Long ago, Stella had stashed a coffee can in the back of the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, and any time she could, she added some coins to the can. She told the grandchildren that it was the “for emergencies only” can. But in her mind, she called it the “bail Shirley’s butt out of the can” can.
Unfortunately, Stella had lost count of the times she had emptied the contents of that can into a pillowcase and then lugged the pillowcase into the station to secure her daughter-in-law’s release.
Stella did not perform this ritual for Shirley’s sake. Quite the contrary, Stella figured some time in jail, with forced sobriety, might do the woman some good. But her grandchildren, especially the younger ones, fretted something fierce when their mother was in jail.
They didn’t particularly miss their mom, as she was seldom home even when she was out of jail and on probation. But they were convinced that while incarcerated, Shirley would attack the sheriff or one of his deputies or try to escape down a knotted bedsheet, flub it, and hang herself, thus heaping even greater disgrace upon the family name.
Stella worried about those things, too. Shirley could be quite creative when she set her mind to it.
“At least you aren’t here to bail anybody out this time,” Sheriff Gilford said, as though reading her mind. He sat down at his desk and began to shuffle papers around, looking for something.
Finally, he found what he was searching for—a black notebook and a ballpoint pen. “Sorry to hold y’all up like this,” he said, waving a hand toward Stella and her two grandchildren, who sat on equally unattractive and uncomfortable folding chairs on either side of her. “But I couldn’t leave until I was sure the crime scene was secure.”
“Of course you couldn’t,” Savannah piped up. “Your deputies probably put that yellow tape stuff all around it to make sure nobody goes inside there. You wouldn’t want anybody contaminating your evidence, touching anything they shouldn’t, moving stuff around, and getting their fingerprints everywhere.”
Sheriff Gilford studied the child thoughtfully for a moment. Stella could tell by the glimmer of humor in his pale gray eyes that he was stifling a grin. She silently blessed him for it.
With a show of great solemnity and respect, he nodded and told Savannah, “You seem to know a lot about law enforcement procedures, young lady. I’m quite impressed. Most people three times your age don’t know as much as you do about how to process a crime scene. Some cops, too, for that matter, I’m sorry to say.”
Waycross gave an impatient, derisive sniff. “Ha. It’s just that she reads a lot of them Nancy Drew books. Always got one of ’em in her hands. Thinks she’s gonna be a policeman when she grows up someday. But she can’t, ’cause she’s a girl.”
“That’s not true!” Savannah retorted. “We women got ourselves liberated, and now we can be whatever we want. I can be a policewoman when I grow up, if I want to. Huh, Granny?”
“Yes, you can, granddaughter. You can be anything you want when you grow up. Or even right now, for that matter.”
“She can’t be Mr. T,” Waycross continued, unwilling to concede the fight. “Or Magnum, P.I.”
Savannah bristled. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Waycross Reid. I don’t wanna be Mr. T! I don’t wanna be Magnum, either.” Her face softened into a sappy smile. “I’d rather just look at him.”
“That’s enough, you two,” Stella said. “We’re not here to debate the ins and outs of women’s liberation or the attractiveness of Mr. Tom Selleck. Sheriff Gilford here is trying to conduct an investigation. The sooner we get it over and done with, the quicker we can go home and relieve poor Elsie of her duties. She probably thinks we ran off to Timbuktu, leaving her with a passel of young’uns to contend with for the rest of her life.”
“And the sooner we get back, the sooner you can gobble down that piece of apple pie she set back for you,” Savannah added, grinning slyly.
“That too,” Stella admitted. “I ain’t gonna pretend I’m not looking forward to it. That toasted cheese sandwich and tomato soup I had at noon done wore off ages ago.”
Sheriff Gilford opened his black notebook and clicked his ballpoint pen. “Okay. Let’s get this done, so you can go home to the rest of your family and your apple pie. If Elsie made it, I can understand your eagerness.”
“Thank you, sir. I appreciate it,” Stella told him.
She saw a frown appear on her grandson’s face and braced herself for what she knew was coming.
Waycross was known for carrying a grudge long past its time. This wasn’t going to be pretty.
“Sheriff Gilford’s mighty partial to Miss Elsie’s apple pies,” the boy grumbled under his breath. “I, of all people, know that. I know it all too well.”
Gilford looked up from his notebook and saw the disgruntled look on the child’s face. “What’s that, young man?”
“Drop it, Waycross,” Stella told her grandson. “Now’s not the time.”
“No, that’s okay,” the sheriff told her. “If this young fellow has a grievance against me, he’s welcome to state it.”
Stella rolled her eyes and sighed. “Okay, Waycross. Go on.”
Waycross eagerly plunged into the deep end, happy to finally air his long-held grievance. “Okay, Sheriff. I’m gonna tell you. The thing is, you bid against me for one of Miss Elsie’s apple pies at the church social last summer. And you beat me, too, by a quarter.”
Sheriff Gilford’s eyes widened. He cleared his throat and rubbed his hand over his mouth before answering. “I’m mighty sorry to hear that, son. I didn’t notice it was you that I was competing with. I suppose I was blinded by the thought of that pie. I didn’t realize you were as eager to sink your choppers into it as I was.”
“That’s just the point,” Waycross said, his lower lip protruding in what would have been a humorous pout if not for the fact that the child had tears in his eyes. “It wasn’t for me. It was for my grandma. For her birthday.”
Gilford glanced over at Stella. A look of profound guilt and remorse appeared on his handsome face. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. “That’s awful. I had no idea.”
“Well, that’s the ugly truth of it,” Waycross commented. “You see, I knew that Miss Elsie would bake one of her apple pies for the auction, like she always does. I knew my gran would rather have that apple pie for her birthday more than anything else on earth. So, I washed Judge Patterson’s big old Cadillac back to front and top to bottom, even though I had to stand on a chair to get the top good. I vacuumed out the insides and cleaned the windows, too, so’s I’d have the money to buy it for her. But all the judge gave me was two dollars.”
“And I outbid you by raising it that extra quarter?”
“You did, sir. But you didn’t know the whole story. You was just thinkin’ ’bout the pie and how good it was gonna taste once you got it home.”
“I was. I admit it. I’m sorry.”
“Then I forgive you, Sheriff.”
At that point, Stella could have sworn she saw a small glimmer of light in her grandson’s eyes . . . a mischievous twinkle, which made her grandma’s instincts stand up and take notice.
Waycross continued to reassure the lawman, who looked like he was feeling lower than a snake in a well. “Don’t worry about it, Sheriff. Really. If somebody does a bad thing and doesn’t realize that it’s a bad thing, you’d have to be a pretty mean, low-down skunk to hold it against them. That’s what I’ve always said.”
Gilford lifted one eyebrow and studied the child with his most suspicious, penetrating gaze—the one he had perfected on hard-core felons over the years. “That’s what you’ve always said, huh? Always said, as in all nine years that you’ve been alive, right?”
“That’s right, sir. It’s a personal motto of mine.” He grinned, showing off a bright smile, even with a front tooth missing. “It’s a good motto, don’t you think, Sheriff?”
Gilford continued to give the kid a skeptical, piercing look. “I suppose so,” he finally agreed, his
tone less than enthusiastic.
Stella stole a quick look at Savannah, who was sitting quietly in her chair, playing with her expired flashlight. But the smirk on her face spoke volumes.
“I think we better get back to the subject at hand,” Stella said.
“Good idea,” the sheriff replied, jotting something in his notebook. “If you could, please, Mrs. Reid, I’d like you to tell me everything you did and everything you saw from the time you and your grandchildren arrived at the town square this evening until, well, until I joined you. Let’s start off with the time you first got there.”
From the corner of her eye, Stella could see Waycross squirm in his chair.
She drew a deep breath and cleared her throat. “I believe we got there about eight thirty, more or less.” She watched as Gilford began to scribble in the notebook. “I parked the truck there on the street, across from the pool hall. We sat there for a while and—”
“For how long?”
“About thirty minutes.”
Gilford stopped scribbling and looked up at her. “You sat in your truck for thirty minutes?”
“Yes, sir. About that.”
“That’s a long time to just sit in a truck. Especially with a couple of kids on a cold winter night.”
Stella said nothing, and for what seemed like forever, neither did the sheriff.
Finally, he asked, “What were you doing, Mrs. Reid, while you were sitting there . . . the three of you?”
“Looking at the Christmas decorations on the street. Watching the people coming and going from the stores. Talking.”
“About what?”
“Stuff.”
Again, he stopped writing and looked up at her. His eyes searched Stella’s with such intensity that it made her most uncomfortable.
She had known Manny Gilford for more than half a century, and this was the first time she had ever felt uneasy in his presence.
Not just uneasy. A bit afraid.
“Okay,” he said. “You sat there for thirty minutes. By then it was about nine.”
“It was.”
“What did you do then?”
“We got out of the truck and . . .” She looked over at her grandson, whose face was a fierce shade of red. His freckles were practically standing out on stems. “And we went about our business.”
“Which was?”
“We were there to do a bit of restoration.” She looked down at her hands, which were folded demurely in her lap. Anything to avoid looking into those intense, truth-seeking, predatory eyes of his.
“You see, Sheriff,” she continued softly, weighing every word, “we felt bad about what happened to the nativity scene. So bad that I went over to Florence’s house earlier in the evening and got some paints. The ones she used when she restored it the first time. We thought we’d paint over the . . . you know, the damage that’d been done.”
“You decided to do a good deed on behalf of the town,” Gilford said, but with a less than congratulatory tone.
“Somethin’ like that.”
“But you decided to wait until the stores had closed and everybody had gone home to do this good deed. As in, you didn’t want to get caught doing a good deed.”
Stella gulped. “Like the Good Book says, ‘Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.’”
He gave her a look that cut straight through to her heart, and in a gently reproving tone, he said, “I’m not sure that now’s the best time to be quoting the Good Book, using it in this circumstance, if you know what I mean, Mrs. Reid.”
She did know what he meant. Exactly what he meant. And she instantly felt guilty. Tears sprang to her eyes. “We did want to do a good thing, Sheriff,” she said, pleading. “Truly, I swear to you, we felt real bad about what was done to them figures there, and we wanted to set things right. Put things back to the way they were before. Before that got done.”
The sheriff looked over at Savannah. He observed how she was nervously clicking the switch on her dead flashlight over and over.
He turned his attention to Waycross, whose face had gone from red to a strange shade of purple, almost matching his sister’s warmest coat. A coat that was covered with splotches of flesh-tone paint, along with streaks of brown and white.
The boy’s hands were similarly stained.
“As I recall,” Gilford began, “about a month ago, a bunch of signboards around here were vandalized in a similar fashion as those statues. Big curly mustaches painted on all the faces. I also saw a couple of WANTED posters in the post office that had the same, um, decorations. I asked around and managed to compile a physical description of the culprit.”
Both Stella and Savannah shot quick looks at Waycross, who was suddenly fascinated by his shoelaces.
“It’s a pretty distinctive description. The suspect was described as male, about four feet tall. A dangerous-looking fellow with wild red curls and freckles galore.”
Waycross looked up quickly, met the sheriff’s eyes for an instant, then went back to studying his shoes.
“Then the vandalizing stopped. No more incidents. So, I figured it was a drifter, some sort of hobo, who’d moved on. I closed the case. I decided that as long as there weren’t any new offenses, I’d just turn my attention to some of the other unsolved crimes here in my jurisdiction.”
He stared long and hard at Waycross, who eventually raised his head and said, “That drifter probably moved on, like you said.”
“Reckon so.” Gilford gave him a half smile. “Or maybe the culprit didn’t realize that what he was doing was bad, and when he did, he decided not to do it. Ever. Again.”
“I’m sure that’s the case,” Stella softly interjected.
“If it is,” Gilford said, “and the vandal has truly seen the error of his ways, I wouldn’t want to be a mean, low-down skunk by holding it against him.”
“Exactly,” Waycross said with far too much enthusiasm.
Gilford picked up his pen and turned back to Stella. “Out of the goodness of your own hearts, the three of you set about repairing the damage to the figures done by some unknown four-foot, red-haired, freckle-faced drifter, and then what happened?”
“We saw Principal Neville’s big, fancy Chrysler station wagon go driving by,” Savannah offered. “We were sure it was his. We’d know that big car anywhere.”
Gilford began to scribble furiously. “Where exactly was the car when you first saw it?”
“Coming south on Main Street,” Stella replied. “We first saw it when it was about even with the drugstore. For a minute, we thought it was your cruiser, both bein’ big cars and all.”
He looked up at her knowingly. “That must have been exciting, under the circumstances.”
“It was. A bit,” Stella admitted.
“Do you think Jake noticed you?”
“I don’t think he would have. We weren’t exactly in plain view,” Stella admitted.
“No, I don’t imagine you were. And then?”
“He drove on past us and pulled into the space between the tavern and the pool hall.”
“Where did he go from there?”
“He disappeared into the alley. Back there behind the tavern.”
Suddenly, the sheriff seemed both excited and intensely serious at once. “Okay, now, this is very important,” he said. “Could any of you tell whether he stopped in the alley or not? Did you hear a car door open or close?”
All three shook their heads.
“No,” Stella said. “Can’t say as I did. But the wind was blowing pretty bad by then. I’m not sure if we would’ve heard, one way or the other.”
“Did you see the car again after that? Like driving back out the way it came in or maybe out the other end?”
“It didn’t come back out the way it went in. As for goin’ out the other end, I can’t say, Sheriff,” Stella replied. “Sorry.”
“We was busy paintin’ to beat the band,” added Waycross.
�
��’Cept me,” Savannah said. “I was the flashlight holder. But I didn’t see him anymore, either. Wherever he went, he stayed gone.”
“Then, when I finished painting the baby Jesus, that’s when we heard it,” Waycross said. “The person holler.”
“It was awful,” Savannah told the sheriff. “Made me feel scared and sick and sad all at the same time.”
“Was it a man’s or a woman’s voice?” Gilford asked.
“We couldn’t tell,” replied Stella. “But you knew they were in trouble. Terrible trouble. And I didn’t know what it might be. That’s why I brought the kids here to the station—so’s they’d be safe, and they could let y’all know what was goin’ on.”
“Good thinking. Then you ran straight back there?”
“I did. I hurried back to the alley and walked into it.”
“What did you see?”
“Not much of nothin’. It was dark as the inside of a cow in there. I couldn’t make out a blamed thing. Or hear anything. But then Elmer hit me.”
“What?” Gilford nearly dropped his pen. “Elmer Yonce hit you?”
“More like ran into me. Full tilt. He darned near knocked me right off my feet!”
“Are you telling me that Elmer Yonce was running out of that alley behind the Bulldog Tavern?”
“Like somebody had lit his tail feathers afire.”
“Are you absolutely sure it was him?”
“When he collided with me, I wasn’t. But once he got to the street, then I was sure. He was limpin’, you know, like he does. And the four-way traffic blinker gave off enough light for me to see his face. It was him. No doubt about it.”
“Did you see anybody else back there in the alley?”
“At first, I couldn’t see anything, on account of the darkness. But then I heard Priscilla moaning. And I heard her death gargle.” She glanced over at her grandchildren, thinking she didn’t want to get overly graphic with them listening. “You know,” she said, “like they do when they’re about to . . .”
“Yes. I understand. Did she say anything to you?”
“Just my name. I told her it was me there with her, and she repeated my name back to me. I asked her if she’d fallen down the stairs accidentally, and she shook her head no. I asked if someone had hurt her, and she nodded.”
Murder in Her Stocking Page 7
