Murder Comes by Mail

by A. H. Gabhart

  “The man was within a desperate inch of meeting his Maker. That can take the lid off.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Michael sighed and looked back over at Buck. “Betty Jean says I’m worrying this like a dog licking at a sore.”

  Buck made a face. “Our Betty Jean does have a way with words, but could be she’s right. If you’re going to be worrying something, worry about something that matters, like figuring out how we can get a decent cup of coffee without going over to the enemy.” Buck glanced over at the Stop and Go as he put his car in gear. “I guess I’d better go find some tourists to slow down.”

  “Since when have you been on patrol?”

  “We’re running this big push this week. ‘Slow down and live.’” Buck boomed out the last four words. “It won’t slow them down, but it will up the take for the month. Anyway, I volunteered some overtime. Billie Jo’s off to Baskin U. next month.”

  “Nice college.”

  “That’s what Susan says, but the tuition’s nice too. Nice and high. They take your kid, brainwash her into thinking everything you ever told her was hogwash, and bill you some gosh-awful amount like they’re doing you a favor. I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”

  With that, Buck drove off to chase down cars with Baskin U. bumper stickers and Michael headed over to put in his weekend hours keeping the Keane mansion and grounds up to Aunt Lindy’s standards. While the house wasn’t really mansion size, it was old, so something was always in need of repair or paint.

  Today Aunt Lindy had pulled out the shovels and hoes for their semiannual fight against the honeysuckle vines and wild rose briars that kept creeping into the back garden. As Michael hacked at the vines, he thought maybe he should have gone to Baskin U. and learned how to leave home.

  He had left home for a few years, but Hidden Springs had called him back. He liked knowing everyone he met on the street, and he liked the fact that in a small town like Hidden Springs he had a real chance to do what all good lawmen wanted to do, and that was keep the peace in spite of what Hank had said about catching the bad guys. In the city he’d been a street cop, the one who tried to staunch the bleeding. The bandage was never big enough. For every bad guy taken off the street, three more popped up in his place. Sort of like dandelions.

  Alex told him he was hiding out from the world, and fooling himself besides. Bad people were in every town, every walk of life, every situation. His problem, according to Alex, was he didn’t have the courage to step out into the unknown and accept the challenge of life. He asked her once if she didn’t think people lived in Hidden Springs, but she had an answer for that too. They just existed, put in their days, and clocked out at the end of their lives without leaving a trace of shadow behind.

  That proved Alex didn’t know much about small towns. Small towns were full of shadows. As Michael grubbed up the roots of a wild rose bush that had taken up residence in the back corner of the garden, he felt Keane shadows all around him. His grandfather had no doubt fought weed intruders in this very spot. His ancestors’ shadows lay heavy over the town as well, from Jasper Keane, who founded the little town almost two hundred years ago, to Aunt Lindy, who devoted her life to keeping Hidden Springs on the map.

  Michael could move to China and not get out from under those shadows, and the fact was he didn’t want to. His roots spread out and clung to the ground here at Hidden Springs every bit as tenaciously as the wild rose he was yanking up bit by bit, all the while knowing that next summer he’d be out here grubbing up the same bush all over again. Some roots couldn’t be killed.

  Alex didn’t have small-town roots. When she was a kid, she spent a few weeks every summer here with her uncle Reece, but roots take longer than that. She never put down roots anywhere else either. Her father, a high school basketball coach, moved on to bigger challenges every couple of years, until he finally settled into a coaching job at a small college on the outskirts of Atlanta. By then, Alex was in law school. To her, the idea of roots choked out ambition and made a person settle for mediocrity. She didn’t think of Hidden Springs as being the slow lane, more like the exit ramp to a rest stop. A nice place to stop for a break now and again, but not somewhere to settle.

  Michael gave the rose roots an extra hard jerk, and Aunt Lindy looked up from patiently unearthing dandelions. “You must be thinking about Alexandria.”

  Aunt Lindy had an uncanny ability to read his thoughts. She said it came from crawling inside his head during the weeks he’d been in a coma after the automobile wreck that killed his parents. Whatever it was, there were times when he was almost afraid to think around her. He stood up now, the fragments of roots in his hand, and met her eyes without saying anything. She smiled and dug her trowel into the ground to oust another dandelion.

  “Wouldn’t chemicals be easier?” He asked the same thing every time they fought the weed battle in the garden.

  “The easy way is not always the best way, and you know chemicals kill the good along with the bad.” She let an earthworm crawl up on her gloved hand. “My mother kept the weeds out without any such poisons. I surely can as well.”

  “Your mother had Uncle Eunice.” Uncle Eunice had been his grandmother’s bachelor brother who earned his keep by making the gardens the showcases they still were. Michael had grown up on stories about his tall, thin great-uncle who preferred the company of his hoe to that of other people. People laughed at his slow movements, the way his bones cracked and popped when he curled down to the ground to nurse a seedling, and how he could go for weeks saying little more than yes or no. No matter what stories they told, nobody denied his roses were the most beautiful in Hidden Springs. Over the years he had developed a large pale yellow rose that still grew in the garden and that Aunt Lindy guarded diligently. To show how much she valued it, chemicals were part of the arsenal to keep it going.

  “And I have you.” Aunt Lindy smiled. She was also impossible to sidetrack. “Have you and Alexandria been talking?”

  “She talked to Betty Jean. I talked to her voice mail.”

  “Rather unsatisfactory, I would say, throwing your voice out along some wire to perhaps languish unheard for days. Letters are surely better.” Aunt Lindy dug around another dandelion. “She must have had a purpose for calling.”

  “I guess she saw the picture. Hank sold it to a dozen papers, last I heard.”

  “I hope he gave you a percentage.”

  “He said he’d tell Rebecca Ann to smile at me. Seems my picture is helping pay for her braces.”

  “Well, the child did need her teeth straightened, and Hank does struggle to keep on top of his bills, or so I’m told. I suppose that allows you to see an extra bonus in the story. The poor man you grabbed back from the brink has a second chance and Rebecca Ann gets a new smile.” She unearthed another dandelion and laid it in the pile beside her. “Not to mention giving you an excuse to talk to Alexandria.”

  “I don’t need an excuse to talk to Alex.” Michael smoothed the ground back down where he’d ripped out the wild rose bush.

  “Of course not.”

  He loved his Aunt Lindy, but sometimes she drove him crazy. For sure, he didn’t want to get into a conversation about Alex with her. Aunt Lindy thought all he had to do was ask and Alex would forget her career in Washington, DC, and come running to Hidden Springs. Why Aunt Lindy would think that, he had no idea. She knew Alex. Plus, she knew about being career minded. She was career minded. A devoted teacher for decades, seemingly happy with her single life. She had told him once that she had been in love when she was young, but her intended was killed in the service. Someday Michael needed to get her to tell him more about that, but right now he wanted to tiptoe away from talk about love and marriage. Better to change the subject.

  “What about the jumper? Did he look like someone you’d seen before?” He didn’t know why he hadn’t asked her earlier. If this man had ever lived in Hidden Springs, she might remember.

  Aunt Lindy paused her digging and looked up at Mi
chael. “He could be one of my former students, but as much as I’d like to deny it, in forty years of faces, a few have escaped my memory. However, there was something familiar about his picture. So, as a matter of fact, I pulled out the annuals for the range of years I thought might be right, but there were no Jacksons I’d forgotten.”

  “He might not have been a Jackson then.”

  “An assumed name. I didn’t consider that possibility. I’ll look through the books again.” Aunt Lindy stuck her trowel in the ground to go back to work on the weeds. “Although I don’t know why it matters. He didn’t commit any crime. There’s really no need for either of us to attempt to track him down.”

  “His car’s still at T.R.’s.” Michael straightened up and stretched his back.

  “And if he leaves it there forever, that’s certainly his own business. Saving a man’s life doesn’t give you any claim over his future, you know.”

  “In some cultures, the person would have to follow you around till he could return the favor.” He grabbed the grubbing hoe again and eyed the next invading bush.

  “That could be a problem, but in this particular case, you say the man has simply chosen to disappear. Story over. Ended. On to a new chapter.” Aunt Lindy was good at moving on. She loved the past, had spent a lot of her life making sure the past in Hidden Springs wasn’t forgotten, but she didn’t live there.

  She said life wasn’t like a math book where you had to have the formulas in the last chapter memorized before you could work on the next chapter. Life just kept rolling the same sort of problems by you over and over again, giving you chance after chance to finally figure out some answers. Of course, she was always quick to point out that there weren’t always clear answers. Not like in math. Life was a process. A glimmer of truth discovered here and a speck of reason unearthed there were the best a person could hope for.

  Now Aunt Lindy climbed slowly to her feet, grimacing a bit as she stood up. “Let’s take a break for some refreshments.” She pulled off her gardening gloves. “I made lemonade. Real lemons.”

  “Sounds good.” Michael stuck his shovel in the ground and leaned the grubbing hoe against it.

  As Aunt Lindy passed by him, she put her hand on his cheek briefly. “I’m not sure why this hero bit is bothering you so, Michael.”

  “It’s not the hero part, I don’t think. It’s more that I feel like Old Blue.”

  “Old Blue?” Aunt Lindy frowned.

  “That dog we had when I was kid that could hear a storm an hour before the rest of us and would tear up the screen door getting inside to hide under the bed.”

  “I remember that poor dog. You had to feel sorry for him, but he was a bother. As well as I recall, Old Blue often panicked even when the storms never edged close enough to give us more than a sprinkle of rain.” She looked at Michael a long moment, her hand still on his cheek. “Do you hear thunder, Michael?”

  “I feel it, Aunt Lindy.”

  “Well, don’t let it drive you crazy like Old Blue. Just wait and see if the winds blow the storm your way before you get too concerned.” She patted his cheek a couple of times. “You did the only thing you could do at the bridge. You couldn’t very well let the man jump.”

  You’ll wish you’d pushed me. The man’s words rang in Michael’s head, but he didn’t say them aloud. Aunt Lindy was right. There wasn’t much you could do about an imagined storm.

  Monday morning the storm hit full force.

  10

  Betty Jean bemoaned the sorry life of a single girl whose phone hadn’t rung all weekend as she slit open the envelopes on the weekend’s accumulation of mail. The office mail varied little from week to week, so Betty Jean had no problem discussing her own lack of romance and quizzing Michael about his weekend as she scanned the letters and forms and sorted them into piles according to importance. Opening the mail and romantic fantasies were a Monday morning ritual.

  “Wasn’t the moon just perfect Saturday night?” Betty Jean sighed, glanced at the letter in her hand, and placed it in one of her piles. “Did you and Karen do something?”

  “I told you Karen and I aren’t dating anymore. I went fishing till dusk. Then watched some dumb movie on television. Guess I missed out on the moon.”

  “You are hopeless.” Betty Jean picked up a manila envelope. “What did Karen preach about Sunday? Or did you even go to church?”

  “I went to church. Karen preached on the Good Samaritan.”

  “Wonder where she got that idea?” Betty Jean looked up at him as she ran her long, thin letter opener under the flap of the brown envelope. “Maybe from some guy she knows yanking a stranger back from the edge of a bridge?”

  “Her sermon had nothing to do with me.”

  “Come on, Michael. It’s not a bad thing to inspire—” Betty Jean shrieked and dropped the papers she had pulled out of the envelope. She jumped up from the desk, banging her chair into the file cabinet behind her.

  Michael looked up from the on-call schedule he was filling out. “What’s the matter?”

  All the color drained out of Betty Jean’s face and her lips quivered. She stared at her desk as if vipers had spilled out of the envelope and were slithering toward her. She threw a wild look at Michael and pointed toward the papers.

  Michael had never seen Betty Jean speechless. He might have savored the moment except for the thunder sounding louder in his ears. Even before he picked up the paper off her desk, he knew the storm had hit.

  A young girl stared up out of a crime-scene-style photograph. A trickle of blood traced a line from a blue-black hole in her forehead down onto her small upturned nose. Brown eyes that had stared death in the face were wide and fixed. Brown hair with blonde streaks lay around her face like a carefully arranged halo. Her dark red lipstick was smudged where fingers had pushed her lips into an unnatural smile. She was young, not more than sixteen, and very dead.

  “Is it a joke?” Betty Jean found her voice. She took another peek at the photos and shuddered.

  “No joke.” Michael had seen his share of corpses, people dead from both natural and unnatural causes.

  While he’d been in the city, he and his partner were sometimes the first policemen on the scene when a body was found or a crime reported. The hardest ones were kids like this who overdosed on drugs or got caught in a street shooting or let the wrong guy pick them up.

  Pete, hardened from years as a Columbus beat cop, had called them throwaways. “Use them once and throw them away. No credit for returns.”

  Michael stared at the picture in his hand. He wanted to drop it. To walk out of the office and up the street where the Hidden Springs citizens would be going about their routines. Where things like this didn’t happen.

  “Who is she?” Betty Jean whispered.

  “I don’t know.” The second page was a view of the whole body, laid out with her arms folded across her middle and her legs looking too white below black shorts. She was barefoot and her toenails painted a bright shade of turquoise stuck up in the air in a sad celebration of life. A teddy bear looked out from her pink T-shirt under the words Somebody needs a hug.

  The picture shook in front of his eyes, and he willed his hand to stop trembling.

  “Why did they send them to us?” Betty Jean asked.

  “And who sent them?” Michael added, although the thunder sounding in his head had already answered both those questions. Still, maybe that wasn’t it. It could be something official. A couple of crime photos sent to the wrong place.

  “The envelope had your name on it.” She reached past Michael toward the envelope.

  “Don’t touch it,” Michael warned and dropped the picture on her desk. He should have thought of fingerprints and not touched the pictures at all.

  Betty Jean jerked back her hand. After a moment, she flipped the envelope over with her letter opener. “No return address.”

  “How about the postmark?”

  “Eagleton. Saturday.”

  Michael gla
nced at the envelope. The address had been printed out on a label. Michael scooted the rest of the mail out of the way and used Betty Jean’s letter opener to spread the pages apart on her desk. The last page wasn’t a picture but a message printed in large bold font.

  I TOLD YOU YOU’D BE SORRY YOU DIDN’T PUSH ME. THIS GIRL IS DEAD BECAUSE OF YOU. WHAT KIND OF HERO DOES THAT MAKE YOU NOW?

  Michael wanted to grab the letter and pictures and rip them to shreds. Make it all disappear, but destroying the pictures wouldn’t destroy the facts. The fact was, this poor girl would never see another sunrise. Michael pulled in a shuddering breath and forced himself to think. “Did you hear the news this morning?”

  “I keep my radio on that country music station that says they play the most music. I figure any news I need to know will come across the scanner here.” Betty Jean was almost whispering as if afraid to speak loudly with the dead girl’s face staring up at them. “Besides, people are always getting shot over in Eagleton.”

  “I didn’t hear anything about a homicide this morning.”

  “Could be they haven’t found the body yet. Can you tell anything about where the pictures were taken?”

  Michael forced himself to look at the pictures again. The background was blurred, probably on purpose, so that the girl’s body stood out in clear relief to the rest of the picture. “Looks like she’s lying on a floor or it could be dirt.”

  “I’d say a floor. A tile floor.” Betty Jean peeked over Michael’s shoulder. “Maybe those big brown and white squares like in schools.”

  Michael looked closer. “You could be right.”

  “Whoever killed her must have put a pillow under her head. And look—she’s only wearing one earring.” Betty Jean pointed at the girl’s ear.

  “Maybe on purpose.”

  “And maybe she lost the other one in a struggle or something.” Betty Jean leaned closer to the picture on the desk. “It looks like she has a hole in the other ear for an earring.”

  Michael stared at the teddy bear earring the girl must have matched to her T-shirt.