The Cradle Robber

by E. Joan Sims

  “But what about her daughter? Ain’t it true about Cassie’s bein’ kidnapped?”

  Horatio turned around and faced Wanda. “Yes, it is. And naturally we’re concerned, but Cassie has called and assured us that she is fine. You, on the other hand, are in need of immediate protection. Now,” he said with a smile, “will you please an old man and do as he requests?”

  I had never seen Horatio’s upstairs apartment. It was unexpectedly attractive, and no one would ever guess it was above an embalming room. The small bedroom and adjoining bath were separated from the pretty little sitting area by curtained French doors. The colors were light and bright: soft blues and yellows, and Wanda was immediately entranced.

  “It’s so pretty. Are you sure…?”

  Mother interrupted by taking Wanda by the arm and showing her a fully-equipped little kitchenette which was cleverly hidden behind sliding pocket doors.

  “There are some essentials in the refrigerator—eggs, butter, that sort of thing. Paisley and I can run to the grocery for you if you’ll make a list.”

  “Thanks, Miz Sterling,” said Wanda as she swiped at a tear. “You all are being so nice to me.”

  “Like I said before, my dear, you are quite the innocent bystander in this affair.”

  I had remained silent the whole time, leaving it to Horatio and Mother to make Wanda at ease in her new temporary quarters, but the terrible truth was that I had been trying to think of a nice way to grill her about the man who had threatened to kill her last night. We still didn’t have a clue about his identity.

  “So,…Wanda,” I ventured, “How about some nice barbequed chicken, or do you prefer beef? I can run down to Cloudt’s and be back in about thirty minutes. You could probably go with me if you put on a scarf and some dark glasses. We could talk a little on the way about this guy that’s…”

  Horatio squashed my idea immediately. “I hardly think that’s a good idea, Paisley. Let’s not take any foolish chances with her welfare. If you want to talk to Wanda, then I suggest you do it here.”

  “Could I take a warm bath and have a little nap first?” she begged. “Honestly, I was so scared last night I didn’t close my eyes a wink, and I never did get to wash the kitchen smell out of my hair.” She gave me a tired smile. “It’ll just be a couple of hours. My mind’s a lot clearer when I’m not so tired. Maybe I’ll be able to remember more details.”

  “Of course, Wanda.” I was thoroughly ashamed of myself. “Take all the time you need. I’ll make a barbeque run for all of us. Maybe we could meet back here around seven tonight and have dinner.” I turned to Mother and Horatio. “I’ll take Mother’s rental car, if that’s okay. I’d like to go home first to check the answering machine. Maybe Cassie has called again.”

  “If she has called,” said Mother, “please let me know. I can’t help but worry about her.”

  I turned to go out the door.

  “Oh, and check on Aggie, too, dear. She’ll probably need to take a walk.”

  I immediately stumbled and stubbed my toe on the doorframe. “Damn dog!”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Mother was right as usual—Aggie was whining for a romp in the orchard. I walked with her down through the sad and sorry sight of the stumps of the fruit trees that had brought such pleasure into the lives of so many Sterlings over the years. It was still hard for me to look at the devastation the tornado had wrought without crying. And I was worried about Cassie. There had been no new phone calls from her.

  My daughter and I were at a new place in our lives—that juncture when I have to prepare to say goodbye. These are the years when she will start a career, and then a family that I will see only at holiday time. I’ll be the grandmother in the “Over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go,” song. I’ll hug them briefly, then have to let them go again. They’ll love me—a lot, I hope, because I plan to be the world’s greatest grandmother—but it will never be the same. I’ll miss that “down the hall in the next room” feeling of closeness I have now. I’ll miss the minutia of everyday life with my daughter. I’ll be a red ring around a certain date on the calendar in her kitchen. She’ll look forward to coming home, then be happy to return to her own house to unpack and get back to her life once more. I’ll be the one waiting and dreaming for the next circled date to come around.

  And right now I had no choice but to let her handle things her own way. She’d told Mother that quite clearly. I could worry all I wanted—gnash my teeth to splinters, but I had to wait until I was summoned.

  I sat on the stump of a chestnut tree and cried my heart out.

  Aggie is not good for much, but she is sweet when you’re blue. Since I don’t get the blues that often, the dog is useless—if not downright dangerous most of the time; but when I’m sad, she seems to sense it and tries to comfort me.

  She nuzzled her wet little black nose up under my hair and licked away the tears on my chin. I laughed, wiped away doggie spit, and playfully ruffled the new growth of feathery fur on her chest. She growled immediately and danced away after a bumblebee.

  I walked slowly back to the house, admiring Billy’s brickwork on the repaired chimneys and the new shingles on the roof. At least, I thought, Grandmother’s house will be looking good.

  Aggie hopped up on my bed and plopped on her/my pillow for another few hours of her perpetual doggie nap while I went to freshen up a bit before my drive down to Cloudt’s. Even after my nap in Horatio’s car I was still tired. It had been a long and eventful day and I was sorry I offered to get dinner. I could very easily have forgone the barbeque and crawled up next to Aggie to gather some more shut eye. I sighed and ran my fingers through my hair, then dabbed on some fresh lip gloss.

  I was about to lock the back door when I remembered the stash hidden in my jewelry box. Until we were able to give the money back to Rudolfo, I was responsible for his loot. The money should be in the bank.

  As soon as I touched the jewelry box I knew that someone had been there before me. For starters, it had been moved slightly from its accustomed spot on the corner of my dresser. My hands were sweaty as I raised the lid and looked inside. I was more solvent than I used to be, but replacing twenty-seven hundred bucks would still be a pain. The money was there! But it was on top of my pearls, and I distinctly remembered tucking the rolls underneath. And besides that, there were ten little cylinders missing.

  I sank down on the bed, ignoring Aggie’s protesting growls, and tried to sort it all out. The door had been locked when I got here, and I had not seen any signs of forced entry. Nothing else looked disturbed. Whoever had taken the money had known where to look and had a key to the house. It had to be Cassie. And either she had been alone or whoever she was with had not forced her to take all of the money, or any of my own personal goodies. In other words, that other person was most likely not of a criminal bent.

  I sighed with relief and decided to leave the money where it was in case Cassie needed some more, then just for the fun of it, I bounced happily once or twice on the bed to disturb Aggie. She gave me a hateful look, passed a small explosion of doggie gas, and snuggled down deeper into my pillow.

  I was still laughing as I locked the door and started down the walk to the car. I was almost halfway there when I heard the telephone ringing. By the time I struggled to open the door again and got to the hallway, it was too late. Cassie had just said goodbye to the answering machine and was hanging up. I grabbed the receiver and dialed *69, the call-back number, but got only the recorded message telling me the call-back service could not respond. Cassie had called from a private number.

  “Damn!” I pushed the button to play back the recording and sat down in the Windsor chair to listen.

  “Hi, Mom. First of all—I’m fine. But I need you to come as soon as you hear this message. Like I said, I’m okay, so please, no mad, furious driving, but don’t stop for gas.” Then her voice dropped down to a whisper. “You won’t believe what I’ve discovered!” She res
umed her normal tone and told me where to find her. “I’m staying where my friend with the funny little car lived last year. I love you, Mom. Bye”

  I smiled slowly. Cassie’s friend had an ancient and rusty orange Karmen Ghia. He had parked it under a garage apartment where he’d lived for three months last summer. The apartment was behind the Parsons’’ house. Cassie was hiding out with my old nemesis, Miss Lolly.

  The look Aggie gave me when I left for the second and final time was one of total disgust and contempt. Her naps were sacred and not to be disturbed by anyone, especially me.

  I decided it was a good thing that I was driving Mother’s rental car. She often paid her elderly friends a courtesy call. It wouldn’t look out of place for her car to be in the Parsons’’ driveway, whereas the whole town knew Miss Lolly had hated me for more than thirty years—ever since I spray painted a white stripe down the back of her black cat, Mr. Whiskers. And both the sisters, Hannah and Lolly, loved Cassie. When her friend Ethan had stayed in their apartment, she had bonded with the old ladies. She still went to see them every time she came home from school for tea and some of their famous nut bread.

  I parked the car at the end of the drive and got out. The back of the house appeared tightly shuttered and locked, but I heard Cassie whisper loudly as I started towards the garage.

  “Mom! This way.”

  I turned around and saw her peeking through a crack in the back door. Her beautiful face was a sight for sore eyes. I told her so while I hugged her madly.

  “I told Gran I was okay. What’s the big deal?” she said as she pulled away from my arms. “Don’t you trust me?”

  “Cassie, for Pete’s sake! Have a heart. You disappear in the dead of night, then call with a mysterious message and expect me to be fine and dandy with it? And it’s not about trust at all, it’s about fearing for the worst.”

  She started laughing. “Can you possibly think of a few more cliches? I hope Leonard doesn’t start talking like that.”

  “You’re changing the subject. Besides, Leonard can take care of himself.”

  “So can I, Mom. So can I.”

  I sighed and gave up. This was just one more argument that I would never win.

  “What’s this unbelievable thing you discovered?” I asked instead.

  Cassie bent her head close to mine. “Miss Hannah’s dead body,” she whispered.

  “My God! Cassie, you can’t be serious. And that’s a pretty damn stupid joke.”

  “Shhhh!” she cautioned. “I don’t want to wake Miss Lolly. Did you know her sister was nearly ninety?” Miss Lolly told me told me about their pact. You see, whoever died first promised to freeze the other.”

  “Wha…whatever for?” I stammered. “Some religious thing? I thought they were Presbyterians—levelheaded and all.”

  “They are…Presbyterians, that is. No, they decided it would be impossible for the remaining sister to live on one of their meager Social Security checks. If it were to appear that they both were still alive, the two checks would keep coming.”

  Cassie led me down a long dark hall and through the butler’s pantry into a big old-fashioned kitchen. She switched on the single light bulb which hung on a long black cord dangling from the center of the high white ceiling. It moved slightly when she closed the door casting fleeting shadows down the length of the sparsely furnished room.

  “They thought they could get away with it,” Cassie continued. “No one ever ventured inside the house except old Doc Baxter, and he died last year. It was a great scheme, and it probably would have worked if the electricity hadn’t gone out.”

  “The tornado!”

  “Exactly, Mom. The tornado took out the power on this street for two days. When the electricity came back on, the old freezer compressor failed. Miss Hannah started to defrost, and Miss Lolly had what she calls a conniption.”

  “What happened? Did the old broad start to stink?”

  “Mom!”

  “Come on, Cassie. We’re talking about a geriatric Popsicle. That’s pretty shocking all by itself.”

  Cassie motioned for me to follow her to the back of the kitchen. She stopped in front of an ancient white freezer like the one my Grandmother Howard used to have on her back porch. It was rectangular, about six feet long and four feet high. It looked like it had the capacity to hold ten little old ladies.

  “Help me push up the top, Mom. It’s pretty rusty.”

  Together we opened the freezer and propped up the lid, then we stood side by side and stared at the faint outline of Miss Hannah Parsons beneath the frosty surface of a block of ice three feet deep and the width and breadth of the freezer. There were three inches or more of melted ice water on each side.

  “I saw an old movie once,” I said in a quiet voice. “It was called ‘The Thing From Outer Space.’ An alien spacecraft crashes in the Antarctic and this creature stumbles out in the melted ice only to collapse and be frozen over by the ice cap. The scientists at the weather station cut him out in one big block of ice…”

  Cassie sighed dramatically. “And it starred Bert Douglas…”

  “That’s Kurt Douglas, smarty pants. Besides, it was James Arness.”

  “Does everything have to remind you of some stupid old movie?”

  “Cassie, this is very shocking. There’s an old lady in there, and she’s frozen solid. I’m trying to relate it to something familiar so I won’t run screaming into the night. By the way, how did you discover her body?”

  “I was hungry.”

  “WHAT?”

  “Hungry,” she insisted patiently. “Rudolfo had gone to bed…”

  “RUDOLFO?”

  Cassie eased the top back down on the freezer. She took me by the hand and led me over to a cheap white enameled kitchen table and sat me down. She sat across from me and took both my cold hands in hers.

  “Stay with me, Mom. We have to make some decisions, and I need you to keep up.”

  “But, Rudolfo…?” I insisted.

  “Rudolfo is an agent with the Departamento Justicia del Districto Federale de Mexico.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  She grinned a big old Cassie grin. “No, I’m not. He’s with some section that deals with international affairs. He and a Texas Ranger came here on a tip that the man they’ve been chasing over half the southern United States is in Kentucky posing as a migrant worker.”

  I sat back with my mouth agape as I marveled at how easily that little man had fooled me.

  “And you’ll never guess who the Texas Ranger is,” she laughed delightedly. “Fatty, from the trailer park!”

  “Holy cow!”

  “Exactly! They’ve been working together on this case for almost two years. He wouldn’t tell me much more, for my own good, he said; but he warned me to be…”

  “Cassie,” I interrupted, “Fatty is dead.”

  Her smiled faded as the rosy color left her cheeks. “Dead? As in—DEAD?”

  “Yes. I don’t know much more. Horatio never got a chance to explain…”

  “Horatio?”

  “When Gran and I went to see him this morning we met Andy Joiner as he was coming out of Horatio’s office. Apparently he had just brought the body to the mortuary.”

  “I guess that’s why Rudolfo was sure his cover had been blown,” she said softly.

  “What else did he tell you? And why did he tell you anything at all? Seems highly unprofessional to me to unload a thing like this on an innocent young woman you hardly know.”

  Cassie jumped to Rudolfo’s defense. “How else was he going to get me to help him? He surprised me last night when I drove into the carriage house. He was hiding inside and scared me half to death. He said his life was in danger and begged me to help him find some place to stay. I offered our attic…”

  “Really, Cassie!”

  “…but he said that was too obvious since you and Gran had hired him to work for you. Besides, he didn’t want to put you in danger.”

  “
So instead, he kidnaps you,” I scoffed angrily.

  “So instead, he makes it look like I was kidnapped,” she explained with exaggerated patience. “That’s why I left Watson’s door open.”

  “And just how did he convince you he was on the up and up?”

  “He showed me his badge.”

  “It could have come from a Cracker Jack box,” I snorted. “How could you…?”

  “And a letter from the FBI giving him permission to carry a gun in this country.” “And,” Cassie continued as she held up her hand to stop me from further protests, “another letter from the Attorney General expressing the desire to help him in his investigation in any way he could.”

  “So you went with him.”

  “Yes. We cut back through the field to the airport. He had an old farm truck waiting by the runway. I puzzled over a safe place to hide him all the time we were walking. Then I remembered the garage apartment behind Miss Lolly’s and the way she was so eager to help me last summer. She really is a dear old thing.”

  “And she agreed?”

  Cassie frowned. “No, at first she seemed very reluctant. I suppose now I know why. It was only because it was it was so late and we had nowhere else to go that I kept insisting. Finally she gave in, but she said I had to stay in the house with her because it was improper for me to stay alone with a man. Rudolfo parked the truck in the garage and went upstairs. Miss Lolly took me inside, showed me to a bedroom, and said goodnight. Everything would have been okay except I got hungry,” she admitted ruefully. “I sneaked back downstairs and tried to find something to eat. There’s hardly anything in the fridge, so I opened the freezer thinking maybe they had frozen some of that terrific nut bread, and found Miss Hannah instead. I screamed and Miss Lolly came running. She broke down, poor thing, and confessed after crying a bucket or two. She’s been under a terrible strain trying to hide her sister’s death.”

  “She’s a nut!”