Murder at Moonshiner Days

by Michelle Goff

  Maggie adored dogs, especially her chocolate lab, Barnaby. But try as she might, she couldn’t muster affection for small breeds that refused to quit barking. When Didi’s pleas for it to hush didn’t work, the dog’s pleasantly plump master swept him up and cuddled him against her ample bosom. No sooner had Didi fallen into her chair than the dog broke free, running to Maggie and nipping her sandaled foot.

  “Winfrey!” Didi admonished the dog. “That’s no way to treat a guest.” Didi scooped up the dog, opened the front door, deposited him inside the house, and closed the door, muffling the sounds of the constant yips. Returning to the porch, she extended her apologies to Maggie and asked, “Can I get you another glass of tea?”

  “No, I’m good. Did I hear you right? Is the dog’s name Winfrey?”

  Putting a hand over her heart, Didi said, “Yes. I just love Oprah. She’s my hero. She’s done so much good for humanity. I cried worse than a baby when she quit doing her show. I wish she had old episodes of the show on her network. Don’t you think that would be a good idea?”

  Having never considered the idea, Maggie said, “Sometimes I find vintage episodes of Dateline and 48 Hours on her network.”

  Shaking her head, Didi said, “I’ll watch about everything on that channel. You know, to support Oprah, but I don’t watch those shows. They’re too negative and Oprah is positive. Besides, those shows were only made possible because somebody died.”

  “Well, when you put it that way,” Maggie said.

  “I’m not criticizing Oprah, though.” Didi wiped a tear from her eye. “I’m sorry. I just get so emotional when I think of all she’s done for people. That’s why I named my dogs after her.”

  Maggie knew she couldn’t sit on Didi’s porch all day sipping tea. She knew she needed to switch the discussion to Jennifer Wagner. Still, she couldn’t stop from asking, “Dogs? Do you have another dog?”

  “Before Winfrey, I had a beagle named Oprah. She was my baby. She lived to be eleven years old. I swore I’d never have another dog, but the Christmas after she died, my husband gave me Winfrey as a present. I’ve had him three years. I almost named him Stedman. You know, after Oprah’s longtime boyfriend and on account of him being a boy. But after I started thinking about it, I realized Winfrey could be a boy’s name.”

  This explanation reminded Maggie of Phil Wainwright’s cats, Laverne and Shirley. “Do you know Jennifer’s friend, Phil?” she asked Didi.

  “I know who he is, but I’ve never met him. I’ll tell you this much, though. I told Mel that if I was him, Jennifer wouldn’t be spending so much time with another man.”

  “What was his response?”

  “He defended Jennifer. That was always his response. Defending Jennifer. Nothing was ever her fault. She was never in the wrong. Not in his eyes. But every time Phil’s name came up, every time Mel told me Jennifer was going out to dinner or to a movie with Phil, I’d remind him that she was his wife, not Phil’s. No married woman should be spending so much time with a man who’s not her husband.” Thinking Didi was finished, Maggie anticipated asking another question, but Didi continued, “And I’d tell him there was no way in h-e-double hockey sticks that I’d let my husband take another woman to dinner and a movie. I told him I’d go all Loretta Lynn on any gal who thinks she’s woman enough to take my man.”

  In an effort to prevent Didi from seeing the smile forming on her face, Maggie bent over to retrieve her notepad, pen, and recorder. “It’s so nice and peaceful up here,” she said. “I’m from the head of a holler, too, and I’d take this over Jasper or any other town or city any day.”

  “Me, too. I love being up here away from everything. Jennifer did not feel the same way. After her and Mel got married, she refused to move up here.” Motioning to an adjacent parcel of land, Didi said, “He was living over on his property in a trailer when he met her, but he told me Jennifer wouldn’t live in no trailer. I live in a trailer, so that set me off and showed me that she thought she was better than me. And her nothing but a girl from Jasper. It’s not like she’s from Chicago. As Oprah says, we all pee and bleed –”

  “This is a trailer?” Maggie interrupted.

  Didi smiled. “You can’t tell, can you? My husband’s a real good carpenter. He could turn a chicken coop into a castle. He screened in this porch so we could sit out here without having to swat flies.” Maggie caught Didi glancing at her left hand. “I don’t see a ring on your finger, so let me give you some advice. When you find a man, don’t marry him unless he knows how to build a house from the ground up,” pointing her index finger at Maggie, Didi added, “and on a budget.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement. Um, you were talking about your brother’s property.”

  “Oh, yeah. Mel talked to my husband to get an idea of how much it would cost to build a house over there. He even had a floor plan in mind. My husband gave him an estimate. He gave him the family price, of course, but that never went nowhere cause Jennifer was too good to live in the head of a holler.”

  “Did you hear her say that?”

  Didi fluffed her white blonde hair, which reminded Maggie of the sticky cake icing her mom made from corn syrup, egg whites, and sugar. “No, but I didn’t need to hear her. I sized her up the first time I met her. Besides, she was always making fun of the name of the holler. You tell me. What’s wrong with the name Rusty Bottom?”

  Recalling the laughter that had spread through the newsroom on the occasion that a Rusty Bottom resident won a dance contest, which had inspired Maggie to suggest the headline Rusty Bottom woman cuts a rug, Maggie said, “You know how people are. So, how would you categorize your relationship with Jennifer?”

  “We didn’t have a relationship. She was my brother’s wife. That’s as far as it went.” Didi moved forward until she sat on the edge of the chair cushion. “You know what she said to me once? And I did hear this with my own ears, so I know it’s true. We were talking about mowing the grass and she said she went to college so she wouldn’t have to do manual labor.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Sooner or later, everybody has to do manual labor.”

  “They don’t if they’ve got somebody to do it for them. She was always going on about how teachers and coal miners don’t make any money. One day I took it as long as I could and I snapped, ‘If you don’t make any money, how can you afford that housekeeper?’ I can’t afford a housekeeper. I don’t even have a dishwasher.” Shaking her head, Didi took another drink of tea. “If there’s one thing that makes my blood boil, it’s when people act like they got it worse than people who are really struggling.” Jerking her head and rolling her eyes, she said, “And her with a housekeeper.”

  “Uh, about this property, it’s my understanding that you offered to buy it from Jennifer. Can you tell me a little about that?”

  “Well, I contacted her about buying it as soon as I found out she was selling it. I guess that was about six months or so before she died. I had expected her to put it up for sale as soon as Mel died, but she didn’t. She waited almost two years before she stuck a For Sale sign in the yard. But this is the head of a holler. There wasn’t nobody here to see it except me and mine.”

  “Why do you think she waited so long to sell it?”

  “I asked Blake about that, after Jennifer was dead, and she said her mom didn’t want to let Mel go. She said that property was all she had left of him. I won’t lie to you. That surprised me. I didn’t think Jennifer actually loved Mel. I figured she had only married him cause he was pulling in a hundred thousand dollars a year as a boss in the mines.”

  “I’m sorry. Did you say he was making a hundred thousand dollars? In the coal mines?”

  “I never saw a pay stub, but that’s what he said he made and I didn’t have a reason to doubt his word. Mel wasn’t perfect, but I never knew him to tell an outright lie.”

  “I wasn’t implying that he lied. I just didn’t know miners made that kind of money. Granted, he wasn’t a boss, but my daddy
never came close to making that much working in the mines.”

  “Mine neither. Now you know why I got so mad when Jennifer was carrying on about Mel not making any money. Of course, nobody’s making anything in the mines now. With all the mines closing, even if he had lived, Mel wouldn’t have been able to work in the mines much longer. And even if she loved him, Jennifer wouldn’t have stayed with him without that big salary coming in.”

  “Tell me about approaching her about buying the property.”

  Didi, who had settled back in her chair, quickly moved forward again. “Oh, listen to this. I called her and she made me wait seventeen days before she called me back. Seventeen days. Can you believe that? I had gone over to the courthouse and looked up the property. You know, so I could see the deed for myself and to double check the acres. So, I offered her a fair price. Forty-five thousand dollars. You know what she did? She laughed at me. She told me to double it and she’d think about it.”

  Maggie allowed her eyes to wander to the adjoining property, which featured a short, sloping hill that leveled enough to house a double-wide trailer. “How many acres is it?”

  “Two. I know what you’re thinking. That it’s up the head of a holler and it ain’t even all flat land. Trust me, I know all about that. I’ve had to make due with living on a hill all my life. We have to go out in the road to play badminton or horseshoes. But I love this place. It’s been in my family for more than two hundred years. Still, I have enough sense to know what it’s worth.” Didi’s blue eyes watered. “And what it’s worth can’t be measured by dollars and cents. When we were growing up, Daddy took sick and couldn’t work for months. Mommy had a job of sorts back then, sitting with old people and watching after a grown man. I don’t know what was wrong with that man, but we always described him as being slow in the head. After Daddy took sick, she had to let those jobs go cause she had to be here to take care of him. Mommy and Daddy had to mortgage this place to get the money to pay his medical bills and keep us going. It was hard, but they scraped by. God healed Daddy and he was able to go back to work and pay off the note. They never had it easy, but they had this place.” Didi wiped her eyes. “They divided the property right in half. They deeded half to me and the other half to Mel. Mommy and Daddy have been gone for years now. You know, they died within six months of each other. Just like Johnny Cash and June Carter. One couldn’t live without the other.”

  “I can’t imagine losing either of my parents, let alone both of them. And so close together. My mind can’t go there.”

  “It was like I kept getting slapped hard in the face. It was like that day after day for months. People say it gets better. It don’t. You just get used to the emptiness, to the hole in your life. But I had my husband and children and Mel. This was before Jennifer came along. Mel and me were closer back then. We got along better. He lost his mind after he met Jennifer, though, and I’ve never understood why. It couldn’t have been for her personality and she wasn’t that special looking. I know this is going to sound mean, but Jennifer had one of those long faces that would put you in mind of a horse. She had flared nostrils, too. My daughter still calls her horse face. I get after her, because I want to set a good example, but I go off in another room and have a good laugh to myself every time she says it.”

  Much like Didi, Maggie didn’t make a habit of judging a person’s looks. Despite her best efforts, though, she couldn’t stop her memory from conjuring up an image of Jennifer and conceding to herself that she did have a certain equine look to her.

  “Even though I didn’t care for Jennifer, I never worried about what would happen to the property,” Didi said. “I knew it was Mel’s to do with as he pleased, but I expected it would someday pass down to Blake. She wasn’t our blood relative, but we treated her like she was and I knew Mommy and Daddy would have loved her just like they did my kids. I never thought Mel would die so soon. I never thought I’d have to deal with the possibility of losing part of the land. My daughter lives on Mel’s old property now and my son will get this part of the land when me and my husband are gone. I don’t have the guarantee that they’ll keep the property in the family, but I’ll be dead. It won’t matter then. But let me tell you, it sure matters now.”

  “I know what you mean,” Maggie said. “I live on Caldonia Road, up Sugar Creek, in my late grandparents’ house. My daddy grew up in that house. The house is more than wood for me and the land is more than dirt. It represents my family.”

  “That’s right, and that’s how I feel about this land. When Jennifer ran the price up on me, I prayed that Mommy and Daddy would help me figure out what to do. I wanted to use this part of the land as collateral to get part of the money to buy Mel’s half. We had enough in savings to cover the rest of it. It would have been hard, but we could have swung it. My husband said we couldn’t afford to take the chance, though, what with the economy the way it is. Besides, he didn’t want to empty our savings. I guess that was the answer to my prayer.”

  “But you ended up with the property? How did that happen?”

  “Only because Blake is a gift from God. No matter what I thought of Jennifer, I never held it against that girl. She’s so sweet. I credit her daddy for how good she turned out. It sure wasn’t Jennifer’s doing.”

  “Didi, if you don’t mind me asking, how much did you pay Blake for the property?”

  “Forty thousand.”

  “But I thought it was worth forty-five thousand?”

  “It was. It is. And that’s what I offered to pay, but she only asked thirty-eight for it. I was so happy I went ahead and gave her two thousand more. My husband told me I was crazy, but it was the least I could do. Of course, we ended up doing exactly what he didn’t want to do – emptying our savings – but some things are worth more than money and at least we didn’t have to mortgage part of the land.”

  “Do you know why Blake sold you the property so cheaply?”

  “She said it belonged in my family.”

  “That was extremely kind of her,” Maggie said.

  “I know. It reminded me of something you would have seen on Oprah.”

  “Do you have any idea why she asked for only thirty-eight? That’s an interesting number.”

  “Because that’s what Jennifer owed in credit card debt. Can you believe that? Me and my husband have never come close to making what Jennifer and Mel made together, and I didn’t have an ex-husband sending me child support payments every month. But we had saved enough to cover Jennifer’s bad financial decisions.” Shaking her head, Didi said, “It’s not right, her leaving that girl with that kind of debt.”

  “To her defense, Jennifer probably didn’t expect to die so young. She was in her early forties and, from what I can tell, in good health.”

  With a turn of her hand, Didi brushed away Maggie’s justification of Jennifer’s actions. “Don’t even try to defend her to me.”

  Maggie held a hand to her mouth to hide another smile. “Didi, I have to ask, when was the last time you spoke to Jennifer?”

  “When she priced the house to me.”

  Flipping through her notepad, Maggie said, “And this was about six months before she died?”

  “Yeah, that’s when she priced it to me.”

  “Do you have any information about her murder? About who could have killed her?”

  “No, but those stories in the paper and on the TV made me sick. Everyone went on and on about how well-liked she was and how much her students loved her. They’re kids. They don’t know any better. Teachers don’t whip students with wooden paddles like they did when I was in school, so of course the students were going to love her. But I don’t care how much candy and how many cupcakes she gave them on Mondays.” Didi rolled her eyes. “That’s all Jennifer’s friend Traci talked about when the TV station interviewed her. That Jennifer wanted the kids to look forward to Mondays so she started something called Sweet Mondays. I’m sure the parents just loved all those cavities Jennifer caused.” Laughing, Di
di said, “If I was looking for suspects, that’s where I’d start.”

  When Didi failed to offer further comment, Maggie asked, “Can you think of other suspects?”

  “No. Thankfully, I didn’t know her that good. She was my brother’s wife, not my friend. After Mel died, I wasn’t forced to eat Thanksgiving dinner with her anymore. But think of it this way, I can’t be the only one.”

  “The only one who what?”

  “The only one who couldn’t stand her.”

  Chapter Seven

  Maggie scrutinized the office of Jeff Little’s garage as she waited for him to finish an oil change. Although the door to the garage was closed, the smell of motor oil permeated Maggie’s surroundings. She decided mechanics must be accustomed to the smell or else they would use plug-in air fresheners to combat the stench. If Jeff left her in charge of odors, she would infuse the garage with the aromatic offerings of lavender. Or maybe coconut. But not citrus or vanilla. Citrus was too strong and vanilla gave her a headache. The more she thought about it, she decided that pine, mint, and coffee wouldn’t improve the surroundings, either. She didn’t even like to drink coffee, much less smell it, mint gave her heartburn, and pine made her sneeze. She was mulling over whether to add fresh laundry to the list of banned scents when Jeff sped through the door.

  Wiping his hands on a dirty rag, he said, “Sorry to keep you waiting. But I promised that ole gal I’d have her car ready by the time she gets off work.”