by Ann B. Ross
“Who?” Mildred asked, red-faced from all the laughing.
“The Ledbetters. I know they’re here, Mildred. You told me they were.”
Sobering up, Mildred looked around. “Well, they were here a minute ago. Ida Lee, did you see where they went?”
“No, ma’am, I was too busy disarming you.”
Under different circumstances, I would’ve laughed at that, but right then I was too anxious to prevent another escape by the pastor.
“Well,” I said, taking charge, “let’s round ’em up. Ida Lee, you look in the dining room and the kitchen. Mildred, take the living room and sunroom, if you will, and I’ll clear the upstairs. Herd ’em in here, and don’t let them escape.” I headed for the stairs, behaving as if the house were mine, while totally ignoring the rights of the homeowner.
But neither questioned their assigned tasks, probably because, for one thing, Mildred’s weight hindered her from a rapid climb up the stairs and she avoided them when she could.
I wasn’t too agile myself, but the urgency I felt to confront the pastor propelled me up the stairs and through a quick glance in each of the many bedrooms, sitting rooms, and baggage rooms on the second floor. I would’ve searched the attic as well, but the door was locked.
Hurrying back downstairs, I called, “Did you find them?”
The answer was no, for both Mildred and Ida Lee stood in the foyer looking up at me with no sign of either Ledbetter.
“I don’t know where they could’ve gotten to,” Mildred said, frowning. “Ida Lee, you didn’t find them?”
“No, ma’am, there’s no sign of them. It’s all very strange.”
“Oh, my,” I moaned, leaning against the newel, “if he’s gotten away again, I don’t know what I’ll do.” I could just see me down on all fours chasing the pastor down the sidewalk.
“What’s going on?” Mildred asked—it was her house and she had a right to ask. “Why’re they hiding and why’re you after them?”
“Not them. Him. Because, Mildred, he got me in this mess, and he’s going to get me out. And because,” I said darkly, “I’m putting him on notice that I am not taking the fall for him.”
Mildred threw up her hands. “Well, I don’t know what you’re up to, Julia, but he’s your pastor so I’ll stay out of it. I’ve never understood you Presbyterians, anyway.”
Chapter 46
I wasn’t about to explain Presbyterianism to Mildred at that particular moment. I had more pressing matters to tend to.
“Think!” I urged. “They have to be in the house somewhere. Where could they be?”
Ida Lee’s face lit up. “The elevator,” she whispered.
“Yes!” I said, turned to take up the hunt, then stopped. “Where is it?”
Mildred led us around behind the staircase, then pointed to a door that looked normal enough except for the call button on the wall beside it. The three of us stood looking at it.
“Is it up or down?” I whispered.
“It’s down,” Ida Lee whispered back. “We would’ve heard it if it had gone up.”
I stood back. “You do the honors, Mildred. Push it.”
She did. A motor hummed and the door opened with a jerk before sliding smoothly back. There stood Pastor Ledbetter with Emma Sue pushing away from him.
Mildred, always the thoughtful hostess, said warmly, “Oh, there you are. Look, Julia has come over for a visit, so we can have a nice little chat. Would anyone care for tea?”
The pastor cleared his throat, ushered Emma Sue out of the elevator, and, without a glance at me, said in ministerial tones, “Emma Sue’s had quite a fright. She needs to lie down. Come, Emma Sue, I’ll help you to bed.”
Emma Sue didn’t come. The pastor put his arm around her and urged her toward the door. “Larry,” she said, shaking him off, “will you please stop pushing me around!” She stared at me. “Julia?” She gave a tentative smile, then began to laugh. “I don’t mean to laugh at you, but you don’t look anything like yourself.”
“Oh, she doesn’t mind,” Mildred said, leading Emma Sue to a chair in the sunroom. “I laughed at her, too.”
I didn’t care. I was staring at Pastor Ledbetter, waiting to get him alone to have it out with him.
“Then,” he said, drawing himself up, “I’ll leave you ladies to it. I’ll be working on my sermon for Sunday.” And he began to walk away.
“As I’m sure you’ve heard, Pastor,” I said, giving him every chance to have a private discussion, “I’ve been wanting to speak with you.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Julia. This is just not a convenient time. The weather, you know, and Emma Sue’s condition. Why don’t you make an appointment for sometime next week when my schedule permits? Norma will make one for you.”
He was trying to put me off again.
“No,” I said, preparing to lay him low. “We’ll talk right here and right now if that’s the way it has to be. I’ve been trying every way I know how, Pastor, to tell you that the promise I made to you is no longer in effect, so take note here and now. That promise has gotten me in more hot water than I can stand, and it’s put me in a position of withholding evidence in an official investigation. So I’m through. I’m not going to remain silent any longer. It’s only fair—even though you’ve not been fair to me—to warn you so you can go in for an interview before I start talking. After that, you may or may not have a chance to confirm what I’m going to tell them, because they’ll hunt you down like a dog, and do it a lot better and a lot faster than I’ve been able to do.”
The pastor looked pained, and lowering his voice, he said, “Please don’t upset Emma Sue. She’s not well.” Then in a normal tone, he went on. “My goodness, the weather has us all on edge, hasn’t it? I suggest we talk about this later.”
“Later? Later, when you’ve had time to run and hide like you’ve been doing ever since Connie Clayborn’s body was found?”
Mildred perked up. “What?”
“Larry?” Emma Sue said, looking from him to me and back again.
Pastor Ledbetter patted the air with his hands. “Not now, Miss Julia. It’s not a good time.”
“Actually it’s the only time, because it’s the first time I’ve been able to hem you up. Now, here’s what you’re going to do. You are going first thing in the morning to see Detective Ellis at the sheriff’s department, and you’re going to tell him the reason I went to visit Connie Clayborn.”
“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Miss Julia. That’s a matter for prayer for both of us.”
“Good! You have all night to pray about it, but you better get yourself down there in the morning and set things straight. Because, Pastor, that’s what I’m going to do. I am going to tell everything I know. And if you’re not there to back me up, I will not only tell Detective Ellis, I will tell everybody else, including LuAnne Conover—and you know what that means—that you sent me to Connie to get her to apologize to Emma Sue, whose condition was reflecting badly on you. It’ll be all over town by nightfall.”
“What?” Mildred asked again.
Emma Sue looked up at her husband. “Why, Larry? Why would you send Julia to see that woman?”
“It was for you, Emma Sue,” he said. “All for you. I asked Miss Julia to act as a mediator to reassure you, to make you feel better. The Clayborn woman had undermined your self-confidence so much that you were suffering a spiritual crisis. I thought . . .”
Emma Sue sprang to her feet, her hands in fists by her side. “You’re always making plans for me. And now you thought by going behind my back and setting up some intervention that you’d fix things, didn’t you? What else were you planning for me? A group session where you would facilitate, just as you always do? Wouldn’t that be a feather in your cap.”
“No, Emma Sue,” I said before the pastor could speak. “You have it wrong. He did
n’t want anybody to know how deeply you were affected by Connie’s criticism. Your reaction showed that he couldn’t rule his own house—First Timothy, chapter three, verses four and five, as cited to me. Look it up. He was protecting you, that’s true, but he was also protecting his reputation. He wanted your reaction to Connie’s criticism kept quiet, and I foolishly went along with it, thinking I was being helpful. That’s why I had to promise not to tell anyone, and that’s why I’m now in big trouble with the law.”
Emma Sue swung around to stare at her husband. Her face reddened and she seemed to grow in stature. “You were ashamed of me? That’s what it was, wasn’t it? And still is, isn’t it? That’s why you wouldn’t listen to that doctor in Winston-Salem who recommended a psychiatrist. That’s why you brought me home and said that the Lord would deal with me. And what else did you plan for me, I ask you? A quiet stay in an institution where I wouldn’t embarrass you?”
“Emma Sue . . .” the pastor began. “You aren’t thinking straight. You don’t understand.”
“Oh, yes, I am, and oh, yes, I do. You think more of what other people think than you do of me. Well, let me tell you something.” And she walked right up to him and got in his face. “I’m through being your assistant pastor, through with committee meetings, and teaching Sunday school, and covering dishes, and calling on the sick, and volunteering for everything you dream up, and being in church every time the doors are open. All I want to do is plant flowers and dig weeds and prune and mulch and fertilize and watch things grow. That park is my Garden of Eden, and there’ll be no snakes in the grass there, whether it’s Connie Clayborn—bless her heart—or you.
“And another thing,” she said before he could get a word in edgewise, “I am going to see a counselor—I’m going so I can learn how to live with you. And furthermore, I’m going to let everybody know what I’m doing.” She swished around and began to walk out of the room. Then she stopped and turned back. “And furthermore than that, you’re going to pay for every session I have. And I intend to have a lot of them.” Then she left, and we heard her stomping up the stairs.
I wasn’t the only one laying down the law.
• • •
I stood outside Mildred’s house on my way home. I’d just gingerly gotten myself down her wide steps onto the snow and ice of the lawn and was hesitating before striking off across it. The sconces beside her door—powered by the generator—lit the porch and cast a golden semicircle across the front yard.
I stood there thinking over the scene I’d just left, wondering why I wasn’t feeling better about finally confronting Pastor Ledbetter.
I hadn’t wanted to do it in front of Emma Sue, much less in front of a member of another church, but he had refused to talk to me alone. So it was his own fault.
Well, maybe not. I’d been so hot to tell him off, especially after chasing after him for days, only to find him hiding in Mildred’s residential elevator, of all places. It beat all I’d ever heard.
But I hadn’t brought up my niggling suspicions about someone using the access road before I got to the Clayborn house by way of the main road on that fateful day. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do it. I would leave that to Detective Ellis, if it occurred to him.
But I still didn’t feel good about what I’d said, spilling it all out before an audience. A small one, but still. A Christian minister deserved respect, and I had withheld it. By the time Emma Sue had flounced off, the pastor was left looking bereft and deflated.
Then I mentally shook myself. He was going to look worse than that by the time I got through, come morning. It was going to be every man for himself, or, in my case, every woman for herself. I was tired of holding back important information concerning the death of another human being. If Detective Ellis wanted to know why I visited Connie, I was going to tell him, from a to z, exactly why I did, including my own eagerness to tell Connie off.
But I’d given the pastor fair warning, so I just wasn’t going to feel bad about it any longer.
I started walking, avoiding Mildred’s paved drive, which would be slick with ice, by picking my way along the side of it. The snow seemed mushier, and my feet in Hazel Marie’s boots broke through the underlying ice with little trouble—a good sign, it seemed to me. So, rather than pushing my way back through the way I’d come, I headed for the sanded street, where walking would be more secure. The temperature might have been rising, but the sky was lowering and the afternoon was fast growing dark.
As I got to the road and stepped over the mounded snow and ice left by the snowplow, I realized I was hearing the rhythmic thuds of a runner’s feet on the gritty street.
Oh, Lord, the night runner was out early. Well, I’d about had enough of him, too. So, with the comfort of having a sheriff’s deputy nearby—even if he was asleep—I kept walking toward home. No more cowering in the bushes, too afraid to stick my head out. I was just before clearing the air, coming clean, ratting out my pastor—whatever you want to call it—to Detective Ellis, so I might as well take on the night runner, too.
He turned the corner without slowing down and headed not to the other side of the street, as he usually did, but straight toward me. I stopped and waited as he came closer. My first impulse was to scream my head off and hope Coleman wasn’t a sound sleeper.
Wearing one of those all-over latex suits like a scuba diver or a luge racer, the runner’s lanky frame ate up the yards, the feet, and the inches until he stopped, breathing heavily, right in front of me.
I looked him in the face and saw nothing but deep-set eyes and wet wool rings around his nose and mouth. My breath caught in my throat as he pushed up his ski mask.
“Well, Mrs. Murdoch,” Stan Clayborn said, his chest heaving as he caught his breath. “Did you find what you were looking for at my house?”
Chapter 47
“How did you . . . ?” I started, then stopped, determined not to let him put me on the defensive. He had a lot to answer for, himself. I drew myself up, felt Sam’s pants slide from under my belt, and clamped my elbows against my waist.
Lifting my head in defiance, I said, “I certainly did. Did you?”
“It’s my house. I had every right . . .” He stopped, just as I had, realizing that he’d given himself away.
“That’s quite possible,” I agreed, “unless your house was still an active crime scene. And assuredly it was because the SBI hasn’t been there yet. And I remind you, Mr. Clayborn, I was not in the house, messing with or destroying evidence, as apparently you were. And,” I continued in case he had messing with me in mind, “I remind you that a patrol car is parked right over there and the driver of same is within easy earshot.”
He turned his head to glance at Coleman’s patrol car, then looked back at me. “I was there,” he said quietly, all belligerence gone from his voice, “to commune with Connie, to reconnect our harmony one last time. I’ve been distraught without the connection we had. But I have to accept that she’s joined that great River of Time, and the positive energy she’d left in the house would soon fade away in its flow. I had to be there before it was gone. The Universe was calling me.”
“The what? How?”
“Never mind,” he said, shaking his head at my ignorance. “You wouldn’t understand.”
He was right. I couldn’t think of one Bible verse that had to do with such a phenomenon—trees that clap their hands, yes, but not a vocal universe.
But then, returning to his first question, he asked, “So it was you out there, creeping around my house. What did you expect to find that nobody else had found?”
“Don’t belittle my efforts, Mr. Clayborn. I had to take matters into my own hands because the investigators had me in their sights. I had to see if someone could access your house by coming in on that fire lane. In other words, get there without being written up by the gatekeeper. And anybody could. In fact, I expect that’s the way
you came in Saturday night, otherwise you couldn’t have been there to do any kind of communing, no matter who was doing the calling.”
Still breathing deeply, he had nothing to say, so I went on. “And I’ll have you know that I had no intention of going near that house when we first got there. It was only when we saw that strange glow in the back room that we decided to check it out. What was it, anyway? A computer you left on?”
He nodded. “I heard your car and saw you come down the hill. I didn’t know who you were—thought somebody was breaking in after seeing the obituary. I waited in the hall to catch you at it and didn’t think about the computer.”
“Well, see, if it hadn’t been for that light, we would never have come so close. So it was you who drew us there. All we were interested in was if it was possible for somebody—anybody—to have gotten to Connie unseen. And they could’ve.” I stopped, waiting for a response that didn’t come. “That was the way you came in, wasn’t it? So there’d be no record of it?”
Looking down, he nodded and, in a choked voice, said, “That night, yes. All I wanted was one last word with her.”
You poor thing, I thought. If he was hearing voices from the universe pouring out through a computer, he was certainly deserving of pity.
Then he lifted his head, that ski mask pushed up above his eyebrows, and looked at me. “But, Mrs. Murdoch, I did not kill my wife.”
“Well,” I said, hitching up Sam’s pants again, “that’s between you and Detective Ellis. But, Mr. Clayborn, tell me this. I’m interested in just how you use a computer to commune with someone who’s gone on before, even with the universe involved. I know that modern means of communication can reach people around the world, but it’s news to me that it can reach someone in the other one.”
His mouth twitched in a semblance of a smile. “I don’t use a computer for that. It was Connie’s laptop and I was checking her e-mails to see if they would tell me anything. They didn’t—she’d just gotten it—which is why the cops didn’t take it, I guess.
