A Garland of Bones

by Carolyn Haines

  “Why? Over Bart?” She laughed that Southern belle laugh. “Sunny wouldn’t care if Bart was hit by a septic tank truck. In fact, it would simplify life for her. She could find another man like that.” She snapped her fingers. “One not so inclined to share his charms.”

  “Has Sunny ever been alone in your house?”

  Clarissa realized I was serious. “She has, but so has every person involved in our group. Sometimes I leave the key under the doormat for lovers to meet if I’m going to be out of town. We all do that.”

  So everyone in the group had access to the staircase. Any one of them could have loosened the step. And that also answered our question about how the archer could have gotten his or her hands on Bart’s crossbow and arrows. “Did you ever consider that perhaps you were intended to take the fall? Not Bart.”

  At last I truly had her attention. “No one would dare try to kill me.”

  “Remember the arrow that nicked your ear.” Tinkie pointed to the ear Clarissa had covered with her longer hair. “You’ve sincerely pissed someone off.”

  “Who?” Clarissa asked. “That’s what I paid you to find out. So far you’ve been about as useless as teats on a boar hog.”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “Well, I hope you find something before I’m a dead woman, since you’ve convinced me I’m a target. Maybe I shouldn’t lead the parade this year.”

  “You’re Santa Claus?” Tinkie asked.

  “Of course not. I’m the hot elf that stands on the back of the lead convertible and sets the parade in motion. Kind of the drum majorette elf.”

  I had no doubt. “Clarissa, did you find Kathleen’s stocking cap when you were diving in the bottom of the river?”

  It was almost as if I’d punched her in the gut. “Absolutely not!”

  “You did, and you left it at the Bissonnette House for Darla to find.”

  She had the grace to look down, but her shame was short-lived. “I didn’t. But what if I did? Darla came to town all better than us. We did invite her to join us, but she didn’t want to. She said she was a romantic and believed in true love and that we were the antithesis of everything she believed.”

  That pretty much summed it up, to my way of thinking. “So you thought you’d just leave something from her dead friend. A little memento that might indicate Kathleen was alive?”

  “That’s really cruel,” Tinkie threw in.

  “Oh, grow up. I didn’t do it, but I see the humor in it.”

  “I don’t. That isn’t funny at all, and it had to be you. You were diving. The only one diving other than the police department volunteers.” I shook my head. “I’ll find out who’s after you, and then Tinkie and I are done with you and your group of friends. I don’t want to be standing by you when karma finally decides to roll up in your front yard.”

  “Piddle posh. There’s no such thing as karma. That belief, like all other religious superstitions, is a sop to make the poor feel better about their pathetic lives.”

  I decided to try another tactic. “Who was the police officer whose clothes were scattered around your place?”

  “Have you never heard of role playing?” Her mouth opened. “Oh, you saw the uniform and thought it was…” She laughed. “You’re too easily fooled to be detectives. I was just having a little law-and-order fun before you so rudely interrupted, but it certainly wasn’t with a real police officer.”

  One mystery solved. It was time to move on. “Clarissa, I’d forget riding exposed in the parade tonight.”

  “I’ve given that some thought. Nope, I’m doing it. It’s my night to shine. No one is going to cheat me out of it.”

  “Fine.” Tinkie and I gathered our coats. “See you tonight. We hope to have an answer for you.”

  Before we went back to the B and B, we stopped by Sunny Crenshaw’s house. It was in the same neighborhood as Rook’s Nest. The Italianate design was beautiful, but out of place in the older antebellum neighborhood. Sunny was home and invited us in, but we didn’t make it past the foyer before she blocked us. She took her stand in the doorway before I could even ask a question.

  “You’re wasting your time here. I’m not involved with Clarissa and her games. I don’t care what Bart does as long as he doesn’t publicly embarrass me—hence the slap you saw me give Bart when I caught him with Tulla. He’s on a short leash now. If he steps out on me in public again, I’ll divorce him. Believe me, that will hurt him a lot more than it will hurt me.”

  If Sunny was pretending, she was very practiced at not giving a damn about what her husband did.

  “Bart could have been killed in that fall.”

  “And?” She arched her eyebrows and waited.

  “You really don’t care,” Tinkie said. “You really don’t. Why not divorce him?”

  For a moment she looked away and I could see that she was tired. “Bart’s a habit. And sometimes he’s really funny and good company. I’ve thought of divorcing him, but before I file the papers, I always relent. It’s just too much work to find another partner, and I admit I’m a woman who needs a man.”

  “Do you need him enough to try to kill the competition?” Tinkie asked.

  She laughed. “Not that much. I’d rather find a new husband than do a stretch in prison.”

  I could imagine that under different circumstances, I might actually like Sunny Crenshaw. “Who do you think is behind all of the mayhem? You know it was your husband’s crossbow used to shoot at Clarissa.”

  “I told Bart not to buy that thing. He’s never even shot it. He was going hunting with some local men, but Bart doesn’t care for the woods or hiding in the bushes. When it came time for the big hunting trip, he found a convenient excuse not to go. Frankly, anyone could have taken the bow from the garage. Or any number of useless things he’s purchased in pursuit of a recreational activity. I honestly don’t know what happened to it. I wasn’t even aware it was missing. Neither was Bart. He was shocked when the police came to question him about it. Look, Bart has his … hobbies, but he isn’t a cruel man. And he’s not desperate enough to harm anyone. Neither am I. Whatever is going on can be traced squarely back to Clarissa. I don’t know what she’s done, but someone means to make her pay.”

  I had the strongest feeling that Sunny was telling the truth. She was a beautiful woman, accomplished, and loaded. Why she would tolerate a husband who had such different values was not a question I could answer. But I didn’t believe she was trying to kill the female swingers to protect her marriage.

  “I have an appointment in town,” she said. “I have to go.” She reached over to a table and picked up a business card. “This is my private number. If you call, I’ll answer. Right now, though, I have to go.”

  Tinkie took the card and we found ourselves on the sidewalk. We still had a lot of ground to cover.

  * * *

  We arrived back at the Bissonnette House at two-thirty to find Darla wasn’t at home. I remembered the note in the journal. Darla had an assignation at three with a mystery man. Whoever it was didn’t impact our case, and Tinkie and I had only a couple of hours before the parade was due to take off. Coleman and the men had asked us to meet at the tourism center, where the parade was to begin. The house was Tennessee Williams’s birthplace. If I had time in the morning before we left Columbus, I wanted to take a quick look around.

  “Where’s Darla?” Tinkie asked when she realized the house was empty.

  I explained about the note I’d found in her journal.

  “Intriguing. I wonder where the location of the rendezvous might be.”

  “We can’t solve our own case. We don’t have time to spy on Darla.”

  “I’d kind of hoped she and Harold would hit it off,” Tinkie said. “What did the note say?”

  “Just something about the pull of the moon and the flow of the tides, and something about Artemis.”

  “Sounds like the beach,” Tinkie said.

  There was a knock on the front door and I
went to open it, feeling only a bit awkward. The young couple standing on the porch—with five pieces of luggage—looked a little shell-shocked. “We need to register.”

  I knew that the Zinnia gang had taken every single room in the inn. And we had one more night before we were due to check out. Clearly this young couple had made a mistake, but Darla was going to have to sort that.

  “Come in. You can put your bags in the parlor,” I said. “Tinkie, stir up the fire, please. Darla has guests.”

  Tinkie peeked around the corner. “To stay here?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I walked over to her. “Darla will have to handle this. We need to find her.”

  “Pronto. These guys will need to find another accommodation tonight, and that may not be easy to do with Christmas and so many people traveling. The sooner we find Darla, the better.”

  Tinkie and I scampered out before any more questions were thrown at us. “Where do you think Darla is?”

  I pulled out my phone. “Simple enough.” But when I called Darla, I got a message that her mailbox was full and to call back later. “That’s really strange.”

  “Maybe we can find her. She couldn’t be far.”

  “She was meeting someone at three.” My watch showed three o’clock on the dot. “And since there’s no beach here, maybe at the river?”

  “Good idea. Her car is still in the garage.” Tinkie pointed. “She must have gone on foot.”

  The obvious place to look was at the edge of the Bissonnette House property, where the zigzagging staircase that clung to the river’s bluff led down to the river. When we got to the edge of the lawn, I looked down, feeling only a little of the vertigo that came along with fear of heights. Tinkie grasped the handrail and started down. When I didn’t follow, she looked back at me. “Are you coming?”

  “Maybe.” The whole wooden structure looked pretty rickety to me. When we’d boarded the boat for the flotilla, we’d driven down to the dock. My gut clenched with apprehension at the idea of descending those steps.

  “Come on, Sarah Booth. There’s someone down on the shore.”

  Indeed, someone was on the dock where the Tenn-Tom Queen was tied up, waiting for someone to repair her propellers. A solitary person paced, as if anxious. I couldn’t tell if it was Darla because the person wore a parka with a hoodie obscuring the face, but I was relatively certain it was a woman. Likely Darla. “If I make it down these stairs, I’m never going back up them.”

  Tinkie only laughed. “You need therapy to get over this fear of heights.”

  I had a snappy retort about fear of cooking, but I didn’t deliver it because I was grasping the handrail in a death grip and forcing my feet to move one at a time onto the stairs. It took all of my concentration to inch forward step by step, slowly going down toward the shore.

  When we were nearly to the bottom, I realized that the woman had disappeared from the dock. She’d either entered the boat or taken the road that wound past several other houses with river docks.

  “Did you see where she went?” I asked Tinkie when my feet were on solid ground.

  “No, she was right there and then she was gone.”

  “Let’s check the boat.” I started on deck. “Darla! Darla!” She had to be nearby.

  Tinkie started around the wheelhouse to the front of the boat and I was close on her heels. Before I could even say a word, someone barreled around the wheelhouse and straight into Tinkie, knocking my partner into the railing.

  “Hey!” I shouted as the person pushed past me, almost knocking me on top of Tinkie. The assailant rushed off the boat and ran down the dock.

  “Who the hell was that?” Tinkie asked.

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t Darla.”

  “Do you think it was someone tampering with the boat?” Tinkie asked. She’d recovered her cool a lot quicker than I would have.

  “I think it was someone up to no good. Let’s check the boat to be sure Darla isn’t injured inside.”

  We moved forward with caution, and for good reason. When we got into the cabin, it was clear someone had been living on the boat. The bed was rumpled and dirty dishes were stacked on the floor beside the bed. I found a receipt from the Marine Repair Center with an estimate to replace the propellers. It was clear the boat had hit something.

  Tinkie came out of the bathroom holding a brush. “Look at this.”

  The brush was tangled with long red hairs. We looked at each other. For a long time neither of us spoke. “Kathleen has hair that color,” Tinkie said.

  Suddenly the fishing skiff tucked up on the bank of the river took on new meaning. If Kathleen was indeed alive, she could have swum to the bank and used the boat to make it to a safe dock. But all I had was a suspicion, no evidence.

  32

  Tinkie and I were both quiet as we left the river behind us. “Kathleen could have been on the boat prior to the Christmas flotilla,” I said. “Maybe she was staying on the boat part-time. That would explain the hair in the brush.” Which would have to be tested for DNA to be real evidence.

  “Gumbo,” said Twinkie.

  I glanced over at my partner as we walked up the road that would eventually take us up the bank of the river—on a gentler slope—and back to the B and B. We still hadn’t found Darla.

  “What’s gumbo got to do with it?”

  “Gumbo, the cat. Kathleen wouldn’t spend nights on the boat and leave Gumbo alone, would she?”

  Tinkie had a point. I often had to leave Sweetie Pie, Pluto, and the horses because I was working on a case or vacationing with a friend. But I hired someone to live in the house with the pets to keep them company. Gumbo had been left alone until Darla retrieved her. If Kathleen had a choice and had left her animal all alone, then she was not the person I thought she was. Of course, if she was alive—letting everyone believe she’d drowned—she wasn’t that person anyway.

  “Why would Kathleen pretend to be dead?”

  Tinkie’s face went completely still. “She’s going to kill Clarissa.” Tinkie said it with such authority that I knew she was correct. “Her death is the alibi. She came here and started over. She’s built a new life so she could pull this off. Once she’s done, she’ll move somewhere else. She had to be the one who attacked Officer Goode, too. She must have been afraid he had seen her and was going to tell others. She had to silence him, but she didn’t want to kill him.”

  Tinkie was making perfect sense—but we needed a motive. “Why would Kathleen try to kill Clarissa?”

  “I don’t know, but Kathleen isn’t dead, and there’s no other reason for her to pretend to be.”

  “I agree. She isn’t dead.” There was too much evidence to prove she was alive. Tinkie and I both had suffered some kind of mental block in this regard. We’d been too willing to believe Kathleen would never pretend to be dead. Would never put her friends through such a cruel charade. Good people didn’t do such things. “There has to be a reason for this game she’s playing.”

  “We really don’t know her background.”

  “We’ve been sadly neglectful in that regard. We never considered her a viable suspect.”

  “Darla will let us use her computer. We have to do what we can.”

  “And we have to know what Darla’s role in all of this is,” I said. “Kathleen has been on the Tenn-Tom Queen, maybe since the flotilla. We don’t know if Darla knows she’s alive.”

  “Maybe not,” Tinkie said. “Darla could have met someone else today. I mean, who was that stranger that almost knocked me down? We’re assuming that note you saw told her to meet at the river. The moon, tidal pull, and Artemis were the clues. For all we know it could be a seafood place. Maybe Darla hasn’t even been back to the boat since the flotilla. We don’t know that she knows anything.” Tinkie’s eyes widened. “And if she was going to meet Kathleen, who’s to say Kathleen hasn’t harmed her or taken her prisoner. In all the time we’ve been here, have you known Darla to leave the B and B for longer than two hours?”

/>   She was right. “So let’s find out.”

  It was a longer walk around the bluff to get back to the B and B, but we still had several hours before it was time to meet the men at the parade. Huffing a little from the incline, we made it. Cece and Millie were still hitting the local high points, and the young couple who’d come to stay at the inn had left their bags in the parlor and gone out. We had the entire place to ourselves.

  Tinkie went to the computer and I began searching the bookcase. I needed to reread the note I’d found. I should have photographed it, but I’d never considered it was evidence of anything except a romantic tryst.

  “I’m going to make some coffee,” I told Tinkie.

  “Great idea.”

  The first thing I saw in the kitchen was the journal that had been on the parlor shelf. A ragged piece of paper was sticking out of it. I opened the flap. This was a different note, but the message was clear and explicit: “Stop chasing me or Darla will die. Go home to Zinnia.”

  I wordlessly took the note, using salad tongs, to Tinkie. She looked up at me, fear in her eyes. “Do you think Kathleen wrote this and that she would really hurt Darla?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m calling the police. We have to now.”

  “Wait!” Tinkie grabbed my arm. “You might get Darla killed. If it is Kathleen and she doesn’t want you and me investigating, she sure isn’t going to want the police.”

  “Damn.” I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. Even if I just consulted Coleman, he would feel obligated to call the police—and that could very well be the smart call. I just didn’t know what the best thing to do was. At last I came to a decision. “You’re right. We can’t call the law. What can we do?”

  “If we assume that this person, whether it is Kathleen or someone pretending to be her, has Darla, where might she be?”

  “What did you find on Kathleen’s background?”

  “I don’t think anything she told us was true. There doesn’t seem to be any record of Kathleen Beesley until the last three years, when she bought a house in Columbus.”