken at the Bullocks’ lake house that fall weekend years ago. Binky was on Burlin’s back with her chin propped on one of his shoulders. I stood behind him on a rock with my chin propped on his other shoulder, creating a three-headed monster. We were all making ferocious faces.

My eyes stung. Had any of us ever been that young?

“Abigail told Lance she was just a child when you met,” Renée broke into my thoughts, “but you talked to her like she was a real person. She never forgot that.”

I wanted to go somewhere and cry a river. “Poor Binky. She probably didn’t get talked to much at all. Her family was so—I don’t know,
involved
in things. Politics, society, sports. That whole weekend, I kept wishing I could bring that little girl home with me to our farm for a week or two, so she could just be herself.”

“She never was.” Renée’s smile looked as sad as mine felt. “She gave her whole life to Lance after his mother left, and everybody took that for granted—including Lance. When I came into the family, I expected her to resent me, but instead, she saw me as a sort of ally: Abigail and Renée against Burlin, Georgia, and Edward—all of whom are determined to make Lance into something he’s not.”

“Governor?”

“Anything political. The only good thing this mess has accomplished is that maybe he can go back to his drawing board and I can go back to my clients. But I’m going to miss Abigail.”

“Me, too, and I hardly knew her.”

“Lance also found this with the other picture, and we don’t know where she got it. We’re terribly afraid—” She handed it to me, her eyes anxious.

I held it carefully by the edges. “Lance will want to have it eventually.”

She nodded. “He doesn’t have many pictures of himself with his mother, and this one is particularly nice. But it didn’t come from any of their family albums.”

“My grandson, the one who stayed with Sperra a few days, said she had some pictures. I’d guess this was one of them. He may recognize it.”

“But how did Abigail get it, unless—” She broke off, turned away, and said thickly, “Lance said would you keep it for him, please? Just for now?”

I shook my head. “I can’t do that. This is evidence in a murder case. You both know that—which is why I guess Lance made sure it had your prints and his all over it, and wanted me to put mine on it, as well. Clarinda?”

When she poked her head around the doorframe, I said, “Bring me a sandwich bag, please.” I had her hold it open while I dropped the picture inside, then I sealed it and handed it back to Renée. “Take that to the police, or you could face a charge of obstructing justice.”

She slid it into her purse with a glum look on her face, then held out one long slim hand. “I don’t know if we’ll ever meet again, but I want to thank you for being a sane island in the middle of this crazy mess.” She spoke quickly and almost ran out the door.

I heard Clarinda rumbling in the kitchen. “What are you doing now?” I called.

“Fixing to finish up in that guest room. That’ll take most of the afternoon. Then I aim to switch a few things around in here again. There’s stuff still not sitting right on the shelves. It’s too crowded, like.” She hummed as she pulled down who knew what and thumped it on the countertop. In a minute or two, I heard a crash.

“Ah! Now I see the method in your madness. If you keep rearranging things, you’ll break enough so the rest will fit.”

She didn’t reply, but in a minute I heard co-cola fizzing over ice. She brought me a glass and glared at me as she set it down. “You are too mean for anybody else to work for. You know that, don’t you? I just stay because I feel sorry for Joe Riddley.”

“And because nobody else will hire you.”

“You wish.” She stomped back down the hall.

I settled back with my book, wishing I’d bought a paperback. I didn’t mind the price—I figured I was contributing to the college fund for the writer’s children—but hardback books are so heavy to hold.

I forgot that by chapter four, when it got really exciting.

But as I looked nervously about to make sure no villains were lurking in the living room, I remembered something I ought to have thought of sooner: Renée had left the front door unlocked.