I’d always thought of driving as a skill, myself.
25
When Joe Riddley and I took Edie’s burial clothes by the funeral home, the woman at the front desk wanted to discuss all of Edie’s wonderful accomplishments and wonder how Hopemore was going to get along without her. Since I was wondering the same thing, that conversation took longer than Joe Riddley thought it needed to.
We barely made it to a business association luncheon that I’d have skipped if I hadn’t been president of the group that year.
After lunch I returned a call from Alex. “The sheriff’s office called me with some message about why Olive isn’t coming in,” she told me, “but they mentioned your name, so I thought I’d get the story from the horse’s mouth.”
“This is one weary horse. But here’s what happened.” I didn’t tell her about the chase in the pecan grove—I figured both Olive and I deserved to hang on to a little dignity as long as we could—but I told her I’d seen Olive taking some things from Edie’s room and turned her over to the sheriff. I finished up, “You don’t reckon Olive could have killed Edie, do you? I mean, I know they were both librarians, so you might find it hard to believe—”
She snorted. “You don’t know librarians like I do. But I am surprised Olive would steal the stuff with you right there. She’s generally real meticulous in her work. I don’t know if she killed Edie—and I hope not, because I don’t need to lose another staff member right now—but I do think she put those keys in Edie’s pocketbook. A woman came by today saying she’d lost her keys a couple of weeks ago, on a day when she, her daughter, and her grandson went to Augusta to shop. She’d thought she must have left them somewhere up there, but she said that last night she asked God to help her find them, and this morning, just as she was waking up, she pictured them, clear as anything, on the floor of our ladies’ room. Can you believe she thinks God bothers with something as trivial as lost keys?”
Having been granted answers to a few trivial prayers myself, I murmured, “Well, there is a verse in James that says, ‘You have not because you ask not.’ ”
“Maybe so.” Alex sounded dubious. “But I’d be embarrassed to pray for anything so dumb. Anyway, after she woke up, she remembered that while her daughter returned books on their way to Augusta, she took her grandson to the bathroom and he got to playing in her purse. She wondered if he’d dropped her keys and she’d not noticed.”
I knew Alex was thinking the same thing I was: Olive could have found them and put them in Edie’s purse. But why?
I couldn’t think of a single reason, but what I wanted to know right then was, “Did you ask that woman why somebody with a grandson—especially somebody who prays for help with lost keys—has a brass tag from a porno Web site on her key chain?”
Alex’s laugh rumbled across the wire. “Not me, girlfriend. She’s a library patron. But you want her number? Call and ask her yourself—and let me know.” She sighed. “You can also come over here and work my front desk. I’m as shorthanded as a one-armed short-order cook.”
I declined both offers, pleading that I was seriously behind in my work.
All that time Joe Riddley had sat at his desk reading spring seed catalogues like they were candidates for the New York Times best-seller lists. “Go on down to the Christmas tree lot,” I told him crossly. “I can’t work with you rustling those pages.”
“I’m not leaving you here alone.” He picked up another catalogue.
“I’ve got five employees protecting me, and a few customers to cheer me up if I get lonesome, and I promise not to leave the building without giving you a call.”
“And waiting for me to answer?” I have been known a time or two to tell him I’ve called when I’ve just let the phone ring once and hung up.
“I’ll wait for your permission. How’s that? I expect to be right here working on the next payroll. While you’re down there, why don’t you find us a nice little tree?”
This would be our first Christmas in the new house, the first time in nearly forty years that we hadn’t had a twelve-foot tree. “How about getting one I can reach the top of?”
He grabbed his cap. “One three-foot tree, coming up.” I don’t know who was more relieved when he left. I love the man dearly, but he makes a better husband than watchdog.
Before I could get much done, Buster stopped by. He dropped into my visitor’s chair, turned his hat around between his hands, and muttered, “I thought you’d like to know how things turned out.”
I nodded encouragingly and turned my chair around to face him.
“She didn’t do it, Judge.”
“She certainly did. I saw her take them with my own eyes.”
“Oh, she had the two necklaces in her pocket, like you said. But she claimed she was picking them up for Ms. Genna Harrison, and Ms. Harrison confirmed it.”
“What? Did Genna come down to bail her out?”
He grinned. “Tit for tat? No, I think Ms. Harrison got enough of our hospitality yesterday. On the way to the detention center, Ms. Harrison called her brother—”
“Could you just call them Olive and Genna, so I can keep it straight?”
He twitched his shoulders. The sheriff doesn’t like calling women he doesn’t know well by their first names. “Well, Olive called Adney Harrison, who was working in Savannah today. He got Shep Faxon to come down. Shep talked to Olive and called Genna, and Genna told me over the phone that it was all right for Olive to have the stuff—that Olive was bringing it to her.”
“You believed that?” I thought of the crafty expression on Olive’s face as she lifted the lid of the chest and the smirk as she climbed into his cruiser. “Why didn’t Genna get the necklaces herself this morning before she left? Or why didn’t Olive wait to come looking for them until after Joe Riddley and I left? Or why didn’t she come upstairs and simply announce, ‘Genna told me to come look for a couple of necklaces the robber may have overlooked’?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. But you know as well as I do that without a charge, I couldn’t hold her. While we had her there, though, acting on what you said down at the grove, I did ask her to reconfirm her alibi for the night Ms. Burkett was murdered. She had told us she was at home asleep. She conferred with counsel and said she hadn’t quite told the truth—she actually stayed in a motel in North Augusta that night. She said her brother doesn’t like her staying in motels alone, so she hadn’t wanted him to know. Her story is that she rented a truck late Wednesday afternoon and drove a couch to a store in North Augusta, but they close at six on Wednesdays. Since they would reopen at eight the next morning, she decided to sleep up there so she could go to the store first thing and get the truck back before she had to go to work.”
“But she was in Hopemore. She said she bought paint—”
“I know. She drove back to Hopemore, drove down Ms. Burkett’s drive like she said, and she went to buy paint. After that, she claims she wasn’t sleepy, so she got the bright idea to drive back to North Augusta and go to the store early in the morning, to save a second day’s truck rental. On her way back to Hopemore Thursday noon, she heard about the murder on the noon radio news.”
I thought that over. Olive hadn’t mentioned the drive back to North Augusta when she’d been cataloguing her woes over at Myrtle’s. “She could have killed Edie and then driven to North Augusta. You aren’t positive when Edie died, are you?”
“Nope, but we know it was after twelve thirty, because Adney Harrison called Ms. Burkett at twelve thirty that night. Said he was concerned because he knew his wife wasn’t there and Valerie had moved out, so he called to be sure she was okay. He said Ms. Burkett was a night owl, so he expected her to be awake, but he woke her up. They talked about five minutes—that checks out with his phone record—and he says she thanked him for his concern and said she’d see him when he got back to town. The medical examiner thinks she died before two.”
“So maybe Olive stuck around until after twelve thirty, killed her on her way
out of town, and checked into the motel real late.”
I could tell from the way Buster shifted in his chair that I wasn’t going to like the answer. “She checked into the motel in North Augusta at twelve thirty-five.”
“So maybe she checked in and drove right back? What’s one more round-trip when she’d already done two?”
“The desk clerk probably wishes she had, but she didn’t. She asked for a nonsmoking room on the side away from the expressway, telling him she has bad allergies and traffic noises bother her. Then she came stomping back ten minutes later, claiming that somebody had smoked in there sometime in the past, because she could hardly breathe. He found her another room, and she moved her stuff in. She called thirty minutes later to say she had gone to take a shower and the shower head was missing. He didn’t have a replacement at that hour, so he offered her a third room, but the only one they had was on the expressway side. The clerk said by then Olive was getting pretty hot under the collar about dragging her stuff in and out of rooms and moving her truck, and said she doubted she’d get a wink of sleep. She demanded a discount on the room, but he wasn’t authorized to give it to her. He did help her carry her things down to the new room at one forty—he remembers because he made a note of when he was away from the desk. He thought he was finally done with her for the night, but she called twice more. The first time she asked for a wake-up call at seven, and the second she complained about trucks shifting gears on the expressway ramp and asked if he had any earplugs. He took her down some cotton balls from a first-aid kit. He said it was two ten when he got back to the desk.”
“Sounds like our Olive,” I said glumly. “If it had been anybody else, I’d have thought she was setting herself up with an alibi for the time of the murder, but that woman is just naturally contrary.”
Buster turned his hat around some more. “We got one more bit of news you aren’t gonna like, either. The forensics report came back on the orange coveralls. Nobody else wore them but Henry.”
“But you said the blood on them was smeared, not in spurts.”
“I know, but you can’t always reconstruct how things happened. Maybe he tried to wipe it off while it was wet.”
“But why would Henry kill Edie? He’s known her all her life, she gave him a job—”
A six-foot man can’t disappear into a normal-size wing chair, but the sheriff was giving it a good old-fashioned try.
“There’s more, isn’t there?”
He nodded, clearly miserable. “I wish Clarinda wasn’t connected to the Joyners.”
“Clarinda’s connections have nothing to do with this.”
“I’m afraid they do. Shep was in my office when the forensics report arrived. I didn’t tell him what was in it, of course, but he asked if it looked like Henry Joyner could have killed Edith Burkett. When I asked why he thought that, he started his good-ole-boy shuffle and dance, then said he reckoned it wasn’t too much of a violation of client confidentiality to tell me what happened last week. He said Edie Burkett called him late Monday, real upset and wanting to see him right away. She went down to his office and showed him a letter from her granddaddy, claiming Pete Joyner was his grandson. She said she had taken it to Josiah and asked him if he was Pete’s daddy, too. She claimed Josiah told her he thought Pete must have been Edward’s son—although neither Shep nor I can figure out how she understood him, the shape Josiah’s in.”
He held up a hand to keep me from interrupting, just like he used to do on our way to elementary school. “Wait, let me finish. Shep said he was still trying to get his head around that when Edie started insisting that she and her daddy needed to revise their wills to do the right thing by Henry. Shep claims he tried to explain to her that what Henry didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him—Don’t get all het up, Judge. You know I’m just quoting Shep. Shall we say he was trying to dissuade her from doing something he considered rash? Edie wouldn’t budge. She said Pete died before justice was done, and with the precarious state of her daddy’s health, she and Josiah both wanted Shep to draw up a new will for him right away, and to go with her to Golden Years on Tuesday morning so Josiah could sign it. She said she would come in later to revise her own will. Then she sat there telling Shep exactly what to put in Josiah’s new will. Since she had Josiah’s power of attorney, and Josiah would have it read to him the next day, Shep did what she asked. That will left everything to Edie for her lifetime, but after her death the pecan grove, house, and all its furnishings—the whole shebang—would go to Henry. Edie insisted that her daddy could understand what he was signing, even if he can’t speak.”
I know now that Josiah had tried to tell Henry, “The grove goes to you.”
“I’d agree with—” I managed to cram that much in edge-ways before the sheriff again held up a big hand and said, “I’m almost finished. Shep said that Tuesday the two of them took the new will to Josiah, Edie read it to him, and he signed it in front of two witnesses.”
“Did Shep say what he said to upset Josiah afterwards?”
The sheriff shuffled his feet. “You don’t want to know. Sometimes Shep makes me ashamed to know him.” He stood. “But that gives us motive, means, and opportunity, Judge. I’m on my way to pick up Henry now. If you’d call Clarinda and ask her to go down and stay with Daisy, I’d appreciate it.”
He left without giving me a chance to say another word.
What was there to say?
26
“You got Olive arrested?” Walker asked in disbelief. “Adney’s sister?”
“She was robbing Edie’s house.”
“Poor Adney, with two crazy women on his hands right now.”
“Genna isn’t crazy,” Cindy blazed. “She’s just stressed out. Anybody would be.”
“Olive was Edie’s friend,” Walker protested. “Why would she rob her after she was dead?”
We were sitting at their breakfast room table later that evening, sharing what Walker has always called “a bednight snack.” Cindy had asked me to come over after the kids were in bed to coordinate family Christmas presents, but I’d seen very soon that what they really wanted was to know more about what had happened to Olive.
This was the night of the full moon. It was so bright through the bay window that I could recognize the shapes of leaves halfway across the yard. Normally the full moon keys me up, but right then I was having a hard time staying awake, in spite of the coffee.
Cindy had served a dreadful new blend she had bought from a catalogue. To me, it tasted like a combination of tea olive and Carolina jessamine, and I’ve never been fond of flowers in my coffee mug. I finished it, to be nice, but set down the mug with relief.
“I’m not sure you could call Olive and Edie friends,” I answered Walker. “They were just bound by family and similar interests—the library, bridge, and eating out at night. Alex James thought Olive was jealous of Edie—she probably thought Edie had pots of money and didn’t have to live on her librarian’s salary.”
“Olive doesn’t live on hers, either. She expects Adney to pay for anything she wants that she can’t afford—and he usually does.” Cindy cupped her hands around her mug, like she was cold. “But Genna says Olive was jealous of Edie, too—not for the money, but because Olive was the best bridge player in her club back home, and she resented that Edie was better. I think she’s jealous of Genna, too. Olive lived in an apartment next door to Adney until he and Genna got married and moved into a house, and the two of them have always been real close. Their parents died when they were little. Genna said one reason she wanted to move here was to get away from Olive, then Olive showed up one day saying she’d gotten a job at the Hope County Library.”
I reached for one of Cindy’s warm pecan chocolate chip cookies. “I still think she’s the best candidate for murdering Edie.”
Walker disagreed. “The sheriff knows who did it. Henry Joyner.” He spoke in that dogmatic tone adult children use when correcting their mothers: part knowledge and part bravado, mixed with
a hefty dose of “my turn has finally come.”
“What makes you think so?” I was sure the sheriff hadn’t been spreading that around.
“Shep Faxon was telling everybody at the country club this afternoon. Henry is actually Josiah’s son—can you believe that? Who’d have imagined dumpy old Josiah would—”
That got my dander up. “You’d better not believe it, because it’s not true. I don’t believe Henry killed Edie, and I am pretty darned sure Henry’s not Josiah’s son—he’s not even his grandson.” I told them what Joe Riddley had figured out.
Walker rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Shep said Edie claimed it was Edward, but then he laughed and said that a dead uncle is a real convenient thing to have sometimes.”
If Shep had been within striking range, I’d have hit him right then, judge or no judge.
Walker continued, “Shep also swears Josiah is leaving Henry everything he has—the house, the grove, the whole kit and caboodle. That set the club on its ear—I can tell you that. In the locker room fellows were saying if Henry hadn’t gotten caught for the murder, next thing we knew, he’d have been applying to join the club.”
“And why not?” When he didn’t immediately give the right answer, I lashed out. “What’s the matter with you? We already have the technical college president, two black doctors, and one black dentist in the country club. What’s so different about the owner of a pecan grove?”
“Nothing, if he’d been born to the grove. But his daddy was a foreman, Mama.”
“Your granddaddy was a farmer,” I said furiously. “My daddy had no more education than Pete Joyner, and nobody asked about that when your daddy and I applied. What do you know about Adney’s daddy—or Shep’s, for that matter? Furthermore, you were never raised to take part in that kind of talk. I don’t care if it costs you the presidency of the club, you need to stand up for what is right.”
He turned and looked out at the moonlit yard. I knew how he was feeling, caught in the predicament of any businessperson whose personal ethics are not always those of clients and customers. Like almost any mama, however, I didn’t know when to stop. “I appreciate your struggle, honey—we’ve lived with it all our lives—”
Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?: A Thoroughly Southern Mystery Page 21
