“Who told you that?”
“I believe it was Jefferson.”
“That can’t be right,” I said. “Mr. Jefferson was looking for him. He was asking people around town if they’d seen him.”
“Now how would you know that?”
“I asked around.”
“Did you, now?” The sheriff shook his head. “Why do I get the idea that there’s more to you than meets the eye? You’re sticking to this thing like a puppy to a root. What’s it to you?”
I dodged the question.
“Are you sure Mr. Jefferson said that Mr. LaSalle left town?” I asked.
“That’s my recollection, but I guess I could be mistaken. I was just a deputy at the time. Sheriff Beale handled the case.”
“But you found the body.”
“I did.”
“So you just happened to be passing that part of the river and you saw it?”
“Something like that.”
I thought about the river and the rutted dirt road that ran alongside it.
“Were you on your way somewhere?”
“Must have been.”
“Where?”
Sheriff Hicks made a show of consulting his wristwatch.
“I have work to do.”
“What about the cable?” I asked.
“What cable?”
“The body was anchored with a cable and a pulley so that it would stay under water, isn’t that right?”
He didn’t answer.
“Did you cut the cable after you pulled him up, or had the cable already been cut?” I asked.
“I don’t recall.”
“Because a lot of people I talked to seem to think the body was tied to that pulley with a rope.”
“These would be the same people who told you where the body was found?”
I saw no harm in letting him think this.
“Like I said, the people you’re talking to seem to have better memories than me,” he said.
“You don’t remember if it was a cable or a rope?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“If I’d seen something like that, I’m sure I’d never forget.”
“Well, you’re not a police officer.” The sheriff consulted his watch again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He tipped his hat and strode away.
Chapter Sixteen
I AM GIVEN ANOTHER PHOTOGRAPH
I NEEDED TO think. Walking is best for that. Mindless chores that keep my hands occupied and my brain free to wander are second best. So when Maggie said that she wished she had time to pick the strawberries that grew wild at the back of her property, I volunteered. I grabbed a bucket, headed beyond the ornamental hedge that divided the lawn from the kitchen garden—Maggie grew all kinds of vegetables and herbs—and set to work. While I picked, I thought about everything I knew. I had filled two containers by the time Daniel’s head appeared above the hedge. He waved something at me. I straightened immediately.
“What have you got there?” I asked.
“Mr. Rollins gave it to me.” He came through the hedge and handed it to me. It was a framed photograph—an old one. The glass was cracked and the frame was chipped.
“It’s the Rooster.” I knew it immediately, even though there was no signage to confirm it. Mr. Rollins, younger but still recognizable, was seated at a piano, his head back, his face split by a wide grin. He was clearly enjoying himself. So were the people around him.
“That’s TJ.” Daniel pointed to a young black man standing near the piano.
“He’s really handsome.” He was tall and well built, with twinkling eyes.
“And that—” He pointed to a blond girl in a tight sweater and a full skirt that fell to mid-calf. She was wearing saddle shoes and ankle socks. “That’s Anne Morrison. She was Anne Tyson then.”
“You know her?”
He shook his head. “Mr. Rollins found the picture after we talked to him. He told me that girl used to come to the Rooster with her friends. Maybe she remembers Mr. LaSalle.”
I took another look at the photo. There were at least a dozen white kids in it, half of them girls.
“How come he remembers her?”
Daniel smiled.
“He says she was a good dancer. Really good. He says he’s pretty sure her mother would have packed her off to a convent school if she’d seen how that girl danced.”
She certainly had a wide grin on her face. And she was pretty.
“Do you know where she is now?”
“Mr. Rollins says she still lives in town.”
“Then she must be in the phone book.” I looked at the strawberries. Maggie wanted to make jam. She would need more berries than I had picked so far. “Come and help me. Then we’ll see if we can track down Anne.”
It took us just thirty minutes to fill every container I could find with plump, fragrant strawberries. Warm from the sun, they already smelled like the strawberry jam they were destined to become.
I started back to the house, but Daniel didn’t follow.
“Aren’t you coming?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’ll wait here.”
I delivered the strawberries and thumbed through the phone book. It contained seven Morrisons, and I couldn’t help wondering if they were related to each other. I copied down all the addresses and took them out to Daniel, who was waiting at the hedge.
“Which one do you think might be her?” I showed him the list of addresses.
“This one is out of town a ways.” He pointed to the first name. “This one too. The other five are closer.”
I wished he could have narrowed it down even more. But five names were better than seven.
“Which is the closest one?”
He pointed.
“Show me.”
He hesitated but finally walked me down to the main street. Three men stood in front of the hardware store. One of them turned and looked at us as we passed on the other side of the street. I was positive that he had followed me home with the mob the other night. He nudged his buddies, and they turned to look too. I prayed they wouldn’t follow us and make trouble.
They stayed where they were. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Daniel came to a halt at an intersection.
“Go up to the first corner. That’s Mulberry. The first Morrison lives there.”
“You aren’t coming with me?”
“I’d rather wait over there.” He nodded to a bench across the street, in front of a small park.
I didn’t argue with him. I sort of knew how he felt. I’d always felt out of place when I ventured into Johnny’s neighborhood, where all the houses had neat lawns and shiny cars in the garage and toys strewn all over the driveway. Going there reminded me of all the things I didn’t have, like parents and siblings and a house and a room of my very own—things Johnny took for granted.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said.
The Mrs. Morrison who answered my knock at the first house was eighty if she was a day. She peered at me through glasses that were a quarter of an inch thick, and I had to practically shout so that she would hear me. Even then, I had to repeat everything, sometimes more than once. It turned out that the Anne Morrison I was looking for was her granddaughter-in-law and the fourth of the five in-town Morrisons on my list. I shouted my thanks and went to find Daniel.
He gave me directions to Anne Morrison’s house but refused to go with me. I promised to tell him what, if anything, I found out.
Anne Morrison was still a blond with salon-coiffed hair, but she was chubbier than in the photograph, and there were fine lines radiating out around her eyes and her mouth, which were made up with blue eye shadow and pink lipstick. She was wearing a cotton dress and white sandals; little pearl earrings dangled from her earlobes. She blinked at me when she opened the door and said, “Yes?” in a soft voice.
“Are you the Anne Morrison who used to be Anne Tyler?” I asked.
A frown deepened the lines o
n her forehead.
“Why do you ask?”
I showed her the photograph.
“Is this you?” I pointed to the slender blond.
At first Anne’s eyes stayed on me. She was probably wondering who this stranger at her door was. But eventually her gaze slipped down to the framed photo, and a smile transformed her face. In an instant, she looked like the exuberant girl she used to be.
“Where on earth did you get that?” She reached for the frame, then paused and said, “May I?” When I handed her the picture, she held it up for closer inspection. “Good heavens, I didn’t even know this existed.”
“Mr. Rollins had it.”
Anne’s expression was vague. She couldn’t make the connection.
“The man who used to play piano at the Rooster,” I said.
“Rolly?” She squealed like a schoolgirl. “Rolly had this?”
“He says you used to sneak down to the Rooster all the time.”
“So did this boy here.” Anne pointed to a lanky youth, his hair slicked back, black-framed glasses all but obscuring his eyes. “That’s Ronald. My husband. We met at the Rooster, although, believe me, we never told our parents. They would have had a fit if—” She broke off. Her smile faded. She fixed me with a sharp look. “I’m sorry, but who did you say you were?”
I told her that I was staying with Maggie. “The publisher of the local newspaper,” I added. If she inferred from what I said that I was a relative of Maggie’s or a houseguest, well, I didn’t disabuse her of the notion.
“I never get a chance to look at the newspaper,” she said. “The kids run me off my feet. I don’t have time to sit down for even a moment. I’d be chasing them around the property right now if Ronald’s mother hadn’t scooped them up an hour ago to take them to a movie. There’s a new Disney picture playing.” She raised the photo again and smiled at some secret memory.
“I was wondering,” I said. “Do you remember a man who used to go to the Rooster about the same time as you did? He was a friend of Thomas Jefferson’s.” I pointed him out to her.
“I didn’t really know any of those boys very well.”
“The man I mean was white. His name was Patrice LaSalle.”
Anne’s forehead scrunched up as she thought. “I don’t recall—” Her eyes popped. “Say, you don’t mean the man who was murdered? His name was Patrick, I think.”
“Patrice.”
“He had some kind of accent. He wasn’t from around here. I think he was from up north somewhere.”
“Canada,” I said.
“That sounds right. A good-looking fellow. Dark eyes, dark hair. A soft way of speaking. Never danced. I know. I must have asked him a dozen times. Didn’t talk much either. But he sure seemed to enjoy the music. His toe was always tapping.”
My heart raced. This woman remembered him. She’d noticed things about him that no one else had mentioned so far.
“I tell you, even though I was sweet on Ronald—we were pinned—there were times when I couldn’t take my eyes off that fellow. There was something about him. I can’t say exactly what it was, but there was something. All the girls tried to get him to dance. He’d just smile and shake his head and say he was too old for that sort of thing. And we all left it at that. We were sixteen, maybe seventeen.” She smiled again. “Ronald got us some phony IDs. That way the owner could pretend he thought we were legitimate.” The memory seemed to tickle her. “We were pretty wild back then. That friend of the Jefferson boy was, let me see, my God, he must have been twenty-three or twenty-four. An old man. At least, that’s what we thought at the time. Wouldn’t I love to be that age again!” She laughed.
“Do you remember seeing him outside of the Rooster? Do you have any idea if he made any friends here?”
“I don’t know much about him except that he was found in the river. They put that Jefferson boy in prison for it.”
I waited.
“We were all shocked,” she said. “Some girls cried when they heard, even though they didn’t know him very well. Just the idea that anyone could kill such a nice man—it seemed so awful. One of the girls, Ellie, had a breakdown over it. At least, that’s what people said.”
This was news. “A breakdown over the murder?”
“She was the worst for flirting with him. But he turned her down every time. After a while she stopped coming around.” She thought for a moment. “Hmmm,” she said.
“Hmmm?”
“I was just thinking—never mind. It’s not important.”
“I’m trying to get as much information as I can.”
Anne looked at me. “It’s just…Ellie stopped coming down to the Rooster. After that, it seemed like he wasn’t there as often either. It’s probably a coincidence. I mean, it’s not like I ever saw them together. But it’s kind of strange, now that I think of it.” She shrugged.
“Did you ever talk to Ellie about it?”
“No. She left town after it happened. The murder, I mean. I didn’t see her again for, I don’t know, it must have been a year. I ran into her on the street. She looked thin, that’s all I remember. We were never close friends, and she didn’t seem to recognize me, so…” Both shoulders rose in apology. “I never spoke to her again.”
“Is she still in town?” If Ellie had known Patrice LaSalle, I definitely wanted to talk to her.
“In a manner of speaking. She died. Years ago. She’s buried in Oak Grove.”
My spirits crashed. Another dead end. Now what?
“Was there anyone else who seemed especially interested in Mr. LaSalle?” I asked.
“Not that I recall.” Anne handed the photograph back to me. “I have a million things to do now that my little monsters are out with their grandma.”
“This girl Ellie,” I said before she closed the door on me. “Does she have family in town?”
“Oh my, yes. Her father is John Chisholm.”
“The John Chisholm who owns a lot of businesses around here?”
“The same. That’s why I didn’t know Ellie well. No one did. Her daddy sent her to private school up in Evansville. If you ask me, she would have been happier if he’d let her go to school with the rest of us. She would have had more friends, that’s for sure.”
She excused herself and disappeared inside.
I was on my way back to Maggie’s when someone called my name. It was Mr. Standish. He was coming out of the drugstore.
“I was just going to get a cold drink,” he said. “Care to join me?”
The man was still a mystery to me. He seemed to pop up everywhere. He knew a lot about the town and its people, and he seemed happy to share his knowledge. But there was something beneath his friendly exterior, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Still, he was a good source of information. I accepted his invitation.
We went to the diner, where he selected a booth far from the window. Mr. Standish ordered iced tea for both of us, and while we waited for it, we made small talk. After we’d been served, though, he leaned back against the upholstered booth and said, “What are you really doing here, Cady? Why are you so interested in Thomas Jefferson?”
I met his pale eyes. In most of our encounters, Mr. Standish had been friendly, like a kindly old uncle. But I wasn’t reading any uncle-like friendliness in his eyes now. There was a steely hue to the blue of his irises. Whatever he used to do before he retired, I was sure he had given it his full attention and had been successful at it. He had the air of a man of competence, someone who meant business and was businesslike in all his dealings. Someone who was used to people paying attention to him, doing what they were told and addressing him with respect.
“I already told you. I want to write about it.” I sipped my iced tea demurely through a straw.
“You’re stirring up trouble too, even though you told me you weren’t a troublemaker.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Mr. Standish waved me to silence.
“That group of yahoos following you.
The fire at Maggie’s. Letting folks think you’re Lorne Beale’s granddaughter. It all adds up to trouble.”
That reminded me of something I wanted to know.
“You told me that Sheriff Beale and his daughter didn’t get along. What happened between them?”
Mr. Standish shook his head. “You’re not going to let it be, are you?”
He was right about that. “What happened?”
He sighed and drank some tea.
“I told you. Lorne’s wife left him, took the girl and went back to where she came from. A few years later, she died. After that, Jane—that’s the daughter’s name—lived with her mother’s people up in Connecticut. Lorne didn’t fight it. He figured she’d get a good education, which they were more than happy to pay for. She was up there all fall and winter. I don’t think she even came back for Christmas most years. But she’d make the trip most summers with a pocketbook full of money from her grandparents. She loved to party. Lorne didn’t approve, but he didn’t have much say in the matter. He’d more or less given that up when he agreed to let his wife’s relatives foot the bills for her. There used to be a place the kids liked to hang out. A roadhouse.”
The Rooster. I didn’t tell him that I knew about the place. I had already learned that different people looked differently at things and remembered them differently, and if you wanted to get a good picture of what had really happened, you had to keep your mouth shut and your ears open.
“Mostly it was a colored place,” Mr. Standish said. “There was music—not the kind that most parents thought was proper for their sons and daughters—and drinking. Who knows what else went on? Kids would sneak down there without their parents knowing. Well, without most parents knowing. But Lorne patrolled the place. He went in there regularly even though it was across the county line, because people around here complained about the noise and about seeing kids drive away from there at all hours. The first time he found Jane in that place, he was furious. He went in there to roust her out. Threatened to tell the other kids’ parents what they were up to too. Threatened to close the place down.”
He took a sip of his tea. “But that never happened.”
My Life Before Me Page 13
