Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 05 - Tight as a Tick

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  “The bet only says I can’t quote the Bard. I can still quote other people.”

  “Since when did you get so sneaky?”

  “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

  I groaned. It was going to be a long two weeks, two days, and assorted hours.

  “Anyway, as I was saying, I have my own reasons for agreeing to spend the week in Byerly. First off, they’re my family, too. So of course I think we should stay for Augustus’s party.”

  “You’re sweet,” I said, giving him a quick kiss.

  “Second, like Aunt Maggie said, we may as well do something useful while we’re in town. Aunt Maggie needs us, and I couldn’t turn her down any more than you could.”

  “I do love you,” I said, and gave him a longer kiss.

  “And third, you have no idea how much I’m looking forward to your making it up to me.”

  This time, he kissed me, and it lasted longer than the other two kisses put together.

  When I got a chance to draw a breath, I said, “Maybe I should start paying you back right away.” I reached into my suitcase and pulled out the new nightgown I’d bought to surprise him with at the beach. “Why don’t I slip this on?”

  “It’s lovely, but I don’t think you’ll be needing it for a while.”

  “Is that so?”

  He was right. It would just have been in the way during what happened next.

  Chapter 6

  What with the time spent making things up to Richard, I didn’t get much sleep that night. When Aunt Maggie came knocking on the bedroom door the next morning, it almost hurt to open my eyes. I looked at the clock by the side of the bed and realized why. It wasn’t morning yet. As far as I’m concerned, five-thirty is still nighttime.

  “I’m awake,” I mumbled, fairly sure that I was telling the truth. Richard slumbered on peacefully, and I thought about trying to talk him into showering first so I could get ten minutes more of sleep. But since I was still making up for that trip to Cape Cod, I went first.

  When the two of us trudged downstairs, Aunt Maggie was standing by the front door rattling the enormous set of keys she always carries. “If I’d known y’all were going to take this long, I’d have woken you up sooner.”

  I thanked the Lord for small favors as we followed her outside. It was still dark, but as we drove through the empty streets and onto the highway, I thought I saw the faint glow of dawn. It turned out to be the lights from Hardee’s.

  “Y’all want something to eat?” Aunt Maggie said as we got off of the highway and pulled around to the drive-thru.

  I might have been half-asleep, but when I smelled sausage cooking, my stomach growled to let me know it was ready and raring to go. “I’ll take a couple of sausage biscuits and some coffee.”

  “Richard?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I looked into the back seat, and saw that even though he was sitting upright, he was sound asleep. He’d learned that trick in graduate school, and though he’d tried to teach it to me, it wouldn’t take.

  “Get him a couple of sausage biscuits, too,” I said, and Aunt Maggie ordered for us.

  A Northern friend of mine once asked me how to make a sausage biscuit, and couldn’t figure out why I laughed. The man was a physicist and didn’t know how to slice a biscuit in half and stick in a sausage patty. Massachusetts has some fine universities, but they don’t teach everything.

  A few more miles down the road, it started getting light for real. Or maybe the coffee and sausage biscuits were having their desired effect.

  There were actually people moving around when we got to the flea market. A line of cars was parked alongside and between the three long buildings, and folks were busy setting up tables and laying out merchandise ranging from stacks of T-shirts to boxes of trading cards to piles of stuff I didn’t recognize. I felt better when I saw that some of them looked as bleary-eyed as I felt, and that large amounts of coffee were being consumed.

  Aunt Maggie said, “Aren’t you glad I don’t have an outside spot, or we’d have had to get up early to set up.”

  “What do you call this?” I said, and then saw she was grinning. “Aunt Maggie, I think you’re enjoying this.”

  “I did like seeing the expression on your face,” she admitted.

  Aunt Maggie drove around to the back of the largest building, which had a sign marking it as Building One. I knew from previous trips out there that it wasn’t much of a building, just walls made of cinder blocks, a corrugated tin roof, and a concrete floor. Still, it provided shade, electricity, and running water, which was more than the outside dealers got.

  We parked in front of a metal door with the words DEALERS ONLY badly painted in red paint. Richard was still asleep in the back seat, so I leaned over and said, “We’re here.”

  He instantly opened his eyes, and looked as wide awake as if he’d had ten hours of sleep. That was another trick he’d learned in graduate school, and once again, I wished he could teach it to me. “Do I smell biscuits?”

  I handed him the bag and his coffee, and we climbed out of the car.

  “Do dealers have assigned parking spaces?” I asked Aunt Maggie. There were several other cars and trucks parked back there, but nobody else had taken the prime parking spot at the door. Like most Bostonians, I consider parking a precious commodity, and I don’t even own a car.

  “Nope, first come, first served. We must have gotten this place because it’s where Carney always parked, and it looks like this is where he died. I expect that’s why nobody else parked here.”

  Hearing that woke me up more thoroughly than the coffee and biscuits had. “I thought you found him inside.”

  “That’s where the killer hid the body, but he killed him out here. It looks like Carney got out of his van and started to open the door to go in. All of us inside dealers have keys because we got tired of having to drag Bender out of bed to come let us in. Anyway, Carney was opening the door when somebody jumped him.”

  “Does anybody other than the dealers have keys?” Richard asked.

  “Knowing Bender, he’s probably given them to half the people in the state, but the front door was jimmied, so it doesn’t matter. Like I was saying, Carney was at the door when he was attacked. There were cuts on his arms from where he tried to defend himself, and a nasty belly wound, but he died from being stabbed in the back. They think he was trying to unlock the door to his van when the killer finished him off. Then he dragged Carney inside and put him under the table of his own booth, right inside the door.”

  “Was the van left here?”

  “No, the killer drove it over to the church parking lot,” she said, pointing to a steepled building on the other side of the flea market. “He parked it way in the back, and it wasn’t until after we found Carney that the preacher reported it. There was blood along the driver’s side, and they found blood on the ground here, so that’s how they figured out what happened. The van’s keys were missing, but there were fresh scratches next to the door lock from where Carney tried to get in.”

  Aunt Maggie scuffed her sneaker in the red clay that covers so much of the area around Byerly. “Mark and Belva shoveled up most of the bloody parts, and Bender cleaned up the rest. I wouldn’t have thought it’d show so much in this clay, but it did once we knew what to look for. Didn’t look like blood—just dark stains, like an oil leak.”

  Despite the offhand way Aunt Maggie was talking about it, Carney’s death had been a violent one. To stab a man over and over like that was a brutal way to kill somebody.

  I tried to imagine the attack. It had happened earlier in the day, so it would have been darker than it was now, with no other cars nearby.

  “Weren’t there any outside dealers around?” I asked Aunt Maggie. “You said they come earlier than the inside dealers. Didn’t any of them see or hear anything?” Surely Carney would have hollered for help, or cried out in pain.

  But Aunt Maggie said, “There weren’t any that day. It rained
overnight, and was supposed to rain on and off all that day, so none of the outdoor people bothered to set up.”

  Something still seemed wrong with the picture. “Aunt Maggie, did Carney have problems walking?”

  “Not that I ever noticed. Why?”

  “Why didn’t he run away? If I’d tried to fight somebody off and couldn’t, I wouldn’t have wasted time trying to get inside a locked van.”

  “How do you know what you’d do?” Aunt Maggie snapped. “Has anybody ever chased you with a knife?”

  Actually, I had been chased a time or two, but I was too surprised by her outburst to say so. Maybe this murder was bothering her more than she wanted to admit. Aunt Maggie was bossy and occasionally sarcastic—make that frequently sarcastic—but she almost never snapped.

  Before I could come up with an answer, I heard the wail of a siren coming toward us.

  Chapter 7

  The sound seemed to warble, and I realized that I was hearing two different sirens.

  “What in the Sam Hill?” Aunt Maggie said.

  Two police cars came screeching around opposite sides of the building, and they both stopped right behind Aunt Maggie’s car, stirring up identical clouds of red dust.

  The car to the right was the familiar blue-and-white Byerly cruiser, and I recognized deputies Mark Pope and Trey Norton getting out. The car on the left was black and white with “Rocky Shoals Police” lettered on the hood. I didn’t know the heavy-set woman with tight, sandy-blond curls hopping out of the driver’s side, but I guessed that she was Deputy Belva Tucker.

  “Who’s been killed now?” Aunt Maggie asked Mark.

  “Nobody,” he said. It’s a shame Mark is a cop. With his nondescript face and figure, he’d have made a great crook. Even his voice was nondescript as he said “Excuse me, ma’am,” before opening the door.

  Belva Tucker was right on his heels, and they disappeared inside, leaving Trey to follow. At least, he would have followed if Aunt Maggie hadn’t stepped into his path.

  “Hold it right there,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  Trey, a tall fellow whose brown forelock won’t stay out of his face, said, “There’s been a break-in, Miz Burnette. The call we got didn’t say whether or not there’s anything missing, but there’s been some damage. I better get inside.”

  “Right after us,” Aunt Maggie said, going into the building herself.

  Trey looked like he wasn’t sure if he should let her go in or not, so Richard and I took advantage of his confusion to follow her.

  “God bless a milk cow!” Aunt Maggie said, running her fingers through her hair.

  That part of the building is long and narrow, just wide enough to hold a line of booths down each side with enough space left over for an aisle for the customers to walk down. Each booth is a rectangle marked off with white painted lines on the floor. There are two long folding tables along the front, where the customers walk by, and shorter ones on each end. A gap between the front tables and the side ones leaves just enough room for the dealer to get in and out of the booth. At least, that’s what it’s supposed to look like.

  The way it looked then, the lines on the floor were the only way I could tell where one booth ended and the next began. There were wads of paper, boxes, plastic bags, and scraps of brightly colored fabric everywhere. When Aunt Maggie took a step, her sneakers crunched on broken glass. A big part of what she sells is glassware, and I knew she was wondering if she was grinding her own stock into dust.

  There were maybe a dozen people milling around. Belva had a notepad out and was questioning a scrawny man in faded blue jeans and a white T-shirt that was worn so thin that if it had been mine, I’d have used it for a dust rag. He was nearly bald, with just a fringe of hair around his head, but that fringe had been left to grow long enough to hang in his face. When he opened his mouth to answer Belva, I could see that he was missing a couple of teeth. Standing between the two of them, looking up as if worried about what was going on, was a magnificent red dog with chow in his bloodline.

  Meanwhile, Mark was nodding and listening as the man next to him talked. At first glance, the man looked as different as could be from the man with Belva. Instead of wearing clothes that should have been thrown out, he was dressed in a crisp blue Izod golf shirt and starched khakis. His dark hair was neatly combed, and as far as I could tell, he had all his teeth.

  But there was definitely a family resemblance between the two men, something about the nose and the shape of the mouth. They looked like nothing so much as the opposite sides of a before-and-after ad. From what Aunt Maggie had said the night before, they had to be Bender and Evan Cawthorne.

  I didn’t know the other people, but I guessed that they were other dealers. A woman was picking up pieces of gingham, and a stocky man with dark brown hair and muscular arms was straightening bottles that had been knocked over.

  From behind us, I heard a throat clearing and a polite “Excuse me.” We stepped aside and Trey came on in. When Mark saw him, he called out, “Tell those people to stop interfering with the evidence, and find someplace they can go to get out of the way.”

  Belva looked annoyed, probably because she hadn’t brought a flunky of her own.

  Bender Cawthorne said, “The snack bar isn’t messed up. People can go over there.”

  There was general agreement, and the deputies started herding people toward the snack bar at the front of the building. Richard and I were going that way, too, but Aunt Maggie had other ideas.

  “I’m going to check out my booth,” she said.

  Richard and I looked at each other, shrugged, and followed her.

  The booth immediately to the left of the door was blocked with yellow tape that said, “CRIME SCENE—DO NOT PASS,” but if anything, it was even more damaged than the other booths. Every box seemed to have been turned over, with knives of all description scattered across the floor. The broken display cases were probably the source of the glass on the floor.

  “That was Carney’s booth,” Aunt Maggie said.

  “They sure did a number on it,” I remarked.

  “Looks like a tornado hit it,” she agreed. “Of course, Carney kept it pretty messy. I don’t know how he ever found anything in there.” She went on to her booth, which was across the aisle from Carney’s.

  “Lord love a duck,” she sighed, her hands on her hips as she surveyed the damage.

  Half of Aunt Maggie’s booth was devoted to paperback books, and it looked like somebody had run his arm down each row of books, knocking them off the table to make puddles of books on the floor. Then the table had been pushed over on top of them.

  The other half of the booth was filled with all kinds of knickknacks: vases and ring holders, porcelain statues and Bugs Bunny mugs, mismatched saucers and mixing bowls, blue glass candlesticks and flower frogs. Not one piece was left upright, and I couldn’t tell how many had been broken.

  Even Aunt Maggie’s worktable had been overturned, with the electric fan and reference books that were usually on top shoved into a corner.

  The only thing left undisturbed were the three signs on the wall. Over the book section was a sign that said, “Don’t Buy Books New—Buy Them from the Book Lady.” The one over the knickknacks said, “The only one who cares about what your grandmother had is your grandfather.” And over the place where Aunt Maggie usually stood to keep an eye on customers was a sign that said, “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.”

  Aunt Maggie bent down to pick up a blue iridescent shard of glass. “I just bought this platter last week.”

  I put my arm around her, feeling awkward. Aunt Maggie isn’t the hugging type, but these were extreme circumstances. “It doesn’t look too bad.”

  She took a deep breath. “I suppose it could have been worse. Most of my best pieces are packed up to go to auction, so they’re probably all right. I just hate to think how long it’s going to take to clean it all up.” She reached for a vase that was laying on its side.


  “We better leave everything until the police have had a chance to look,” I warned.

  “I don’t know what good that’ll do,” she said, but she pulled her hand back.

  Trey walked up then. “Miz Burnette, Mark wants me to tell you—”

  Aunt Maggie turned and gave him the look that Southern women use when words aren’t enough.

  Trey blanched, but managed to stammer the rest of his message. “He wanted me to ask you if you’d come over to the snack bar so he and Deputy Tucker can talk to everybody at once.”

  She headed in that direction, but she said, “A fat lot of good their talking has done so far. First Carney gets killed, and now this.” I wasn’t sure from her tone of voice which event bothered her more.

  Calling it a snack bar was exaggerating a bit. It was just a hole in the wall with a warped counter that showed a kitchen big enough for one person. Surrounding it were half a dozen ramshackle, formica-topped tables that played the part of dining area.

  The other dealers were scattered around the tables with Styrofoam cups of coffee and disgruntled expressions. I noticed that nobody was putting their elbows on the tables, which was a good thing. If they had, they might have stuck—the tables didn’t look like they’d been wiped in a month.

  Trey joined the other deputies, who were talking to Evan Cawthorne in a room with a sign on the door that said, “Flea Market Office.” The door was open, but when Belva saw Aunt Maggie, Richard, and me nearby, she firmly closed it.

  Since we couldn’t hear anything through the door, the three of us went to sit at an empty table. Richard said, “Would you like some coffee?” He still had his Hardee’s bag, but his coffee must have been cold by then.

  “I sure would,” Aunt Maggie said. “It’s going to be a long day.”

  He headed for the counter, where Bender Cawthorne was manning the coffeemaker. His dog was in the kitchen with him, but since Rusty looked cleaner than Bender, I saw no reason to complain.

  Aunt Maggie was looking so disgusted that I thought I should distract her. “Are these folks ones you think might have had something to do with Carney’s death?” I asked in a low voice.