Waking Up Dead

by Margo Bond Collins

  “Ah. Yeah. I can see how that would take a while.”

  Chapter Eleven

  We picked Maw-Maw up at 10:30 the next morning. She was already sitting on the swing on her front porch waiting for us. She stared at Stephen through her thick glasses as we walked up the sidewalk.

  “Miss Adelaide,” I said, “this is Stephen Davenport. Stephen, this is Adelaide Thompkins.”

  “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he said.

  She surveyed him up and down, peering at him intently. “Oh, well,” she said. “I guess he’ll do.”

  Stephen and I exchanged startled glances.

  “Miss Adelaide,” I said, “Stephen’s here to help us out.” He offered his arm to help her to her feet. “I guess he is at that,” she said, picking up her cane and hobbling down the steps. She leaned heavily on his arm.

  I hovered nearby while Stephen got Maw-Maw settled into the car.

  “Tell me again why she has to go with us,” he said as he moved around to his side of the car.

  “Because I can’t leave town without her,” I said. “Kind of like American Express, only worse.”

  I slid into the back seat.

  “So,” said Maw-Maw, “how we going to do this?”

  “You’re going to take me out of town, then wait by the end of the road. Just wait until Howard drives by, and then follow him.”

  I felt that same rubber-bandy belly-button sensation I’d had before when we passed by the city limits sign, but it wasn’t quite as strong as it had been the first time.

  The morning was sunny and bright--not the sort of day one expects to spend chasing murderers to their secret meetings. Those sorts of days ought to be dank and dark, shrouded in fog.

  Then again, the dead ought to spend their afterlives someplace other than Alabama. So much for “ought.”

  Anyway, the plan went . . . well, as planned. Stephen and Maw-Maw pulled off to the side of the road, hidden from the old dirt road by the trees, but still able to see its intersection with the highway.

  I flitted off to Howard’s house, hoping that we’d gotten there early enough.

  Barely, I thought, as I slipped into the passenger seat of the white SUV. We jounced along in silence for a while--not surprising, since Howard couldn’t see me. As we pulled out onto the highway, I craned my neck to see if Stephen and Maw-Maw were following us.

  For a second I thought they’d missed the car, but then Stephen pulled out onto the highway after two other cars had passed, leaving enough space between him and the SUV to keep Howard from suspecting he was being followed.

  We drove back into town.

  Great, I thought. I didn’t need Maw-Maw after all. I could have just waited on the side of the road. Dammit.

  We drove through the center of town, past the statue of the general. I waved at it cheerily; suddenly glad to know that at least I wasn’t tied to it any more. Rather to my surprise, a child crossing the street with his mother waved back at me. I smiled and he smiled back.

  I had forgotten how nice it could be just to be seen and acknowledged--with something other than pants-peeing, anyway.

  The little boy distracted me enough that I was surprised when we pulled up in front of the bank.

  Ashara’s bank.

  Howard parked the SUV and got out, heading into the white building.

  A moment later, Stephen and Maw-Maw pulled up, too. They parked several spots down from Howard, but the parking lot only had four other cars in it. They weren’t exactly inconspicuous.

  Maw-Maw rolled down her window. “What now?” she asked.

  “I think you’d better go home,” I said. “I’ll come get you if I need you.”

  “Nope,” the old woman said. “No way.”

  “Then at least go park in some other parking lot,” I said to Stephen. “This guy knows who Miss Adelaide is.”

  Stephen nodded and put the car into gear.

  I moved into the bank as they pulled out of the parking lot. At first glance, I couldn’t see Howard, and for a moment I panicked. Then I realized that he was sitting down at one of the desks scattered around the room, a plump blonde woman sitting across from him entering information into a computer. Howard hunched over a form, laboriously filling it out.

  I slipped across the room and stared at it over his shoulder.

  An application for a checking account.

  This wasn’t making any sense at all.

  Or at least, it wasn’t until I saw Jeffrey McClatchey walk in, a battered brown suitcase in his hand.

  He and Howard made eye contact, then nodded slightly, acknowledging one another. In a small town like Abramsville, it would be seen as a polite gesture--if anyone noticed at all. Given what I knew, the nods took on more significance. McClatchey stood back, waiting to talk to the same woman Howard was with.

  The woman behind the desk stood up and handed Howard a stack of temporary checks. “There you go, Mr. Johnson. All set. We’re glad to welcome you to our bank.” She smiled and they shook hands.

  Mr. Johnson? I thought. What the hell?

  Then Howard put his hand into his pocket, casually, before turning around.

  And then pulled it back out again as he greeted Jeffrey McClatchey. The two men shook hands, and I saw the glint of the tiny key being passed from Howard to McClatchey. Howard walked toward the back of the bank, then stopped and turned around. “Excuse me,” he said to the woman he’d just left, “but is there a restroom I could use?”

  “Certainly,” she said, and pointed him in the right direction. “Now,” she said, turning back to McClatchey, “you said you’d like to get into a safe deposit box?”

  Of course. That was what Ashara had been trying to put together the night before. The number on the slip of paper Howard had pulled out of his desk the other night was a safe deposit box number. And this was the key to a very important one.

  Damn.

  I hesitated for an instant, trying to decide what I should do: try to get to the safe deposit box first or warn Ashara that our two prime murder suspects were in her bank.

  People, I thought. People are more important than anything else.

  I moved as swiftly as I could to the drive-through tellers’ windows.

  “Ashara,” I hissed from behind her.

  She jumped a little, but to her credit, she didn’t scream. Or even turn around. She just muttered “Huh?” under her breath.

  “Howard is here. And so is Rick McClatchey’s brother. They’re here in the bank. Something weird is up--and McClatchey has that key and is going to use it to get into a safe deposit box.”

  Ashara’s head tilted to one side and she nodded slightly.

  “I’m going to go keep an eye on them. I’ll be back in a little bit,” I said. She nodded again as if in time to some inner song. If she keeps doing that, someday her colleagues are going to decide she is crazy, I thought.

  I raced to the safe deposit room, hoping to beat them there and open number 203 for myself. After all, I knew I could.

  If only I’d figured it out sooner, I thought in a silent wail. I could have opened the box and seen what was in it.

  I didn’t have time, of course. If I’d popped the box open, both McClatchey and the bank officer would have noticed. I stood in the middle of the room, muttering a steady stream of curses.

  Once the two got into the safe deposit room, the woman inserted her key and turned it, then showed McClatchey how to use his key to open the box. She also showed him how to close his box once he was done looking through it. She pulled the box out for him, had him sign some sort of sheet, and then left the room. “Just let me know when you’re done,” she said.

  “Thanks, ma’am,” he said, and opened up the box. I peered over his shoulder.

  It was full of cash. Stuffed to the brim. I saw twenties and hundreds, and maybe even an old thousand dollar bill, though I couldn’t have sworn to it.

  McClatchey took the money and stuffed it into his briefcase, then put the safe de
posit box back and locked it.

  He headed out of the safe room, and I sped out in front of him. I needed to tell Maw-Maw and Stephen to follow us again.

  I hadn’t gotten far, though, when I saw Ashara coming out of the tellers’ restroom. At the same moment, Howard stepped out of the men’s room. He looked up and he and McClatchey nodded at one another again, just the barest of nods. McClatchey stopped by the bank officer’s desk to let her know he was done, and then headed out the front door.

  Meanwhile, Ashara’s face was down and she wasn’t watching where she was going. She smoothed her skirt down and looked up just in time to avoid running into Howard.

  They locked eyes.

  No, I thought. No. Oh no, oh no, oh no.

  “Don’t say his name!” I shouted at Ashara. “Pretend you don’t recognize him!”

  Startled, she glanced in my direction. At empty air, as far as anyone else in the bank could tell.

  “Excuse me,” she said to Howard, brushing past him. “Sorry about that.”

  Howard didn’t say anything, but he gave Ashara a long, hard stare as she walked back toward the back of the bank and her teller’s window. Then he moved slowly toward the entrance.

  Once I was sure Ashara was once again safely behind bullet-proof glass, I rushed out into the parking lot and looked around frantically. McClatchey was just starting up the engine on his Ford pickup truck and Howard had his SUV in gear. I searched wildly for Stephen and Maw-Maw.

  I finally spotted them in the parking lot of the McDonald’s across the street.

  “Follow us!” I shouted, waving my arms and jumping into the passenger seat of McClatchey’s car. Stephen looked startled, but he nodded and started up his own car again.

  I glanced at the truck’s clock. 11:30. If he was the one meeting up with Howard, they couldn’t be going very far for their noon meeting.

  I was right. We pulled up to Ira’s, the town’s only non-chain burger joint--a tiny place that served homemade burgers and fries and made, according to the sign, the best milkshakes in town.

  McClatchey pulled into a space in the very back of the parking lot and hauled the briefcase up into the middle of the passenger seat.

  Which meant, of course, that he hauled it up into the middle of me. And then he opened it and started sorting through the cash, which meant that his hands were moving in and out of my thighs. Yuck. I slipped into the back seat and leaned over to watch.

  First he sorted the money into piles by denomination. I’d been right. There were several thousand-dollar bills in the case. I was surprised, as I was pretty certain that the government had quit making thousand-dollar bills a long time ago--years and years. That meant this money was old. Some of it, at least.

  The sight of the big bills threw me off, and I forgot to keep count with McClatchey. Still, it was a lot. Maybe in the tens of thousands of dollars? Thirty? Forty?

  Yeah, I know. Thirty or forty thousand dollars isn’t really all that much, not even enough to buy a house with. But if I were to bet on it, I’d bet that people have killed for less. And I was guessing that all this money had something to do with Molly McClatchey’s death.

  Once McClatchey had counted it all, he split it in half. Every so often he’d look up to make sure that no one could see what he was doing in the passenger seat. Half of the bills went back into the briefcase. The other half went into an old plastic grocery sack that he pulled out from under the seat.

  After he’d split the money, he stared at the briefcase for a long moment. Then he reached in, grabbed a handful of bills, and shoved them into the grocery bag.

  He smiled a little and nodded, then snapped the briefcase closed. The grocery bag full of cash he shoved back under the passenger seat.

  I’d been so intent on watching what McClatchey was doing that I’d forgotten to look for Stephen and Maw-Maw. I was going to have to get better at paying attention to more than one thing at a time if I hoped to save Rick McClatchey.

  This business was getting complicated.

  But not nearly as complicated as it was about to get, I realized as I floated into the burger joint behind Howard.

  Stephen and Maw-Maw were seated in a booth in the back, munching on hamburgers.

  “What are you doing here?” I hissed at them. I slid into the booth next to Maw-Maw, both to get a clear view of the restaurant and in the hopes that my proximity might keep her quiet.

  No such luck.

  “Me and this nice boy here are just out for some lunch,” she said at her normal volume.

  The couple in the booth next to us smiled and nodded, unsure whether Maw-Maw was talking to them or just slightly demented.

  “I couldn’t stop her,” Stephen murmured to me.

  I shook my head and watched McClatchey order at the front counter. He slid into one of the bright orange booths toward the front of the restaurant, near the windows.

  Stephen’s back was to the front of the room. He started to turn around to see what had caught my attention, but I shook my head at him sharply.

  “Get down,” I whispered to him. He slouched down in the booth.

  A few moments later, McClatchey sat up a little straighter. So did I, craning my neck to see what he had seen.

  The door opened and in walked Howard.

  “Now, Miss Adelaide,” I said. “Don’t you answer me. I need you to stay very, very quiet. I don’t want the man who just walked in to see you. He’s already seen you once and he’s nervous. So you just finish your burger and we’ll wait until he leaves.”

  Maw-Maw peered at me through her thick glasses.

  “Well. You don’t have to talk to me like I’m stupid, you know,” she said. Aloud.

  Stephen smiled apologetically at the couple in the next booth.

  “No ma’am,” he said. “I know you’re not.”

  I sighed. This was a disaster. At least McClatchey wasn’t paying any attention to the other diners. He stared out the window, absently chewing the burger he’d ordered.

  Maw-Maw ate her burger in a huff, glaring at me now and again but saying nothing further.

  Howard stood to the side of the counter until his order was ready. Then brought it out into the dining room on a little orange tray.

  And sat down right behind McClatchey, their backs to one another in the booth.

  The men never acknowledged one another. But McClatchey, I realized, had placed the briefcase on the floor beside his booth. And now, ever so slowly, never looking up from his lunch, he curled his leg around the side of the booth and nudged the briefcase with his foot until it was sitting beside Clifford Howard’s booth.

  Then McClatchey got up to leave. Casually, Howard reached down and picked up the briefcase, placing it beside him on the booth seat.

  And in the entire crowded restaurant, I was the only one who saw it happen.

  At least, that’s what I thought, until I saw Maw-Maw staring at Howard intently, then looking back and forth between the two men.

  Howard finished his burger, too, and followed McClatchey out the door. He made it all the way to the front entrance before he felt the weight of Maw-Maw’s stare. For an instant, I thought we were safe. But then Howard turned back and surveyed the restaurant one last time.

  Just one last time. Just long enough to catch Maw-Maw’s stare.

  Again, as with Ashara, Howard froze and stared intently.

  “Look down,” I said to Maw-Maw. “Look at your food. Try to look like you can’t really see anything.”

  And for once, wonder of wonders, she did what I told her to. Without comment.

  After what seemed like half an hour but was probably only a few seconds, Howard left the restaurant, the glass door swinging shut behind him.

  “Now,” I said to Stephen. “While he’s getting into his car. Look outside. Not Howard. The other one.”

  Stephen sat up and spun around in his seat. With a gasp, he slumped back into his original hiding position.

  “That’s Rick’s brothe
r,” he hissed.

  I nodded. “And just wait until you hear the rest of it,” I said.

  Maw-Maw started to scoot out of her seat.

  “Don’t anybody move,” I said to Maw-Maw and Stephen. “We’re not out of trouble yet.” Maw-Maw stopped fussing and they both nodded, subdued. Stephen sank even further into his seat.

  The couple next to us finished their burgers and left, smiling at Maw-Maw as if she were perhaps a little senile. Maw-Maw returned their smile with a snarl.

  “I ain’t stupid,” she said to them.

  The woman of the pair drew herself up as if to say something, but her husband grabbed her arm and hurried her out of the restaurant.

  We continued to sit in silence long after Stephen and Maw-Maw had both finished eating.

  Chapter Twelve

  “No fucking way,” Stephen said. We were seated in Maw-Maw’s living room discussing the events of the day. Ashara hadn’t come home from work yet, but the others hadn’t been willing to wait for her; they wanted me to tell them everything I’d seen.

  “Watch your language, young man,” Maw-Maw said, but her voice was distracted. “You’re positive that briefcase was full of money?” she asked me.

  “Absolutely. A lot of money. And some of it looked old.”

  “Hmm.” Maw-Maw patted her bottom lip as she pondered.

  “I just don’t believe that Jeff would have anything to do with something that horrible,” Stephen said. “I’ve worked with the guy for four years now. He’s a nice guy.”

  “Right. A nice guy who gives money to the man who cut Molly McClatchey into bite-size chunks,” I said.

  Stephen shook his head. “I’m sorry. I know it looks horrible. You’re probably right. I’m just having a hard time believing it. I mean, I’ve gone out for beers with the guy after work, you know? You just never think someone you know could do something like that.”

  I nodded, and wished for a moment that I could touch his shoulder or something. The moment passed, though. He needed to face reality more than he needed to be comforted.

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s one more thing that we can add to the list of things we know.”