The Complete Mystery Collection

by Michaela Thompson

  The cars passed him by. In the lull that followed, Buddy had time to wonder whether hitching right now was a good idea, but only in a vague way. When the next headlights approached, he stuck his thumb out again.

  The car stopped. Buddy felt a spasm in his chest. “All right, then,” he muttered, and ran to open the door.

  The driver was a middle-aged woman. She wore a blouse with a bow at the neck and square glasses, and her dark hair had been teased and sprayed into immobility. At first glance, she resembled Buddy’s Aunt Grace. “Guess you do need a ride, standing in the dark. What are you doing out here?” she said.

  Buddy didn’t even have to think hard. “Truck broke down. I got to go into— into town and get a part.” What town? Buddy had no idea.

  “Into Brewton?” the blessed lady, so much like Aunt Grace, said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Brewton.” Buddy slid down in the seat. Brewton. He hadn’t strayed as far off the trail as he’d feared.

  “That’s where I’m going. I’ll drop you at the filling station.”

  ‘Thank you, ma’am.” The air conditioner was on. The seat was soft. Buddy’s eyes started to close.

  “Tell me something,” the lady said.

  Buddy roused himself. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “It’s kind of a personal question.”

  Buddy tried to assemble an explanation, an apology really, for his body odor. Working hard all day, no place to take a shower. “What’s that?”

  The lady’s face was serious. “Have you accepted Jesus as your Savior and Lord?”

  Whoa. Buddy settled on what he considered to be, under the circumstances, the only possible response. “I tell you what,” he said. “I have. I surely have.”

  The lady seemed disappointed. “Fully and completely? Without doubt and fear?”

  “Well… mostly,” Buddy said. He didn’t want to get put out of the car because he was already saved.

  Mollified, the lady said, “Doubts do come, don’t they? What doubts do you have?”

  Buddy rubbed the bristles on his face. He wondered what he had done to deserve this. “It’s awful hard to be good sometimes,” he said after some thought.

  “Yes!” That set her off. She went on to tell Buddy, giving chapter and verse, why it was so hard to be good. Buddy, heavy-lidded, nodded every now and then. Before she’d had a chance to check back with him about his other doubts and fears, they were entering the city limits of Brewton.

  Buddy was saying, “Thanks” as the lady pulled up at the gas station, but she interrupted him by leaning on the horn and yelling out the window, “Oscar! Oscar!”

  Buddy was rigid. “Don’t bother to call him,” he said as he opened the door.

  “Oscar!”

  A swarthy man emerged from the station. The lady said, “Oscar, this young man needs a part from you. A part for his truck.”

  Buddy was out on the concrete by now. “What do you need?” Oscar was asking while the lady looked on with interest.

  Buddy couldn’t think. “I got to— I got to” —his mouth had dried up— “call my brother. Find out exactly what.” Buddy looked down the block. He could see a Dairy Queen. “They got a phone down there?”

  “We got one here,” Oscar said. He looked as if he thought Buddy might be an escaped convict.

  “I’ll be back,” Buddy said. He bent and waved good-bye to the lady, then turned and walked energetically toward the Dairy Queen. Let them call the sheriff. At least he’d have time for a burger first.

  It took every cent, but he got his burger. As he ate it he walked on, past the Brewton city limits. A few houses were clustered along the road not far past the outskirts of town. A pickup sat in the driveway of one of the houses, and by the porch light Buddy could see a shotgun on the rack in its cab.

  Now that he’d eaten, Buddy wasn’t as afraid as he’d been before. He sidled up to the truck. No dogs barked. He pressed gently on the door handle and felt it give as the door opened. Reaching into the cab, he extracted the gun from the rack and slid back out of the truck. He leaned against the door until it clicked shut again.

  It’s awful hard to be good sometimes. Carrying the stolen gun, Buddy left Brewton behind him.

  Part III

  26

  Isabel drove along the state road, scanning the horizon for a fire tower. The young man she’d talked to on the phone, one of the Purseys, had told her, “Turn at the fire tower and keep going for about ten miles. You won’t have trouble getting here unless there’s a good rain tonight.”

  The young Pursey, whose name she never got, had answered the N. K. Pursey’s phone. He had seemed unfazed by— or, more likely, uninterested in— her story of trying to track down information about River Pete, a Pursey employee many years ago. When she finished, he said cheerfully, “You say that was back when the store was at Cape St. Elmo?”

  “Yes.”

  “You ought to talk to Donna. Donna’s the one keeps up with all that.”

  So Isabel was on her way to talk to Donna. She pictured Donna Pursey as a blue-haired matron who spent her days studying genealogical charts and family trees.

  And why was Isabel doing this? Taking off on a fool’s errand into the countryside, ten miles past the fire tower? Was she really so hesitant to call the law on Harry Mercer and expose whatever underhanded illegal activities he was carrying on in Merriam’s house? Was she afraid to ask whether he might have hurt or even killed Merriam?

  There was the rub. Isabel still couldn’t believe Harry would have attacked Merriam. He had disliked Merriam, even hated her, years ago. But then, so had Isabel. Now, Isabel felt nothing but sadness and a sense of missed opportunity where Merriam was concerned. And she could believe many bad things about Harry Mercer, but she had known him pretty well and she just couldn’t see him attacking Merriam. She was having a lot of trouble facing the fact that she could be wrong about that. So, she had to admit it, she was running away.

  The road was lined with cattail-choked ditches. A flock of blackbirds wheeled and settled on a field of half-grown corn.

  She saw the fire tower up ahead. At the intersection, there was a wooden sign— DEEP CREEK— with an arrow. Smaller signs said, LOTS AVAILABLE and BOAT LANDING. She turned off on the secondary road.

  As she continued, the terrain became swampier. The hot air rushing in the car window had a brackish smell.

  When she passed a few small cabins, she began looking for the house where she’d been told to meet Donna. Its major identifying feature, according to the young man who’d given her directions, was a fence made of whitewashed truck tires.

  A few miles farther along, she caught sight of the fence. The tires, half-buried, made a scalloped border around a rambling frame house set back under chinaberry trees. When she pulled up and got out of the car, a boy in a baseball cap appeared on the screened porch. “You the one looking for Donna?” he shouted. “She said to tell you she’s down at the landing.” He pointed to an extension of the road, a narrow track under a canopy of oaks. “Leave your car here, if you want.”

  Isabel walked along the dusty, rutted trail. She smelled rotting vegetation and heard a dog barking. She emerged from beneath the trees into a basin of red clay opening on a dark brown creek. Cars with boat trailers ringed the basin, and several boats were in the water, moored to a makeshift dock.

  Across the basin, an open-sided pavilion made of unpainted lumber sheltered a ragged sofa, folding chairs, a trestle table with a camp stove, and a blackened coffeepot. DEEP CREEK LANDING SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE was painted in crude letters on the roof of the pavilion. Back on higher ground stood a concrete-block building with a metal sign— DEEP CREEK LANDING GENERAL STORE— over the door.

  The place was deserted except for a black dog with a plume of a tail standing on the bank and a figure in overalls sitting in one of the moored boats tinkering with an outboard motor. As Isabel approached, the tinkering figure looked up and called, “Hey there! You Isabel Anders?”

  It was
, Isabel realized, a woman, with straight dark hair raggedly cut off at shoulder length. Under the overalls, she wore a white T-shirt with flapping sleeves. She stood and wiped her hands on a rag, which she replaced in her pocket, leaving the end trailing out. She was gaunt-faced, probably in her mid-fifties, and when she stood and jumped from the boat to the clay bank, Isabel saw she was at least six feet tall.

  “Donna Pursey,” the woman said, offering a smudged hand, and Isabel’s vision of the blue-haired matron with the family trees vanished. As the black dog yipped and danced around them, Donna jerked her head toward the boat. “Got to get it running right before I take off up the river.” She gestured at the pavilion. “Want coffee? Won’t take but a second to heat it up.”

  The coffee was strong, and bitter as bile. A boat came along the creek, motor chugging, and the dog ran to the bank and barked as it passed. Donna said, “Joey— that’s my nephew— told me you want to know something about the store Granddaddy used to have down at Cape St. Elmo.”

  “I’m trying to trace someone who used to do odd jobs there. Back in the twenties.”

  Donna cradled her tin mug. “The twenties? There was hardly anybody there back in those days. Cape St. Elmo got too built-up for us after a while, though. One day in 1955 Daddy said, ‘That’s it,’ and moved out here. Our store used to be where Margene’s MiniMart is now.” She leaned forward. “Now, what was it you wanted?”

  Isabel wondered if she should be taking Donna’s time. “I don’t know much about the person I’m trying to trace. Not even his last name.”

  Donna shrugged. “I’ll do what I can to help you. I’m the only one keeps up with the stories. They want to know something, they ask Donna. I ought to write it down, but I never do.” She chuckled. “I tell them, ‘What are y’all going to do when you can’t ask Donna?’ I ought to write it, but I’m a whole lot better at fishing than I am at writing.”

  The black dog came and rested his head on Isabel’s knee, gazing at her with adoring brown eyes. She settled back on the musty sofa. Her second swallow of coffee went down more easily than the first.

  Donna said, “See, I used to be so bad, beating up my brothers, getting in trouble, that they’d punish me by making me stay in the store with Grandma and Granddaddy instead of going out to play. I got so I liked it, sitting there listening to their tales. So then I’d get in more trouble, so I’d get to stay at the store with them. Lordy, I could get in the most mischief. One time—” She laughed and shook her head. “Never mind. What did you want to know?”

  “I’m trying to trace a tramp who did odd jobs at the store in the twenties. All I know is that he was called River Pete.”

  “River Pete.” Donna gazed out over the basin. “There used to be tramps from time to time, all right. Even I remember some, from when I was little. They’d stay awhile, then go on. Maybe they were in bad with the law; maybe they drank too much, or gambled too much, or were just down on their luck. Granddaddy believed in giving a helping hand, so he’d let them work in exchange for what they needed— chewing tobacco, grits, beans, or like that.”

  “Did he ever mention one called River Pete?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t remember the names, really. I ought to write it down.”

  So much for that. The dog’s tail thumped on the rough floorboards.

  “Don’t give up yet,” Donna said, “This doesn’t always work, but we could try asking Daddy. Seems like he’s having a pretty good day.” She seemed to come to a decision. “Come on up to the store. Let’s see what we can do.”

  Isabel followed Donna and the black dog up the bank. In front of the store, another dog, this one yellow, lay sleeping in the sun in front of a Coke machine. Just inside the screen door a shriveled old man, also in overalls, sat watching a rerun of “The Brady Bunch” on a small television set on the counter. On the shelves behind him, cans of vegetables sat beside fishing tackle and shotgun shells. Behind the cash register hung a dingy oil painting of a person in overalls, possibly the same old man, standing in front of a building that was dimly recognizable as the one they had just entered. There was a smell of bug spray.

  Donna touched the old man’s shoulder. “Hey, Daddy?”

  The old man twitched his shoulder, but his eyes didn’t move from the screen.

  Donna raised her voice. “This lady has a question! About when we had the store at Cape St. Elmo!”

  Mr. Pursey seemed unimpressed.

  “Daddy—”

  “Wait for the commercial!” snapped Mr. Pursey in a reedy voice.

  Two commercial breaks came and went before Mr. Pursey consented to give some thought to Donna’s question. “River Pete!” Donna bawled. “A tramp! Do you remember?”

  The old man drew back and glared at Donna. He bared yellow teeth and cried, “You remember him, girl! The twenty dollars!”

  Donna sagged against the counter. “Oh my Lord,” she said to Isabel. “Is he that one? If I’d known, I could’ve told you in the first place.”

  They left Mr. Pursey to the television set. Outside, they sat on a narrow bench beside the Coke machine. The yellow dog continued to sleep. The black one cavorted with delight when Isabel reappeared, jumping up to lick her hand.

  Donna stretched her legs out and leaned back against the wall. “So River Pete is the twenty-dollar one. I wish I’d realized. I must’ve heard the story a hundred times.”

  The concrete wall was warm against Isabel’s back. Down at the landing, a boat putted by. A dragonfly hovered briefly and darted away.

  “That tramp made a big impression on my grandfather,” Donna said. “He did odd jobs all right, but Granddaddy gave him credit, too. He wrote it down in the ledger, and then the tramp— Pete, I guess— would either work the amount off or go fishing and bring in a mess of fish, but some way or other he’d pay his bill. That was kind of unusual in itself, and Pete was so good about it, Granddaddy started trusting him. Then one day he went off, like they always did, and didn’t come back.”

  “When was this?”

  “Heck if I know. Long time ago.” She kicked at a pebble. “Before he left, this Pete character had run up a bill of about twenty dollars, which was a lot of money in those days. Then, all of a sudden, he’s gone. Granddaddy didn’t worry about it much at first, because Pete had gone off before, but after a month passed, then two, and so forth, he commenced to think he’d seen the back of that tramp and lost his twenty dollars.

  “Now, you didn’t know my Granddaddy, but if you had, you’d know how bad that got away with him. He never wiped it off the books, because he wasn’t somebody to forget being done out of twenty dollars— or twenty cents, come to that.” She leaned down to scratch behind the ears of the yellow dog, and the dog heaved a slobbery sigh.

  “So Pete was never heard from again?”

  “Oh, yes he was. This is the good part.” Donna sat up. “Five years went by. Five at least. One day in the mail, Granddaddy gets an envelope postmarked Gilead Springs. You know where that is?”

  “Not far from Tallahassee?”

  “Right. A hundred miles away from here, more or less. No return address on the envelope. Inside it is a twenty-dollar bill and a note— ‘Thanks from Pete,’ or some such. ’Course, Granddaddy always said he figured after all that time Pete should’ve paid interest, too, but that was Granddaddy.”

  “You never found out what happened to Pete?”

  “Not that I know of. That was the end of it. I don’t know if it helps you any. Maybe Pete ended up in Gilead Springs, or maybe he just mailed the money from there.”

  “It would help a lot if I knew his last name.”

  “Shoot. I hadn’t thought of that. Come with me.”

  Isabel followed her into the store. The television chattered on. Donna said, “I bet we can find that name. Let’s go look at the old books. They’re back there in the office.”

  “The old books?”

  “The records. We’ve got them back to 1907, when Granddaddy first open
ed up a store.”

  Donna led the way past her father, down the aisle to a door at the back. The office was dusty and disordered, the window glass smeared and the sills piled high with papers. Donna opened a closet door, pulled the chain on a light inside, and said, “I won’t let them throw these away. I say, ‘This is history, right here.’”

  Isabel looked in. The floor and shelves were piled with ledger books. “I pretty much know where everything is,” Donna said. “What year do you want to try?”

  “Nineteen twenty-two.”

  “All righty. Sit down for a minute or two, why don’t you?”

  Isabel settled in the desk chair and Donna disappeared into the closet. Moments later, Isabel heard several thuds, and Donna said, “Damnation!”

  “Can I help?”

  “Nope, just give me a minute. Nineteen twenty-two. Nineteen twenty-two. It’s here somewhere, you can take my word on that.”

  Eventually, Donna emerged, looking cobwebby, with a ledger book under her arm. She dusted the book with the rag from her pocket, shoved some of the clutter on the desk aside, and put it down in front of Isabel. “When I was a little girl, I’d look at these books for hours,” she said. “It was as good as TV. There was a whole lot you could figure out from these books.”

  She opened the ledger. The entries were written in fading brown ink in a fastidious copperplate hand. Donna turned the pages slowly, running her finger down the columns. She tapped the page. “There’s your grandma, isn’t it? Polly Anders, ten pounds of cornmeal?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “And here she bought some lye. See? People made their own soap. Boiled the clothes out in the backyard.”

  Yes, they had boiled the clothes. Isabel remembered the iron wash pot that had disappeared in the storm.

  “Where are you, Pete?” Donna said. She turned a page. “Here we go. Granddaddy gave him five cents worth of tobacco on credit.”