The Ugly Truth

by Jill Orr

  I knew little about their other son, Thomas, except that he lived out of state and had been estranged from his parents for some time. Whenever anyone around town mentioned him, it was always in a whisper, like how people say “cancer” or “herpes” or, in some circles, “liberal.” Mom told me she had actually known Thomas Campbell back in school and said that while he was smart and charming, he’d made a series of bad decisions that had landed him in various rehab centers for various addictions that always seemed to result in various relapses. He was currently serving a three-year sentence in Dillwyn Correctional Center for “credit card fraud.”

  This Ashley character—or Ash, as Eudora said was common parlance—was Thomas’s son, and although he was born in Tuttle, his mother moved the family to Texas after the divorce some twenty-odd years ago. That would explain why I’d never seen him before. He was just a couple of years older than me and had recently graduated from law school. Mrs. Winterthorne said Patricia had begged her only grandson to come help run the business until Franklin was back on his feet. As hard as it was for me to believe the guy I’d met could do anything nice for anybody, I guess he had agreed.

  I plunked myself down in the chair across from Will Holman, my co-worker and mentor at the paper, and told him the new information about Franklin and his heir apparent.

  “So you didn’t ask him if anyone had come to claim Balzichek’s body yet?”

  “Didn’t you hear my story?” I said. “He wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “BZZT!” A brash sound erupted from Holman’s lips.

  I flinched. “What was that?”

  “BZ—”

  “—I heard you,” I said, stopping him. “I was just wondering why on earth you would make that sound.”

  “Oh.” He blinked. “I was simulating the sound of a game show buzzer to illustrate your answer was incorrect.”

  “It was not incorrect. Ash wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “BZZT!” Holman did it again. “He talked to you quite a bit. He said that they were closed, that he was fine, that you were trespassing…”

  “You know what I meant.”

  Holman gave me one of his blank stares that indicated he did not, in fact, know any such thing.

  “He tried to lock me inside a funeral home!”

  I saw him start to curl his lips inward again, and I held up my hand. “So help me if you make that sound again, Will Holman, I will get up and leave this office.”

  He shrugged, looking mildly offended. “I thought you said you got out by simply turning the deadbolt?”

  “I did, but—”

  “Then he didn’t lock you in.”

  At times Holman’s logical brain was simply maddening. “Anyway,” I said. “He’s difficult. I’ll have to try to talk to someone else at Campbell & Sons later. Carl said that if they can’t locate Balzichek’s next of kin or get anyone to claim the body in the next couple of days, he’ll likely be cremated and his remains kept in a four-by-six-inch box on a shelf in the sheriff’s office basement. Seems so bleak, even for a guy like Balzichek.”

  “Ironic.” Holman typed something into his laptop and twisted it around to show me. “Greer Mountbatten got quite a different farewell. This was in the Washington Journal yesterday.”

  On the screen was a picture of a large crowd of mourners, an understated sea of black, navy, and camel-colored wool coats, streaming out of a grand-looking church I recognized from TV. The headline read, “Hundreds Gather to Mourn Shocking Death of Socialite.” I scanned the article and saw all the sordid details were there….

  Two weeks ago the car of Greer Mountbatten, wife of prominent Washington, DC, lobbyist Dale Mountbatten, was found abandoned and covered in blood just inside Tuttle County. The next day, a jogger discovered Greer’s body lying facedown in the tall grass of Riverside Park along the bank of the James River. She had been killed by a blow to the head. It was a shockingly brutal crime against a woman of Greer’s blue blood pedigree, and made even more shocking by the surrounding circumstances.

  About two weeks before Greer’s body was found, someone had thrown a sledgehammer through the window of Rosalee’s Tavern in downtown Tuttle Corner. I know this because the sledgehammer in question almost killed me. I’d been in Rosalee’s at the time with my (regrettably) ex-boyfriend, Jay. Justin Balzichek was eventually arrested for the vandalism, but he swore up and down that he’d been hired to do it by Greer Mountbatten. There were rumors around town that Rosalee, who used to be the Mountbattens’ au pair, had been having a years-long affair with Dale. In exchange for a lighter sentence, Balzichek agreed to testify that Greer hired him in order to send a message to Rosalee to leave her husband alone.

  However, before anyone could question Greer, she went missing—and later was found dead. And then in a twist right out of an episode of Law & Order, two days after that, Justin Balzichek was also found dead, his body lying facedown at the entrance of Sterns cemetery in Tuttle Corner. The sheriff’s department has not released how Balzichek died, but the running bet in the newsroom was that he had been hit over the head just like Greer had.

  The weird part is that no one had been able to find Rosalee since then. And while many of us worried for her safety—after all, Greer Mountbatten was dead, Justin Balzichek was dead, it wouldn’t be crazy to think that Rosalee might have met the same fate—Rosalee was being treated by the press more like a potential suspect than a potential victim. Her enigmatic air and good looks, combined with the juicy story about an affair with a powerful man, had elevated her to femme fatale status, and the press couldn’t get enough of the story.

  “If we could just find Rosalee, maybe she could shed some light on all of this…” I twisted a strand of my hair between my index and middle fingers. “Do you think she’s okay?”

  Holman and I had had this conversation at least half a dozen times in the days since Rosalee disappeared, and my mind was split between two bad options: Either Rosalee was in danger, or she was the cause of it. A third option was that she was scared for her life and simply decided to go on the run. But if that were the case, why not go to the sheriff? No one had seen or talked to her since Balzichek’s body was discovered, and even I had to admit that it looked a teensy bit more like she ran away than like she was in trouble. For starters, she’d left her cats in a crate outside of her café manager/cook Melvin’s front door with a note saying, “Please take care of them while I’m gone.” For another thing, when the sheriff went to talk to her at the Tavern the morning they found Balzichek, he found the door locked up tight with a note addressed to the staff letting them know about the schedule of deliveries and specials for the upcoming week. Planning out Wednesday’s Quiche Lorraine with leafy green salad didn’t sound like the act of a woman afraid for her life.

  “My gut tells me Rosalee is okay,” Holman said, bouncing slightly on his ergonomic exercise ball chair. “She’s obviously mixed up in all of this somehow, but it’s too early to know exactly how. We need more information. I’m working a couple of sources and hoping they’ll give me something we can use.”

  “Any more on Dale Mountbatten?” I asked, nodding to the article still up on Holman’s laptop.

  When a woman is violently murdered for no apparent reason, all eyes turn to the husband. This case had been no exception, but so far Greer’s husband seemed as shocked and distraught as you’d expect an innocent husband to be. Friends and family who’d been interviewed said as far as they knew the couple was happily married. Plus, Dale had an airtight alibi for the time his wife was killed: He was giving an interview in the studio at the NPR affiliate in Manhattan.

  Holman shook his head. “Nothing new. He admits to the affair but says it ended a long time ago,” he read off the screen.

  “What about her family? Doesn’t she come from money?” If love gone wrong was the number one motive for murder, money had to be number two.

  “Yes,” Holman said. “Her father has made a fortune in oil and gas, but according to his lawyer, Dale
signed a prenuptial agreement stipulating he is not entitled to any of her family money.”

  “Does she have any siblings? Could there be bad blood there?”

  “One sister, Hadley Lawrence of Charleston, South Carolina.” Holman scanned the article. “She’s quoted saying she is heartbroken and that ‘Greer had the perfect life.’ She says she can’t understand why anyone would have wanted to hurt her.”

  I checked the time on my phone. “The press briefing starts at ten, do you want to come with?” I said, standing to leave.

  “No thanks.”

  “Are you working on your Sterns book?” I asked. Holman had started research for a book he planned to write about a local historical site called the Sterns Smallpox Graveyard. Back in the late 1700s, a medical doctor by the name of Josiah Sterns bought a plot of land to bury all of his patients who died of smallpox. He claimed it would help stop the spread of the pox, which had wiped out half the town. Eventually, the Campbell family bought the graveyard and expanded it. However, the good people of Tuttle Corner didn’t want to be buried in a smallpox cemetery, so someone had come up with the bright idea to cordon off the victims of smallpox with a copper fence to separate the contaminated dead from the uncontaminated dead. It was actually listed on the historic register of Tuttle County. I’m not sure when people started joking about it, but it was an oft-used threat by parents to their misbehaving kids or wives to their misbehaving husbands that if they didn’t straighten up, they’d have them buried “in the Sterns Copper.” Strange, because it wasn’t even a good threat. Obviously, you can’t get smallpox if you’re already dead. But anyway, it was one of those Tuttle colloquialisms that was braided into the fabric of our town. And Holman was fascinated by all things historical.

  “No, Kay gave me a new investigative piece to look into.”

  “Oh yeah?” I asked, surprised I hadn’t heard about it.

  “Stormer Windows. They have a couple hundred complaints through the BBB for shoddy workmanship, baitand-switch selling tactics, and possible tax fraud.”

  “Sounds like a real pane,” I said with a wink. When Holman didn’t react, I added, “Get it? A pane—like a windowpane?”

  Holman raised his eyes, which looked about three times larger than normal through his thick lenses. His face was an implacable façade of stony indifference. “I got it. It was a pun.” Then he blinked at me, owl-like, and went back to what he was doing.

  I thought about arguing that my joke was at least worthy of a chuckle, but thought better of it. I knew Holman was nothing if not literal; besides, I had never seen him chuckle before. He often smiled and occasionally laughed, but a chuckle just wasn’t in Holman’s wheelhouse.

  “All right, well, good luck with the window people!”

  He made a noncommittal noise as I left his office. I grabbed my bag off the back of my chair and started toward the front door of the newsroom. Before I walked out, however, I ditched into Flick’s office to see if he was in yet.

  Hal Flick was in his early seventies and was the obituaries editor for the Times, which meant he didn’t work a full-time schedule. He’d earned the right, as back in the day he’d been a hard-hitting reporter, covering everything from foreign wars to Watergate to the Iran-Contra scandal. That was how he met and became rivals, then later best friends, with my beloved granddaddy. They’d worked at the same paper up in Washington, DC, for years and then both settled into the downslope of their careers here in Tuttle Corner.

  It had been almost six years since Granddad died under what I believed were suspicious circumstances, and not a day went by that I didn’t think of him. At first, Flick refused to listen to my theory that Granddaddy hadn’t committed suicide like the police report said, but since I’d started working at the paper with him, it seemed like he was finally coming around. In fact, he had recently been looking into some things about Granddaddy’s death but kept saying he wasn’t quite ready to share the information with me yet. I’d hoped that today (like I did every day) might be the day he decided to let me in on it. I texted him to let him know about the press conference and asked him to meet me there as I headed for the door.

  “Where are you off to in such a hurry?” Gerlach Spencer, my least favorite colleague at the paper, said as I walked past his desk. “Is there a shoe sale somewhere?” He laughed and reached over to high-five his cubicle-mate, Bruce Henderson.

  I looked down at my red Chuck Taylors, the same shoes I’d worn nearly every day since I started working at the Times, and then back up at each of them. “Seriously? A shoe sale? That’s the best you could come up with?”

  “Oh relax,” Spencer said. “I’m just giving you shit, kiddo.”

  “Actually, I think what you were trying to do was to degrade me by suggesting that as a young woman the only thing that could possibly motivate me would be some sort of trivial retail event. And furthermore, I think you tacked on the ‘kiddo’ to the end of your quasi-misogynist insult to seal the deal.”

  With anyone else I might have let the comment slide, but I’d had enough of these sorts of interactions with stupid Spencer over the past few months to know calling him out was the only way I’d ever get him to stop. My usual policy of polite-or-die just did not get it done with Gerlach Spencer.

  His fleshy face reddened as his eyes slid over to see Henderson’s reaction, which basically was restrained laughter. At least Henderson was an equal-opportunity douchebag.

  “Geez, who peed in your Cheerios?” Spencer sniped at me—or rather to my back—as I walked out the door with a little extra spring in my step.

  CHAPTER 3

  I was halfway to the courthouse when my mom called. “Honey? Is that you?”

  This was how ninety percent of my conversations with my mother started. “Yeah, it’s me, Mom. You called my phone, who else would it be?”

  “Oh right,” she said with a laugh. “Okay, well I just wanted to report that I finally did it!”

  “Did what?” I could see the crowd of reporters gathering up ahead.

  “I took your advice and signed up for that Uber thingy you were telling me about. I thought it’d be good for when we’re out on the road and don’t want to take the tour bus around locally. It can be so hard to park, you know.”

  My mom and dad made up the two-person band The Rainbow Connection and traveled regionally playing for kids at libraries, schools, churches, state fairs, etc. As the quintessential aging hippies that they were, they’d bought a VW van a few years back and referred to it as their “tour bus.”

  “Good for you.” I’d been trying to get Mom and Dad into the twenty-first century with technology and thought Uber would be an easy way to start. Plus, it’d cut down on the number of notes my dad had to leave on people’s windshields apologizing for tapping their bumpers.

  “I just downloaded the app, like you said—but boy howdy, did they want a lot of information! My credit card number, my birth date, my address, my social security number, my driver’s license number, whether or not I’ve ever been convicted of a felony—”

  Uh-oh.

  “—they even needed to know the make and model of my vehicle! It took forever to fill out that sign-up thingy, and all from my phone, too. You know I have trouble sometimes toggling between the number keyboard and the letter one—”

  “Mom—” I said, trying to get a word in.

  “—they asked about past speeding tickets, moving violations, driving under the influence, for the love of Pete—and then there was the background check!”

  “Um, Mom?”

  “—I mean, I understand you can’t be too careful these days, but a background check seemed a bridge too far, if you know what I mean. Then again, I know I need to get with the times, so I did it and—”

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Mom,” I said, stopping her. “I think you might have signed up to be an Uber driver.”

  “Oh.” She paused. “Well, now that you say that, that actually makes sense. I thought it was a little strang
e that the next day I got a notification from some lady who needed a ride to the Piggly Wiggly over in West Bay.”

  That did it; I busted out laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” I said, trying to get control of myself. “Sorry. Whatd’you do?”

  “What did I do?” she asked as if I was insane. “I gave her a ride, of course!”

  “You did not—” I was laughing so hard, people around me were starting to stare.

  “I just thought it was like a co-op or something. Give a ride, get a ride,” she continued, sounding somewhere between confused and resigned. “I don’t know why you think this is so funny, Riley.”

  “No reason.” I forced myself to gain control. I didn’t want to offend the poor woman. “It’s just that most people sign up to get rides, not to be drivers, that’s all. I should have mentioned that. I’ll come by the house later and fix it for you.”

  “Fix what?”

  “Fix it so you’re not a driver.”

  There was another pause. “Oh, that’s okay.”

  “No really, it’ll take two seconds.”

  “I think I’ll just leave it.”

  “But people are going to keep bugging you for rides.”

  “I really don’t mind,” she said. “It actually kind of reminds me of when you were little and needed me to drive you all over creation…and I’ve already met several interesting people!”

  My mother had fallen ass-backward into a career as an Uber driver. I was dying. Dying. “How many rides have you given?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, maybe eight? And I have a perfect five-star rating, I’ll have you know.”

  When I was finally able to stop laughing, I said, “I wouldn’t expect anything less, Mom.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The front steps of the courthouse were already packed with reporters. Since I worked for the only local newspaper in Tuttle County, I knew that everyone there was from someplace else. Then again, I could tell that just by looking at them. As I scanned the hordes of people buzzing around, holding camera equipment, phones, and notebooks, I didn’t see a single familiar face. That simply didn’t happen in Tuttle. If there was a gathering of more than five people in one spot in town, it was a guarantee I’d know at least two of them—if not by name, then certainly by sight. I was born and raised here, as were my parents and my grandparents, and while I didn’t know everyone in town personally, there weren’t that many faces I hadn’t seen before. Besides, the preponderance of coffee cups from McDonald’s was a dead giveaway, as the closest McDonald’s was seven miles up I-95. The locals got their coffee at Landry’s.