“Kip isn’t exactly a stranger. I knew her father,” he said with one eyebrow lifted. “I’m Krystal Brook’s husband.”
Mike Rich, star-maker. Now I placed his name.
“What are you going to do about that child?” Virginia asked. “She’s been in trouble at school. I was hoping that psychiatrist would put her on medication. There are times I worry that she’s a danger to herself or some . . . one . . . else.” She let her sentence stumble to a halt. “Excuse me, I need to check on the carpenters. We’re installing the scaffolding for the floral arrangements.”
Virginia left the room, and I found myself alone with Mike. I could feel him watching me as I walked to a beautiful old piano. I touched the ivories, drawing out a few simple chords.
“Krystal didn’t tell me you were musically inclined,” he said. “I thought your talent was sleuthing.”
“You said you were at Dahlia House to discuss a business proposition.”
“Yes, security for Krystal’s benefit concert. Since you’re in the private eye business, I thought you might be able to recommend some muscle. I’ll need at least four trained men. One at the door, one backstage, and two in the crowd. I pay Nashville wage.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know any reliable ‘muscle,’ ” I said. It was an interesting term. “Why don’t you check with the sheriff?”
“He’s agreed to attend the concert, of course. He’s a friend of Lee’s and also of my wife. But Sheriff Peters’s staff is small, and he doesn’t encourage moonlighting.”
I closed the piano. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” I had to find Kip. I’d given her a few moments to calm down, but I was going to have to talk to her.
“I know you’re not Kip’s mother, but let me give you a word of advice. That girl needs to be taken in hand. She’s famous for pitching fits at horse shows, refusing to ride. She’s high-strung, but that’s no excuse for the tantrum she threw here.” He followed me to the front door. “Maybe some medication wouldn’t be a bad idea. Something just to level her out for a while.”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” I said as I walked across the porch and down the steps.
Kip was sitting on the ground, her back against the wheel of my car. She climbed into the front seat without a word. I backed up, hesitating before I put the car in gear. “Do you want to see the horses before we leave?”
She shook her head, burgundy spikes wobbling.
“Kip, what happened out here?”
She shrugged. “I lost something in Bud’s apartment. I was looking for it.”
“Did you ask his permission?”
“He wasn’t around.” She shot a glare at me. “Besides, it’s my place, not his. He’s just a hired hand. He doesn’t own anything.”
“Only a few hours ago, you were defending Bud,” I reminded her.
“That was then.” She turned away from me so that I could see her jawline. It reminded me of Lee’s, the stubborn strength of it.
“What happened?” I asked her.
“That bitch Carol Beth Bishop was in the barn. She and Bud. Together.” Her voice was swollen with hurt and anger. “He said before it was because he was trying to help Mama, but that was just another damn lie. Since Mama’s in jail, I guess they can screw in the barn aisles if they want to. They all lie so they can do whatever they want to do.” She reached across her seat and grabbed the seat belt. “Can we go?”
I set the car in motion, going slowly out the drive. “Was she after the horses?” I asked.
“The horses, Bud, whatever she can get. I hate her.” She was staring out the windshield, and a strange blank look came over her face. “I hate her,” she said slowly. “She’s always here, always hanging around. I wish she’d die.” The expression on her face shifted chillingly in the spring light. “Maybe she will.”
My mouth went dry. “What are you saying, Kip?”
She looked at me, a long, appraising glance. “I know what it’s like to hate someone, to hate them enough to do something awful.”
My pulse quickened. “What kind of awful thing are you talking about?”
She lowered her chin, tucking it almost to her chest. Her glance was sidelong, considering. “You don’t really want to know, Sarah Booth. Trust me, you don’t. Because if I tell you, then you’ll have to do something about it, and that would make Mama really upset.”
7
Propped up on pillows in my bed, I tried to focus on the book I’d selected to read. It was a defense lawyer’s recounting of cases, many of them involving women who’d killed their spouses. I was hoping for some help, but my mind refused to cooperate. I couldn’t stop thinking about Kip.
She had hammered me with her bitter assessment of my cowardice. I’d failed to question her about the syringe in her makeup kit. She was correct—I didn’t want to know the truth. Not until I had an idea of what I would do with it. What I should do with it. What my role as Lee’s private investigator and my ethics required me to do with it.
I felt a chill in the room and lowered the book I wasn’t reading to find Jitty standing at the foot of the bed.
“You’ve got yourself in a fine mess,” she said softly. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her weight undetectable. “Have you figured out what you’re gonna do?”
I shook my head. “I have a hypothetical question. If Lee chooses to sacrifice herself for her daughter, do I have a right to try to stop her?”
Jitty shifted, semireclining so that the moonlight falling through the bedroom window was softly gathered into the folds of her sheer nightgown. “This entire case is about the future, Sarah Booth. Lee’s and Kip’s. If you had a daughter, what would you do?”
Imagining the future was difficult. Imagining the future with a teenage daughter was even harder. But I knew the answer. Deep inside, there was no doubt. “The same thing Lee is doing. The same thing Mama would have done for me.”
Jitty nodded. “There is no sacrifice too great for your child.”
I sighed. “What about the truth?”
“Whose truth?”
There were times when Jitty’s wisdom superseded her pain-in-the-ass qualities, and this was one of them. “Did you ever have children?” I asked.
She shifted off the bed in one fluid movement and went to the window. Her gown shimmered on a soft spring breeze, and I saw no trace of childbearing in her lean and supple body. But Jitty was a ghost. She was beyond the scars and failings of mere mortals.
“No children. But like you, Sarah Booth, I’ve had many losses. Children are the hope of the future. Kip is Lee’s future. That child is what she lives for.”
“What should I do?” I was firmly wedged between duty and honor.
Jitty turned to face me, and in the moonlight I saw the glint of her smile. “It seems to me your friend is hanging on to the past and trying to preserve the future. I don’t think she can do it. I don’t think anyone can.”
She left the window and drifted to the door.
“Don’t go,” I said. Her words had left me with a sense of vague dread.
“I have an appointment.” Jitty’s moment of pensive-ness was over. She did a slow turn so that the gown swirled from her hips to her ankles in one shimmering movement. “One of us has to exercise the old libido.” She was gone, but her voice, faded and hardly more than a whisper, came back to me. “Be careful, Sarah Booth. Be careful.”
I snapped off the light. The dark was velvety soft, the best of the Delta before the arrival of humidity and savage, biting insects. I could hear the soft throbbing of the frogs, and the chirr of the crickets, sounds I’d come to expect as part of my life, part of the first awakening of spring.
For most of my life I’d slept in this room, except for a few years of misadventuring. Jitty’s comments had thrown my past and my future into sharp relief. I saw myself clearly hung on the cusp of the present. I had no past or future. One was lost in the fog of time and the other didn’t exist. Would a child connect me to both, as Jitty implied
? I wasn’t certain.
At last I felt the pull of sleep, and I tried to shake free of the bonds of anxiety that held me in wakefulness. Eyes closed, I slipped into a dream. I was alone in the middle of a darkened room. As I glanced at a wall, a light snapped on, highlighting a black-and-white photograph. I went closer, to examine the image.
The child that looked back at me was dark-haired and smiling, a beautiful little girl holding on to a horsehair sofa for support. I knew her. She was my daughter. Her name was—
I wasn’t certain what startled me out of my dream, but I was fully awake, tensed, and listening. Someone was walking by my bedroom door.
The steps were sneaky, a tiptoe on the stairs, a pause whenever a board creaked or moaned. Easing out of bed, I cracked my bedroom door and looked out into the dark hall. A slight figure was descending the stairs. Kip.
Listening closely, I waited for her to make it to the first floor before I followed. Moving with great care, I slipped down the stairs, alert to every tiny sound. Kip had gone through the parlor and the dining room, and I heard the soft shush-shush of the kitchen door swinging closed. Maybe she’d gotten up for a snack. But that didn’t explain her furtiveness.
I continued behind her, stopping at the swinging door. I could hear her in the kitchen, and after a few seconds I knew what she was doing. She was on the phone.
“I found out today that she has my horse,” she said. There was a pause. “I’m positive. The man who bought her was put up to it by Carol Beth.” Another pause. “I don’t care. I don’t care! I’m going to kill her.”
I took a long, slow breath through my nose.
“I hate her. She’s tried to take everything. She’s greedy and awful, and I hate her!”
Kip’s voice had begun to rise, but she got control of herself. “She’s going to pay,” she said in a calmer, more deadly tone. “I can’t call you. My phone privileges have been revoked. She pretends not to, but she’s watching me all the time.”
I could hear her opening a bag of chips as she talked. “Good idea. Maybe that’ll keep her off my back so I can finish what I started.”
There was the click and fizz of a soda opening. “Okay, that sounds good. Whenever you can stop by. Just don’t call.”
The receiver was returned to the hook.
I crept back up the stairs and crawled into bed. I was not afraid of Kip, but I was afraid of what I would learn about her. Before I opened this can of worms, I needed hard facts. If Kip had committed one violent act, there was a likelihood that she might do it again.
When Kip was safely back in bed, I picked up the telephone in my room and hit star sixty-nine. I counted the seven musical beeps, a local number. The telephone rang and rang, but no one answered. Digging up the phone records to reveal Kip’s partner in crime would take too long. I needed to make Lee understand that she could protect Kip from everyone but herself.
Mornings are normally my favorite time of day. There is a magic in the first moments of wakefulness, a tear in reality when anything is possible. My night had been restless, and I awoke groggy and filled with a sense of dread.
The pale yellow light of morning spilled through the window and across the foot of my bed, filling the room with a soundless presence. I realized then that Sweetie Pie wasn’t beside my bed. Normally I could hear her light snoring. She was undoubtedly in Kip’s room. The girl did have a way with animals.
“If you’re gonna play mama, you’d best get yourself down to the kitchen and make breakfast.”
Jitty was sitting in the rocker in a corner of the room. Gone without a trace was the compassion she’d shown the previous night. She’d finally changed out of my sweats and was wearing a red shorts-and-halter set. Forties? Nineties? I couldn’t exactly pin down the era. Jitty had an annoying habit of traipsing through the decades in search of an identity. Whatever place in history that outfit had come from, it was definitely hot. The material was shiny and clingy. Spandex? Her white sandals were strappy, with a three-inch heel.
“You’re looking anything but maternal,” I said, throwing back the covers and standing up to stretch.
“Somebody around here’s got to look presentable. What are you gonna do about a date for that big ball? Might be fun to conjure you up a man out of thin air. ’Course that might be the only place you’d find one willin’ to be your escort.”
“I have other, more important things on my mind, Jitty.” I’d gone over every available man I knew and hadn’t come up with a single idea for a date.
“Keep on pretendin’,” she said, walking across the room with a strut that could have made a grown man cry. “You ought to get on one of those computer dating services.”
I was tired of this harangue. “You do it if you’re so smart.”
Jitty did a three-quarter turn like a runway model. She must have practiced the move for weeks. “You know I can’t type.”
“Never too late to learn a useful skill.” I retrieved a pair of shoes from beneath some clothes on the floor.
“It’s too early for such attitude.” Jitty glared at me. “It’s not that I can’t type. I can’t type.”
I had forgotten. Noncorporeal drawback. “So there is a limit to your mischief. Thank goodness for that.” I went to the closet and found some jeans and a blouse.
“You gone go off and leave that young’un again today? Seems to me you might want to keep an eye on her.”
“I’ve got to go see Doc Sawyer. I don’t think she needs to hear the details of the autopsy. And I have to check on Kemper’s arrangements.”
Jitty nodded. “Keep it short. That’s my advice. A song, a prayer, then plant him.”
I gave her a dirty look. “Lee and the high-school principal agreed with me, so Kip has schoolwork to do. Don’t be pestering her.”
“You know I can’t pester anyone but you. That’s an interestin’ word choice, though. Back when I was a young woman, pester was what a man did to a woman.”
“I don’t have time for this now.”
“You’re runnin’ out of time, all right. That ol’ biological clock is ticktocking away. Maybe you should give up on the man and just hunt you an Internet sperm bank.”
“I can find a date. I can find one right here in Sunflower County. I don’t have to import a man from cyberspace. Now give up on the whole Internet romance idea.” I drew on my clothes. “I’ll make some coffee. Kip’s on her own for breakfast.”
I opened the door and found Kip standing there, eyebrows drawn together in concern. “Were you talking to someone about finding a date for the ball?” she asked, looking around me at the empty room.
“Myself,” I said, annoyed and embarrassed. “I live alone. Sometimes I need stimulating conversation.”
She examined the corners of the room one more time, then accepted that I was as crazy as a run-over dog. “You really have to have an escort. It’s the stupidest rule. You could take a corpse, but it has to be a guy and he has to have on tails.”
“I’ll find someone.”
“Where? All the men around here are married. Even if they don’t act it.”
My love life wasn’t something I wanted to discuss with Kip. “I’ve got to get busy. Will you be okay?”
“I want to get my hair fixed. The funeral . . . Folks blame Mama because I look different,” she said.
I was surprised. Kip’s “look” was something she’d worked hard to achieve. “How about this afternoon? We can go to one of the salons—”
“No.” Her objection was sharp. “You can do it.”
“Me?” I didn’t mind; it was just that she would likely turn out bald.
“I don’t want to go to town. Everyone will stare.”
They would, but Kip was going to have to face them sometime. She couldn’t hide away at Dahlia House or Swift Level for the rest of the year.
“Please, Sarah Booth.”
Kip had taken two giant steps. She’d put her mother first and she’d used the word please. She was trying hard,
and I had a sudden inspiration. Tinkie had aspirations of hair design. “What if Tinkie did it?”
Kip nodded. “That would be okay. I like her dog.”
“Chablis is hard not to like.” The dog and I had a long history. In my desperation to save Dahlia House, I’d dognapped Chablis. Tinkie had been my first client— she’d hired me to find her dog. I was still working that black mark off my karma. “I’ll be back soon, and I’ll have Tinkie give you a call.”
Doc Sawyer’s office hadn’t changed an iota since the last time I was there—to get the autopsy results on Lawrence Ambrose. It appeared that even the same pot of coffee was brewing. At Doc’s offer, I poured some into a Styrofoam cup. When the cup didn’t dissolve, I added five spoons of whitener and enough sugar to sweeten crotchety old Mrs. Hedgepeth.
“You’re here to get the results of Kemper’s autopsy,” Doc said. He swung his feet down off his desk and sat forward in his chair. “Take a seat, this is going to take a bit of time. He was quite a mess.”
With his magnificent nimbus of white hair, he looked like Mark Twain, and he had the wonderful mannerisms of an old Southern gentleman. A little eccentric, a lot kind. I noticed his complexion was less ruddy and his eyes were crystal clear. He’d gone on the wagon shortly after Lawrence was murdered, and judging from his appearance, he was still riding high.
I sat in the only other chair in the small, cramped space behind the Sunflower County Hospital emergency room. Doc had given up his general practice and semi-retired to standby emergency work. “Doc, I need something solid. I have to talk to Lee, but I need the facts before I go there.”
“You want me to tell you who killed him, right?” he said with a deep sadness.
“What I’d like to hear is that the horse killed him.”
Doc picked up some papers on his desk. “I could almost say that.”
I almost leaped out of my chair. “Can you? Really?”
Doc waved me back into my seat. “It’s a little more complicated than that, Sarah Booth.” His smile was tired. “But then isn’t it always. You know, I delivered Eulalee. I watched that girl fight to carve her own identity. And then I delivered Katrina.”
Splintered Bones Page 7
