But as Rudy pointed out later, he didn’t get to use the siren very often and besides, the aging ambulance, bought third-hand from a department three counties over, needed a good run now and then. And there didn’t appear to be any rush. Horace Harris, the neighbor who had called them to the scene, made it pretty clear that Bill was dead when he found him. “Thought to myself, I did—here’s a good chance to give the engine a good workout. Siren, too,” Rudy said to me. “Wouldn’t hurt Bill none.” He had a point. Still, it just didn’t seem right somehow.
“Looks like he died a happy man,” Rudy said to me, surveying the messy scene in the kitchen. “Bill always did like his fried chicken. Hey, Joe, watch that grease over there.” Fried chicken, cornbread, and peas were still scattered around the kitchen floor. I could see the empty plate on the floor with grease from the chicken congealing in lumps. Winnie had good intentions, but she wasn’t much for healthy eating.
“That’s probably what killed him,” Joe said, pointing at the plate and food parts here and there. “All that fried food never did nobody any good. Besides, have you ever tasted Winnie’s chicken? It’d choke a horse.”
Rudy looked up from examining Bill then glanced over at me. “Hey, think maybe she killed him with it? Sort of gradual like? Those two never did see eye-ta-eye, you know. Why, she could’ve cholesteroled him to death. Is that a word, cholesteroled? Anyway, it’s as good a way as any to kill a man, I s’pose. Couldn’t be traced neither.”
“Yer nuts, Rudy,” Joe said, “just plain nuts. Here, let’s get poor Bill off the floor here and over to the funeral home. This is gonna be a big one. Funeral, that is. Bill knew just about everybody in these parts. Nobody’s gonna wanna miss this one.”
As far as anyone could tell, I was the last person to talk to Bill before he suffered a massive heart attack and died on his kitchen floor, or, depending on your point of view, finally succumbed to his sister’s evil plot to choke his arteries over a period of four years through the carefully-controlled use of cholesterol-clogging chicken.
His sister, Winnie, the one he was complaining about to me during our phone call, was the one who found him. She’d brought his lunch at 11:30 a.m., something she’d done ever since his wife died four years earlier. When she returned to pick up her plate about an hour later, she found him in a crumpled heap on the floor. They tell me her screeching could be heard for three blocks. If Bill had still had a pulse, the sound of her voice alone would have awakened him.
Horace hailed me from across the kitchen, walked over, and took me aside. “We found him, Pastor. Me and Juanita. He was already dead.” I guess that was supposed to comfort me. “We heard some awful wailing from over here and when we got here, there she was—Winnie, that is—just a’sobbin’ over her brother’s body. ’Course, he was gone by then. Couldn’t do nothing for him, but we did what we could for her.” He shook his head. We could see Juanita comforting Winnie out on Bill’s screened-in back porch. She seemed to be force-feeding her some iced tea.
A pitcher of tea, sweet, I presume, since that’s what they drink with their sugar down here, sat next to the sink. A glass stood next to it, along with an overturned tray of partially-melted ice cubes. Bill’s knife and fork were on the table, with a napkin neatly folded beneath the fork, though both the napkin and fork were skewed. It was all I could do to keep from lining them up again. He didn’t appear to have suffered. It looked to me as though he crumpled and fell to his side while he was on his knees wiping up the ice cube spill, and then hit the table, which in turn toppled the plate of food to the floor. A red and white-checked dishtowel was still in his hand.
“Guess he died doing what he liked to do the most,” Horace said.
I looked at him. “Cleaning his floor?”
“Eating.”
Oh, right.
Horace spoke again. “I’m going to miss old Bill. He was a good man, God-fearing and hardworking. You know the kind I mean, Colonel Foster? Just a darned good person. Kept his lawn up nice. Trimmed the shrubs once a summer. Even put up a few Christmas lights every year.” He paused, then, “Yep, I’m gonna miss him. Won’t miss that sister of his comin’ around every day at noon, tell ya that much, but I will miss Bill.”
So some folks in town say it was the cholesterol in the fried chicken. Others sought a more immediate cause of death, namely the grease the chicken was swimming in when she brought it over. Two legs, a thigh, and a giant breast, all of them glimmering with the sheen of shortening that encased the thick, soggy batter that Winnie called her “prize-winning deep-fried delight” and others dubbed “Winnie’s Weapon,” were found scattered around the body.
Little trails of grease marked a lengthy skid across the dinged-up and dingy 1940’s linoleum. At least a few of the residents of Road’s End, the “skid and die” proponents, figured Bill had dropped the plate of chicken and slipped on the greasy skid marks in a hapless attempt to retrieve his flying—or rather, skating—chicken parts. He then fell to the floor and cracked his noggin, thus ending his life the way he lived it—surrounded by deep-fried chicken parts, more than enough grease, and a few peas. Proponents of the “skid and die” scenario deemed the gleaming chicken parts or melting ice cubes as the culprits in what they considered to be nothing more than a tragic accident.
There were others, however, who thought differently. Ample evidence that Bill slipped and fell or had a heart attack didn’t deter those who thought Winnie had murdered him, slowly and with cold calculation, through cruel and intentional manipulation of his arteries. Death by cholesterol was their conclusion. And who knows? Maybe they’re right. I’ll admit Winnie’s a weird one, but then so are most of the people who live here. And I’m starting to think I’m no exception.
So today Joe was obviously just tossing out something he’d heard Rudy suggest at Bill’s house two days before and nobody was going to take it seriously. But Dewey wasn’t going to settle for that. Dewey wanted justice; Dewey wanted revenge; Dewey wanted to pop Joe Rich in the nose. Things were getting interesting. And they’d probably get a lot more interesting before the night was over.
Chapter Fifteen
I’ve never been one to lust after new technology. I had a hard enough time adjusting to push-button phones without the world getting all crazy on me and developing call waiting, cordless phones, answering machines, and all that other jazz. When I was kid, if you called someone and they weren’t home or didn’t want to take your call, you lived with it. They weren’t dead or kidnapped or not speaking to you. If they were already on the phone, it rang busy. If one of the kids left the phone off the hook, no big deal. If the cord was no more than three feet, you stayed close to the wall. No leaving a message, no interrupting the call someone was already on, no wandering out into the yard or driving to the grocery store with the phone at your ear, no panicking if you didn’t reach someone three nanoseconds after it occurred to you to call them. Life was simple, just the way I like it.
So you can imagine my horror when Mel brought home two cell phones and a two-year contract. But I learned to live with them and after a year or so, I even figured out how to set up my mailbox—although that’s a dumb name for it. A mailbox sits out in front of your house and you wait for the mailman to put a postcard in it from your cousin three blocks away who visited Washington, D.C. two weeks ago and who’s been home for twelve days already. It isn’t a piece of landscape too small to imagine inside a device too tiny to hold in your hand, let alone push its buttons—a device that has an annoying tendency to end up in the washer every other time you wear anything with pockets. But that’s just me.
I have to admit, though, that having a cell phone came in handy during the blizzard. Aside from traipsing back and forth across terrain that was rapidly becoming about as hostile as, say … Antarctica, it was the only way I had to stay in touch with Mel. That didn’t seem all that important at first—although hearing a voice of reason in a vast universe of dopey declarations was refreshing. It also turned out to be
the only way we had of keeping track of a situation that managed to get worse by the instant.
We talked several times that afternoon, keeping one another appraised of our individual, yet intertwined, situations. She had her hands full over there. The ladies were in the middle of creating costumes for the live Nativity that someone—nobody knew just who—decided would be a good fundraiser for the church—someone before my time, someone who didn’t have to worry about broken hips or lawsuits by grown children who think their parents’ pastor should know better than to let their mom or dad commune with nature in the dark.
For reasons unknown to anyone but Sadie, she’d been saving chicken feathers for as long as she could remember. The result of her conscientious—some would say compulsive—hoarding was a fifty pound flour sack chock-full of them. Fortunately, the bag no longer weighed fifty pounds since she hadn’t compressed them to the density of flour, but it was still a big old bunch of feathers. Sadie, bless her little chicken feather-hoarding heart, brought the bag with her when she arrived at the inn earlier in the day. She and the ladies were, at that very moment, in the kitchen gluing thousands of chicken feathers onto a cheesecloth-covered mesh frame in the shape of a pair of angel wings. Mel was fit to be tied. We’ll be finding chicken feathers for the next century.
Winnie was in charge of costumes, but Sadie was in charge of the feathers. That put Mel in charge of refereeing. She offered to trade jobs with me; I thought about it for a minute and decided I had the better end of the deal. Yes, I had a church sanctuary full of gun-toting vigilantes, one of whom was out to punch another one in the nose, but at least I didn’t have feathers floating in my beef stew.
Things took a turn for the serious when I filled her in on what Emma had told me. “I suspected there was something pretty serious going on in that little head of hers,” Mel said. “I’m glad you were able to draw her out. Any idea what you’re going to do?”
“Aside from pray for her? Not a clue. I wonder if she knows the Lord.”
“I hope so. I guess all we can do is ask her.”
“Come to think of it, I had a conversation with Sadie … when was it, yesterday? Anyway, I asked her what she knew about Emma. Turns out they go way back, but they stopped talking about seventy years ago. Had a falling out of some kind.”
Mel gasped. “Seventy years? That’s quite the falling out. Over what?”
“She wouldn’t say, but she also told me that Emma refuses to have anything to do with the church or with God, for that matter.”
“Hugh, we have to do something! Emma might be in perfectly good health—I don’t know about that—but still, she’s over eighty years old! She doesn’t have a lot of time to waste mulling this over.”
“I know. As soon as this mess blows over, I’ll talk to her again. She’s not exactly enamored of me, but she did open up to me today. If you feel like getting out of the kitchen for a while, why don’t you talk to her? And speaking of difficult people, how’s our twinkly star doing?”
She laughed at the reference. “You mean Del, right? Not one of our other twinkly stars? I have several of them over here, my dear.”
“Me, too. Yeah, Del. Is he helping out at all? He promised he would when I told him he didn’t need to come to the church. I think he thought he was getting the better end of the deal, but it sounds like he figured wrong.”
“He’s not doing much at the moment, but I’m about to ask him if he’d mind going back outdoors to shovel again. I hate to do that to the poor guy, but if someone doesn’t keep up with it, we’re going to be socked in forever.”
“He’ll be fine, Mel. Just don’t let him stay out too long. He’s not in the best shape. I’d hate to have the poor guy keel over from a heart attack. With our luck, Joe and Rudy are liable to kill him off just trying to save him.”
“Well, as soon as he’s off the phone, I’ll ask him. He’s not real happy to be here. He’s been trying to get hold of someone all day long—to rescue him, I presume—but I don’t think anyone’s taken him up on his offer.” She paused, and I could hear loud female voices in the background. “I don’t think we can count on him as a repeat customer.”
I laughed. “Probably not, but who can blame him?” I looked around the sanctuary at the men gathered there. Most of them carried a weapon ranging from Frank’s ball bat to Dewey’s nasty-looking pistol. Leo had a rifle of some kind, but he’d be better off beating someone over the head with it. I hoped it didn’t come to that. “I’d better go, hon. The troops are bickering again, and I don’t feel right leaving the mediating all to Bristol. What is it about bad weather that brings the worst out in folks?”
“Or the best.”
She was right. Maybe I’d have to eat my words. I sure hoped so.
We hung up when all the commotion started. I didn’t know what it was about at first. After all, commotion seemed to be the order of the day. But when Bristol came to attention, I knew something was up. I walked to the back of the sanctuary as he reached the front door of the church. I could hear someone banging on it from the other side—the cold side, and by now, the very dark side. At least I assumed it was someone; the way my luck was going, it was some creepy, slime-dripping, bloodthirsty monster straight out of a Stephen King novel.
We’d spent the last three hours taking one-hour look-out shifts at both the front and back doors and several of the windows just to be on the safe side. In the meantime, night fell and as it’s wont to do when night falls, it got dark. Very dark. Frank’s tour of duty at the front door happened to occur about twenty minutes before the knocking began. I suspect he fell asleep somewhere and so did everyone else, but Frank claimed he was only using the bathroom. He came back to a thunderous pounding and eighteen curious men gathered around his guard post.
“Who’s out there?” Bristol yelled, but without opening the door, it was unlikely anyone on the other side could hear him in all the racket the wind was making. Besides, his ears were probably frozen shut. Not surprisingly, Bristol didn’t get an answer.
He tried again. “Hey! Who’s out there?” More pounding, no answers. Bristol looked at me, and I shrugged. There were nineteen of us and who knows how many men, or monsters on the other side of the door. Granted, most of us were senior citizens, but we were men, nonetheless. Assuming the worst, we were goners. Assuming the best, opening the door would reveal nothing scarier than a very strong, yet cold kitten. I figured we were somewhere in the middle. “Might as well see what’s out there,” I said. “I mean who’s out there.”
Bristol slid back the iron bar on the door that served as a backup to the key lock and cracked it open. Snow filled the entryway in a gigantic whoosh and the temperature dropped twenty degrees in two seconds. Opening the door further seemed impractical under the circumstances, but you just don’t leave kittens outside to freeze in a blizzard. Or a man, for that matter.
Bristol peeked around the door, took a blast of frigid wind and snow right in the face, and yelled—once more—“Who is it?”
“Me!” Good answer.
“Who’s me, for crying out loud?”
“Sherman. Sherman DeSoto. Hey, man, let me in, all right? I’m freezin’ to death out here.”
Bristol turned to the men and said, “Anyone here know a Herman DeSoto?” Nobody took credit.
Then Dewey spoke up. “Could it be ‘Sherman’ DeSoto?”
“What difference does that make, Dewey? How many Herman or Sherman DeSotos do you know anyway?” I was losing my patience as well as most of my body heat. “Do you know him or not?”
“Think so. Well, I know a Sherman.” He raised his gaze to the ceiling for a few seconds as if in deep thought. “Aw, let him in, Bristol. It’s my wife’s nephew … or great nephew, whatever you wanna call him.”
“Whatever you say, Dewey,” Bristol said. He backed away from the door and opened it just wide enough for the man to enter. The snow swirled in a vicious cyclone around Bristol’s feet, over his head, and through his hands. “Hurry up, m
an, or I’ll have to shovel in here.” The guy nearly fell into the room as Bristol grabbed him by the arm and yanked him inward then slammed the door behind him.
“Whew! Nasty night. What took you guys so long, anyway? Thought I was gonna die out there.” The man, a young one from the sound of it, stamped his feet and brushed the snow off his shoulders. He pulled off his stocking cap and revealed orange hair. Carrot orange. Heck, fluorescent orange. And not the kind that comes from a box. This was natural, glow-in-the-dark orange.
I held out my hand and said, “Hugh Foster, son. So you’re Sherman DeSoto. Welcome to the Christ Is Lord Church.”
He pulled off one of his gloves and shook my hand vigorously. He was probably about seventeen. “Thanks, sir.”
“What brings you to Road’s End, Sherman? And on a miserable night like this?”
“What? You don’t know?” he said. He looked around. Nobody seemed to have the foggiest notion what he was talking about. “Really. You really don’t know.” He seemed to be stating the obvious then asked one more time, “You really don’t know?” He scratched his head. “I can’t believe you really don’t know.”
Either the gears in his brain were frozen, or he was the most astonished kid I’ve ever run across. “Just what is it that we don’t know, Sherman?”
“I brought Sophie with me.”
“Well, bring her in, man,” Bristol said, getting ready to open the door and dash out into the maelstrom to rescue Sophie.
“By all means, bring her in. But what does Sophie have to do with any of this? And just who is this Sophie?” That was me talking. The confused one, the one who really didn’t know.
Misstep (The Road's End Series Book 1) Page 9
