Murder at Mabel's Motel

by G. A. McKevett

  “It’s about the Holocaust.”

  Her answer surprised everyone at the table, including Stella. The book’s cover was simple, just plain, red cloth with no dust jacket to reveal what was inside. Stella had surmised it was one of Savannah’s detective novels.

  “The Holocaust?” Manny said. “That’s some heavy reading.”

  “Very,” was Savannah’s reply.

  “Why are you readin’ somethin’ like that?” Stella asked, wondering if the book contained the most chilling and graphic details about that horrible event. She hoped not, for her granddaughter’s sake.

  “Because I wanted to know what the big deal was about the Nazis.” Savannah looked up from her reading for a moment, and Stella saw, reflected in her granddaughter’s eyes, the same sickening awareness that she had felt when she had first studied the subject, so many years ago.

  Stella remembered, all too well, when she was a teenager, how learning about the Holocaust had changed her. Changed her to the marrow of her soul.

  Finding out the depths of evil that human beings were capable of doing to each other had caused the young Stella to lose her respect for mankind. Having read the heartbreaking accounts, having seen the devastating pictures, Stella had never felt completely safe in the world again.

  She had hoped her grandchildren would be spared that experience, at least until they were a bit older.

  But Savannah had always been a precocious child, so eager to learn and absorb all the world had to offer.

  In this case . . . unfortunately.

  “So, what have you learned about the Nazis?” Manny asked.

  “Enough to know that Billy Ray and his friends are stupid and meaner than mean to think they were good guys. They were horrible.” She slammed the book closed. “How could anything like that even happen? How could anyone ever read these things, see these pictures, and then say it never happened, or if it did, it was a good thing?”

  “You never will understand it, child,” Stella said. “You could think about it ever’ minute of ever’ day for the rest of your life, and you wouldn’t understand. You can’t, because it’s just not in you to think that way. You’re not made like that.”

  “No, I’m not! I would die, literally die, to keep something like that from happening!”

  “A lot of soldiers did,” Manny told her. “In fact, some of them are buried right here in our cemetery in McGill.”

  “I wonder if people who are alive now would be brave enough to do that,” Savannah said, “to die to stop something like that from happening.”

  “I wonder that myself,” Elsie admitted. “Seems like folks won’t even speak up against that kind of thing anymore, for fear they might offend somebody, or ’cause someone else might not like them. That’s a long, long way from being brave enough to die to stop the powers of evil.”

  “There better be people like that left in the world,” Stella said. “ ’Cause it’ll show up again. Evil don’t stay buried. It always rises up again, sometime, somewhere, and if there’s not good, strong, brave people there to force it back down into its grave . . . heaven help us all.”

  * * *

  A half hour later, Manny stood up from the table, stretched his long arms and legs, and said, “I’d best be going. That motel bathroom isn’t going to check itself.”

  At first, Stella felt an overwhelming urge to ask if Manny would like some help with the motel, but one thought of her precious Alma lying in her bed in the other room just home from the hospital and Stella wondered what was wrong with her.

  This was why she had to watch how involved she got with Sheriff Manny Gilford. She found both him and the life he led far too exciting. At least, too exciting and tempting for a woman with seven . . . soon to be eight . . . children to raise.

  There was a momentary silence, as though Manny was waiting for her to invite herself.

  Elsie, always the mind reader, filled in the blank. “Why don’t you go with him, Stella? He could probably use a hand. The children are all in bed but Savannah, and I’d be happy to visit with her till you get back.”

  Stella looked up at Manny. She could see in his eyes that he wanted her to go with him. After all, Elsie had said it was okay.

  “But Alma . . .”

  “Alma’s asleep and will probably stay that way for the rest of the night. She won’t even know you’re gone.”

  For a moment, Stella almost agreed. But at the last second, she thought of how she’d felt and the promises she’d made there in that chapel. Vows that she would never let anyone or anything distract her from her true calling in life, raising her grandchildren.

  “I’d better stick around,” she told Manny. “If you think you’ll be okay over there on your own.”

  Manny grinned. Of course he would be okay, she reminded herself. He appeared to enjoy her company, but he’d been the sheriff his entire adulthood without the assistance of Stella Reid. She realized she was being a bit conceited to think he actually needed her.

  “I’ll be fine, Stella,” he said. “I doubt I’ll find anything. From what I hear hydrogen cyanide is either pale blue or colorless. I don’t know how I expect to actually see it. But I have to try.”

  “Hydrogen cyanide?” Savannah asked, suddenly very interested in the conversation. “Why will you be looking for hydrogen cyanide?”

  “Seems that’s what killed Billy Ray. He breathed it in and that was the end of him.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” she said, grabbing her book and flipping the pages as fast as she could, searching for something. “That’s what they used in the gas chambers in the death camps. The Nazis used hydrogen cyanide to kill all those people!”

  “I think you’re mistaken, darlin’,” Stella said. “I believe it was something called Zyklon B. Terrible stuff, it was, too.”

  Savannah had found what she was looking for and showed it to Manny, pointing to the passage on the page. “See, Sheriff. Granny’s right, but I am, too. Hydrogen cyanide and Zyklon B—they’re the same thing. It’s the stuff that came from the ceilings of those fake showers and killed all those poor people.”

  “Wow!” Elsie said. “Sounds like the murderer wanted Billy Ray to get a dose of the evil he was crowin’ about all the time.”

  Savannah nodded, tapping her finger on the page. “It’s right there. It tells how awful it was. Elsie’s right! The killer wanted Billy Ray to suffer like they did. Exactly like they did!”

  Stella felt an excitement welling up in her, but it was quickly doused when she heard herself saying, “But that don’t get us any closer to who done it. Ever’body knew what kind of hateful nonsense he was spoutin’.” She turned to Manny. “Like we said in the car, Earle and Deacon couldn’t pour water outta a boot if the directions were written on the heel, which rules them out, ’cause it’d take a bit of smarts to handle nasty junk like that and not kill yourself.”

  Manny nodded. “So, that brings us back to either Raul, who, as a farmer, could get his hands on that stuff. Or Franklin, who probably knows more about chemicals and how they can kill than you or I ever will.”

  “Or it’s somebody else in town,” Elsie said, “who Billy Ray hurt or offended. Somebody you ain’t even thought of yet.”

  Manny shook his finger at Elsie and gave her a grin that caused her to giggle. “That will be quite enough out of you, young lady,” he told her. “I can think up plenty of depressing thoughts all on my own. I don’t need help from the likes of you!”

  With both Savannah and Elsie wishing him good luck, Manny headed for the front door, and Stella walked him out onto the porch.

  “Thank you again for bringing Alma and me home today. Nobody else would’ve put up with those balloons.”

  “That’s for sure.” He laughed. “I’ll call you tomorrow morning and tell you if I found anything over there.”

  “You will not,” she said.

  “Oh, okay. Of course you’d like to sleep in, after the last few days you’ve had.”

  “I�
�ll not be sleeping in. But I don’t want you to call me tomorrow morning. I want you to drop by here on your way home tonight and tell me what you found.”

  “You’ll be up?”

  “I won’t sleep a wink until I know.”

  Chapter 27

  Stella, Elsie, and Savannah sat in the living room, chatting about the new baby, what clothes and supplies they had or would need to get. The conversation was light, joyful, and companionable as the three females shared what it would mean to them to have a baby in the house.

  “I just want to touch its little cheek,” Elsie said. “There’s nothing softer on earth than the feel of a newborn’s skin . . . except maybe that of a very old person. Seems our skin’s the softest when we first enter the world and then again when we’re about to leave it.”

  “I just want to sit and hold it for hours at a time.” Stella smiled, feeling her entire body relax at the thought. “There ain’t nothin’ more peaceful in the whole world than sittin’ and holdin’ a baby and listenin’ to it breathe.”

  “I want to stick out my finger and feel the baby wrap its little hand around it,” Savannah told them. “That’s about the sweetest thing they do, I believe. It’s like they trust you, even when they’re just itty-bitty. Like they love you and want to hang on to you.”

  “I’ll be happy with whatever it is, but I hope it’s a boy,” Stella admitted. “Poor Waycross is so outnumbered in this family. He’d be tickled to death to have a little brother.”

  Savannah grimaced. “Just what we need, another boy to help him put frogs in us girls’ underwear drawer.”

  The women laughed and continued their baby daydreaming, but all three kept sneaking furtive looks out the front window. They might be talking about infants, but they were all wondering about murder.

  Stella kept an eye on the clock. Manny had only about two miles to travel to the motel. So, the driving part of the trip would have been less than five minutes round-trip.

  He had been gone forty-eight minutes, so she figured he must have found something.

  It wouldn’t take forty-three minutes to find nothin’, she told herself, as her excitement built by the minute.

  She tried not to be too hopeful. After all, both she and Manny had scoured that room twice, looking for anything out of the ordinary, and had discovered nothing unusual inside the bathroom but Billy Ray’s dead body. It wasn’t logical to think that Manny would happen to discover a poisonous gas lurking about. Anything vaporous was bound to be long gone, probably even before they had first opened the bathroom door.

  Suddenly, Stella recalled that her eyes had burned a bit and her throat had felt sore when they had been gathering evidence from the motel room. She wondered if it might have been caused by the same substance that had killed Billy Ray.

  Quite a sobering thought.

  “Do you think this baby will have black hair, like the others,” Elsie was saying, “or red curls, like your Art and little Waycross?”

  Stella opened her mouth to answer but caught a glimpse of Manny’s cruiser turning off the highway and heading up her dirt road.

  “He’s back!” she announced, jumping up from the couch and heading to the door.

  Elsie and Savannah followed her out onto the porch, then down the stairs, just as the vehicle pulled up and stopped nearby.

  The three women ran around the car to the driver’s door, and Savannah yanked it open. “Well, Sheriff?” she said. “Did you find something? We’ve been dying in there, talking about babies, but wondering about you.”

  Manny chuckled as he stepped out of the cruiser, then shut the door behind him. “I always thought I was the nosiest person in McGill, but you three have got me beat by a mile.”

  “Not nosey. Curious,” Savannah said. “Rabidly curious, that’s all.”

  Manny reached over and tweaked her chin. “That’s why you’ll make an amazing police officer someday, Savannah. A detective, I’m sure.”

  Stella grinned, watching her granddaughter beam with joy at his compliments.

  Manny was so good with Savannah. With all the kids.

  Okay, he’s good with all of us, she admitted to herself.

  She looked him up and down and, even by the dim porchlight, she could see that his usually spotless and perfectly pressed uniform was wrinkled and covered with dirt and cobwebs.

  “Where have you been, boy?” she asked. “Crawlin’ around in a swamp somewhere?”

  “Nope, but just about as bad.”

  “I’ll say. You’ll never get all the grit outta that uniform,” Elsie told him. “You couldn’t get that clean on a washboard.”

  “Hey, I don’t mind going home at the end of the day with some dirt on me. As long as it’s not blood. Mine, anyway.”

  Savannah started to jump up and down like an excited child wanting to open gifts on Christmas morning. “I’m dying here, Sheriff. Tell us what you found!”

  “I’ll do better than that. I’ll show you.”

  As he walked them to the back of the car and stuck his key into the trunk lock, he said, “I checked the bathroom again, like we did the other two times, Stella. But just like before, I couldn’t find a thing. Then, Miss Savannah, I remembered what you said about how the Nazis released the gas from the ceilings of those fake showers. So, I looked up.”

  “I already looked up in that bathroom,” Stella said. “It’s just one of those old foam tile ceilings.”

  “Tiles that can easily be removed or slid aside from above.”

  “Bingo!” Elsie said. “Now we know how you got so dirty. You were crawling around up there in the attic!”

  “I was,” Manny said, opening the trunk, “and that’s where I found them.”

  “Them?” Savannah tried to look over his shoulder as he bent down into the trunk and pulled out a cardboard box.

  “Yes, and I’m going to show them to you. But I don’t want you to get too close to them, because I don’t know exactly what they are or if they’re still dangerous.”

  He carefully opened the lid of the box, took his flashlight from his service belt, turned it on, and shone its beam inside.

  “I picked my way—carefully, I assure you—across the beams in the ceiling of that attic. Right below were those foam tiles and the flimsy frames that hold them up. Finally, I got over the number five motel room, then its bathroom.”

  “And?” Savannah poked his ribs with her forefinger.

  “And these four things were lying on top of one of the tiles that makes up the corner of the bathroom ceiling,” he said.

  First, he directed the beam of the flashlight on an opaque, white glass bottle with a label on it that read “Sulfuric Acid.” Then he moved the light so they could see a dark amber bottle, which was marked as “Potassium Cyanide Crystals.”

  “I’m not sure what those are,” Stella said, “but with wicked-sounding names like that, I sure wouldn’t put ’em in a cake I was bakin’.”

  “That’s good to hear, since I frequently eat at your house,” Manny told her.

  Next, he illuminated something that reminded Stella of a homemade cheese strainer bag, a bundle made of cheesecloth and tied with a string around the top.

  A smell emanated from it that was familiar, but not pleasant. It was what Stella had briefly smelled when they had first opened the bathroom door.

  “I remember that,” she said. “It’s the smell of almonds. Like the almond extract I bake with sometimes, only not nice. Bitter.”

  “They say that’s what the stuff they used in the gas chambers smelled like,” Savannah said, looking like she might be sick, as she put her hand over her lower face. “I don’t even want it in my nose. I can’t stand to think this is what they were smelling as they . . .”

  The four of them stood there in the dark, thinking of the victims, even though it pained their souls to do so.

  “We have to think about them, Savannah honey,” Stella said, putting her arms around her granddaughter’s waist and drawing her near. “T
hey had to suffer having it done to them. We can at least honor them by remembering, never forgetting, making sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  Savannah said nothing. She just sniffed, nodded, and wiped some tears away with the back of her hand.

  Manny moved the flashlight once more. This time it was a mask they saw. Not a simple dust mask, like the one Stella used when she cleaned out the henhouse. This was a heavy-duty, industrial-looking thing. Stella figured it had probably been designed to protect its wearer in especially dangerous, toxic environments.

  “That’s how the killer kept himself safe,” Elsie said.

  “Yes,” Manny agreed. “I suspect those two chemicals, when mixed together, produce hydrogen cyanide.”

  Stella mulled it over, thinking aloud, “Billy Ray was naked and had an old towel with him there in the bathroom. He’d left his clothes outside on the bed. So, he must’ve been fixin’ to take a shower. Once he was in there, the killer coulda barred the door with the chair, and after that, Billy couldn’t have got out. So the murderer could’ve taken his good ol’ easy time puttin’ the tape around the door and then makin’ his way up to the attic.”

  “Yes. I believe that’s how it happened,” Manny agreed. “They walked across on the beams, just like I did. Then they put the crystals in that cheesecloth bag, dipped the bag into that liquid acid, slid the tile aside, and then hung the bag down there in the room, where it released its poisonous fumes. It wouldn’t be that hard to do. Dangerous and dirty, but not difficult.”

  “Don’t you think Billy Ray would have seen the bag hanging there?” Stella asked.

  “He might have, but he couldn’t have done anything about it with the door taped and barred. The bathroom had no window to crawl out of.”

  “Couldn’t he have yanked the bag down and dumped it in the toilet, or pulled himself up to the ceiling and crawled into the attic?” Savannah asked.

  “No,” Manny said. “After I found this stuff I went back down to the bathroom and tried myself. I’m a lot taller than Billy Ray was, and I have much longer arms, but even standing on the toilet, I couldn’t have reached the bag, let alone the ceiling.”