07-Peaches And Screams

by G. A. McKevett

  “And?”

  “And . . . nothing. I don’t know. Maybe there was some reason why he couldn’t wait. Or maybe he arrived at the mansion right after Macon and Kenny Jr. ran off and saw the perfect opportunity to kill the judge and blame it on them.”

  “Okay. That’s . . . well . . . sorta possible.”

  “Wow, and the crowd goes wild again!”

  He sent her an irritated sidewise look. “I’m trying, okay? I’m listening. I’m workin’ with ya, but—”

  “I know. We don’t have enough.”

  “We don’t have anything. Savannah, you want to accuse a prosecuting attorney, a highly successful, dearly beloved pillar of the community, of murdering two people, and you don’t have jack shit.”

  “We’ll get something. I’ll talk to Tom, and he’ll help us. You wait and see.”

  “You’re nuts, Savannah. You’ve always been on the bright side of whacky, but you’ve crossed all the way over.” Tom rushed over to the door to look outside, leaving the two of them sitting on folding chairs next to his desk.

  He hurried back. “Sheriff Mahoney’s late this morning, and you’d better thank your lucky stars, because if he heard you saying a blame-fool thing like that, he’d . . . Oh, Lord, I don’t even know what he’d do.”

  “Tom, I—” Savannah ventured.

  “And what’s worse . . . he’d do it to me, too, just for talking to you. He found out that I took you out to the Patterson place, and I’m still hearing about that. If he found out you were spreading crap like this all over . . . cheez.”

  Savannah stood and walked over to him. She stepped close, deliberately invading his space, and fixed him with her blue lasers. “I am not spreading anything anywhere, Tommy Stafford. I’m interested in solving some murders, not being a gossipmonger. And if you’d just stick your fear in your back pocket and listen to me, you might find the killer, too.”

  “Fear?”

  “Yes, fear. You’re scared spitless of Mahoney and Goodwin.”

  “I sure am, and you would be, too, if you had the sense God gave a cockroach.”

  “Hey, watch it.” Dirk left his chair and strolled over to them in what Savannah could only describe as a John Wayne swagger. She could practically hear his spurs and pistols jangling. “You don’t go callin’ anybody a bug, hear?”

  “It’s all right, Dirk. It’s just a quaint Southern term. He didn’t mean any disrespect.”

  “I most certainly did. You’re an idiot if you think I’m going to investigate Mack Goodwin, the best prosecutor this county has ever had, the finest—”

  “Oh, stop already!” Savannah held up both hands in surrender. “I can see now you’re ready to canonize the guy, and nothing I say is going to change your mind.”

  She turned and grabbed Dirk’s arm. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve got a case to solve and boy, some people are sure gonna feel dumb when we wrap it up without any help from them!”

  In a quiet, sane part of her brain, Savannah knew she had reverted to the emotional quotient of a ten-year-old. She knew because it was all she could do not to stick out her tongue and give Stupid Head Tommy a major raspberry.

  She also didn’t care.

  Okay, she cared a little.

  At the door she paused and, summoning her last vestige of maturity, said, in what she hoped was a very adult voice, “Of course, you could quietly check Goodwin’s phone and bank records, compare them with the judge’s and Alvin’s. Goodwin would never know. No one would ever have to know. Hell, you wouldn’t even have to tell me if you’d done it or not.”

  She sailed out the door, Dirk in tow.

  When they were back in the car, Dirk turned to her, a wide smile splitting his face. “You’re an evil woman, Savannah Reid.”

  She grinned back. “I am. And you love me anyway.”

  “Anyway? Baby, I love you because!”

  Savannah stood in her grandmother’s kitchen and looked out on the vast ocean of food that constituted Sunday dinner. For as long as she could remember, the ritual had been the same: Sunday school and church, then home for the best that Gran could afford. During lean times, it had been only one piece of fried chicken apiece; they had taken turns having to eat the wings. And during better times, a roast or maybe even a ham had been proudly displayed on the big blue platter in the center of the table.

  It might have been bologna sandwiches during the week, but Sunday dinner was always an event.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of cooking?” Savannah asked, as her grandmother dumped an enormous bowl of milk into the browned flour and bacon drippings mixture that bubbled in a giant skillet.

  “I like cooking,” Gran said with a big smile to prove it. “I’ve gotta admit, now that my rheumatism’s worse, I don’t like doin’ it as much as I do. But Sunday dinner’s fine. It’s family time.”

  “Are they all coming?” Savannah looked down the endless streams of plates lining both sides of the table and the counter.

  “Sure. What else would they do with themselves?”

  Savannah grabbed the panful of mashed potatoes and began spooning them into a bowl. “How do you afford to pay for all this food, Gran?” she asked. “Do they chip in at all?”

  “Sure they do. Well, Alma and Waycross do. Alma’s a darlin’. When she gets her check from Donut Heaven, she just signs it right over to me for food and the like. I have to make her take back some of it for the things she needs. Alma’s got ways a lot like yours, Savannah. She’s a real comfort to me. And Waycross, when he gets a big job there in the garage, like a motor overhaul, he slips me fifty dollars. Sometimes even a hundred.”

  “And Vidalia and Butch? Marietta? Cordele or Jesup?”

  “Vi and Butch have a hard time making ends meet.”

  “They drive a brand-new car.”

  Gran shrugged. “And Jesup can’t seem to keep a job.”

  “I hear she lost the last one because she showed up late five days in a row and insulted the boss.”

  “Jesup’s got a bit of a temper. It gets the best of her sometimes. And Cordele, she’s going to school. . . .”

  “One class per semester. She’s been going to college for ages, and you’ve been paying for it. She could work part time, too.”

  Gran poured in the milk and stirred vigorously. “You don’t understand, Savannah. Kids are different these days. They’ve got so many pressures on them that we didn’t have.”

  “Like saying ‘no’ to sex and drugs?” Savannah cleared her throat. “Yes, I guess that’s harder than working in the cotton fields and taking in laundry from the country club and cleaning people’s houses in town. We just had to worry about how we were going to feed and clothe the younger ones, and how we were going to come up with the money for medicine when they got sick. They have to worry about getting AIDS and whether or not their tennis shoes light up when they walk. I don’t know how they stand all that pressure.”

  Savannah put the bowl of mashed potatoes on the table and turned to see her grandmother staring at her, a startled and infinitely sad look on her face.

  “I’m sorry, Gran.” She rushed over to put her arms around her. “I shouldn’t have said all that.”

  She hugged her grandmother to her and was surprised at how frail she felt, how drained.

  “That’s all right, Savannah girl,” she said. “You can speak your mind to me anytime. You know that.”

  She pulled back and looked up at Savannah, tears in her eyes. “Seems you had something you needed to say.”

  “Seems so.”

  “And maybe I needed to hear it.”

  “Maybe,” Savannah said softly. “I reckon you’d be the best judge of that.”

  Outside, the sound of a car pulling into the driveway and the shouts and laughter of Vidalia’s energetic children broke the moment.

  “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” Gran said. “And that gravy’s getting lumpy. You know I can’t abide lumpy gravy.”

  Like a giant twister sweepin
g across a plain, leaving destruction in its path, the Reid clan descended on the tiny kitchen. And after a flurry of forks and spoons, plates and glasses, jokes and insults, laughter and a few tears—shed by the recently jilted bride-to-be—they left.

  They took the bags of clean laundry from the porch and left mountains of dirty dishes, pots, and pans in the sink.

  Even Cordele and Jesup found places they simply had to be and silently slipped away.

  “How convenient,” Savannah said, standing in the kitchen, her hands on her hips. “Do they do this every week?”

  “What?” Alma said as she began to scrape and stack the dishes on the table. “Oh, yeah. Usually. They all have busy social lives.”

  “In McGill? What’s to do? Cruise up and down Main Street? That takes twenty seconds.”

  Alma laughed. “That’s about all. But somehow they can make an afternoon of it.”

  Savannah placed the stopper in the sink, squeezed in a generous portion of liquid soap, and turned on the hot water. “How about you, Alma? What do you do for fun?”

  “Oh, I had a boyfriend last winter for a while. But we broke up. And since then, I pretty much just work at the donut shop and help Gran. I teach Sunday school, too. The four- to ten-year-olds. I like that a lot.”

  “I’ll bet they like having you for a teacher.”

  “I wish you’d gone to church with us this morning, but I know you were out helping Macon.”

  “Yes. I know we’re not supposed to work on Sunday, but there’s a scripture somewhere that says something like: If your ox is in the ditch, you can pull him out.”

  Alma carried a stack of the plates over and set them in the sudsy sink. “I guess having your jackass brother in jail is pretty much the same thing, huh? It’s a bit of an emergency either way.”

  Savannah laughed, then leaned over and kissed her sister on the forehead. “You’re a sweet girl, Alma. I’d like to take you and Gran home with me.”

  “Don’t say that twice. You’ll have one of us stuffed into each of your suitcases on that plane.”

  The phone rang, and Alma hurried over to the phone on the wall. “Hello. Sure, just a minute.” She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s for you, Van. Somebody named Ryan. He sounds really cute.”

  Savannah dried her hands on a towel. “Oh, darlin’, you have no idea how cute.”

  She took the phone, pulled up a chair, and sat down. “Hey, sugar, what’s shakin’?”

  “We miss you,” Ryan said, his voice dark and silky.

  “I miss the two of you, too. Tammy’s going through hunk withdrawal.”

  “John’s got something for you on your county prosecutor.”

  Savannah felt her heart leap. “Already? I just called him last night.”

  “Yes, but it was for you. He was on the phone most of the night.”

  “And?”

  “I’m going to tell you something, but you’re going to have to substantiate it with other means.”

  She nodded. “I’m hearing what I’m hearing, but I didn’t hear it from you.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “Mack Goodwin comes from the poor side of the tracks, but he’s smart.”

  “Yeah, that’s the consensus around town. A bit of a self-made man.”

  “Well, not completely. He had a lot of help along the way from your Judge Patterson. Even when he was a kid in law school.”

  “Okay, I think I heard something about the judge helping with his tuition. The judge’s daughter, Katherine, and Mack were dating even back then, so the judge was probably just making sure he’d be a worthy son-in-law.”

  “From what John heard, that’s exactly right. And Mack did well by the judge, good grades, kept his nose clean. Except . . .”

  “Except?”

  “Except for one rather nasty event that occurred during Mack’s last year of school.”

  “Do tell!”

  “I can’t give you all the details, because John could only find out so much. But, you see, John is close friends with Lt. Governor Hastings. And . . . well, this tragedy involved both Mack Goodwin and the lieutenant governor’s son. Some sort of awful accident with one of the boys in their frat club. A kid was killed in some kind of hazing ritual, though it was never proven that the club members were involved.”

  “Were Mack and the Hastings boy suspected?”

  “Only for about two seconds . . . thanks to old man Hastings, who was a senator at the time, and Judge Patterson. They got it squelched before any harm was done to either young man’s promising future.”

  “And the victim?”

  “In the end, his death was ruled a suicide.”

  “Suicide? What method did he use?”

  “Hanging. He was found dangling from one of the giant oaks on the Hastings estate in Athens, just down the street from the capitol building. His neck wasn’t broken. They figure he strangled.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Yeah. A big old yuck.”

  Savannah gazed up at the cat clock, its green eyes switching back and forth with each twitch of its tail. But her mind was far away, beneath a moss-draped oak tree in the shadow of the state’s capitol. And with a boy’s family, who would have been told that he hated his own life enough to end it.

  And if that weren’t true, the lie was a terrible tragedy in itself.

  “Savannah, you all right?” Ryan asked, drawing her back to the kitchen and the moment at hand.

  “Yes. Just . . . thinking. Tell John I love him dearly, and I owe him a pecan pie.”

  “Only if I get half.”

  “Don’t you always?”

  When Savannah hung up the phone, she walked over to the screen door and gazed outside at the serenity of her grandmother’s garden. Gran was walking among the tomato plants, her straw bonnet guarding her porcelain complexion—her only vanity—and a basket over her arm.

  “Van?”

  She jumped and turned to see Alma watching her. She had actually forgotten her sister was there.

  “I couldn’t help overhearing your phone conversation,” she said. “Both this one and the one you made last night in the living room.” She shrugged. “Sorry, but it’s a small house.”

  “Of course it is. No problem. But it’s important that you keep everything you heard to yourself. Really important. It could make all the difference for Macon.”

  “I understand. I’m good about keeping my mouth shut when I need to.”

  Savannah reached out and tucked one of her sister’s glossy dark curls behind her ear. “Thanks, hon. I appreciate that.”

  “If you’re trying to find out stuff about Mr. Goodwin . . .” Alma said, tentatively.

  “Yes?”

  “I heard something this morning in Sunday school. And normally, I wouldn’t repeat gossip, but . . .”

  “What did you hear, sweetie?”

  “Little Caitlin, Mr. Goodwin’s girl—she’s in my class. And she was really sad about her grandpa dying. We talked a long time about how he was in heaven and she would get to see him again.”

  “I’m sure you were a comfort to her.”

  “Yes, but she’s also really disappointed, because she says her grandpa told her that she could come and live with him. He promised he’d buy her a pony of her own. She said her daddy got really mad and said she couldn’t, but that Grandpa told her not to worry about it. He was going to make her daddy agree.”

  “He did, huh?”

  “That’s what she said, and I believed her. Little kids, they don’t lie about important stuff like that.”

  “No, they don’t,” Savannah said thoughtfully. “They leave the lying about important stuff to adults. Grown-ups are a lot better at it; they’ve had more practice.”

  Chapter 22

  “Why do I feel like I’m never going to see my little house trailer in California again?” Dirk said as he held the flashlight for Savannah, while she picked the lock on Mack Goodwin’s office building
.

  “Sh-h-h. Hold that light steady,” she said. “I can’t see a thing I’m doing with you bobbing it all over the place like that.”

  “It’s because I’m shaking. In my whole stinkin’ career, I’ve never broken into an officer of the court’s place. We’re going to wind up in a rotten little jail cell for the next fifty years with some of those snaggle-toothed yahoos from Deliverance, tellin’ me to squeal like a pig.”

  She stopped what she was doing long enough to shoot him a dirty look. “As a Southerner, I find that comment highly offensive, just like that disgusting movie. Besides, you old fart, what makes you think you’re gonna live another fifty years? You’re already older than dirt.”

  “Just get the damned door open, would you? This place gives me the willies, big time. I wanna get in and outta here in record time.”

  “Then hold still and stop yapping for a minute and let me . . . there . . . got it.”

  “We’re getting good at this,” Dirk said as they slipped inside the building that housed the prosecutor’s office, as well as those of other county officials.

  “Don’t you dare say something like that. Those sound like famous last words if I ever heard any.”

  They made their way down a short hallway until they found a door with Goodwin’s name on it. Savannah had better luck with that lock and had them inside within seconds.

  “Do you suppose there’s a watchman for this building?” Dirk asked as they hurried in, guided by the beam of his flashlight.

  “Naw. But Mahoney probably drives by once or twice a night, so keep that light away from the windows.”

  Savannah took her own penlight from her pocket and began her search. With such minimal light, she was only vaguely aware of a well-organized office with contemporary furniture and modern art on the walls.

  “It would help if we knew what we were looking for,” Dirk said as he opened first one drawer, then another.

  “But how much fun would that be?”

  “You call this fun?”

  She stopped her search long enough to look up and give him a mischievous smile. “Yeah, don’t you?”