Paging the Dead

by Brynn Bonner

  “That’s fine,” Carlson said.

  “Other people saw Dorothy after we left,” Esme said, getting snippy now. “Doesn’t that clear us?”

  “Not really,” Carlson said, putting his notebook away. “You could have come back. But I’ll follow up,” he said, pointing to my receipts. “And I appreciate you ladies being so helpful. I apologize if the rumors are distressing you, but as I say, we don’t have any control over that. If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to call.” He pulled out a card, then wrote on the back and handed it to Esme, even though I was standing closer. “Day or night. That’s my personal cell on the back.”

  “One more thing,” Esme said, taking the card and tossing it onto the side table. “Mrs. Porter’s great-niece, Cassidy, came to see us this morning. She and her grandmother Ingrid, Dorothy’s sister. That little girl is just purely heartbroken about Mrs. Porter’s death. I gave her a promise you’d find who did this. Are you going to make a liar out of me?”

  “No, ma’am,” Carlson said. “I intend to track this person down and see they get what’s coming to them, no matter who the culprit turns out to be,” he added, his voice grave. He gave her a long, penetrating look, but Esme’s gaze didn’t waver.

  The soundtrack from a gunfight scene in a spaghetti western started playing in my head.

  seven

  ESME DROPPED ME BY THE DEALERSHIP TO PICK UP MY CAR, then she was off to her gig as a volunteer in a summer tutoring program at her church. I was on my own for the meeting with Joe Porter. Just as well. I love Esme dearly, but she can be a loose cannon when dealing with clients. Once she forms an opinion sometimes she can’t help but say it out loud.

  I had nearly an hour to kill so I stopped by Keepsake Corner to leave a book I’d promised to loan Marydale. She was doing brisk business for a weekday morning. I tried not to groan when I saw a young woman checking out a stack of decorative stickers and factory-made embellishments. I appreciate an attractive scrapbook page as much as the next person, but this trend of using embellishments at the expense of documentation makes me sad. Fifty years from now those pretty stickers won’t mean a thing, and family members will be left pining for more information about the photos. What was the occasion? When was it? Who are those people? What happened that day?

  But whenever I preach the importance of journaling in scrapbooking workshops people claim they can’t think of what to say or their handwriting isn’t pretty or some other lame excuse not to document. To which I say Pfft!

  I browsed while I waited for Marydale to get a free moment. She’d gotten in some beautiful handmade papers that would be perfect for Dorothy’s heritage scrapbooks if we got to do them.

  Two older women were perusing the stationery section. They were relative newcomers to Morningside and I recognized them as garden club ladies.

  “I was scared half to death to stay by myself last night. I checked the locks three times,” one of them said.

  “I heard they’re looking at the nephew,” the other said. “I hate to say it but I hope it does turn out to be a family thing and not some psychopath going around breaking in at random and killing people.”

  “I heard that about the nephew, too,” the first woman said, “but I also heard they suspect those two—” At that point she looked up and saw me and became flummoxed. “Never mind,” she said.

  They both seemed to come to the sudden realization they didn’t need any stationery after all and hustled out of the store.

  “Pay no attention,” Marydale said, coming up behind me and putting her arm around my shoulders. “People like to gossip.”

  “But I have to pay attention, Marydale,” I said. “This could hurt our business, not to mention it’s humiliating to have people looking at me like that.”

  “It’ll soon pass and they’ll realize what ninnies they’ve been,” she assured me.

  I told her what Jack had found out from his reporter friend, then filled her in on our visit with Ingrid and Cassidy and our talk with Detective Carlson.

  “My, you’ve had a busy morning,” she said.

  “You should have seen Cassidy,” I said. “Do you know anything about her mother, by the way? I never asked when we were doing the research since we were tracing backward.”

  “From what I understand her mother took off for parts unknown when Cassidy was an infant. Ingrid was divorced by then, so she left San Francisco and moved down to where Jeremy lived—Sacramento, I think it was—so she could help out with the baby. Then when Cassidy was school age they decided to move back here. Ingrid got a job as a receptionist for Dr. Warren and Jeremy got on at the bank. They moved into one of those little duplexes down on River Road so Cassidy could go back and forth easily between them. It’s a far cry from Dorothy’s life up on the hill.”

  “Why would Ingrid want to come back here, do you suppose? Seems like there’s so many bad memories for her here.”

  “She’s getting older,” Marydale said, “maybe she thought it was time to heal old wounds.”

  Or settle old scores, I thought, but did not say aloud. “Did you know Ingrid when you were growing up?” I asked, only now realizing she and Marydale must be around the same age.

  “I did.” Marydale nodded. “I mean, we weren’t good friends or anything, but we were schoolmates when we were little. She left home young, and I mean really young, like in her early teens. At first the story was that she was sent away to boarding school, but she never came home on school breaks or summers. There was even a rumor for a while that she was dead. But a couple of the girls at school had some contact with her. A few postcards and a phone call or two. Turns out she’d just had enough of the Pritchett family—her father, in particular—and ran away. It was the sixties”—Marydale shrugged—“so of course she struck out for San Francisco.”

  “It’s hard to believe she and Dorothy were even sisters. Dorothy was so proper and Ingrid’s more the free spirit type.”

  “True,” Marydale allowed, “but they were very close at one time. Their mother died when Ingrid was small. Dorothy looked after her like a fierce little mama lion. But Ingrid was strong willed and the relationship got more complicated as they got older.”

  “I’ll say. It seems like every time we saw them together they were having words—loud, angry words.”

  “Not every family’s the Waltons,” Marydale said. “Doesn’t mean they didn’t love one another deep down.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Sometimes people are like porcupines. The more they try to get close, the more they hurt one another.”

  • • •

  I still had a half hour so I stopped by The Morningside Apothecary, which most of the locals still call Stanton’s Drugs. I slowed my pace to admire the front window display of antique apothecary bottles, old measuring implements and vintage medicine boxes and tins. Uber quaint, though I knew once I got past the register I’d find the store stocked with the same assortment of health and beauty items as any chain, plus aisles full of things a person might not know he needed until they beckoned from the shelf. Chia Pets, battery-operated spaghetti twirler forks, T-shirts and all manner of plastic toys with a half-life of about three minutes once they’d been wrestled from the blister packaging.

  I nodded hello to Mr. Stanton, who was tidying the magazine rack. He’d given over the pharmacy operation to his son about a year ago and now spent his days puttering around the store, slipping out to play golf whenever the urge struck him.

  I followed the familiar path to where I knew I’d find my contact lens solution. One of the perks of small town shopping is that even blindfolded I could locate every item I needed from this store.

  As I filled my basket I overheard two teenaged boys at the other end of the aisle. “I betcha it was the husband. It’s always the husband.”

  “I thought the old woman was divorced. Wasn’t she that rich old lady who married a grease monkey?”

  “He’s not a grease monkey, dude. He, like, owns a whole s
tring of gas stations. And my mom says they weren’t divorced yet, just heading for it. Maybe he offed her before she could divorce him to get all her money.”

  “Or maybe you watch too many cop shows, nimrod. My dad says it was probably a robbery gone bad. He says there’s no telling what kind of stuff she had stashed up there in that big old house.”

  “My mom is freakin’ out, man! She’s all like, Lock the doors! Lock the doors! Like we got anything anybody’d wanna steal. And anyway, she heard it’s got something to do with these two women, like private eyes or something the old lady hired to dig up dirt on somebody.”

  “That’s kinda hot.”

  “You’re sick, man.”

  “Not the murder, I mean women private eyes. Like Charlie’s Angels, right?”

  They started making some kind of teenage boy rutting noises. One of them punched the other on the arm and they guffawed some more. I had a fleeting fantasy about borrowing one of the hair dryers from a rack and blowing my hair back as I walked toward them in slow motion. Here you are, boys, here’s your Charlie’s Angel. But first off, with my short legs it would have taken me forever to get to their end of the aisle. And secondly, it was freaking me out that this bizarre rumor about Esme and me was spreading. To top it off, when I checked out I could have sworn I was getting the stink eye from the girl working the register, but it could have been my imagination.

  As I pulled out on River Road and headed for Joe’s service station I was filled with dread. I did some mental bookkeeping and saw lots of mac ’n’ cheese dinners in our immediate future. It didn’t seem fair. We’d already put in so much work on this project. I wondered if I could at least negotiate a kill fee.

  “Note to self,” I muttered. “Don’t call it that when you make the pitch.”

  I knew Joe Porter, but only remotely. My father, who had been particular about our vehicles, had always taken them to Porter’s place for service. So I knew my dad must have trusted the man. On the other hand, Dorothy hadn’t had much good to say about Joe. She’d made it clear she felt she’d married well beneath her station. Once she referred to her marriage as “an unfortunate lapse in judgment.” Course, she and Porter had been married for twenty-five years, so it hardly seemed a momentary lapse.

  I parked on the street alongside a row of crepe myrtle trees, hoping the meager shade would keep the car’s interior from reaching broiling temps before I returned. I got out and headed across a parking lot shimmering from heat and gasoline fumes. This was no quickie-mart gas station. No stale snacks, sodas, tacky souvenirs or bad coffee inside. Customers looking to stave off starvation had to depend on the vending machine outside the door. And no self-service nonsense, this was a filling station of the old-fashioned variety. I heard a crisp double-ding as a car ran over the alert hose and pulled to the pump. This brought a young man trotting out to fill the tank. He set the nozzle then proceeded to wash the windshield while a man sat in the car talking on his cell. As I walked by the man grunted and pointed to a spot the young man had missed. You just can’t do enough to please some people.

  The two big bay doors were up and cars were on the lifts. One of the men looked up from where he was checking parts at a workbench. He wiped his hands on a dirty rag, then picked up a wrench and came in my direction. Something about the way he held that wrench looked menacing. Now I really hoped I was being paranoid.

  “Excuse me,” I said, trying to make myself heard over the air compressors and the clanging noises of the garage. “Could you tell me where I could find Mr. Porter?”

  “Who wants to know?” the man asked, still holding the wrench as if it were a club. “You a reporter?”

  “No, I’m Sophreena McClure. I’m not a reporter, I’m—” I stopped. This is a problem with introducing myself by my profession. Half the time people start asking about rock formations and I have to explain that no, I’m not a geologist. Sometimes people ask if I’m some kinda doctor and even the ones who know what it is can’t understand how it translates into an actual job.

  “Mr. Porter asked me to come,” I said.

  “Okay. Right back there on the left,” the man said, pointing with the wrench.

  Once I was seated in his small office Joe Porter didn’t waste time. “Sophreena, thanks for coming. I’ll make this quick. I’m sure you have things to do and I know I do.” He was handsome in a rugged sort of way. I knew he was several years younger than Dorothy and he’d aged well. His hair was gray, but he still had plenty of it and he was lean and fit for his age and seemed comfortable in his own skin.

  “I’ve talked to Ingrid and it’s been decided we’ll have a private funeral and burial for Dorothy tomorrow, family only,” he said, staring down at the desk.

  “I see,” I said, though I had no idea why he’d summoned me here to tell me that.

  “Tell me, what was your arrangement with Dorothy?” he asked, looking up.

  “Arrangement?”

  “I know she hired you to trace her family. You finished up with that?”

  “Mostly,” I said, seeing that final payment circling the drain.

  “And you saw her yesterday? You were out at the house?”

  “Yes,” I said, slowly. “We saw her in the early afternoon. Others saw her after that.” I felt compelled to add that last in case he was accusing me of something.

  He stared out the window, though I didn’t think he could see much with the glass panes covered in a thin film of oil and grime.

  “You see anybody else when you were out there?” he asked, his eyes narrowed.

  “Only Dorothy’s housekeeper, Linda, and Cassidy,” I said.

  “Cassidy,” he said with a sigh. “That poor kid.” He dragged his hand down his face, forehead to chin, as if this could erase the fatigue. “So tell me, what do you mean when you say mostly finished? Ingrid said you had some questions.”

  “Yes, I do. I hope you’ll forgive me, I know it’s bad form to be asking about trivial things right now. We gave Mrs. Porter our report yesterday but she also hired us to archive the materials and construct heritage scrapbooks. She’d wanted them done before the Founders’ Day open house she was planning to host just before the Honeysuckle Festival. Esme and I wondered if we should go ahead with the project?”

  “Yes,” Porter answered straight away. “Yes, she’d want that.”

  This cheered me, but I thought it inappropriate to whoop it up given the circumstances. Anyhow, next came the delicate part. “We’d be happy to,” I said, “but we wondered if we were still looking at the same timeline for delivery and the same payment schedule?” My voice went up on the last words and Porter gave me a weary smile.

  “It’s okay, Sophreena. Money’s not a taboo subject. Tell me specifics.”

  I’d brought along our contract and invoices just in case and I pulled them from my bag. He waved them away. “Just tell me how much Dorothy owed you.”

  “She didn’t owe us anything until the heritage scrapbooks are done. The outstanding balance once we complete those will be thirty-two hundred dollars. It’s a lot of work and that includes the supplies and—”

  Porter held up a hand to cut me off. He reached into a desk drawer and brought out an oversized checkbook, the business kind with three checks on a page. I noticed his hands as he picked up a ballpoint pen. They’d definitely seen lots of manual labor in his lifetime and they looked strong and capable. Capable of what? I wondered.

  He wrote out a check for the full amount, tore it from its moorings and handed it over. “There will be a memorial service for Dorothy up at the house on the day she’d planned that party. It would mean a lot to the family to have these things finished by then. Dorothy would’ve liked that. You can still have them done?”

  “Yes, but our understanding with Mrs. Porter was that we weren’t to receive payment until the job was finished.”

  I caught a brief sardonic smile. “I’m sure that was your arrangement with her,” he said. “Will you have the scrapbooks done when you pro
mised?”

  “Yes, sir, we definitely will,” I said, sitting up straight in the chair.

  “Then we have a new understanding, you and me.”

  “Would you like to see them before the memorial?”

  “I’ve got no use for the Pritchett family story,” he said, making no attempt to hide his bitterness. “You can give them to Ingrid, though I don’t know if she feels much different than I do about it. Meant something to Dorothy, though, and this is about her.”

  He pushed back from his desk and I took this as my dismissal. I quickly gathered my things and he walked me to the door. He grabbed the doorknob then hesitated. “Tell me, when you were at the house yesterday did Dorothy do or say anything out of the ordinary? Did she seem like she was okay? Happy?”

  “She seemed very pleased with our report,” I offered. I debated whether to tell him about the ring and how over-the-moon she’d been about that but decided I’d best keep that to myself for now. “She was happy to have Cassidy with her. And, now that you mention it she did seem like she was in an unusually good mood.”

  Porter nodded and pursed his lips. “Good. That’s good, then.”

  He walked me all the way outside to the parking lot where we said our goodbyes. As I headed for my car I glanced back to see him talking with the mechanic who’d directed me to the office. The mechanic scowled in my direction and nodded.

  I had the words of the kid from the drugstore echoing in my head as I pulled back out onto River Road. “It’s always the husband.”

  Something seemed off. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but just something. Joe and Dorothy were in the midst of a split and from what I’d heard it hadn’t been that most miraculous of wonders, an amicable divorce. But I was getting mixed signals.

  The man had written me a very nice check, and he’d wanted Dorothy’s wishes carried out. That was a caring gesture, wasn’t it? But then again, maybe money was no object if he was set to inherit Dorothy’s estate.