Invisible

by Lorena McCourtney

  My jolt of surprise—and, okay, a sliver of disappointment— was over by the time we ate fried chicken for supper at yet another civic club stand. We wandered the carnival again in the evening, shared a fuzzy bundle of cotton candy, and watched more 3:00 a.m. shooting stars. On Sunday morning, I cooked buttermilk hotcakes while Mac showered.

  Immediately afterward, Mac started readying the motor home for travel. He tucked the jacks that leveled and stabilized it into a side cubbyhole, cranked down the TV antenna, rolled up the carpet under the steps, and checked the gauges that showed battery, water, and holding tank levels. By the time I was ready to leave for the 9:00 worship service, he was putting things away inside so they wouldn’t fly around during travel.

  He followed me out to the car and leaned his elbows against the window as I put the key in the ignition. “You will get a motel room tonight, won’t you? I don’t want to be worrying that you’re camped out in your car. Even if you do have a whistle.”

  “No need to worry.”

  “I really did like your cobbler at Magnolia’s. And your being here made Meteor Daze a lot more fun.”

  “I’ve enjoyed it too.”

  There was still much I didn’t know about Mac MacPherson, and I was mildly regretful. We hadn’t gotten around to talking about what occupation he’d been in before he retired. How he happened to have that motorcycle tattoo. What his real name was, behind the Mac. If he intended to stay on the road indefinitely.

  “I’ll probably be back this way one of these days,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about doing something on Lake of the Ozarks.”

  “If you get back to Madison Street, I’ll bake you another cobbler.”

  “I’d like that.”

  For a moment I thought he was going to lean inside the car and kiss me, but instead he squeezed my shoulder and backed away. I wheeled the Thunderbird in an arc, and when I looked back he was checking the oil in the motor home’s engine. Moving on. Would I ever see him again? Well, not something I planned on worrying about.

  *

  The worship service was nice. Chairs were set up on the grass. Small crosses made of wired flowers stood on either side of a wooden pulpit. One of the groups we’d seen at the bluegrass festival provided the music and did a credible job. The message was brief, on the simple theme of loving your neighbor.

  After lunch I felt at loose ends. I’d seen pretty much everything there was to see at the Daze, and now it was just a matter of waiting around until I could talk to Beth Bigelow at the lawyer’s office tomorrow. Then the thought occurred to me: Was it necessary to wait? This was a small town …

  I found a phone booth outside a gas station and looked up the Bigelow name. One Bigelow had an address that sounded distantly rural, but an Andy Bigelow lived on 14th Street. Should I call?

  I decided not. I remembered reading in a detective book that the element of surprise is always good. I didn’t know why that should matter here, but I was out of my unlikely could-this-be-romance state (a daze of my own?) and back into investigative mode.

  The house on 14th was a neat clapboard, with an older blue Honda in the driveway. I rang the bell. A young woman in her midtwenties came to the door. She was wearing a bulging maternity top over red shorts.

  “I’m looking for Beth Bigelow?”

  “That’s me.” Friendly smile, not a hostile glare, for a stranger at the door in small-town Clancy.

  “I’m a friend of—” I broke off, thinking I should have choreographed this better. I didn’t want to upset her the way I had Marcy Alexander. Although maybe that was inevitable, given the circumstances. “You were a friend of Kendra Alexander?”

  “Oh yes. We went all through school here together and then roomed at college together too. She was always so energetic and healthy, I couldn’t believe it when she …” She trailed off with a hard swallow and quick glisten of tears in her blue eyes. “And then to have her go so fast. She was a bridesmaid at my wedding just a few weeks before she died.”

  “I have a photo here. I think she was a friend of Kendra’s, but I need to identify exactly who she is.”

  Beth took the photo and studied it. “I’m sorry. I don’t recognize her. I didn’t know everyone Kendra knew at college, of course. But I’m pretty sure I’d recognize anyone who was really a close friend.” She handed the photo back.

  I held up the other picture. “I think this is Kendra’s fiancé, Ray Etheridge.”

  “Oh yes. Ray.” She smiled. “A wonderful guy.”

  “Could you tell me something about him?”

  For the first time her open friendliness took a step backward. “Why? What’s all this about?”

  “It’s complicated, but this woman—” I indicated my Kendra’s photo, “was murdered up in Missouri not long ago, and I’m looking into—”

  “You’re a policewoman?”

  Obviously, from her incredulous question, I doubted she’d believe in the existence of some Special Geriatrics Force, even if I wanted to lie. “It’s just that she was a friend and neighbor, and so far her killer hasn’t been caught. But I have reason to believe she had some sort of relationship with Ray Etheridge.”

  “Relationship? You mean he was dating her or something?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, you can be sure Ray didn’t kill her! And he certainly wasn’t cheating on Kendra. He … fell apart when she died. He was really crazy about her. He’d never kill anyone.”

  “The thing that concerns me is that my friend had this photo of Ray in her apartment.” I took a deep breath, hating to go on, because what I had to say seemed to reflect so badly on my Kendra. “And she was using the real Kendra’s name and identity.”

  “Pretending to be Kendra? That’s awful!” I could see Beth rising toward outrage now, and I hastily said the same thing I’d said to Marcy Alexander.

  “I don’t think she was using the name maliciously.” Which came off as lame as it had with Marcy Alexander.

  “How long ago was this woman murdered?” Beth asked.

  “Just a few weeks ago.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it for a long time, but I remember hearing sometime last year that Ray was dead too. Though I never heard if it was true or not. Somewhere up in Missouri, I think it was supposed to be.”

  “Did they say how he died?”

  “Accident of some kind, I think. Although I remember thinking at the time, oh my gosh, did he commit suicide because of Kendra? He was so devastated when she died. But you know … Let me see that picture again.”

  I started to hand her Ray’s picture, but she grabbed the photo of Kendra instead. She put her thumbs over the dark hair and tilted her head as she studied the oval face partly hidden by a hand.

  “Ray had a sister. She was going to college too. Not there at Jonesboro with us, but she came to see him a few times, and we all went out for pizza and beer. Except for the hair, this does look rather like her. But she was very light blond, just like Ray.”

  I felt a rush of excitement. “This Kendra in the photo dyed her hair dark. Underneath, I’m sure she was quite blond.”

  “Really?” Beth bent her head to study the photo more closely. “I didn’t know Ray’s sister well, of course, just met her those few times. But I never saw her in anything even close to this sexy outfit. And I can’t imagine why she’d pretend to be Kendra.”

  I put the two photographs together, and we studied them side by side. Yes, if I mentally blocked out the dark hair, there just might be a family resemblance between the two.

  Beth nodded agreement. “It could be her.”

  “What was the sister’s name?”

  “Um, I’m not sure … Oh, I remember. Debbie.”

  “I’d really appreciate anything more you could tell me about either Debbie or Ray.”

  “I remember Debbie was supposed to be a real computer whiz—”

  A phone rang somewhere back in the house. Beth looked that way but didn’t move. “Ray was majoring i
n some kind of engineering. I don’t think they had any family. Ray had insurance money from when their folks died to pay his way through college, so I suppose Debbie did too. But Ray was no goof-off, taking it easy. He was a great guy,” she added, as if she wanted to be certain I understood that.

  My thoughts were more on Debbie. A college-educated computer whiz. With insurance money paying for a college education. But if Debbie Etheridge and my Kendra were one and the same, why would such a person use someone else’s identity and work at sleazy Bottom-Buck Barney’s? Had Ray perhaps bought a used car at Barney’s, and she thought some defect in it had caused his accident?

  “Hey, Beth, where’d you go?” a male voice yelled from somewhere back in the house. “Your mom’s on the phone.”

  “Do you have any idea where I might get in touch with Ray or Debbie, in case one or both of them isn’t dead?”

  “The Alexanders might know.”

  “I talked with Marcy Alexander, but …”

  Beth nodded understandingly. “I know. They’ve stopped going to church, and they won’t talk about Kendra at all. I don’t remember where Debbie was going to college, but Arkansas State might have an old address for Ray.”

  “Which they undoubtedly wouldn’t give me.”

  “That’s probably true.”

  From somewhere in the house, “Beth! Are you coming?”

  Beth rolled her eyes, and I got the gist. Husband and mother-in-law were not friendly chitchatters.

  “I won’t keep you,” I said. I pulled out my notebook and scribbled my name and phone number on a page. “But if you think of anything, give me a call. Collect,” I added, since the modest house and car and pregnancy suggested they hadn’t funds to spare.

  “Aren’t the police handling the murder investigation and the identity theft and everything?” she asked, obviously puzzled by my involvement.

  “Oh yes. I just …” I floundered for a reasonable explanation of my being here. I couldn’t think of any, maybe because my involvement wasn’t all that reasonable. So all I said was, “The Kendra I knew was my friend, even though there were … puzzling circumstances in her life.”

  “I hope you find out what happened to her.”

  *

  I hadn’t been worrying that my house might be vandalized again, but I was relieved to find everything safe and normal when I got home the following day.

  First item on the agenda, I decided, was to figure out what to do with my new information about Kendra. I was certain I might have something important here. So, steeling myself for the reaction, I dialed Dix’s number.

  24

  I tried to ease into the situation diplomatically. I asked how he was feeling and what the doctors had to say. To which I got skimpy answers of “Okay” and “Not much.” So then, very casually, I slid into, “Has Kendra’s body been identified yet?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “The body is still in the morgue?”

  “All I know is what’s in the newspaper.”

  “What’s in the newspaper?”

  “Nothing.”

  The strong, silent … grumpy … male.

  “Is Haley still helping you out?”

  “She cooks. She cleans. She runs errands and chauffeurs. I have to go for physical therapy now. She drives me. I’m supposed to exercise with my walker. She nags me.”

  “You don’t sound particularly grateful for the help.”

  “She’s always sermonizing at me.”

  “About exercising?”

  “About God. Jesus. The whole enchilada.”

  “Haley preaches at you?”

  “Well, not out loud. But she wears those T-shirts with all their God messages.”

  The man was complaining about T-shirts. “You really ought to work on your attitude, Detective Dixon,” I snapped. “If I were Haley, I’d be inclined to wrap one of those T-shirts around your neck—tightly—and shove you off that balcony.”

  Silence big as some black hole in space.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he muttered finally. My next thought was that if the T-shirt messages were getting to him, maybe they were doing their job.

  “Okay, look, I’ve just acquired some information that may be helpful.” I told him that the guy’s photo was definitely identified as the real Kendra’s fiancé, Ray Etheridge, and that the girl I knew as Kendra was possibly Ray’s sister.

  “Identified by whom?” Dix growled skeptically.

  Now we were down to the nitty-gritty, and to give the information credibility I had to tell him where and how I’d acquired it. So I told him about Clancy and then held the phone away from my ear for the blast I knew was coming.

  “Mrs. M., I told you to stay out of this! What have you got anyway, some mutant curiosity gene? Why don’t you just sit around and knit or play pinochle or gossip like other little old ladies? This isn’t your job, and it could be dangerous. You’ve already been vandalized once.”

  A mutant curiosity gene! Well, maybe I did have one. But I wasn’t about to admit it. “That was cemetery business, nothing to do with Kendra and murder. But I guess you’re not the person I should be giving this information to anyway, are you? You can’t do anything with it or find out anything more anyway.” A blatant challenge to his blue funk, of course.

  “I’m still on the payroll. I still have friends in the department. I’m not completely out of the loop.”

  “Oh?” I deliberately painted the word with my own skepticism.

  “You say someone says this Ray Etheridge may have been killed in an accident, maybe around here?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Car accident?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible he committed suicide.” Then I added a possibility of my own that no one in Clancy had mentioned. “Or maybe he was murdered, just as Kendra was.”

  Another silence. Detective Matt Dixon, I suspected, might have been reluctant to encourage my thinking along these lines, but he had a curiosity gene of his own. Finally he said, “I might be able to talk to a guy. Or look through some records myself. I may take a desk job before long anyway. Temporarily,” he added, though I wasn’t certain if the emphasis was for my benefit or his own.

  “Well, you do whatever you think is right.”

  “I thought going after that crook at the house was right. And look where that got me. A leg full of more metal than a junkyard, Haley on my case, and Harmon running my murder investigation.”

  “Feeling sorry for ourself, are we?”

  “Ivy Malone, you can be a thoroughly aggravating woman.”

  “I’ll decide later if that’s a compliment or an insult.” Along with considering whether Mac’s temporary suspicion about my having a midnight rendezvous with some man was flattering or insulting, a matter I still hadn’t settled.

  Dix warned that I should consider the information I’d gathered confidential and not discuss it with anyone.

  “But you’ll tell me what you find out? We had a deal, you remember,” I reminded.

  “I’ll see.” A silent P.S.: Don’t hold your breath.

  *

  After hanging up with Dix, I unloaded the car and put a load of wash in the machine. The phone rang just as I was closing the lid. Magnolia, of course. Mindful of Dix’s admonition, I skirted around the edges of what I’d learned in Clancy. I had something else with which to divert Magnolia’s attention, anyway.

  “I ran into Mac MacPherson there.”

  “Mac!”

  “The town was having a meteor celebration. He was covering it for a travel magazine article.”

  “Well, well, well.” I could almost see her squashing the phone closer to her ear in gleeful anticipation of juicy details.

  Even if I’d been willing to share juicy details, I hadn’t any to offer, so all I said was, “We had a nice time at the flea market and carnival and bluegrass festival. And watching the shooting stars, of course.”

  I left out my two nights in the motor home bedroom, afr
aid she might give that some erroneously juicy interpretation. Even holding that back, she pounced on what I’d told her.

  “I’m getting vibrations of romance!”

  “Just a casual friendship.” Quite casual, in fact, considering how fast Mac had zipped out of there.

  “Oh.” She sounded disappointed, but then she took a philosophical view. “That’s how the best romances start.”

  I’d barely hung up when the phone rang again. This time it was the deacon, Charley Mason, whom I’d talked with at the church.

  “I didn’t see you at church yesterday, so I thought I’d call and bring you up to date on the cemetery matter.”

  “I appreciate that. I was out of town for the weekend.”

  “I talked with the pastor and other deacons and the board about the possibility of the church taking over restoration at Country Peace. They’d read in the newspaper about the vandalism there, of course, and everyone is interested.”

  “Great!”

  “Several of us drove out to look the situation over, and a couple of our members have been looking into details. Brad Englebretson works for the county, and he’s been checking up on ownership, who’s buried there, county regulations, et cetera.”

  “Does it look possible?”

  “We think so. It’s a murky situation, with all the officers listed on the Country Peace Association papers being deceased. But using information Brad gave me, and the Internet, I’ve personally located family members of several people buried there, distant relatives in most cases, but they’ve all been concerned and cooperative. I think we can count on some donations. It’s going to take a fair amount of money, of course. Getting those big headstones back in place will require heavy equipment.”

  “Perhaps that Mr. Braxton would help. Even though his subdivision is some distance away, he was concerned about vandalism spreading to his equipment. Maybe he’d even contribute funds, since he was so generous with his offer of moving the graves and providing land for a new cemetery.”

  “Actually …”

  “Actually?” I prompted, sensing a bit of wariness here.

  “Jordan Kaine, our other member looking into this, is a retired lawyer who’s had some courtroom dealings with Mr. Braxton. Jordan is a bit—” Charley Mason broke off, as if trying to come up with a proper word.