Hog Wild

by Cathy Pickens

  I wondered if the book with the tree pictures he’d been reading was still here, or at my great-aunts’ house. Or in a box in my office. Funny he should mention title search work, when I’d been thinking about the need to develop my lawyering-staple skills.

  I put the journal down on the trunk that served as a coffee table. It was making me think too much. Before I climbed the ladder to the loft, I picked up a new mystery I’d gotten at the library. Somebody else’s puzzles and drama would be reassuring.

  12

  Tuesday Morning

  Next morning, I stopped by Maylene’s for a banana nut muffin and some ice tea—my caffeine of choice, even at breakfast. No sooner had I slid into the booth than Rudy Mellin came through the door.

  “A’vry, you gotta get your own hangout. You’re crowdin’ me here.” He hesitated before he slid into the booth across from me. He twisted sideways, one leg stretched out across the booth seat. It dawned on me he’d rather be sitting in my seat, facing the door in good gunslinger style. Too bad. He should get here earlier.

  “How’s the sheriffing bid’ness?”

  “What the hell’s happened around here? Like ever’-body’s possessed by aliens or something.” Rudy shook his head, studying the menu, though Maylene’s break-fast offerings hadn’t changed since the flyspecked windows were last washed. “We got a dead guy crammed in a gold mine and a woman dead at home that—Lord, I don’t even want to think about that one. Quite a death spree around here, I can tell you.”

  “The woman dead at home, that the one you got a call about yesterday? On Liberty Street?”

  The waitress joined us, and he ordered the same breakfast I’d always seen him order: coffee, three eggs over easy, bacon and sausage, buttered white toast, and grits.

  “So?” I prompted him after the waitress left.

  Rudy’s big frame shuddered, and he lost his usual seen-it-all air for a moment. I got the sense he’d hoped I wouldn’t ask, but, at the same time, he wanted to talk about it. “I tell you, that was one to give you nightmares. You remember that meningitis scare back in elementary school? They said get to the doctor if your neck started hurting and ol’ Curtis what’s-his-name said the spinal meningitis made your back bow up and your neck bend backwards ‘til it broke and you died and we all believed him?”

  I didn’t remember all those details, but third-grade girls usually weren’t privy to the elaborate and gruesome imaginings of boys. Sounded like the boys might have been confusing meningitis with tetanus. I just nodded.

  “That’s what she looked like, all stiffened up. She’d been throwing up all over the place and hadn’t made it to the pot. And her face. Gawdamighty, I can’t get it out of my head. Grinning like something in a bad fright movie. There she lay on the living room sofa, reeking of vomit with that frozen fright face.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Suse Knight.”

  I hadn’t really expected to know her.

  “She was a nurse. Did those in-home physicals for insurance companies and such,” he added in case it might awaken a connection or recognition for me. It didn’t.

  “Who found her?”

  “Her husband came home from work. God help him, I wouldn’t want to have that seared in my brain if I was him. He thought she’d been strangled or something. I didn’t tell him that somebody strangled, with a purple face and a black tongue lolled out, looks a helluva lot better than his wife did. And I’ve never known one to throw up. Jeez.”

  That was a lot more detail than I needed with my banana nut muffin. “So you think somebody strangled her?”

  He shrugged. “The ME’s got it, so we might get some idea later today, maybe tomorrow. Depends on how weird things are in the rest of the state this week. That looked like a bad way to go. Real bad. Just hope I don’t ever see another one.”

  “Say, you don’t think it was meningitis, do you? Isn’t that stuff highly contagious?” I was kidding him, but his eyes opened wide. I was suddenly reminded of crew-cut little Rudy Mellin in the third grade.

  “I really don’t think you have anything to worry about.” I tried to backtrack and reassure him.

  He nodded, but he still had a worry wrinkle between his eyebrows. Wherever that Curtis kid went after the third grade, I hope he decided to do something productive with his powerful storytelling skills; if the horror could last this long, look out, Stephen King.

  “What about the guy in the gold mine?” I changed the subject. “What happened there?”

  “A’vry, you know I can’t be talking about open investigations.”

  That usually meant he didn’t know much. I started to say, Swell, I’ll just ask Cissie Prentice. Instead, I took another tack. “How are Jesse and her mom taking it?”

  “Befuddled, I’d say. Miz Ruffin seems confused by it all. In shock, I guess. L.J. thinks it’s odd she doesn’t cry. From what I hear, she had reason not to cry, with him gone. I sure don’t see how she got him off up there in that hole and shot him, if she’s the one that did it.”

  “Ever have any domestic calls or complaints from the Ruffins?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Nothing but gossip about ’em.”

  I had finished my muffin and tea when the waitress slid two heaping plates in front of Rudy. I scooted out of the booth. “Better be getting to work, I reckon.” I had likely gotten all the good information out of Deputy Mellin.

  Rudy just nodded, intent now on his eggs and pork products.

  As soon as I stepped out Maylene’s door, a buzzing rush of noise shoved me back against the plate glass window. I hit the glass with such a crack, I feared I’d shattered it. What had attacked me? Killer bees? A blitz mugging?

  A motor scooter. On the sidewalk. It wobbled to a stop three storefronts down. The passenger and the driver, both sporting pumpkin-orange helmets, stared back over their shoulders at me. The driver towered over his passenger, and I couldn’t figure out how the two of them fit on such a tiny bike.

  Still straddling the scooter, the driver lifted the handlebars so the front wheel cleared the ground. The passenger, with a squeal of panic, grabbed the driver, her legs flying out to either side to keep from falling off. He walked the bike around, wobbling from one foot to the other, until it was aimed right at me. Ready to take another run at me.

  Then he waved. A goofy, elbows-akimbo kindergarten wave I knew well.

  “Hey, A’vry!” The face crammed into the orange helmet crinkled in a grin.

  Donlee Griggs.

  “Hey, Donlee,” I called back, hoping he would stay put and wouldn’t try to get close enough for a conversation.

  “We’re ridin’ around.” He cocked his thumb toward his passenger. I swear his chest swelled with pride.

  “I see that, Donlee.” His passenger’s orange helmet tilted and she peered around him. I couldn’t make out her features, just that she was tiny and she was a girl. “You all have fun.”

  His orange helmet bobbed. Donlee with a girlfriend.

  He revved the bike, and I almost ducked back into Maylene’s door. Not that I wanted to endanger innocent bystanders. He might choose to follow me inside to continue our chat.

  Donlee and his woman must have had other plans. He lifted the handlebars and waddled the little bike around toward his original destination. His girlfriend held on tight, her helmet mashed up against his back.

  In an impressive cloud of blue smoke, the little scooter buzzed down the sidewalk like an angry bee, the two pumpkin heads solidly aboard.

  Movement inside Maylene’s caught the corner of my eye. The entire populace had gathered at the front window, craning for a view of my close encounter. Rudy was grinning, but had the decency to look a bit sheepish. The rest were laughing their heads off.

  Good to be home. I knew my face was flushed with embarrassment, but all I could do was give the crowd an exaggerated shrug. Got to have a sense of humor.

  As I walked away, I felt oddly sad. Donlee had found another object for his affections. The
big dumb goof had trailed me around in high school. After I’d been away in school and practicing law for over a decade, Donlee had welcomed me home in November with a series of embarrassing stunts designed to win my attention and affection. At the time, half the town had turned out for the festivities and I’d felt like a fool. Now that he had a girlfriend and matching pumpkin helmets, I was struck that even Donlee Griggs had a love life while I had none. What did that say?

  From Maylene’s, I decided to walk the four blocks around to the post office and back to the office. Getting enough exercise hadn’t been easy since I’d moved to Dacus.

  I exchanged nods and casual pleasantries with post office patrons, some I recognized but none I knew. It surprised me how many people I recognized though I couldn’t put names to the faces. Was my memory going bad? Or did I just think I remembered them?

  As I strolled toward the junior high football stadium, I opened some envelopes. A bill for the office phone installation. I probably should have stuck with my cell phone and voice mail. Junk mail. A continuing legal education brochure.

  I stopped dead in my tracks when I pulled out an envelope addressed to Miss Avery Andrews, Attorney at Law. In spidery cobalt blue ink.

  I carefully slit the top open with my thumbnail and pulled out the thick sheet.

  Dear Miss Andrews,

  Your family has long set a standard for decorous behavior in Dacus. I’m surprised none of your family has not seen fit to advise you against your current path, but you should know that many in town question your judgment and even your morals.

  Establishing your office alongside Melvin Bertram—and in the same house where he has chosen to reside—has raised eyebrows. You should realize what this flouting of convention may mean for your business here, regardless of how they choose to do things in the lower part of the state.

  You need to remember that people are watching.

  A friend.

  The two-inch square of newspaper, carefully clipped and decoupaged to the lower right-hand corner, was an advice column about suspected high jinks between two coworkers, titled “Where There’s Smoke?”

  Even in the sun and wearing my wool sweater, I shivered. How dare—whoever. A friend. I wanted to stomp up and down on it. Or ball it up and pitch it in the woods. What a creepy, sneaky, disgusting thing.

  I stood stock-still in the middle of the post office access road, and a car turning into the post office had to drive around me. She waved and kept driving. Nobody else was paying me the least attention. That has always been one of Dacus’s most appealing traits: It was a live and-let-live kind of place. Certainly not a place where somebody sends creepy letters rather than tell you directly—or indirectly, through careful comments to a parent or a friend. For Pete’s sake, anyone could’ve gone to Aunt Letha and hinted that she should set me straight.

  On second thought, anybody who knew Aunt Letha would hesitate to approach her with complaints about me. She might iron out the kinks in the message bearer before she turned her attentions to me. Not even Aunt Letha—or Hattie or Vinnia, for that matter—had said anything to me about setting up practice next to Melvin’s office. So who was this letter writer to take sneaky shots at me?

  I wanted to crumple the nasty thing up in a ball, but my lawyerly respect for evidence made me fold it carefully back in its envelope with one last shiver.

  I marched off toward the office, threw the mail in the passenger seat of my car, and kept walking. I needed to burn off some of the adrenaline the anonymous letter had created.

  Why did it make my skin crawl? Was it because it wasn’t signed? Or because someone lumped me and Cissie Prentice in the same questionable-morals class? It was only a stupid letter. Just stop thinking about it, I told myself.

  I forced my mind to Maggy Avinger’s problem. I needed to come up with a workable solution that didn’t involve selling her house to pay for that beautiful piece of idiocy. It really was a work of art. Harden Avinger didn’t deserve that angel bowed prayerfully over his grave. By the same token, Maggy Avinger didn’t deserve to be accused of his murder.

  I turned at the gas station and walked toward North Main and my great-aunts’ house. Where had Harden Avinger gotten the cash for that sculpture? Apparently Carlton Barner had the funds in escrow, ready to pay Innis Barker. The price tag was eye-popping, while his wife was left digging in the sofa cushions for spare change. Had he taken all their savings to lavish on himself—and to torment her? What a wonderful marriage she let herself stay trapped in.

  I crunched along the heavy coating of pecan and acorn shells in front of Harrison Garnet’s house. The squirrels had fed well from the massive oaks in Harrison’s yard. I kept my eyes focused on the sidewalk. Something I’d read in Granddad’s journal danced around the edges of my brain, had teased me as I fell asleep last night. Something that seemed to point to a solution. Then again, I sometimes dream I’m flying and I haven’t yet lifted off the ground.

  Innis Barker had paid for the sculpture but wouldn’t get the final two-thirds of the payment until he’d engraved the poem on the statue and installed it. He had to engrave it and install it.

  . . . find what we want hidden behind what we thought we had. A shell game. That was it. I walked faster, almost hopping. That was it. I knew how to bring the angel peacefully to earth—behind what we thought we had.

  13

  Midday Tuesday

  Ihadn’t been able to talk directly with Carlton Barner, Harden Avinger’s executor, but I’d miraculously managed to get an appointment with him for tomorrow afternoon, despite the animosity Lou Wray, his receptionist, had harbored for me when I’d first returned to Dacus. In November, Carlton had graciously offered me space in his office, but Mrs. Wray never felt as charitable about me intruding on their well-ordered office life. Now that I was safely six blocks away in the old mortuary, she’d grown more tolerant.

  I paid some bills and stared at the boxes surrounding me. How to organize things when I didn’t know what was in each box until I unpacked it? My grandfather’s old library would be useful but, more important, it would be reassuring to have around. If I could ever get it on the shelves.

  I could just unbox the books and stack them so I could see what I had, measure them, clean them, and find the right space in the two rooms of bookcases. Much simpler than what I’d been doing: putting them on the shelves, then shifting them around when I uncovered missing volumes in other boxes.

  As I grabbed my box cutter with renewed resolve, the phone rang.

  “Miz Andrews? This is Carl Newland Knight. Miz Maggy Avinger said to call you, said I should talk to you.”

  “Yessir?”

  “I’m not sure what about. Just to see if you think I should do something.”

  “Yessir?” So much better to do your warm-up before you dial, isn’t it?

  “My wife . . . died. And the sheriff took me down-town, to ask me some questions. Because it was suspicious.”

  “Mr. Knight, if you could start at the beginning?” Hearing that his wife had just died made me feel guilty for my impatience.

  “We-ell, I come home and my wife was in the den and she was dead. She had, um, been sick. All over the place. Her face looked . . . bad.” The last words he almost whispered.

  Dear Lord. The woman on Liberty Street.

  “The sheriff questioned you?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “That’s standard procedure in an . . . unattended death.”

  “Yes’m. I thought so. But. . . seemed like her questions went, um, maybe weren’t so standard. I got worried.”

  “Not standard in what way?”

  “Miz Avinger thought I should talk to you, after she heard.”

  “About the sheriff’s questions?”

  He paused, the phone silent. “Sheriff seemed to think my wife was . . . killed. She seemed to think I. . . done it. Or had something to do with it.”

  I wasn’t sure whether the hesitation in his voice was just his way of talking or i
f he was having trouble talking about what had happened to his wife. From the horror scene Rudy had described, anyone would have trouble dealing with it.

  “Did Sheriff Peters come right out and accuse you?”

  “We-ell, no. But her questions . . .”

  “Sometimes that’s just her way of testing you, really seeing what you know.”

  Silence. “Good. I’m really sorry . . . I bothered you. Miz Avinger thought you wouldn’t mind.”

  “No bother at all, Mr. Knight. Please don’t hesitate to call, especially if Sheriff Peters has any more questions. Okay? You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to, you know.”

  “Yes’m.” He sounded uncertain. I’d seen L. J. Peters in action. I knew why he sounded uncertain, but I couldn’t in good conscience offer to rush to his defense. If he hired a lawyer at this stage, L. J. would believe he had something to hide. Then she really would make trouble for him.

  “Okay, then.”

  Poor guy. What a mess, in more ways than one.

  I unpacked books the remainder of the morning. When my stomach started a faint growling, I started to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but the bread looked lightly green. For lack of a quick alternative, I walked back down the street to Maylene’s. I’d missed the lunch rush, so I had my pick of booths. Feeling in a healthy mood, I ordered vegetable beef soup and some corn bread, which I crumbled into the thick soup to sop up the grease that floated on top.

  I ate, idly watching customers drift in and out the front door.

  “Excuse me for interrupting.”

  A bosomy woman in tight pants and a low-cut leopard-print blouse put her hand on the table to get my attention. “Do you mind?”

  Before I could respond, Lionel Shoal’s wife slid into the booth and touched her not-really-blond hair to make sure the mousse still held it in place. Her creased makeup and false eyelashes completed a look that managed to look cheap, but not for lack of money.