"Grumpy. I'm sure that's politic. I bet she'll hate me."
"It's not a bet worth taking. Billie Jo hates everyone, straight out. A better bet would be to see if she takes a swing at you."
With that happy thought, we got out of the car and headed in. A cowbell attached to the door clanked metallically when we pushed it open. The inside of Spencer Apothecary was lit like a singles bar and smelled of the perfume favored by Abbie Walker. The floor badly needed to be swept, but thanks to the mood lighting, I wouldn't have been able to tell except for the crunching under my feet as I walked.
We moved toward the back of the store where a significantly obese black woman in a purple nylon sweat suit was walking away from the counter with a large paper bag. When she saw Aodhagan, her face lit up. "Lordy, Aodhagan, you sick?"
He smiled back at her, and I saw that, much like the other people we'd talked to today, Aodhagan had a genuine rapport with her. "Of course not. I never get sick. That would be against the rules, Rosie." She swallowed him in the kind of hug that can only be given by a fat woman, and he readily returned it. Suddenly, he turned stern. "How's the foot?"
"Better. I been keeping good track now." She pulled an insulin counter from the bag and presented it to Aodhagan like a trophy.
"Good for you, Rosie. Diabetes is nothing to ignore or play around with."
"I know. I just keep getting better." Suddenly she seemed to notice me. "Ooh, ain't you a pretty picture." She gave Aodhagan a sly smile, wagging her eyebrows. "You got something to tell old Rosie?"
With a slight twitching of his lips that I was starting to recognize as his signature repression of humor, he said, "This is Helen Harding. She was here to visit her aunt, Penny Cadgell."
Instantly, I was alarmed by an engulfing, cushy, baby-powder-scented bear hug. "You poor little honey. I heard about your aunt. I'm so sorry."
"Um…thank you," I murmured into her tremendous bosom.
"Don't you worry, sugar booger, the cops will figure out who did it just that quick." She let me go and gave me a significant crack on the back that was no doubt supposed to be comforting but instead nearly rendered me unconscious. As it was, I knocked over a rack of rat poison, conveniently placed where any child could get to it. It tumbled to the floor with a resounding crash, and I went with it.
"What in the Sam Hill is goin' on out there?" The screeching question came from somewhere behind the counter. Rosie gave Aodhagan a just slightly less violent slap on the arm and fled as fast as her squat body would carry her. An incredibly tall woman literally vaulted herself over the counter to tower over me and her fallen wares. She looked like someone from the cast of The Kids in the Hall with her gray wig and turquoise-flowered wrap dress.
Aodhagan cringed and righted the rack, motioning me to adjust my dress. I looked down to see that it was nearly around my waist, treating everyone to a presentation of my underwear, the white cotton grandma variety with the word Tuesday printed all over it. In the store, I'd found them amusing. Here, they were just embarrassing. I struggled to my feet and then wished I hadn't when the she-man instantly cornered me against the wall. "What do you think your doin', girlie? You got no respect for other people's things, just knockin' stuff over that way?"
"It was an accident, Billie Jo," Aodhagan interjected.
"Ain't you got no sense to watch where you're going?" She poked me hard in the chest.
I instinctively grabbed her hand and shoved it down. "Watch it, Mammy Yoakum."
I could tell that Aodhagan feared that we should have made that bet in the parking lot, and I was about to experience the full wrath of Billie Jo Spencer. Instead, she just put her hands on her hips and gave me an appraising look. She had a wad of chewing tobacco in her bottom lip. This lady made my aunt look like a Barbie doll. "Who are you, and what do want?"
"I'm Helen Harding. Penny Cadgell was my aunt, and I want you to tell me what you remember about Norma Jean Fredrick."
Both Aodhagan and Billie Jo looked slightly mystified, but I think it was for two different reasons. Aodhagan probably would have touched upon the subject with a little more sensitivity, and Billie Jo probably hadn't thought of Norma Jean Fredrick in nearly half a century. Finally, she said, "Do what?"
I was still trying to translate that into something that made sense to me when Aodhagan repeated the question in a slightly more circumspect manner. She evaluated us both closely for another second. Then, at the top of her lungs, she screamed, "Jimmy, you get on out here and clean up this mess." In a quieter voice she told us, "Why don't y'all come back to my office?"
Obediently, we followed her down a short dirty hallway to her "office" which was little more than a glorified broom closet. On the wall was a gigantic sampler, cross-stitched with the words, Texas is somewhere between Heaven and Hell.
I didn't know if this gave some sort of deep spiritual insight or what since, as far as I could tell, so was everywhere else on Earth. I had to restrain the urge to grab the black permanent marker off her desk and mark out the four words in the middle section of her sampler.
She flopped down behind the desk and started talking. "Boy, that Norma Jean, she was a real piece of work. She was about two years younger than I was. I haven't thought about her in years."
"Tell us anything that you do remember about her," Aodhagan encouraged, taking one of the three orange plastic chairs placed strategically in front of Billie Jo's desk to hide the BB holes. Gingerly, I perched on the edge of one and folded my hands in my lap so as to avoid accidentally touching something. Like Billie Jo herself.
"Well, I'll tell you one thing, she thought she was something special. And she acted real sweet around the grown-ups, but around the kids, the claws came out."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"She was always startin' fights with one girl or another. Just to yell, you know. I never saw her hurt no one. At least not to touch. She was always trying to steal someone's steady. She was that kind of girl. But you never would have known it for looking."
"So she seemed sweet?"
"Like a cupcake."
"Do you remember when she was murdered?" Aodhagan asked.
"Sure. I don't think you forget that sort a thing. It was Halloween, 1969. I'd already graduated, but every year the school had a dance to benefit the FFA or the 4-H. I heard within a couple hours that it happened, but I was told that it was an accident. No one started crying foul until later."
"Who do you think killed her?" Aodhagan managed to sound casual.
Billie Jo shrugged with all the delicacy of a football player. "Probably some guy that she blue-balled or some girl she played too many cheap tricks on. Who cares anyway? That was forty-seven years ago."
I returned her shrug. "I think that Penny cared. And if she cared, I care."
Billie Jo laughed like a barking seal. "You don't think that this stuff is connected, do you?"
"Who do you think killed Penny?" Aodhagan asked, voice touched with mild curiosity.
Another shrug. "I figure it was probably her boyfriend."
Aodhagan and I looked at each other. Carefully he asked, "Did you know her boyfriend?"
"Nah, we didn't talk, but she came in here every week to buy an economy pack of condoms."
CHAPTER TWELVE
It wasn't until we got into the car that we even talked about what Billie Jo had said. Certainly, it was shocking, but it was also the very thing that Aodhagan had suggested on Friday. A secret lover.
"So what do you think?" I asked.
"I don't know what to think." Aodhagan started the car and put it into drive. "We should go see Addie, then Dwight. Maybe he knows something he hasn't told us."
"Not any less important, he's supposed to give me my divorce papers from the Tallatahola County Sheriff's Office today."
He frowned and pulled out onto the road. "Even if he says that you're free to go, I wouldn't expect any miracles. He's hooked on somehow placing the blame on your shoulders, even if he knows you didn't do it."
He wasn't alone in the sentiment. Maybe it was somehow my fault. If I'd come just a little earlier or tried just a little harder to find out what she was up to before I'd come, maybe I would have been able to stop it. Or maybe I would have been killed too, but I couldn't just dismiss it as water under the bridge. She had called on me for help, and I had failed her. Like I'd failed at everything important in my life.
After the years of letting people down without intent, very little affected my conscience, but I knew that this would haunt me forever. I couldn't pretend not to care about this or convince myself to truly not care, like I did with parental expectations. Because this did matter. And I had let her down.
I was silent while Aodhagan drove, debating all I could have done differently, what I could have changed. In the midst of my guilt I had a sudden thought. "Dooley said it was a man because the stranglehold came from such an upward angle, but what if it was just a really tall woman?"
"What do you mean? You're a tall woman."
"No, I mean a really tall woman. Like Billie Jo. I mean she's like six feet, if she's anything."
"You think Billie Jo killed Penny?" He didn't bother to hide his incredulity.
"Of course not. I'm just saying we shouldn't immediately discount women."
"We'll keep that in mind if we see any other women like Billie Jo, but I'm not going to hold my breath. There aren't too many ladies who come out that way." He pointed out the window. "This is Tallatahola, by the way."
It was the most metropolitan city that I had seen in days, and from the city limits sign I learned that the population was just a few people fewer than seventeen thousand. There were quite a few restaurants and food places, but all had seen better days.
Right past the Rent More Video Store, Aodhagan pulled into the parking lot of a contemporary redbrick building, apparently the home to a massage therapist and the Tallatahola County Star.
"I made an appointment with Addie because you can't always just show up and expect her to be in. She's partially retired, so she usually does three on and four off." He parked the car, jumped out, and got my door before I had a chance to. Feeling slightly abashed at the first show of chivalry I'd seen in months, maybe even years, I thanked him. He merely brushed me off with the flick of a wrist. "Her son, Shel, runs this place now, and he's sharp as a tack, but she still wears the pants."
While we waited, the secretary made eyes at an impervious Aodhagan, who was more interested in Addie Arnett's fresh fish collection than her fresh-faced secretary. When Addie Arnett finally came out to receive us, I saw she was a diminutive woman in a tan tailored skirt and a sea-green silk blouse. She kept her long silver hair in a tight bun, and looking in her eyes I saw something else that I hadn't seen a lot of since coming to Birdwell. Intelligence.
She greeted Aodhagan warmly, and then she turned and shook my hand. "And you must be Helen Harding. I have to tell you that although this may not be the time for it, I'm a tremendous fan of your books. I wish that we could have met under different circumstances." Flattered, I said thank you and followed her down the hall to her office. "I'm so sorry to hear about your loss. I didn't know your aunt well, but I spoke to her socially. Our mothers came out together in the forties"
"Thank you. I hadn't seen her in a long time, but I was looking forward to being reacquainted."
She led us to her office and gestured for us to take a seat in one of her red tweed chairs. Addie Arnett's office was much more sanitary and spacious than Billie Jo's, but it was just as disorganized. Though she didn't have any cross-stitched samplers, she did have hundreds of framed awards and weathered articles pinned to the wall. "How can I help you?" she asked, after we had been seated and refused drinks.
Aodhagan leaned forward until they were practically touching. "I wonder if we could just talk to you about Norma Jean Fredrick?"
She looked at him appraisingly. "Why?"
One of the greatest questions a person could ask. I had conducted entire interviews for my books based on that single question. I decided to answer for him.
"I guess you know that Penny was murdered." When she nodded grimly, I continued. "Right before she died, she ordered some spools of microfiche from your morgue. Marian Depew, the Birdwell librarian, told me that she'd made copies of several articles from them. All of those articles were about Norma Jean Fredrick. I would like to know why."
She tapped her well-manicured nails against her cherry-wood desk for several seconds. Finally, she said, "You both seem smart. Not to be cryptic, but you'd both be better off using that intelligence to plan Penny's funeral and pretending you don't even know Norma Jean existed."
Aodhagan shook his head slightly. "Are you trying to suggest there's some danger in asking questions about Norma Jean? Surely you aren't saying that someone killed Penny because she read a few newspaper articles about her best friend from the fifties?" I was slightly put off that he was making our own idea seem so ludicrous, but I knew he was trying to get her opinion without biasing her with ours.
"I'm not saying anything," she recounted flatly.
That much was obvious. I asked, "So you can't tell us anything about it?"
She sighed heavily. "Norma Jean Fredrick was the kind of girl that parents love, boys dream about, and girls write bad things about on locker room walls. She was a year younger than I was, and we might have come out together, except that I got married. That was 1969, you remember. People got married at sixteen or seventeen every day. I thought that she was pretty horrible, to come right out and say it."
"Why was my aunt her friend?" I was utterly curious why Penny, a woman who wouldn't put up with the slightest infraction of her invented rules would put up with a girl like that.
"She could be very sweet and giving to the people she cared about, and those people had a lot of trouble seeing beyond that to the way that she treated everyone else. She was incredibly two-faced, and back then I wanted to slap both of them, but I was sorry that she died."
"So, what's the big secret?" Aodhagan asked.
"Back when it happened, there was a lot of pressure on Herb not to say too much about it in the paper. A whole lot of people right from the Frederick's down to the police. Lots of other citizens also made it clear that any good hometown paper wouldn't dwell too much on this sort of thing."
Her lips pressed together disapprovingly. "Of course, the same people talked it to death at their kitchen table but never in public. Herb knew that it was big news, so he had to print something, but it was all vague."
She stood up and walked over to the coffee machine. She gave herself a refill and stared out the window before coming back to her desk. "I think that the word cover-up would not be too strong a word. I was too young to know my own mind, and New York Times material, Herb was not. We were just convinced to back down."
"So, you can't tell us anything that wasn't printed?"
"I didn't know anything. Maybe Herb did, but he knew how much the whole thing was upsetting me, and I was pregnant with Lionel at the time, so he never talked to me about it."
"So, the case is still open?"
"I guess it would have to be since it's never been solved. Obviously, it's a cold case by now." She stood up, and it was clear she'd decided that our interview was over. "I'm sorry that I couldn't tell you more."
On our way out, I asked one last question, "Why do you think that the cover-up started?"
She shrugged, somehow making the motion look graceful. "I think it was partly that everyone wanted to pretend as though it had never happened, and you can't do that if you talk about it. People, especially people around these parts, are masters at pretending the unpleasant doesn't exist. It's how they've made it through hard times, recession, and abuse. Mostly, though, I think it was the cops. They knew that they had nothing, but they didn't want the public to know."
"Well, thank you." I stopped at the door and shook her hand.
"Sure. I really am sorry I couldn't help you. When all this is settled and you
r grieving time is over, you should come and see me. We'll talk." She turned and shook Aodhagan's hand. "Don't be a stranger, Aodhagan."
"I'm never a stranger to you," he told her sincerely. "Have a wonderful week." When we got back into the car Aodhagan spent several seconds just staring at the wall in front of us before turning the key. "If the case is still open, I might be able to get her case files. If I can convince Dooley to give it to me, we might be on our way to really learning something."
"Why would he give something like that to you?"
He frowned, pulling onto the main street. "That's the part I haven't figured out yet."
We stopped and had lunch at a Tex-Mex restaurant. I would have talked about the case, but instead Aodhagan guided the conversation to New York City, which turned out to be one of Aodhagan's favorite haunts. We compared restaurants, theaters, and clubs. His choices were a bit more Jack Kerouac-ish than mine, which didn't really surprise me, but we had both attended many of the same clubs, and plays, and eaten at the same restaurants. By the time the check came, I realized I had been more animated and amused than I had been in…well, maybe in years.
Though we were clearly very different, I recognized the truth. The person he seemed to be from the outside looking in was not the same as the person he held inside. He had a front that he wore like armor, but I had no idea why. Underneath, he was impish, clever, funny. Outside, he was anal-retentive, humorless, and serious. I had no clue whom he was hiding his real self from exactly, but in him I saw a kindred spirit. Not just because we both hid behind a front, though mine was arrogance and flightiness and his was being a stick in the mud. We thought the same. Our brains worked in similar patterns.
After lunch, it was only a few miles' drive to the Tallatahola County Sheriff's Office. A burgundy Cadillac was parked in the sheriff slot, so I assumed that Dooley was in.
The inside was decorated in late-nineties hospital. Everything looked unbelievably sterile and smelled vaguely of something medicinal. I saw the culprit behind the receptionist desk. A mom-ish type in pink stirrup pants and a baggy flowered shirt was cleaning between the keys of her computer keyboard with a Q-tip.
Digging Up Bones (Birdwell, Texas Mysteries Book 1) Page 10
