“Besides,” he said, “If it’s still in there when I get the key made to the trunk, I can just take it down to Sam’s office and give it to him. What I really want to know is what she did with the damned keys. Now I’ve got keys to the car I haven’t got and a car with no keys.
Something clicked in Hunter’s mind – a connection – but Chipper was back.
“Is this the one you wanted?”
“Sure is,” Skeet said, grinning at him. “Let me look at that. I got to figure out the closest place we can buy some ice cream.”
Chapter 23
“WE’VE GOT TO TALK TO SAM right now,” Taneesha said. “You’ve got to tell him this and I mean now.”
They were sitting at Taneesha’s table at the café, talking in low voices.
“I want you to tell him,” Hunter said, “The only thing I’ve got to add that I haven’t already told you is that I hope he won’t go over there and take a crowbar to Skeet’s trunk.”
“He’s not going to do that,” Taneesha said. “That’s ridiculous. If Skeet won’t give him permission to open the trunk, he’ll have to get a search warrant, and he’d get a locksmith anyway. If he messed up the trunk we’d have to pay to put it right.”
“But you need to be the one to tell him,” Hunter said. “He takes you seriously.”
“He takes you seriously, too,” Taneesha said, “What are you so mad at him about?”
“I’m not mad at him. I’m just tired of his taking that High Sheriff of Magnolia County patronizing authority-figure attitude with me, and every time I’ve tried to tell him something he’s acted like I’m wasting his time or I’m getting in the way.”
“That sure sounds mad to me. About as mad as he was when he found out that you were going out with T.J.”
Hunter got up, “Taneesha, please. I’ve got a deadline. I’ve told you what I know. Now please just tell Sam and he can take it up with Skeet.”
Back in the office, she sat down at her computer, opened her notebook and began to go over her notes from her talk with Skeet. There was a good story there, she thought, and the Thunderbird picture helped.
She had made it to the fifth paragraph when Sam Bailey came through the door.
“We need to talk right now,” he said when he reached her desk.
“Well, stop looming over me and sit down,” she said.
“Why don’t we go over to my office?” he said.
“Because that’s your turf,” she said, “and this is mine. I’d rather talk here.”
“How about the café,” he said “Is that neutral enough? “
“I can’t take long,” Hunter said when they were seated in a back booth, and Sam had told Annelle that they wanted two coffees and not to seat anybody within hearing distance of them.
Annelle looked startled and said “Yes, Sir.”
Hunter studied the light fixture above the next booth.
“Why don’t you just talk to Skeet? I’d just as soon stay out of the middle of this. He’s going to be mad at me for telling you anyway.”
“I’ll talk to Skeet,” Sam said, “and the little boy, too, but right now I want to know what you heard Chipper say, and I don’t want it second hand from Taneesha or mixed up with whatever in the hell Skeet thinks I’m going to do to his car. You’re going to remember it better than he will anyway.”
Hunter sighed and started with the interview, where they were sitting, where Chipper was, how he seemed to know all the cars by name, how he began to interrupt when the subject of the Thunderbird keys came up, and the story he told about Tamlyn. Sam made notes.
“And then he said she yelled at him and the baby to shut up,” she stopped and paused, “Do you want all this detail.”
“Every word,” Sam said, stopping to take a sip of his coffee. “So she saw something in the trunk of her own car that got her upset? That’s odd.”
Things were relaxing a little between them.
“Anyway,” Hunter said, “Chipper said they went to the shed, and she unlocked it and unlocked both trunks and moved the bag, Chipper called it the garbage, from the Taurus to the Thunderbird, and then she locked the shed and apparently she calmed down a little, because she got the baby to stop crying and she told Chipper she was sorry for yelling at him, and she took him home, and that was about it.”
“And it was real clear that this was the day that Taneesha was there?”
“Yes, he said that it was after the police lady came before Aunt Tam got dead.”
“Did you take notes on all this?”
“No. I had finished with the interview and we were just talking. I wouldn’t put something a child said in the paper, anyway.”
She started to get up.
“Sit down,” Sam said. “I need to think a minute and I don’t want to have to come after you again if I have another question.”
Hunter sat down.
“This is good,” Sam said after a long silence. “I’ve been trying to figure out why the Taurus got broken into when the keys were right there in her pocketbook, but the Thunderbird keys were missing.”
“That’s easy,” Hunter said. “Whoever it was just picked up the wrong keys.
Sam grinned.
“I guess that’s the easiest explanation.”
“You’d prefer a more complicated one?” Hunter said, raising an eyebrow. “Maybe sometimes thing really are just simple.”
“Could you just stop being so touchy?” Sam asked. “I need your help and I’ll be damned if I can figure out exactly how to talk to you so you don’t wind up doing that eyebrow thing or acting like I’m trying to kill cats or destroy people’s cars.”
Annelle tiptoed over with refills for their coffee, and tiptoed away.
“That was good information about Claire,” he said. “I followed up on it and you were right. Still doesn’t make her a serious suspect, but it was helpful. All the people who work for me can tell you I’m abrupt sometimes.”
“I don’t work for you,” Hunter said, “but it wasn’t that big a deal. You said you needed my help. How?”
Sam sat and thought a while longer.
“You were interviewing Skeet. What kind of a story are you writing?” he finally asked.
“You know, sort a tribute to Tamlyn, something nice for the family, something the little girl can read later on. Skeet more or less asked me to do it. He was saying we did such a big thing on Mae-Lula Hilliard.”
“Do you think you could write it in such a way that it lets the killer know where the Thunderbird is?”
Hunter thought about it.
“Sure,” she finally said, “I’ve even got a picture of the two of them with the car.”
Hunter stopped and looked Sam straight in the eye for the first time in the conversation. “You’re thinking you can get whoever’s got the keys to come and open that trunk,” she said.
“Seems easy enough to me,” he said. “You’d prefer something more complicated?”
She laughed.
“Okay,” she said, “Let’s negotiate.”
Later when Sam explained the plan to the others, T.J. wanted to know if it wouldn’t be a good idea to get a locksmith and see what was in the trunk first.
“What if we do all this and there’s nothing in the trunk?” he asked. “What if he’s already got it.”
“I don’t want Skeet Borders to have anything to do with this,” Sam said. “We can’t open that trunk without getting his go-ahead, and if he gets an idea what we’re up to, we’d probably have to lock him and Bo out of the middle of it. Besides that, I’d just as soon nobody see any of us around that car.”
“What are we going to do about getting Hunter and Miss Rose out of there?” Taneesha asked.
“Hunter’s staying,” Sam said. “That’s part of the deal.”
“And Miss Rose?” Taneesha asked.
“That,” Sam said, “is going to be a challenge.”
Chapter 24
HUNTER’S STORY APPEARED THE NEXT DAY.<
br />
When Skeet Borders first worked up his nerve and asked Tamlyn Sykes if she wanted to go to the movies with him, he was a senior at Magnolia County High School, and she was a junior.
“She was pretty as an angel,” he remembers. “And a cheerleader, too. I wasn’t much of anybody. I was mostly just trying to pass, and I was always holding down a job so I wasn’t much at school. I was almost scared to ask her, but she kept smiling at me whenever we passed each other in the hall, and I finally asked her for a date and she said yes.
That was in 1994, but the car they had their first date in was from another time entirely – It was a two-toned, blue and white, 1964 Thunderbird.
Neither of them ever dated anybody else.
He married Tamlyn Sykes six months after she graduated from high school.
“It was a big church wedding,” he says, “Tamlyn said she had dreamed of being a bride all her life and it was the biggest day of her life and mine, too. She was really something in that white dress. I felt like I was marrying some kind of princess.”
On Saturday, he stood with his daughter in his arms near the same church and watched as his wife’s casket lowered into the ground. She was 28.
“I think more than anything else, she’d want people to remember that she was a good mother,” Borders said in an interview on Monday. “She loved Madison a lot, and she took real good care of her.”
A good friend, Marcie Turner, agreed.
“She wanted to enter Madison in pageants, and all that kind of thing,” she said, “She just couldn’t wait until her baby was old enough to do that kind of thing. She was always buying her cute clothes, and you never saw a baby with so many toys, but it wasn’t just that kind of thing. She was just really patient and sweet as a mother, and always hugging and talking to Madison.”
Another friend described her Tamlyn Borders as “just a real sweet girl and a lot of fun.”
“She loved pretty things,” Sally Wilson, both a classmate at MCHS and a former co-worker, said. “She was always shopping for pretty things for her house and making it look nice. At work, she always had pretty things on her desk and she just went all out at Christmas.”
Wilson remembers the car, too.
“It was old, but boy, did he keep it shiny and running smooth.”
She was astonished to learn that the car is still around after all these years..
Yes, he kept it.
“I just never could quite bring myself to sell it,” he says.”Until now.”
On Monday, some good friends helped him put tires on it, push it out of the shed on Old River Road where he has been keeping it and tow it into town into Miss Rose Tyndale’s back yard where he’s waxing and buffing it one more time.
“Sure it’s old, but it’s in good shape,” he says, “It’ll still crank right up. I’d show you, but I only ever had one set of keys for it and wouldn’t you know that they’ve gone missing?”
He’s got a locksmith coming on Thursday to solve that problem, and he doesn’t expect it to take long to sell the car.
“There’s always people out there who are crazy like me for old cars,” he says. “I just hope I can sell it to somebody who’ll care about it the way I have. I’d keep it, but right now, I just plain need the money more.”
Still, for a day or two, it’s been back out in the sunshine, in the yard where he first worked on it during his high school days, and that’s brought back memories of another time when he had to keep on going despite a family tragedy, and a time when he found hope and love.
“I had some really tough times when my folks got killed in that wreck,” he said, “But then really good things that happened to me in a row,” he added, “Miss Rose Tyndale said I couldn’t drop out of school and she took me into her house and fed me up good just out of the kindness of her heart, and then I saved up enough money to buy that old car and fix it up, and then I asked the prettiest girl in school for a date and she said yes.”
Borders has quit his job as a long distance truck driver to find something closer to home so that he can be with his baby daughter.
“I want to do the best I can by her,” he said. “I lost both my parents when I was 13 and I had to grow up real fast. I just want my baby girl to be happy and healthy and know she’s got somebody who loves her. I know she’s going to miss having a mother, but I know that her aunts and her grandmother will do everything they can to make that better for her.”
Chapter 25
“I DON’T MEAN TO BE DIFFICULT,” Miss Rose told Taneesha, “but I simply will not spend the night away from my home. I’d be scared to death out at that motel with all those strangers coming and going, and besides, I’m, I’m well, I’ve just set in my own routine. I’ve got Ozymandias to look after and he’d be just petrified if I were gone and the house were full of strangers. He might even try to run out the door.”
“Sam would really appreciate it if you would be willing to leave,” Hunter said, “It’s for your own safety. And Ozymandias knows me. I’ll look after him.”
“Fiddlesticks!” Miss Rose said. “If he thought there was any real danger, he wouldn’t let you stay, Hunter. If Sam and all his deputies can’t keep one little murderer out of my house when they’re all in my yard, then he should turn his badge in.”
She turned back to Taneesha. “You just tell Sam Bailey that I’m always in bed with my murder mystery by 9:30, and that’s where I’ll be tonight, but I’ll leave some cookies out for anybody who wants them.”
Taneesha nodded.
“I’ll tell him as soon as I can get with him,” she said, “and I’ll call you back. Now in the meantime, Miss Rose, we do need your promise that you won’t mention anything about this to anybody…”
“Well, of course I won’t tell anybody. The way this town talks it could get back to the killer by mid-afternoon,” Miss Rose interrupted, “And if you’ll take an old lady’s advice, you won’t let Skeet know a thing about it either. The way he is right now, he’d probably be hiding under my rhododendron with a shotgun.”
“I think we’ve met an unmoveable object,” Taneesha told T.J. back at the courthouse, as they waited for Sam to get through with his telephone conference with the District Attorney. “Miss Rose says she’d be scared at the motel, and I don’t doubt she would, but she’s also worried about her cat.”
“Cat?” T.J. asked.
“So you can’t be in the house,” Sam said flatly when he heard T.J.’s concern about Miss Rose’s cat. “There’s no way we’re going to talk her into boarding her cat for the night and I’ve heard how loud you sneeze.”
It was still light when Hunter went down her stairs and knocked on Miss Rose’s door.
The smell of chocolate in the kitchen brought back a sudden vivid memory of Mae-Lula Hilliard’s kitchen. Miss Rose was just taking brownies from the oven.
“I’ve always found that men do love brownies,” she said.
“Are you really going to stay in your room and behave?” Hunter asked.
“Well, certainly,” Miss Rose said. “In fact, I’m planning to have a little sherry on my bedside table in case I have trouble getting off to sleep with so much excitement going on.”
“You know it’s just a chance, don’t you?” Hunter said, “I mean it could be that the killer won’t even read the story, or won’t even get the meaning of it.”
“I think it’s a very clever idea,” Miss Rose said. “My understanding is that murderers always read everything they can get their hands on about the crimes they commit, and this is certainly an intelligent killer. A moral idiot no doubt, but intelligent.”
“Or, it could turn out that there’s nothing in the trunk,” Hunter said, “that it’s already been taken out.”
“Well, that’s true,” Miss Rose said, “But just having the keys would be proof, wouldn’t it? It seems to me that whoever it is, he or she was still hunting for that bag on Monday night, and it must have something really incriminating in it – like those petitions of Mae
-Lula’s, all taped together.”
“All taped together?”
“You know, Annie Laurie said that Mae-Lula told her she was taping them together in two parts because she was going to hold one in each hand for the picture, just to show how long they were. Annie Laurie was just exasperated about that, because she wanted to photocopy them all and present each council member with the whole set, and that was going to make it complicated. “
“Did she tell Sam that?”
“Oh, I’m sure she did. I think Annie Laurie’s more worked up about losing those petitions than she is about Mae-Lula’s being killed.”
Just after nine, Bub dropped Taneesha off by the back driveway and she sprinted to the back door. Hunter let her in.
“Sam will be here in a minute,” she said. “He’s just making sure everybody’s in place.”
“Won’t there be others coming in? “Miss Rose asked. “I made a double batch of brownies.”
Taneesha laughed and hugged Miss Rose.
“No,” she said, “but Sam can probably eat one batch, and we’ll take the rest of them work in the morning.”
It was almost ten before Sam got there.
Miss Rose insisted on serving him brownies and milk in the darkened dining room before she followed his polite instructions, turned off her kitchen light and went off to bed.
“Light’s still on upstairs?,” Sam asked Hunter in the dark.
“Yes, they are,” she said. “And I can go up by the inside stairs to turn them off whenever you say.”
“We were thinking about sending T.J. up there and then locking him in,” Taneesha said, “But Sam was afraid his sneezes would give us away.”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought about poor T.J. and the cats,” Hunter said laughing. “It’d be six times worse in here.”
Deep South Dead (A Hunter Jones Mystery Book 1) Page 17
