Southern Harm

by Caroline Fardig

  Brock wouldn’t meet our eyes.

  Portia said, “We have our theories, but Esther never told us she was going away that night. I assumed she kept it quiet because she didn’t want to run the risk of her parents finding out, because they would have put a stop to it. She had to hide a lot of things from them. If she wanted to stay out past eight, she had to sneak out. She hid her relationship with Brock from them for a year.”

  Delilah mulled this over for a moment, then said, “What happened that night? Did she disappear right after the graduation ceremony?”

  Portia shook her head sadly. “No. It had been the perfect evening—one we’d remember forever. A group of us went around and hit several of the graduation parties. We didn’t have a care in the world, and we had our whole lives ahead of us…or so we thought. Esther’s parents even extended her curfew all the way until ten P.M. so she could go out and have fun for once. A nice gesture, but we’d made plans to spend the night at my house. Her parents would never have known if she’d stayed out all night.” She frowned to herself. “In hindsight, I think she intended to use the sleepover at my house to buy herself the time to get away. At the last minute, she said she wasn’t feeling well and needed to go home. That was the last time I saw her.”

  What a bittersweet story. To have the time of their lives on graduation night, only to wake up the next day and find out your friend had left (or so you thought) without saying goodbye.

  I said, “I’m sure it goes without saying that I’d love to see Lela Heyward be exonerated. I know you said she was horrible to Esther, but…is there anything that would make you think Lela could be innocent in all this? You watched their interactions. Do you really believe Lela was angry enough at the time to have killed an eighteen-year-old girl and buried her in her backyard?”

  Brock stared grimly ahead. “I was a prosecutor before I turned to politics, and a defense lawyer before that. People are capable of much uglier things than you can imagine.”

  Delilah said, “I guess what we’re really asking is if Esther had any other enemies. If there’s a chance the police have the wrong woman.”

  Portia’s too-smooth forehead puckered just above her eyebrows. “While I’m confident in our city’s police force, I won’t sit here and say Esther had no enemies.”

  Brock interjected, “The Magnolias always had enemies.”

  “The Magnolias? Was she in some sort of club?” I asked.

  “Not exactly.” He sent a glimmer of a grin toward his wife. “There was this small group of popular girls who called themselves the Magnolias.”

  I found it rather egotistical that high school girls would bestow an actual name onto their little clique, but I didn’t share my feelings because I assumed Portia was one of those girls.

  Portia smiled ruefully, confirming my suspicions. “It’s true that we were the most popular girls in school. It came with jealousy on the part of other students…” Her face fell as she flicked her eyes downward. “Especially the ones we excluded. There were even teachers who seemed to be threatened by the sway some of us held with the other students. Plus, Esther was so very pretty. Everywhere she went, she caught men’s attention.”

  “Like the landscapers who were working next door?” I asked.

  Her jaw dropped. “Yes. Oh, they said some downright horrible things to us. Esther in particular. Honestly, I quit going over to Esther’s house because of them. They gave me the creeps.”

  “Did they seem predatory?”

  “Quite frankly, yes. I warned Esther to be careful around them.”

  I shot a look at my sister. Tucker had texted me earlier to let me know he’d gotten us a meeting with Mike McLeod later today to speak to him about his workers. This was looking like a promising lead.

  Brock stood suddenly and pasted on a smile. “As much as I’d love to spend my afternoon with you three lovely ladies, I should get back to work.” He leaned down and kissed his wife on the cheek. Giving us a wave, he walked away swiftly toward the front door before we could even say goodbye.

  I could feel the excitement rolling off Delilah. Portia’s candor had afforded us numerous avenues to explore, and I could tell my sister was chomping at the bit to get started.

  She said, “We should probably go, too. Thank you so much for this exquisite lunch, Portia. And especially for your support of our community theater. We couldn’t make it without you.”

  The three of us walked toward the front door.

  “Oh, go on,” Portia said, beaming. “It’s my pleasure. You know, I dabbled in theater in high school, but I was terrible at it! I enjoyed being up onstage, but it was always better if I didn’t have any lines. My best work was always as Townsperson Number Three.”

  Delilah smiled. “You know we’d be happy to have you onstage with us anytime.”

  “Why, I might have to take you up on that,” she said with a wink.

  I said, “Your meal was delicious. Thank you for inviting us. It was so nice to meet you, Portia.”

  When we got to the door, she stepped between us and laid a hand on each of our shoulders. “It was wonderful getting to know the two of you, and I would love to do this again sometime. If you would, please extend my condolences to your mother on the loss of Esther. The two of them were very close once upon a time. I’d love to tell her myself, but Dixie, she…might not remember me so fondly. We were friends once, but we had a bit of a falling out, I’m afraid. I…” She sighed. “Back in high school, I was less than kind to your mother. I was a snob, and I excluded her from my little clique.” She hung her head. “I did that to a lot of girls. I wish I could take it back, but you know how teenage girls are…dramatic, catty, fickle. I had the good fortune of being popular, but I used it to step on people rather than to build others up. I regret that more than anything.”

  I smiled. “That’s kind of you to say. We’ll be sure to pass it on to our mother. Thank you again.”

  On the way back to the truck, Delilah said, “How many mean girls do you know who grew an actual conscience after high school?”

  “I know, right? When does that happen?”

  “I think Portia will be a good resource going forward, but did you notice how antsy Brock got the more we talked about Esther?”

  “I did. He’s hiding something.”

  She wiggled her eyebrows at me. “And we’re going to find out what it is.”

  Chapter 16

  Delilah and I scurried to do our afternoon work after taking a long lunch. Once we were done, we holed up in my room armed with our mother’s yearbooks and a pad of paper.

  Deep in thought, Delilah murmured to herself, “Where to start…where to start?”

  “Brock, obviously.”

  “Well, yeah. We already knew that. Write him down.”

  I did as instructed.

  She began paging through the senior yearbook. “Portia said there were jealous girls who were excluded from their clique. We need to figure out who those girls were.”

  I frowned. “Um…I hate to say this, but…Mom was one of those excluded girls.”

  “Write her name down.”

  Staring at my sister, I said, “Write our mother’s name down on our list of people who had a good reason to kill Esther Sinclair?”

  “It sounds bad when you say it that way.”

  “That’s what I’m getting at.”

  D shook her head. “Okay, maybe we make two lists. One of people to interview, and one of possible suspects.”

  “I can live with that.” I turned to the next page and put Mom’s name on an interview list. “Who else?”

  She pointed to the page she was studying. “We could talk to her brother, Ezra. She might have confided in him about something.”

  I wrote his name down on the interview page. “We’ll have to go easy with that one. He only laid his siste
r to rest a couple of days ago.”

  “True. So who else was in the clique with Portia and Esther? What did Brock call them?”

  “The Magnolias.” I took the yearbook from her and shuffled through until I found one of the photos I was looking for. Showing it to D, I said, “This girl, Coralee Avery, shows up a lot with them. More than anyone else. I’d assume it’s her. If Mom would talk to us…”

  Delilah got out her phone. “I’m calling her.”

  “Maybe we should wait and talk in person—”

  She held up her hand to shush me, but then her shoulders slumped and she threw her phone on the bed. “She didn’t pick up. You try.”

  I got out my phone and called our mother’s number. She didn’t text. All she had was an ancient flip phone, so it would take her several minutes to send a simple message. My call went to voicemail, but I didn’t leave a message.

  Delilah shrugged. “Guess we’ll try again later.” Taking the yearbook back from me, she said, “Put that Coralee person on the interview list. We’ll verify if she’s a Magnolia later.” After a pause, she added, “Odd that Portia brought up teachers as people who had it out for Esther because of her popularity.”

  “Maybe she was a difficult student. You never know. It’s possible she didn’t do well with authority. She certainly didn’t respect her parents’ rules.”

  “Her parents’ rules were stupid.”

  I smiled. My sister was always breaking the rules, which would get her into major trouble with Papa Sal and Grandmama Hattie. She never meant any harm; she just marched to the beat of her own drummer.

  “Considering how Esther met her fate, I think they may have been on to something.”

  Her eyes widened. “Wait. Do you think they knew she was in danger?”

  I thought for a moment before responding. “I don’t know—it sounded like those rules were already in place long before Esther’s death.”

  “We really need to talk to her parents.”

  “I agree, but I think we need to give them more time to grieve before we bother them. Or maybe there’s another relative we could find who is a little further removed.”

  She nodded. “That brings us back to needing to talk to her brother, though, to find out who her other relatives were. They weren’t named in the obit.”

  My phone rang. It was Tucker. “Hey,” I said, hoping he was in a better frame of mind today.

  “Hey, yourself. Ready to go see Mike McLeod? I can pick you up in a few minutes.”

  I cradled the phone against my chest to mute the sound. “D, can you take care of check-in so I can go with Tucker to meet with the landscape contractor?”

  She hopped up. “Of course! Get out there, you two.”

  I smiled and said into the phone, “I’m ready anytime.”

  * * *

  —

  I got into Tucker’s truck and was met with a sweet kiss and an apologetic smile. “I realize last night I wasn’t the best company.”

  “You’re always good company, Tucker. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. It’s okay to be upset. There’d be something wrong with you if you weren’t.”

  “I appreciate that. But still…”

  “No buts, and no more apologies, mister. Now, let’s go. We’re burning daylight.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  We talked happily as he drove, his spirits higher than I’d seen them in a while. I hoped he hadn’t been stressing over not being a great companion for me. I never wanted him to feel like he had to put his true feelings aside where I was concerned. However, I did keep the conversation light, refraining from giving him a rundown of what we’d learned over lunch with the Sheridans.

  We came to a big gravel lot with pile after pile of different kinds of rock and mulch. The sign at the entrance read, mcleod landscape, and the office was a trailer that sat off to the side. We knocked on the door and were greeted by an older gentleman who shook our hands heartily as Tucker made introductions.

  “Come on in,” Mike McLeod said. He led us past an empty desk with a nameplate that read jennifer mcleod. Seemed like a family business. He ushered us into his office and shut the door, offering us the two seats facing his desk. “What can I do for you folks? Tucker, you mentioned a job I did for your aunt and uncle back in the eighties?”

  Tucker nodded. “I know it’s been a long time, and you probably don’t remember the job well, but—”

  Mike cleared his throat. “As it happens, I do remember the job. Your uncle and I went round and round about the final cost. And the police came out last week to talk to me about the very same job.”

  Tucker frowned. “I see. I’m sorry to hear that my former uncle gave you trouble, but I can’t say I’m particularly surprised. As for the police, well, I guess we’re going to be barking up the same tree. They’ve arrested my aunt Lela for Esther Sinclair’s murder.”

  Shaking his head, Mike said, “I heard about it on the news. I’m sorry to hear of Lela’s incarceration. She’s a good woman.”

  “Thank you for saying that. It’s actually why we’re here. We hoped you or your employees who worked on the job would have some kind of information that could prove Lela’s innocence. They were around her house day in and day out during the time frame the police believe Esther died. I guess we’re grasping at straws here, hoping they might have seen something that could help her case.”

  A news story came out a few days ago detailing the coroner’s report. He was able to determine from Esther’s bones that she had to have been roughly around eighteen at the time of her death, so the police believed she was killed at the time she disappeared and never actually left town.

  Mike smiled halfheartedly and pulled a file from a stack on his desk. “I don’t know if I can give you anything that will help you, but I’m happy to tell you what I told the police. Good thing I’m a pack rat and a stickler for paperwork. I’ve kept every invoice for the past thirty-eight years.”

  Tucker whistled. “Wow. I’m impressed.”

  “Some grumbly detective wanted to take my file as evidence. I gave it to him, but not before I made a copy for myself. Like I said, I like to keep my paperwork. Never know when you’re going to need it.”

  I smiled at Tucker. I hoped this would be what we needed.

  Mike put some reading glasses on and flipped through the file. “Looks like we started the job on May twenty-second and finished it on June tenth. We repaired flowerbeds and replaced plants, re-graded the yard, laid sod, and re-mulched the flowerbeds.”

  Tucker seemed deep in thought. He asked, “When was the grading done?”

  Mike shuffled a few papers. “Looks like it was done on the twenty-second. First thing.”

  “And when was the sod laid?”

  “It was delivered on June second, so it should have gone down either that day or the next at the latest.”

  I said, “Graduation was May thirtieth, a Friday.”

  Tucker finished my thought. “Which means she was probably buried between then and the second of June, sometime that weekend. According to Lela, the minute that sod went down, she was out there every day, watering and taking care of it. She would have known if her new yard had been disturbed.”

  Mike nodded. “No way you could dig a whole grave by hand and get that ground back in perfectly level condition under the sod. Not to mention, even if you were careful, there’d be clumps of dirt everywhere, plus you’d have to find a way to cart off the excess. I bet you whoever did it dug the hole and then spread the extra dirt back out into the yard. We started the repairs on the flowerbeds after the grading, so the yard would have been a mess of footprints and discarded soil. A patch of roughed-up ground wouldn’t have been a big deal at that point. Just before the sod went down, they would have raked the yard by hand to smooth the dirt out again.”

  Tucker shi
fted in his seat. “So you think no one would have noticed if a body had been buried out there one night? As long as it had been decently covered up?”

  “Probably not. But that’s just my opinion. I wasn’t on the job site. I can give you the names of some of the guys who were, though.”

  I said, “I don’t mean to be impertinent, but did you ever get any complaints of any of your workers taking a particular interest in Esther Sinclair?”

  Mike frowned and dove further into the file. “Yes, in fact, the police asked that very question. And we did get a complaint. It was from Ada Sinclair, Esther’s mother. She caught one of the guys flirting with her daughter and called me immediately. Gave me a tongue-lashing you wouldn’t believe. Evidently gave him one, too.”

  “Who was the man in question?”

  He turned around to the copier behind him and made a photocopy of one of the papers in his file. He circled a name on it and handed it across his desk to me. “Zack Robinson. I fired him on the spot.”

  Hmm. A disgruntled, newly fired man with an eye on pretty little Esther, who’d been warned by her mother and his boss to leave her alone. If he wanted to take his frustration out on someone (or assert some kind of power he felt had been taken from him), Esther might have been the perfect candidate. He even knew of a ready-made gravesite.

  I shivered involuntarily.

  Mike went on, “Can’t guarantee they’re still around these parts, though. As I’m sure you know, there’s high turnover in the construction business.”

  Tucker smiled. “Very true. But we’ll take anything we can get.”

  Chapter 17

  We left McLeod Landscape armed with the names of the three employees who’d worked on Lela and Beau’s backyard project. Tucker had more work to do, so he dropped me off at the B&B with the promise to return later to help us track down current contact information for these men. I found Delilah at the check-in desk looking none too pleased.