“Sadly, you’ve got a point.”
“Well.” She stood. “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. I really have to get back to work.”
“Okay.” I looked around. “Although we do have this very convenient table here. Does that door lock?”
“Are you out of your mind?” She giggled. Giggled like a kid, headed for the door. “You really have to examine your predilections.”
“Examination table right here,” I insisted. “You could examine my predilections for me.”
“God.” She burst from the room laughing, which set every nurse in the station to whispering.
“Fine,” I announced, emerging from the room and following her.
We walked back to the nurses’ station in silence.
“Sorry I couldn’t tell you anything more helpful. Really.” Lucinda managed to put the imposing counter of the station between herself and me. “What’ll you do now?”
“See if Andrews got anything useful out of Hovis.”
“Did you really think Hovis would talk to a stranger?” She shook her head.
“Time’s of the essence, and I’d rather talk to you—”
“But I mean, Dr. Andrews?”
“He can turn on the charm when he wants to. I mean, obviously he’s not as charming as he thinks he is—”
“He’s a big flirt.” Lucinda shook her head.
“All right.” I deliberately pushed myself off the counter and turned toward the exit. “Dinner later?”
“Of course.”
I could hear the smile in her voice.
I could also hear Nurse Chambers behind me as I pushed the exit door.
“Who’s this Andrews? Is he a new doctor here?”
Long may she wave.
Fifteen
Skidmore’s squad car was still not in evidence when I pulled into a parking spot in front of the police station. I could see Melissa Mathews, listening to the tape, through the big front window.
I consulted the sky, which seemed to say that it was nearly noon. I hurried into the station.
Melissa looked up.
“That was quick,” she said, turning off the tape recorder and glancing at her watch.
“What time is it?” I asked, leaning on the desk. “Oh, it’s almost lunchtime,” she told me. “So—Dr. Andrews?”
Melissa began fussing with the tape recorder in an utterly meaningless series of gestures, which led me to believe that she was trying to say something or ask me something but couldn’t quite manage it.
“That Dr. Andrews,” she began slowly, not looking up. “He’s not much like you, for you’uns to be such good friends.”
“How do you mean?” I thought I knew what she meant, but I wanted her to say it.
“He’s a little too bold for my taste.” Her lips thinned. “He makes me nervous.”
“He made a pass at you.”
“Did what?” She looked up.
“He came on to you, he heavy-flirted.”
“Yes.” She looked back down. “I don’t like that. It makes me uncomfortable.”
Melissa Mathews—thick chestnut hair, perfectly porcelain skin, insanely sky-colored eyes—was probably the most eligible bachelorette in town, if there could be such a thing in Blue Mountain. She was only several years out of high school, beautiful in the extreme, and too shy for any social situation. A short trip down Freudian Lane would probably have yielded some easy answers if anyone questioned her chosen profession. As a deputy she could wear a uniform, which acted as armor to hide behind and, in this case, even involved what was commonly called “a shield”—her badge. She had a gun and knew how to use it, though she was very gentle in general, only firm when she had to be.
She had also suffered some great trauma as an adolescent. Skidmore would never tell me what it was, only that it had scarred her, rendered her incapable of a relationship with any one of the thirty or so local boys who buzzed around her at any given moment. She spurned them all.
She had once been accused by gossipy spiders—people like Mrs. Jackson—of having an affair with Skidmore. It could not have been a more absurd accusation, of course: Melissa could never have a relationship with any man; Skidmore was the most monogamous man on the planet; and Skidmore’s wife, Girlinda, would have found out if anything had been going on and killed them both about seven times with a shotgun. That’s what Lucinda always said, that Girlinda would have killed Skidmore, then brought him to the hospital to bring him back to life just so she could kill him again. So: no infidelity there.
But the rest of Melissa’s psyche was a mystery. It occurred to me at that moment that she was the exact opposite of Nurse Chambers—the perfect negative image.
“You want me to ask him to stop it,” I concluded.
“Would you mind?” She was very uncomfortable.
“Consider it done.”
She nodded, still not looking up. She wasn’t finished.
“When I asked him how you two were such good friends,” she said softly, “he told me you saved his life during the Academy Wars. I never knew you were in the army. And anyway, when were they?”
“When were what?”
“The Academy Wars.”
“Oh.” I managed to keep a straight face. “He was joking. Some people in university life, in academia, think of their difficulties as a kind of battle.”
“So you didn’t really save his life.”
“No.”
Further comment on the subject was interrupted by a sad call from the inner recesses of the office where the cells were hidden. “Melissa?”
Andrews was ready to be let out of jail, and was, for some reason, using his most plaintive tones.
“I think Mr. Daniels is finished talking to me. Could you come here, please?”
She stood instantly, hand on her keys.
“Mind if I go with you?” I said softly.
She caught my eye for a second. “Thanks.”
We wended our way through the brief, familiar labyrinth and found ourselves in the long hallway that boasted five cells. Four were about the size of a really large bathroom; one was big enough to hold, perhaps, ten people in a pinch. The previous sheriff, Maddox, had thought all that room necessary, and had contracted, with his brother, to build the facility—at relatively great expense to the city. I had never seen more than three people in the entire place at any one time.
We came to the cell from which Andrews had called and quickly discovered the reason for his odd tone. Hovis Daniels had collapsed on the floor and was breathing strangely.
“Could you let me out, please?” Andrews was pressed up against the bars of the cell door.
Melissa moved with supernatural ease and speed. The door was open, Andrews was out, and she was kneeling beside Hovis before I could get a good breath.
“What happened?” I asked Andrews.
I believe Andrews’s expression could only be described as sheepish.
“Hovis?” Melissa shook the man. Hovis grinned and mumbled.
Melissa’s head snapped back. She stood, her face red and her fingers twitching a little. “He’s drunk!” My eyes shot to Andrews.
“I thought it would help,” he began, backing away a little. “I happened to have a little flask of that fantastic apple brandy—needing a hair of the dog for myself, see—and when he wouldn’t talk to me, I thought I might loosen his tongue—”
“He’s drunk!” Melissa repeated, not quite believing her own words.
“I really apologize—” Andrews began.
Melissa whirled around so fast it made Andrews take another step backward.
“I ought to lock you up in this cell with him.” She actually had her hand on her gun. “Damn it, do you have any idea how mad this’ll make Skidmore?”
“Maybe we just shouldn’t tell him,” Andrews said quickly.
“Hovis?” she said sweetly. “Come on, get up, sugar.”
She reached down, grabbed an elbow, and helped the old man to his cot. H
e seemed not to know where he was, but he was very appreciative of Melissa’s help as he fell back onto the bed.
“How much did you all drink?” I whispered.
“Not that much.” Andrews sloshed the flask around, trying to peer into it.
But I was well aware that not that much to Andrews was way too much to many other mortals.
Melissa covered Hovis with a county blanket and shooed us away. She locked the cell door and pointed toward the front office.
Andrews walked meekly toward it; I followed, making certain Melissa could see me shaking my head.
Once we were back at her desk, Melissa engaged Andrews in a fairly brutal bit of eye contact.
“If you were a resident of Blue Mountain,” she began, barely controlling herself, “you’d be in jail now. I expect you’d know that the substance you had in the flask was illegal. I’ve smelled it a hundred times. It’s also against the law, of course, to have spirits of any sort in the county jail; and plus: I ought to kick your ass for getting that old man drunk. The only thing keeping you out of a cell is your friendship with Dr. Devilin, which I don’t see why you have it, but damn.”
That was her speech. She turned to me for comment.
“It’s entirely my fault,” I began. “Dr. Andrews is my guest, and I all but demanded that he come here with me, made him interview Hovis—”
“After Dr. Devilin saved your life,” Melissa shot her stinging glance back to Andrews, “in the Academic Wars.”
“Oh.” Andrews managed a vermilion hue about his cheeks. “Yes.
Well. That—”
“I don’t know what kind of trouble he got you out of in your petty little university world,” she snarled, “and I don’t care. My guess is that you made a pass at the wrong coed, or worse, and nearly got yourself fired—but for the intervention of Dr. Devilin. That’d be your speed.”
I had to admire how quickly Melissa had caught on to the phrase ‘made a pass’—and how perfectly she had grasped both the university world and the character of Dr. Andrews. In fact, I found I was fascinated that she had absorbed, evaluated, and learned so much in so little time. I felt it was the closest I would ever come to a proud parental feeling. But there was also the matter of rescuing Andrews.
“In fact,” I said, clearing my throat, “Dr. Andrews was accused of the crime you mention—”
“Fever,” Andrews said softly, shaking his head.
“—with the daughter of our chancellor,” I concluded. “In the university world, if you’re an ambitious sort, you aspire to work your way up from professor to department head to dean through a few other steps and on to being the president of a university. The only place to go from there is the board of regents, the governing body of the whole system, kind of like the board of directors of a large corporation. At the head of that table, like a CEO, is the chancellor. Ours had a daughter that had grown accustomed to lightweight course content and easy A’s. Andrews failed her in his Introduction to Shakespeare class when, among other things, she recorded on her final exam that Shakespeare had written The Odd Couple, had been blacklisted by McCarthy, and had played drums for a rock and roll band called the Holy Modal Rounders.”
“He gave her an F,” Melissa confirmed.
“He did,” I assured her. “And when he did—I believe the expression is ‘All hell broke loose.’ She accused him of attempting to have an affair with her. She said that her F was a result of rebuffing his advances. He was set to be fired with a speed far beyond the ordinary capabilities of the university system.”
“But you saved him.” She drew in a healthy breath.
“I did, because I happened to have a graduate assistant who was working on some field research—a bit of urban folklore involving the preponderance of stories about body parts, usually fingers, found fried in foods and canned in soft drinks. This graduate assistant had, miraculously, recorded several conversations with the chancellor’s daughter, who claimed to have found a thumb in her French fries, and on several of the tapes—”
“Dr. Devilin is a bit long-winded here,” Andrews stammered. “Suffice it to say that the tapes revealed her lie and were used in evidence to support my innocence. I was not fired. However, the chancellor was quite upset and had to do something for his lovely daughter, so he set things in motion in order to close down the folklore department at our university, ensuring that Dr. Devilin would lose his job. Which he did.”
“ That’s what happened to make you come back up here to Blue Mountain?” Melissa’s face was burning red.
“Someone’s head had to roll,” Andrews said, eyes narrow.
“There was nothing to be done about it.” I shrugged. “I’m happy to be home. Now. And anyway, the university was thinking about closing the department no matter what.”
“That explains why he’s your friend,” Melissa said, at the end of her patience with Dr. Andrews. “But not the other way around.”
“Dr. Andrews pulled a few strings for me after that.” I looked at Melissa’s desktop. “I didn’t ask him to, he just did it.”
“I should hope he did.” She looked him up and down with an expression that could have skinned a catfish.
“He had a friend in the human resources department—” I began.
“With whom I had dallied, for the record,” Andrews interrupted, apparently interested in full disclosure. “And she arranged it, all very legally, I’m told, so that Dr. Devilin would receive his full retirement salary—”
“Even though I was twenty years or more away from retirement,” I inserted.
“And that means that he’s receiving his full salary—as a full professor at the university—for staying up here in the mountains, drinking illegal spirits, and helping the local constabulary solve the more ghoulish crimes.” Andrews nodded once, a final punctuation.
Melissa wasn’t certain how to react, and kept her eyes locked on Andrews.
“If only the tape you’ve been listening to, Melissa,” I said, mostly to take up the silence that followed our tale, “could yield such fruit.”
“That.” Melissa looked down at the tape recorder as if it were a dead skunk on her desk. “I’ve listened about fifty times, and it only gets more confusing every time I hear it. There’s nothing I can find that could possibly tell us what he’s after. I think you turned off the machine too soon.”
“I agree,” I told her.
“Maybe it would be better for all concerned,” Andrews said, nervously eyeing the street outside, “if Dr. Devilin took me away from this place before the sheriff comes back.”
“Amen to that,” Melissa said immediately. She came around her desk, went to the door, and held it open for us. “I’ll let you know if anything else turns up.”
“You think Millroy—” I began.
“He’ll most likely say it was murder if the sheriff charges Hovis with it, so your deadline is gone.”
“Not really,” I told her, stepping past the threshold. “It’s just set back a bit. Now I have to prove that Hovis didn’t do it before the sheriff can get a formal charge filed. Hovis can’t take a trial, do you think?”
She was about to answer when Andrews pushed past her and rushed to the truck, still absently holding the flask in his hand.
“I’d put that away if I were you,” she called to him.
He glanced down, realized what he was holding, and instantly jammed the flask into his back pocket.
“Sorry,” I whispered to Melissa. “Honestly.”
“Still not certain what you see in him.”
“I’m hungry,” he called out to no one in particular.
“For one thing,” I confided to her, “he keeps me from taking myself too seriously—which I could do all day long and twice on Sundays.”
“Hungry,” he moaned to himself.
She grinned. “Plus, he keeps you from ever starving to death.”
I turned to look at him. He was shivering beside the truck, despite the fact that he would have known,
if he’d thought of it, that the door wasn’t locked.
“There is that,” I agreed.
Sixteen
I’d decided that Andrews was a bit too inebriated for Miss Etta’s public dining room, so I drove back to my place instead. He was very quiet most of the way, but as we were making the final upward climb he seemed to rouse himself from some deep well of thought, which I had mistaken for lethargy.
“I think I understand why you have to help Hovis Daniels.” He was watching the leaves rain down.
“Really.” This ought to be interesting, I thought.
Andrews turned my way. “In the first place, he didn’t do it, in the second place, you know who did, and in the third place, no one else will help him. He’s had the trials of Job heaped on him for most of his life, and he deserves to flag down a break.”
“Agreed on all counts,” I assured him, “but how did you come to such a compassionate conclusion in so short a time?”
I was assuming that the answer would have something to do with what had once been in the flask Andrews carried. Andrews surprised me—which was apparently becoming something of a habit for him.
“Hovis Daniels is more than a human being.” Andrews folded his arms. “He’s a time machine. I don’t know if he’s always been a time machine or if his tribulations forged him into one, but at this point in his life, he ought to be preserved as a national treasure.”
“Why do you think I tape-recorded him so much when he—”
“I mean there ought to be films and television shows and a declaration from Congress.”
“He made an impression.”
“He did.”
I turned the wheel and guided the truck into my front yard.
“Anything in particular—?” I started to ask.
“He talked about old man Jackson,” Andrews answered. “I’d asked Hovis why he would want to stay around a person like Mrs. Jackson—I guess I was still a little spooked by her—and he said he did it because he liked Mr. Jackson. Said they used to get drunk all the time down in that little shack where Hovis stays. One thing led to another and I eventually produced the flask—you know, mostly in memory of the dearly departed. Anyway, I wasn’t just listening to him talk, I was transported. I was there in the room with those two old men, listening to them laugh and talk and sing. I could smell them. And the manner in which he described Mr. Jackson himself—it broke my heart; made me wish I’d known him.”
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