The Second Mouse

by Archer Mayor

  Joe laughed but couldn’t resist checking. He was fine.

  “How are you?” she inquired, leading the way to the sagging porch. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

  “Really?” he asked. “I’ll have to tell Doug Matthews that. He was hoping you and I would get something going.”

  This time she laughed, reaching the porch, putting the basket down, and waving him to his earlier perch on the railing. “If you weren’t a cop, he might’ve been right. You want something to drink?”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine. You don’t like cops? I didn’t get that when we met.”

  She settled into her chair. Bogey wandered off. “It’s not a blind prejudice,” she said. “Just something born of my time in the city.”

  “Things might be different up here,” he told her.

  She smiled. “Is that an invitation?”

  He tilted his head and made a regretful face. “No. I’m afraid not. I’m here officially—at least sort of.”

  “Ah,” she said, studying him.

  He studied her in turn for a moment before commenting, “You haven’t asked about the case.”

  She widened her eyes, but the look in them remained careful. “I figured you’d tell me if anything had happened. Has it?”

  “In a way,” he confessed. “But not how you might think.”

  “Really.” She said it as a statement.

  “Yeah. Every once in a blue moon, it ends up that what we had from the start was all we ever needed.”

  “Like when a car kills a pedestrian?”

  He shook his head. “No. There we need to know if the driver was drunk. Or the pedestrian. Did they know each other beforehand? What was the lighting at the time? And on and on. Those actually get pretty complicated. I’m thinking more about a case like Michelle’s. Before, that is,” he added, “someone changes how everything looks.”

  She didn’t respond, but he felt a stillness settle over her, as if she were waiting to hear a distant but telling mechanical click.

  “Newell Morgan was pretty awful to her, wasn’t he?” Joe asked.

  She barely nodded. “I told you that.”

  “Yes, but you phrased it in terms of his being her landlord—wanting her out so he could sell the house. There was more to it.”

  “That’s all I knew.”

  “You also said you’d never met him.”

  She hesitated. “Did I? I might have, once. I was over there a lot.”

  “So was he.”

  She didn’t answer. She tried to swallow without revealing it to him.

  “Newell Morgan was after Michelle sexually. He wanted to replace his son in her bed.”

  Joe could almost see Linda’s brain analyzing what she should say next.

  Finally, she went where he would have in her place. “Am I in trouble here?”

  He sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees, so his eyes and hers were on a level. “I don’t think so. But that’s why I’m here. I do think you’ve done things you haven’t told me about—things that normally would get you into hot water. But if I’m right, and if you confirm them, then I’m willing to let things rest as they are.”

  “So,” she said, striving to sound natural, “what do you think I’ve done?”

  He smiled and straightened. “That would be too easy. I’ve got to find out if the truth and my suspicions are one and the same. My telling you what I think would be a poor way of doing that.”

  She pressed her lips together for a moment. “I see what you mean. Puts me in a tough spot, though. If I say too much—more than you suspect—then I land myself in jail for no good reason. You’re asking me to risk suicide.”

  He smiled. “Interesting choice of words.”

  She stared at him, and he could see at that moment an almost visible cloud lift from her brow.

  “He almost pulled it off,” she then said.

  “Getting into Michelle’s bed?”

  “Yeah. He came by again and again, wearing her down. She started saying she could see maybe making an accommodation. He’s just another guy, you know? Nothing a shower can’t wash off, right? Things like that. But it was killing her.”

  “It did kill her,” he suggested.

  Linda’s face saddened. “Well, yeah, in the long run. But at least he wasn’t the primary reason anymore.”

  “Because of you,” he stated.

  She paused before finally nodding. “Yeah. I was there the last time he came by. I gave him hell. Told him that if he kept at it, he’d end up in prison, being put to the same use he was trying to put her to, only by a bunch of hairy guys. I also said I’d tell his wife and everybody else who gave a damn.”

  “And that did it?”

  “He was a pig. He wasn’t brave. Plus, he was going to get everything else he was after. Michelle didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. The house was his, and she was going to end up on the street. All I did was spare her that last humiliation.”

  She sighed deeply and, staring at the floor, added, “At least I thought so.”

  “But she did commit suicide,” Joe suggested quietly.

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “A while later. Not so much because of him, though. At least I can claim that. It was more the rest of it—Archie, the lack of money, her kids not wanting contact. In a way, it was even Adele and me doing what we could. Our offers of help just highlighted how badly off she was.”

  Linda looked up at him, her own burdens and struggle commingling with her sorrow. “Michelle died of a broken heart. She just turned on the gas to make it real.”

  “And that’s where you came in.”

  She touched her upper lip with her fingertip and stared thoughtfully at the floor.

  “You really have figured this out, haven’t you?”

  He nodded without saying a word.

  “Yeah.” She said the word slowly, dragging it out. “At the time, I was just so mad, you know? I had to blame somebody. And he was so easy. So deserving. I hated it that she would just be allowed to slip away, and that a bastard like him wouldn’t suffer a single thing. It wasn’t right.”

  Joe kept silent, letting her work through her story.

  “It wasn’t like I really pinned it on him,” she said a little defensively. “Not that I wouldn’t have tried if I’d known how. I would’ve put his fingerprints on her throat, the creep. But all I could do was muddy the waters a little. Turn off the gas, fiddle with the tank, crawl through from outside, open the windows . . . I did what I could to draw your attention to there being someone else involved.”

  “You buried Georgia.”

  She’d gotten a little worked up admitting all this, and his comment brought her up short. Her face softened. “Poor Georgia. I doubt Michelle even thought about her. Such a sweet old cat. She didn’t deserve being killed without a thought.”

  She stopped speaking for a while, simply staring off into space. Joe let her be.

  But she gazed at him eventually and asked, “That’s what tipped you off, wasn’t it? Burying the cat.”

  He smiled at her, enjoying the way her brain worked. “It helped. Newell would’ve just thrown her in the woods or forgotten about her.” He didn’t mention how Mel—had he even been remotely involved—would have done the same.

  Linda sighed again, shoving her hands between her thighs like a child. “God, what a life. So, what now? You lock me up?”

  Joe rose instead and shook his head. “No. You actually did me a favor, pointed me places you knew nothing about. It didn’t get Newell in trouble, but we put some bad people in jail along the way. Things have a funny way of working out.”

  She nodded, smiling sadly. “I guess they do sometimes, if not always according to plan.”

 

 

 
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