Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 02 - Dead Ringer

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  “I wish you would. I’m so upset I just don’t know what to do.”

  “We’re heading out the door as soon as I get off the phone. Don’t do anything until we get there.”

  “All right. Bye.”

  Aunt Maggie was shaking her head as I hung up the phone, but all she said was, “I’ll see y’all later.”

  It didn’t take us but a few minutes to get to Aunt Daphine’s house, and she opened her door almost before we could knock.

  “I knew I should have paid that money yesterday, I just knew it,” she said before we were all the way inside. “What am I going to do?”

  “The first thing you’re going to do is calm down,” I said firmly. “Where’s the letter?”

  “Here.” She picked it up from the coffee table and handed it to me.

  As with the previous messages, the words were put together with pasted letters from magazines and newspapers. Richard and I read it together, him looking over my shoulder.

  Miss Burnette,

  You don’t think you have to take me seriously, but you do! You didn’t bring the money Sunday, and now you have to pay triple. Bring it to the old graveyard on Sunday, or I’ll tell. There will be plenty of time to get the truth out before the election.

  Tell your nosy niece to stop asking questions, or I won’t wait for Sunday. Tell her to stop, or she’ll be sorry.

  Don’t you think I won’t do it, because I will. This is your last chance.

  “This came in the mail today?” Richard said.

  “It was in the mailbox, but there wasn’t any stamp. Whoever it was just put it in the box.” She handed me a plain, white envelope, without any name or address.

  “Do you suppose that any of your neighbors might have seen who left it?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Most of them work, same as me. He could have waited until there was no one around before he left it.”

  I folded up the letter, and put it back in the envelope. “Aunt Daphine, do you want me and Richard to stop asking questions? I don’t really think that the blackmailer will go to the newspaper, because if he does, he’ll lose his meal ticket, but we’ll stop if you want us to.”

  Aunt Daphine took a couple of long breaths, and then shook her head. “Whoever it is isn’t going to stop until he’s bled me dry, I know that now. I want to find out who it is that’s doing this. It’s just that …”

  “What?”

  “Well, now I’m afraid of what he might do to you. What if he is the one who killed Dorinda and that man at the mill? How do we know that he won’t try to hurt you or Richard?”

  “We don’t,” I had to say, and I didn’t much care for the feeling.

  “Maybe we should just go to Junior after all,” Aunt Daphine said dejectedly.

  I tried to think about it objectively, and I just wasn’t ready to give up. “Not yet,” I said. “I feel like if he was really going to do something to me and Richard, he wouldn’t have warned us. He’d have just gone ahead and done it.”

  “Besides,” Richard said. “I don’t intend to let him get away with what he’s done to you, threat or no threat. Laura and I can take care of ourselves.”

  “All right,” Aunt Daphine said, “but I want you to promise me something. If anything dangerous happens, we’ll go to Junior right away.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said.

  After that, Aunt Daphine remembered our trip to Raleigh and we told her what we had learned from Michael Cooper. Or rather, what I thought we had learned. I halfway expected her to laugh at the idea, but instead she was quiet for a long time, and I could tell that she was considering it seriously.

  I asked, “What do you think, Aunt Daphine? Could the man we found at the mill have been Small Bill?”

  “I just don’t know, Laurie Anne. That picture of Cooper that Hank Parker printed in the paper sure looked like Big Bill a few years ago, just like Small Bill would have if he had lived. You saw the dead man and you saw those pictures I have of Small Bill. What do you think?”

  “The pictures you showed me were over twenty years old,” I pointed out.

  “But if that man was Small Bill, who did we bury?” she wanted to know.

  “I’d guess that it’s Leonard Cooper in that grave, but I don’t know if it can be proved now. Somewhere along the line, he and Small Bill switched places. The question is why.”

  Aunt Daphine shook her head. “I can’t for the life of me figure out why Small Bill would have gone off like that. He had money and a good job waiting for him, and just about any girl in Byerly would have been proud to marry him.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “Are you sure that he hadn’t done anything he wanted to hide from? Not necessarily a crime, but maybe something scandalous.” I was going to suggest that he could have gotten some girl pregnant, but caught myself in time.

  Aunt Daphine thought about it. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t. You know how Byerly is. There would have been a rumor at least.”

  “You kept your secret all these years,” Richard pointed out.

  “That’s different,” Aunt Daphine said. “I was just one of the Burnette girls. Small Bill was a Walters, and that means a lot around here. He’d have had a much harder time hiding anything, at least anything big enough to make him go away like that. I just don’t know, Laurie Anne.”

  I said, “Maybe the reason he left isn’t all that important anyway. What I’d really like to know is why he came back to Byerly after all this time.”

  Aunt Daphine shrugged.

  “Aunt Daphine,” I said slowly, “you did admit that Small Bill might have figured out about you and Uncle John Ward.”

  She nodded.

  “Could he have been the blackmailer?”

  “I don’t think so. I told you how much I thought of Small Bill.”

  “He could have changed a lot since you knew him. How much can you trust a man who had been living a lie?”

  “Maybe,” she said, “but whoever that man was, he’s been dead for over a week now. I just got this letter today.”

  That stopped me. For a while I had thought that Dorinda might be involved, but she was dead, too. Somebody else had put that letter into Aunt Daphine’s mailbox.

  “You’re sure that it was put into the box today?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t check Saturday’s mail because of Vasti’s party and all the confusion afterwards, so I got out everything that was in the mailbox this morning. The letter was in with today’s mail when I checked this evening.”

  That meant somebody else was involved. Who? Joleen? Even if I could believe that she would shoot her own mother, I had been with her when Small Bill was killed and she was at Vasti’s party when Dorinda died.

  We had gone back over the facts several more times without getting anywhere when I noticed Richard looking at his watch in rapid succession. That’s when I remembered that we hadn’t had any dinner. Aunt Daphine hadn’t eaten either, so Richard volunteered to go and bring back hamburgers and fries from Hardee’s while Aunt Daphine made a pitcher of iced tea. I didn’t know if eating would help our thought processes, but I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t hurt them any.

  Chapter 27

  “Well one thing is pretty sure,” I affirmed as we nibbled on the last of the french fries. “Since that letter was left in the mailbox today, neither Small Bill nor Dorinda could have been the blackmailer.”

  “Granted,” Richard said. “However, if we have to wait for a person to die to eliminate him as a suspect, we’re not going to solve this before this Sunday.”

  I ignored his remark. “It seems that Leonard Cooper’s, or rather Small Bill Walters’s, arrival precipitated all of this.”

  “But the blackmail began months ago,” Aunt Daphine said.

  “Not the murders,” I said. “Why did Cooper come back now, particularly? Why not years ago, and why not never? If Uncle John Ward were still around, we could ask him.”

  “If Uncle John Ward were still around, we
wouldn’t have the problem,” Richard said.

  “True.” Still, that thought had led to another idea. “What about letters?” I asked. “Did Uncle John Ward talk about Small Bill in any of his letters?”

  “I guess he did, but those aren’t the parts I was paying the most attention to.” She smiled, and I got a glimpse of how she must have looked as a young girl in love. “John Ward wrote such sweet letters.”

  “I hate to ask this, Aunt Daphine,” I said, “but can Richard and I read those letters? There might be something you missed.”

  Aunt Daphine thought about it, and then nodded decisively. “Of course you can read them, if you think it might help.” She went to the shelf where she kept her photo albums, and pulled out an old candy box.

  “There’s only a few of them,” Aunt Daphine said, handing us a small bundle tied up with a baby blue ribbon. “On account of him dying not long after he got there.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?” I asked Aunt Daphine as I picked up the first envelope.

  She shook her head emphatically. “Of course not. I’ve read them so often I should know them by heart, but there might be something I didn’t notice. John Ward would understand.”

  “All right,” I said, and opened the envelope. The first two letters were written from boot camp, and didn’t mention Small Bill at all. Instead they talked about how much he missed Aunt Daphine, and how everything reminded him of her. I was more than a little embarrassed to read them, but I kept going.

  The third letter had obviously been written after Aunt Daphine went to Norfolk to see him.

  Dear Daphine,

  It seems like it’s been years since I left you, instead of only days. I cannot tell you how much I miss you, but if I had a dollar for every time I’ve thought of you, I’d buy the mill from Big Bill Walters.

  I had some real good luck when I got here. Small Bill and I got assigned to the same outfit. Having him with me is like having a little bit of Byerly with me. The other guys kid us some about how we talk, but we just kid them right back. They’re good guys, really.

  Small Bill and I have made lots of friends already. Only I guess I shouldn’t call him “Small Bill” anymore. When we met the other fellows, he said for them to call him Bill. I went along with it, of course, but it sure sounds funny to me. Bill said he didn’t want to be small anything anymore, and I couldn’t argue with that.

  Bill and I had a layover in Tokyo on our way here. We didn’t have but a few hours there, but we saw what we could. Daphine, that city is like no place I have ever seen before. Cars and bicycles and rickshaws (that’s a cart pulled by a man on foot) all going every which way. It reminds me of when we used to stir up ant hills with a stick.

  Bill said he thought the women there were the prettiest he had ever seen, but I told him that the prettiest woman on earth was back home in Byerly, North Carolina. That’s when I decided I wanted to get you something, and I did. I won’t tell you what it is, because I want it to be a surprise. Bill helped me pick it out, and I think you’ll like it. I was going to mail it, but the other fellows told me that the mail can’t be trusted. Besides, I want to give it to you myself.

  We’re in Vietnam now, and it’s not what I expected. Not very pretty, I have to say, and it smells funny. I guess I’ll get used to it. It sure is hot, and it rains a lot. When I get back home and hear someone talking about the heat and humidity in Byerly, I’m going to laugh.

  I’ve got to go now. We’re going into the jungle tomorrow. Only the guys don’t call it that, they call it something kind of ugly. I guess it can get pretty bad out there, so I can’t blame them for it. I’ll write you again when I can.

  Love,

  John Ward

  “What was the present?” Richard asked as I folded up the letter and put it back into the envelope.

  “I never got it,” Aunt Daphine said. “It wasn’t with his things when they sent them back, so I guess it got lost somewhere along the line. Probably a geisha doll or something like that.”

  “That’s a shame,” I said sympathetically. “It would have been his last gift to you.”

  “Next to the last,” Aunt Daphine said with a smile. “I got Vasti a few months after that.”

  The next letter was dated a week later.

  Dear Daphine,

  Now I know why the other guys call going into the jungle “being in the shit.” It’s hot and wet all of the time, and the bugs are just about big enough to carry you off. I’m not ashamed to tell you that I was afraid for my life for most of the mission. I thought I’d see who it was shooting at me, but that’s not how it is at all. There’s just gunfire coming out of nowhere, and booby traps that will take your leg off if you’re not extra careful.

  That’s enough of that. I don’t want you to be worrying about me, and I’ve got some real good fellows watching after me. Bill for one, and a fellow named Leonard Cooper from Tennessee. We all got here at the same time, so the other guys called us three virgins until we made it through that first mission. I had to laugh when they said that, and Bill wanted to know why, but of course I wouldn’t tell him.

  I’ve been thinking about that, our weekend together. Some days, it’s the only nice thing I can come up with to think about. I don’t know if I should be ashamed that we didn’t wait or not, but I’m not. I only wish it had been a month instead of just the two nights. As soon as I get home, we’re going to have the biggest wedding Byerly has ever seen. You wait and see. I’m counting the days until I come home to you.

  Love,

  John Ward

  The next envelope was a telegram, and I didn’t have to open it to know what it was. “The Marstons let me have that after he died,” Aunt Daphine said quietly. She sat watching as I carefully replaced the ribbon around the letters and put the packet into the candy box. Then Aunt Daphine put the box back on the shelf, and said, “Excuse me for a minute. I need to go to the bathroom.”

  The walls were thick enough that I couldn’t hear Aunt Daphine crying, but I knew that’s what she was doing. I was pretty close to it myself. It wasn’t just sadness, it was anger. How dare somebody take advantage of Aunt Daphine’s tragedy? How dare somebody use her love against her like that?

  After a few minutes, Aunt Daphine came back, trying to smile. “Do you think there was anything in the letters that will help?”

  I had to shake my head. “I’m sorry, Aunt Daphine. Dredging all that up for nothing.”

  She patted my hand. “Don’t you worry about it. You’re just trying to do what you can. Now, Dorinda’s funeral is tomorrow. Are y’all two going?”

  “I hadn’t even thought about it,” I said honestly. I felt a little guilty about it, too. I hadn’t really liked Dorinda, but the poor woman had been murdered. Besides, her daughter was kind of dating my cousin.

  Aunt Daphine said, “I’m closing down the shop, and all of us are going together.”

  “Maybe we’ll go with you,” I said, and Richard nodded.

  We made plans to meet at the funeral parlor, and then Richard and I headed back for Aunt Maggie’s. I hated leaving Aunt Daphine like that. Although she had lived by herself ever since Vasti got married, this was the first time I had ever thought of her as living alone.

  Chapter 28

  Aunt Maggie was gone somewhere by the time we got back. I asked Richard, “Where’s that stack of photocopies from the Cazette? I want more details about Small Bill’s ‘death.’ ”

  “I’ll go get them,” Richard said, and I cleaned off the table so we could spread them out.

  Not surprisingly, there were a lot of articles about Small Bill. There was a piece about his leaving and how proud Big Bill was of him. Then there were stories about how well he was doing at boot camp, and a copy of his boot camp graduation photo that filled the entire front page. Big Bill graciously allowed the paper to print excerpts from several of Small Bill’s letters home, and a number of snap shots of him in uniform.

  When word came of his death, the front
page was ringed in black, and his funeral also filled the front page. No wonder Aunt Daphine didn’t think he could have committed any misdeeds without rumors spreading. The poor fellow probably couldn’t have picked his nose without the whole town knowing.

  “According to this,” I told Richard, “Small Bill’s body was pretty torn up. ‘For reasons of delicacy, the coffin remained sealed. William Walters, Sr., though confessing his dismay, said that perhaps it was best that people remember his boy as he had been when alive, not after the ravages of war.’ So it could have been Leonard Cooper and no one would have known.”

  “If the body was that torn up, how did he ever come to be identified as Small Bill in the first place?”

  “Dog tags,” I said, reading further. “Those would be easy enough to switch.”

  We kept on reading. “Richard, are you finding any reason for Small Bill to leave?”

  “Not a one. What about amnesia brought on by a head injury? When he came to in the hospital, they told him he was Cooper.”

  “How did the dog tags get switched?”

  “So I don’t have all of the answers yet,” Richard said huffily.

  The fact was that we didn’t have any answers, just more questions. Richard, who can read me like one of Shakespeare’s plays, saw that I was getting disgusted and plucked the photocopy I was glaring at from my hand.

  “Quitting time,” he said firmly.

  “But—”

  I had expected one of his reasoned arguments about why it would be best to rest, but instead Richard pulled the sneaker and sock off of my right foot so he could tickle me. I tried to retaliate, but I was laughing too hard. Papers flew everywhere, of course. I got my right foot away from him, but then he got to the left.

  The battle raged for a while, and by the time we called a truce, I couldn’t even consider doing anything serious. Instead I raced Richard up the stairs to bed, and I won, too.

  Chapter 29

  The way things turned out, I was glad that Richard and I went to Dorinda’s funeral. Admittedly Dorinda had been new in town and apparently hadn’t gone out of her way to make friends, but I would have thought that more people would turn out. There’s something terribly depressing about a poorly attended funeral.