Something About Sophie

by Mary Kay McComas

  “The part about you being crazy.”

  “Me?”

  “About a woman?”

  “Did you think I was talking about you?”

  If she didn’t, she knew now by the teasing light in his eyes. She squinted and gave him her best scary-teacher stare. He chuckled in the face of danger, undaunted.

  “I confess. I do think you’re pretty adorable.” He used his left thumb to rub a surplus tear off her cheek; looked entirely inclined to kiss her, then sobered. “I hate that you’re caught up in all this—digging up the past, what’s happening in town. One or the other would be hard enough, but together it must feel overwhelming.”

  A vague impression grew clearer. It must have shown on her face.

  “What?” he asked. He leaned back, as if being too close to her made it harder to think. “What are you thinking?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing really. Just a half-thought. We should get back to Jesse. She’ll worry.”

  “She’ll be fine and it won’t make any difference if we’re there or not. What are you thinking? Talk to me.”

  She wondered if this might be more therapy for a hysterical woman, but his tone was compelling—and she didn’t care if was. Thinking out loud might help.

  “What if . . . what if someone’s trying to frame me? The sheriff already has his suspicions. It could happen.”

  “No, it couldn’t. You have alibis and there’s no proof. No motive.”

  “But what if they plant evidence or do something else? What if it works?” He opened his mouth to protest again. “Just what if. . . . What if it worked? What would anyone have to gain from sending me to jail? I don’t have anything—certainly nothing someone else would want. I can’t say for certain that I’ve never hurt anyone, but it was never intentional and it certainly wouldn’t justify this sort of revenge. And even if it did . . . why here, why now all of a sudden? The only thing I can think of that’s changed for me since I got here is that I have BelleEllen now.”

  An unfamiliar emotion rippled across his features. “I can’t think of Hollis as—”

  “No. Don’t think of Hollis. Don’t think of him doing anything to hurt me. He cares about me. He wanted me to be his sister. He did. As much as I wanted to be. Besides, I’m giving it back to him. As soon as he’ll let me or I figure out how. I don’t want BelleEllen. He knows it. It’s not him.” She hesitated. “Those Florida cousins. . . . The big one? Richard Hollister. He was furious. And he seemed like the kind of guy who’d bite the heads off live chickens for sport.”

  “And the farm would go to him if anything happened to you,” Drew said, a hopeful ah-ha in his voice. She squinted. “No? So Hollis would get it.”

  “I don’t know. But it wasn’t Hollis. I’m sure of it.” She crossed her arms mutinously across her belly and stared out the windshield, thinking. And just as Drew—still caught up in the possibilities—reached out to put the car back in gear to drive on, she stalled him with her hand and another thought.

  “Wait a second. You know, I barely had any contact with those men. I spent more time with the tech who took my DNA sample the other day. I talked to the little curator in the museum for over an hour. If someone is setting me up, why didn’t they pick people I’d spent more time with? More people like Lonny . . . like Ava or Billy, Jesse or Mike, you or your mother? Why not people I actually know, instead of two men who knew each other, but not me?”

  He turned toward her again. He took a moment to review the data, readjusted his breakdown of the information, and encouraged her to continue.

  “Does it seem like someone might be afraid of what could happen if they had further contact with me? Like if one or both had actually talked to me?”

  “Like they knew something and whoever’s doing this is shutting them up?”

  She nodded. “Cliff Palmeroy was following me for some reason. And Maury Weims was . . . cold and unpleasant. Specifically toward me—and I’m not imagining it. He was. He must have had a reason.”

  “And Lonny?”

  She was thoughtful. “Lonny and I . . . chatted. For several minutes. We talked. And I had my car sent to him. We probably would have talked again. Maybe he knows, too. They might have thought he’d let something slip. And what happened last night might have been a warning.” Wagging her head slowly, she met his gaze. “You’re right. It isn’t my fault. Someone else is pulling all the strings for their own reasons. But it does have something to do with me.” She paused. “Or even more likely, it has to do with my birth mother. She’s what Arthur wanted to talk to me about, and my coming is why everything else is happening.”

  Gravely, he searched her face, accepted the conviction in it, and kissed her—soft, solid, and sure. He nodded. “Okay. It’s as good as any other explanation. We’ll run it by the sheriff and see what he thinks.” A quick promissory peck. “We’ll figure it out.”

  They arrived back at Jesse’s to see her red Jeep looking shiny and new at the curb—and the sheriff’s brown SUV and two other county cars, grimy with mud and dust, parked in front of the house.

  Jesse stood in the dappled sunlight amid the ferns and sweet rose accents on the porch. She wasn’t tearing her hair out or screaming hysterically, so it seemed safe to suppose that Mike was well. But she was pale, looked stressed with the nervous flip of one hand in greeting, and her smile was strained: she had more bad news.

  “Oh dear,” Sophie muttered, sharing a look of dread with Drew. He set his jaw and went for the door handle. He held the gate open for her and neither of them spoke until they stopped at the bottom of the steps, looking up at their friend.

  “I’m sorry, Sophie. They have a warrant. I had to let them in.”

  “Oh.” Her shoulders and neck tingled as those muscles loosened and leveled out. “Thank God. I thought someone else was missing or— Have they found Maury Weims yet?” The shrug and short shake of Jesse’s head was troubling—very troubling when she had no words to add to it. “How’s Lonny? Have you heard anything else? Why would anyone do that to him? Can he have visitors? Do you think he’d mind if I went to see him?”

  This time Jesse tipped her head, baffled. “What is it with you and Lonny? He’s such a cranky old fart—he’s alienated almost everybody in town. The only reason he’s still in business is because he can fix anything. Cars, toasters, freezers, lamps. He fixed Adam Bowman’s grandfather’s pocket watch two years ago. Adam was so grateful, he replaced all the lightbulbs in Lonny’s service-and-repair sign, then Lonny went around bitching about the cost of the electricity to turn it on every night—which by the way, he still doesn’t do. Ornery old poop.”

  This didn’t sound like the Lonny she’d met, but her ten-minute acquaintance with him hardly put her in a position to dispute it, except to say, “I caught him in a good mood, I guess. He was nice. I liked him.”

  Jesse was clearly perplexed still, but voices from inside the house distracted them all.

  “So, they’re going through my stuff.” She couldn’t remember how full her dirty laundry bag was; wondered if they’d touch all her underwear . . . or made comments.

  “And your car.”

  An ironic chuckle. “Well, it won’t take long. They’ve already crawled all over my car once and my stuff doesn’t fill a whole drawer up there.”

  “That’s what I said.” She was plainly relieved that her guest wasn’t overly upset. “Well, not the number of drawers, of course, but that you brought so little—not even running clothes, so you had to buy some. It didn’t seem to matter.”

  “Did they say what they were looking for?” Drew asked.

  “Incriminating evidence is what the warrant said. So far they’ve bagged up most of my knives, both of the flathead screwdrivers from the junk drawer, my sewing scissors, and the safety scraper—that thingy with the razor blade inside to get paint off windows? They even took my razor from my bathroom. Ha! I thought they were going to declare a national holiday when they found the X-Acto knife I use to cut away old
caulking.”

  “They’re looking through your things, too?”

  “They’re looking everywhere. Inside the vents, the basement—even I can’t find anything down there. The toilet tank, behind the stove and the frig, and the—”

  “They’re tearing your house apart?” Sophie glanced at Drew—he tipped his head to say they’d already pitched the frame-up theory and it didn’t float.

  “Ho.” Jesse stood taller. “They tried. But I told Fred Murphy I’d call his mother if he didn’t put everything back the way they found it.” She huffed, hardly as daunting as she pretended to be, and settled in a wicker chair to wait out the search. Drew glanced down at his watch, debated in silence, and then mounted the steps to lean against a support pillar—to prop up his friend. “That was the only fuss I made, though. I figured I’d get more out of Fred with honey than my usual sweet self, so I cooperated as much as my temper would let me. I came out here when they found Mike’s Swiss army knife—it was my father’s.”

  “They’ll give it all back,” he said, sounding certain. “They think Cliff’s throat was slashed at with a thin smooth-edged object, likely a scalpel or razor blade, less than two inches long. And if it was anyone’s house but yours, I’d have to say it’s better to take too much and return it later than not enough and miss something.”

  Reluctantly the women agreed—or at least didn’t argue. Instead, Sophie asked, “What else do you know?”

  “All I got was a quick peek at the preliminary autopsy in the ER—nothing’s for certain yet.” They stared at him, unaffected by his disclaimer. He heaved a sigh. “Because of the shape and location of the lacerations—and the pattern of the blood splatter—they think the killer was in the truck with him at the time of the attack, that the killer was right-handed, that he may have some knowledge of human anatomy, and was either a weak or an unpracticed killer due to the number and the various lengths and depths of the wounds.”

  “Why right-handed?” Sophie asked.

  “Because of the direction of the cuts and which side of the neck they were made on,” Jesse explained, clearly up to date on her episodes of CSI but shaken enough to look at Drew for confirmation.

  “That’s right. We know Cliff was in the truck when he died because that’s where all the blood was. And if the splatter was on the left side of the truck, the cut had to be on the left side of his neck.”

  Jesse stood and, without a word, took Sophie by the hand, turned her and placed her behind the steering wheel of an imaginary pickup truck. She pointed to the left side of Sophie’s neck. “You’re on the driver’s side with the window down and the cuts are here. If someone came up behind you on your left and they were left-handed, the cuts would be on the right side of your neck. If they were right-handed it would be too awkward.” She tried a pretend incision from Sophie’s larynx to her left ear and was startled to see it wasn’t impossible. She looked to Drew.

  “You can tell the direction of the cut because they’re deeper where they start and end superficially.” Perhaps he was thinking this gruesome reenactment would supply more facts than their wild speculations.

  “Yes, right. I knew that.” Jesse turned back to her victim. “So they can tell that the cuts were made from left to right, so anyone standing here, outside his window, couldn’t have done it . . . with either hand.” She circled the invisible truck and came up on Sophie’s right. “Obviously, I can’t reach you from over here, so I have to get in.” She wiggled in close to the soon-to-be-deceased. “I could maybe stab the left side of your neck with my left hand if I had rubber joints, but not slice it. I’d have to use my right hand and reach across like this.” When she did, Sophie’s hands automatically reached up and grabbed Jesse’s arm to protect herself—and again, the older woman looked surprised and turned to Drew.

  “That’s a natural response,” he said with a shrug. “And it might explain the number and mix of lengths and depths of the wounds. They struggled.”

  “Should we tell Fred?” Evidently Jesse was hoping that solving the crime would make it go away, flush it from her mind. Sophie wasn’t so certain.

  He grinned. “Couldn’t hurt, but I’m guessing one of his other forensic specialists might have told him by now.”

  She simpered at him and made a short production of walking away from the murder scene. Sophie remained, completely creeped out.

  “What I can’t figure out,” Drew went on, “is why he’s still so fixated on Sophie? Do you know if he thinks everything is related? Cliff, Maury, the tires, Lonny?” He glanced at Sophie, aware of what she thought.

  Keeping her eyes averted, she walked passed Jesse to take the other big white wicker chair. She felt drained, sat—then bounced to her feet just as Sheriff Murphy pushed through the screen door to join them on the porch.

  “I do,” he said, looking around at each of them—one no longer than the other. “I do think they’re related.”

  “And that Sophie’s involved?” Jesse jumped on him. “Because of those stupid pictures? Or because of the bloody knife you found in her room? No? No knife? Maybe you found Maury’s truck up there—or the black clothes and ski mask Lonny reported. No? So, where’s your evidence, Fred? And let’s not forget she has an alibi for nearly every second she’s been in town. Truly, I don’t understand why you’re wasting all this time on Sophie when it’s so obvious it isn’t her. You should be looking somewhere else.”

  “Like where?”

  “Well, how the hell should I know? You’re the cop.”

  His moan was long suffering. “I swear to God, Jesse, you are chewing on my last nerve.”

  “Then talk to us,” Drew said. “Help us understand where you’re coming from. If you think Sophie has something to do with this, explain why and maybe she, or we, can elaborate or explain it for you.”

  The sheriff debated so long, Sophie was sure he was going to step off the porch and leave them to their guessing—or worse, leave her panicking that her most terrible imaginings were true.

  Finally, he took up the pillar opposite Drew’s, in front of Jesse, and began to count out the steps he’d taken to his deductions. “First, and most obvious, is the location of Palmeroy’s murder and Sophie’s pictures in his truck—both of which I could have taken as circumstantial until Carla, his wife,” he clarified for Sophie, “told me that their camera hadn’t worked in years; that he hadn’t let her get a new one; that she’d wanted to take pictures of the boys . . . and so on. The next day she tells me the only thing missing from the truck, that she could tell, was a hotshot that Cliff kept in the bed of his truck.” He put up a hand. “And don’t ask me why he needed a cattle prod for the half dozen head he keeps out there when a cattle cane would work just as well, because I don’t want to think about it.” His jaw tightened with disgust, and it was plain the sheriff didn’t approve of or like the victim, either—not that that let Sophie off the hook.

  “So I have pictures of you on a camera that’s not his, in the truck with his dead body, and a missing hotshot.” He gazed at each face. “It didn’t make any sense to me, either. Then your tires are slashed and we all sort of agree that it’s vandals. New bright red car in town. They might even have known whose it was because of all the hoopla with Arthur Cubeck’s will. I get it dusted for fingerprints for two reasons—to see if it’s one of my habitual delinquents—case solved. And because it sets off an alarm in my head that it’s the second time in two days that you’ve been involved in a crime.” Again he held up a hand to stall Jesse. “One way or another. Next, when I was ready to call whoever was next on our towing list, you requested that it be taken to Lonny’s. Fine, no problem. But now I have you in a suspicious connection to Lonny.”

  “Why suspicious?” Drew asked before Sophie could.

  “You know Lonny. You know his place. Why would anyone—especially a stranger—request him to tow her car?”

  “Because she’d met him that morning getting gas and she liked him?”

  “How would I kn
ow that?”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  Sophie glanced at Drew. She was scared—not so much of being found guilty of something she didn’t do because, well, because she didn’t do anything. But even the sheriff believed she was connected somehow to the evil occurring in his town. And that connection scared her. A lot. How many more people would it lash out at, and why? And how long before that evil came after her?

  “Maury goes missing. I don’t respond as aggressively as I should have because it hasn’t been twenty-four or twelve or even eight hours yet, and I’m busy with the homicide. By noon, Leigh was beside herself and I begin to take notice. I didn’t begin to make the connection until I went over to the house to interview her—and this is after I find out Frank Lanyard thinks someone might be trying to kill him, too—and she tells me Maury had been acting strangely all day Friday, even before they heard about Cliff Palmeroy.”

  “I wondered about that,” Sophie said, and when the sheriff turned his curious scowl on her, she added, “I heard from . . . through the grapevine that Mrs. Weims thought he was acting peculiar after he heard about the murder of his friend.” Both men slid their gaze in Jesse’s direction—identifying the grapevine—and back again. “I wondered what he was doing that would stand out as odd behavior after the death of a friend, but if it was all day Friday as well . . .” She paused. “Well, I’m still curious. More, since I saw him earlier that day, before I saw Mr. Palmeroy watching me across from the hospital.”

  She watched the sheriff review his mental time line before saying, “Leigh said he rushed into the house unexpectedly Friday morning, about eleven or eleven-thirty. He rummaged through their utility closet for their camera and ran out again. She called out the door, asking what he needed the camera for, and he said, ‘to take pictures.’ He got back in the car and raced off.”

  “Oh, no.” Jesse hid her face from the truth with her hands. “It’s his camera in Cliff’s truck.”

  “With my pictures in it.”

  The officer pressed his lips together in a tight line and nodded. “She called him later in the afternoon on his cell—he was short with her, said he couldn’t talk and would call her back. But he didn’t. He was late getting home from work, nothing too unusual, but she thought he was coming down with something because she’d fixed something he liked for dinner and he hardly touched it. She said that even once they’d settled in front of the TV, she could feel his tension. She wanted to ask if something had happened at work, but assumed he’d tell her when he was ready. My wife would have nagged the hell out of me,” he said as an aside, marveling at Leigh’s self-control. He took a breath. “Apparently he liked to have time to ‘think out’ whatever he was feeling before he told her about it. I guess if you’ve been married to a guy like that for that long, you figure out quick what works and what doesn’t.”