Hush My Mouth

by Cathy Pickens

  “If the right guy comes along, I’ll know it,” I said. “Until then, no need to waste my time or some guy’s money.” Or risk another broken heart.

  Shamanique gave me a pitying look. For one so young, she’d mastered Aunt Edna’s silent expressiveness. “Honey, there’s always a good reason to use a guy’s money. That’s about all some of them are good for. Trick is finding one with some money. Too many of them got their eye on your purse along with your other things.”

  She stirred some honey in her mug and eyed with suspicion my artificial sweetener.

  I followed her down the hall, dunking my tea bag. The dating scene undoubtedly presented different challenges for the two of us—very different. In my case, if there’d been any good prospects, they’d moved away or were already married. The ones who’d stayed seemed to gather in a small-town hill-country fraternity specializing in hunting and fishing, with football, stock-car racing, and golf thrown in for variety. A woman in the beauty parlor last week, when I went to get my hair trimmed, was talking about how glad she was her husband had something to do every season of the year now—the best was when he was gone off hunting, but locked in his den with the TV remote was almost as good, she said.

  From watching my great-aunts—two who had never married—I judged single a better option than that, even if a guy who could hunt and fish had skills and could feed the family. He might even be able to rewire electrical outlets. But getting his attention could take longer than learning to do it myself—which reminded me I needed to stop by the hardware store for a sink washer.

  The phone rang as soon as we entered the reception room. Given how much I hate phone calls, just having somebody answer the few phones calls I got was proving worth her salary. I liked her directness and her spunk, though I hoped she’d satisfied herself on the topic of my love life. Her chattiness made me appreciate all the more Rudy’s reticence on personal matters.

  “One moment please,” she said in her cheerful phone voice. Covering the receiver with her hand, she mouthed, “Rowly Edwards?”

  I nodded and carried my tea into my office.

  “How’do, Miss A-ver-ee?”

  “Grand. Take it you have some news?”

  “Another long chat with Miz Sidalee Evans yesterday.” He said her name as if it ran together, Sidely. “A fount of information, she was. And more than willing to talk. I also got a little more on Dirick Timms, the boyfriend. Not a gang member. I wondered if maybe he could’a had somebody helping him, lending him cover. He’s a punk, true enough, but a loner, by all accounts.”

  “Not even the other punks like him, huh?”

  He snorted. “Like as not. Oh, and from the little I’ve dug up, Neanna had for certain broke it off with him.”

  “Really.” That gave me pause. “That’s too bad, in a way. I’d had him picked out to play the bad guy.”

  “Don’t mean he isn’t,” said Rowly. “He moved on to another girlfriend, but that don’t mean he was ready to let go of the old one. Word is, he’s not averse to slapping girls around.”

  “That’s what made me vote him most likely culprit.” That and the fact that lightning had struck twice. Neanna and Aunt Wenda both attracted dangerous men into their lives—and ultimately into their deaths.

  “He still could’a gone after her. Got drunk or tweaked out, decided he’d been wronged and decided to fix it. Wouldn’t be the first ex-boyfriend or ex-husband to want to right a wrong done him.”

  “Yeah, but he’d be the first to slip out of the Atlanta jail and slip back in to do it.”

  “True enough.” He paused. “But who’s to say he was her only bad boyfriend?”

  That was a thought. “Any mention of another one?”

  “Nope, but she headed outta here on a crazy whim. Maybe some guy was part of that.”

  I thought about Skipper, her boyish hitchhiker. Did he know something he wasn’t telling? Was he hiding something I couldn’t see?

  “What did Cousin Sidalee have to say?”

  “Over mint tea and these little powder-sugar balls that make one heck of a mess unless you poke the whole thing in your mouth, she had plenty to say.”

  “Oo, the buttery kind with chopped pecans?”

  “Uh-huh. They were good, but hard to be dainty with. She didn’t seem to note the mess. She was just glad to have company. You know how it is with folks of a certain age. They get lonely, don’t get too many new stories or new listeners.”

  I could see Rowly puffing little clouds of powdered sugar as he chewed the nut teacake balls, his Adam’s apple and his brown-thatch hair both bobbing as he nodded in time to her story.

  “So what’d she ’llow?” I asked. Talking to Rowly, with his deep drawl, deepened my own drawl.

  “She talked a lot about how devastated Gran—everybody called her that—was over her children. The first daughter running off, lost somewhere in drugs or craziness. The other one, Wenda, murdered. Sad enough to lose your child, but to such as that, and to have both of them gone in bad ways.”

  Rowly’s tone summed it up with words I could imagine in one of the country songs I knew he wrote.

  “She loved that granddaughter of hers. Seemed determined to fix whatever had broke with her own two, even to the point of asking the French family to take Neanna in when she herself got sick. Seemed to be working, too, right up until Gran died. Thank goodness she never knew it didn’t keep working.”

  “So why’d she have such a large insurance policy on Neanna? That really freaked her out when she learned about it. Frankly, it would freak me out, too.”

  “Ready for this?” Rowly said. “Miz Sidalee had fussed at Gran about spending money on the premiums. Miz Sidalee didn’t think it right to spend that money when Gran needed it for herself. But, in Gran’s words: ‘This is the only way I got to hold her here. God knows I could use the money, but He ain’t gonna give me two hunnert thousand dollars, else I might stop relying on Him. So if He won’t give me the money, He’ll have to keep her alive.’ ”

  “That’s—” I didn’t have a word to describe my reaction to it. The theology was more than a little cockeyed, but who was I to question the methods of a desperate woman?

  “Crazy?” Rowly supplied a word.

  “Not to her, apparently.”

  “I reckon.” Rowly’s tone oozed judgment.

  “The policy was in effect when Neanna died and the premiums were paid up.”

  “Yep.”

  I searched my memory banks, reordering information Fran had given me, what I believed about her. Why hadn’t she mentioned that she was Neanna’s beneficiary?

  “Is the insurance why Fran French can afford to be little Miss Money’s No Object?” I asked. “Is she using blood money?”

  Rowly knew we’d be remiss not to cast a skeptical eye on everyone involved.

  “No, not hardly. Truth is, Miss French’s family’s got plenty of money. That insurance payoff—when it comes—wouldn’t pay to air-condition one of their houses.”

  “Those are her dad’s houses, though, aren’t they? Not hers.”

  “True enough. Still, she hasn’t put in a claim for the money, and the girl’s not hurting. Got her own trust fund, from her own grandmother. Following the money this time doesn’t lead far.”

  “Her grandmother, huh?” The dichotomy between Fran and Neanna, the two “sisters,” and the two grandmothers who’d played—or tried to play—fairy godmother struck me.

  “Yeah. One other thing. Miz Sidalee talked—at grave length—about how hard Gran worked to find out what happened to both her girls. Finally she found Marie, the oldest, but not the way she’d hoped. Gran went to the library and studied up in the computer classes after states started posting Jane and John Doe descriptions of unidentified bodies. Miz Sidalee said Gran could ‘googly’ anybody. Made me laugh. Googly. I like that word. Like that song about goo-goo-googly eyes.”

  “Dear Lord. Imagine searching for your daughter on Jane Doe sites.”

  �
��That’s how she found her. On a Web site out in San Francisco. That’s how she learned she was dead.”

  No wonder Fran disdained private investigators. Gran had been left to do on her own what they didn’t do.

  “The strange part,” said Rowly, “was Gran quit pushing to find out what happened to Wenda. She just stopped. No more calls to the police or the newspapers to stir up stories. No more scrapbook—mostly because there were no more articles. She just stopped.”

  “Did Miss Sidalee know why?”

  “At the time, Miz Sidalee thought it was a good thing she stopped, that Gran needed to put it behind her so’s she could heal. When she thought on it later, she saw it wasn’t so good. Gran got that picture in the mail, the one you sent me. That scared Gran, made her worry about the same thing happening to Neanna. So she stopped. Miz Sidalee saw it once. Said Gran thought it meant Neanna, even though she was only seven at the time, would be leaving her too and it scared her.”

  “Did she have any idea who sent it?”

  “No, but before that picture came, Gran was always pestering the newspapers to run articles, especially on the anniversary. She even tried to get it on one of those TV shows about solving mysteries. She loved that one show, but not so much after they wouldn’t do the story. Said they were nice enough, but still.”

  The murderer had sent the photo a year after the murder. If he’d wanted to scare Gran off, it had worked. The photo was eerie, but not gruesome, and Gran didn’t sound like the kind of woman who would back down easily, especially when she was fighting to protect her brood.

  Worried about the same thing happening to Neanna. Had the photo arrived with an explicit threat? Had the murderer finally, twenty-three years later, made good on it? What if these weren’t his only victims? Had other families received sick mementoes from him? A chilling thought.

  “Thanks, Rowly. Send me a bill. This has been a lot of help. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Sure you can—just let me know how it comes out.”

  “Will do.”

  I shuddered at the words “how it comes out.” So far, I had a murderer with a long memory and a long reach, one who didn’t mind threatening little old ladies with macabre memento mori. One who was close to getting away with murder—for a second time?

  Friday Afternoon

  and Evening

  I finished drafting a simple will for a couple, friends of my parents—and hoped they hadn’t sought me out thinking they needed to help a charity case. They’d be in Monday to have it signed and notarized. That’s something I needed to put in motion for Shamanique. Having her serve as notary would be more professional than paying a teller from the bank to come on her lunch hour.

  The rest of the afternoon, I worked upstairs cleaning my two-room apartment. I still hadn’t unpacked many of my boxes, unsure whether this home would be permanent and worth the effort.

  My summer clothes hung in the closet or were folded carefully in a few of the drawers in the dresser I’d first hauled out of my grandfather’s attic when I was in high school. A few books sat on the built-in shelves that ran under the large windows in both rooms. The packed boxes sat stacked in the corner of what would ideally be my sitting room. What a genteel concept: a sitting room.

  Years before, someone had put a doorway between these two rooms, so I didn’t have to go into the hallway to move from one room to the other. The luminous marble bathroom, complete with a decadently deep, claw-footed tub and shower, opened off the bedroom.

  My rooms sat at one end of the second floor, opposite Melvin’s suite of rooms. Like our offices below, mine were on the left of the stairs and Melvin’s were on the right. The stairway continued to a third floor of smaller, cluttered rooms—perhaps once the children’s rooms—and on to the attics.

  Had Melvin’s grandmother and grandfather used these suites as separate bedrooms? Maybe they’d filled the third-floor rooms with children, then wisely decided to stay away from each other. I’d never asked Melvin how many siblings his father had.

  It struck me, as I squirted tub cleaner around, that Melvin’s grandfather and mine would’ve known each other. They’d lived blocks apart. Had they served in civic clubs together? Did they like each other?

  My cell phone rang, Shamanique calling to say I had a phone call downstairs. I needed a better phone system than this—but originally I hadn’t had a receptionist or an assistant. I also hadn’t wanted—still didn’t want—the office phone ringing upstairs. I was determined these rooms would be a haven, a place where I could forget that my office and my work were literally under my feet, beneath my pillow, all the time.

  I thundered down the wide oak stairs and into my office.

  Rudy said, “It’s official. No file on Wenda Sims.”

  I groaned and flopped into one of the armchairs, trailing the extra-long phone cord across the floor from my desk.

  “Thank the County Council who wouldn’t cough up the money for secure storage until the old courthouse was crowded and crumbling at the seams.”

  “So that’s it, huh? Somebody gets away with murder, because the evidence was thrown into a Dumpster full of sodden, moldy papers and photos.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “So? What’d you find, Mr. Brilliant Detective?”

  “Not what. Who. Vince Ingum. The guy who retired to Myrtle Beach. He returned my phone call.”

  He waited in vain for an admiring murmur of appreciation. Then he sprang his biggest surprise.

  “He has copies of the file, along with the crime-scene photos.”

  “You’re kidding?” Now I was awed and admiring.

  “Talked to him this morning. Said that case was his one regret. Forty years in law enforcement, that’s the only murder he never solved.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “I’m going to see him tomorrow. Said he’d meet me in Columbia. You game?”

  “Sure.” I immediately craved a chicken-fried steak at Yesterday’s, but it was their meeting; I figured they had their own favorite spots, maybe one featuring barbecue and rebel flags.

  “Can you leave about eight? That’ll give us plenty of time, in case we want to stop for breakfast or something.”

  In other words, Rudy knew he’d be hungry and knew a good place to eat on the way.

  “See you then.”

  Melvin met me in the hallway as I headed back upstairs.

  “You just missed our new best friends,” he said.

  “The ghosters?”

  He nodded. “They came by to thank us for rescuing them last night from, as they said, that witchy little crazy woman. I told them I couldn’t take credit for that.”

  He eyed me with suspicion, as if he hadn’t quite believed my story about not foreseeing the collision until it was too late.

  “They also came to issue a very gracious invitation to the two of us for this evening.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  He chuckled. “Well said. They’re going to film a campfire storytelling session at Yellow Fork Camp. Ghost stories, of course. For background.”

  “Yellow Fork?”

  “Somebody’s rented it for the summer, to host a series of summer camps for kids. Unfortunately, a prior commitment prevents me from attending the evening’s festivities.”

  I started to decline, but the possibilities for both hilarity and disaster struck me at almost the same time.

  “I reckon somebody ought to go keep an eye on things.” And I did like bonfires and storytelling.

  “Who better?” he said, his arms open, palms up. “If that witchy little crazy woman should materialize, for instance, you’ll have the proper counterincantation.”

  “Seems to me your charms are what enchanted her.” Edna wasn’t what I was worried about. A bunch of screaming kids with whittle-pointed marshmallow sticks and the ghosters—who needed anything else to fret over?

  “The festivities commence at nine o’clock,” he said.

  “Isn’t that past the crumb-cru
nchers’ bedtime?” It would push up on mine, if I was heading out with Rudy in the morning, but the more I thought about it, the more I was both repelled and intrigued. “I’ll let you know what you missed.”

  He smiled. “Take good notes.”

  “You can wait for the movie version.”

  I went back upstairs to finish my bathroom cleaning, dusting, and vacuuming. The nice thing about a small abode: It allowed a quick trip to a sense of order. I left the unpacked boxes pushed close against the wall. Those could stay put for a while longer—mostly winter clothes and a few books. Easier to dust without all that stuff anyway.

  The mugginess persisted, hinting at either rain or more heat. I reminded myself, as I dressed in a short-sleeved knit top and shorts, that this weather was tame compared to the humidity and heat we’d find in Columbia tomorrow. I laced my walking shoes, grabbed my purse, and, at the last minute, grabbed my camera, though I didn’t know why. After supper at my parents’ house, I headed up the mountain as the air began to cool slightly.

  The rutted dirt road to Yellow Fork turned off the two-lane and wound through the woods to a jumble of weathered gray buildings looking much as they had when I’d come in March to visit what I’d hoped would become a corporate client. They’d decided to pack up and move on. The place now teemed with kids, running and tagging each other and jumping and chattering. The counselors—identifiable only because they were taller than their charges and slightly less red-mud-tinged—seemed remarkably immune to the chaos.