Smarty Bones: A Sarah Booth Delaney Mystery

by Haines, Carolyn

  “I’m the only one who has access to Stanton’s letters, and I intend to make the most of it. Truth is the only defense against slander or libel. I’m going to prove my hypothesis is true.”

  “How?”

  “Once the body is on an autopsy table, I’ll compare DNA to the living family members.”

  “And how do you intend to prove that the woman in that grave had anything to do with Lincoln’s assassination?”

  “Oh, I have my ways, Ms. Delaney. And I’m willing to stake my professional career on it. Now I must go. I can’t miss my massage. There’s so much tension in this kind of research, and I can’t afford to stress my back.”

  2

  Chablis, Tinkie’s lionhearted Yorkie, greeted me with a little dance and yips of pleasure when I slipped through the front door of Hilltop, Tinkie and Oscar’s home. Now, while she was alone, would be the best time to tell Tinkie about Olive Twist. Oscar was still on the links with Graf, and Tinkie would have a couple of hours to calm down before he returned.

  My friend was not a hothead or a brawler, but she’d married a Richmond, and woe unto anyone who messed with her family. Since I hoped Twist would be a passing nuisance—a kerfuffle among the heritage dames of the county—I’d considered keeping the situation from Tinkie. But I would hate it if someone hid things from me. Especially something involving family. Perhaps Tinkie could straighten out Dr. Twist and send her packing. Tinkie’s social skills were sharper than a surgeon’s blade.

  “Sarah Booth!” Tinkie sang as she came out of the kitchen waving a spoon covered with something brown. And stinky. Really stinky. Even Chablis took a whiff and ran to hide under the sofa.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Tinkie continued. “I’m making doggy treats for the local animal shelter fund-raiser.” She grimaced at the sad apron she wore, spattered with gunk that reminded me of an explosion in a turd factory. “The first batch I baked turned into rocks. I was afraid Chablis would chip a tooth. I didn’t have to worry. When I tried to give her one, she hightailed it and ducked behind a chair.”

  “You’re making doggy treats?” This did not sound like my detective partner. Tinkie and Oscar had a cook. And a maid. And a gardener. Tinkie was more inclined to get a pedicure than to bake. Judging from her apron and the smell wafting from her and the counter area, life was better in the Richmond household when she stayed out of the kitchen.

  “It’s for a good cause, and Madam Tomeeka assured me it was a simple recipe.” She was dangerously close to a pout. “I don’t understand why it won’t come out right. Tammy predicted I would be the hit of the bake sale.”

  Madam Tomeeka, known to her close friends as Tammy Odom, was a psychic of sorts and a loyal friend of the highest order. This time, though, she’d led my partner astray.

  “Did she also tell you that you’d wreck your kitchen and create something akin to toxic waste?”

  Tinkie took a halfhearted swipe at me with the spoon. I almost gagged. “What in the hell is on that spoon?” The color, consistency, and odor ignited convulsions in my throat. “God, it’s awful.”

  “I know.” Tinkie plopped the spoon in the sink. “I did something wrong.”

  “Understatement of the year. Put the baking aside, I need to talk to you.”

  Tinkie untied her apron and threw it on a chair. Her gaze swept over the kitchen and she picked up a bowl filled with foul-smelling brown goop and dropped the whole thing in the trash. It was swiftly followed by a pan of baked brown things shaped like bones. “I’ll buy some gourmet dog treats and donate them to the fund-raiser. I don’t think any dog in its right mind would eat one of these things.”

  Silence was the wisest choice. When the kitchen was tidy again, Tinkie motioned me to follow. “I have an appointment. We can talk while I’m getting dressed.”

  Tinkie was a clotheshorse, and I had total appreciation for her élan and taste. She’d look good in a feed sack, but her closet was filled with the latest fashions. I settled onto an overstuffed burgundy velvet chaise and gave her a chance to ask me the news. I wanted her full attention.

  She shook out her blond curls. “You never come to Hilltop if it’s a case, so this has to be personal. What has you picking your cuticles? You and Graf have a lovers’ spat?”

  I shoved my hands into my pockets. Tinkie had the vision of an eagle. “Graf and I couldn’t be better. It’s something else. It’s not as bad as it may sound at first, but—”

  “Spill it, Sarah Booth, before you give me a coronary.” Tinkie tapped her bare foot on the carpet. “It must be horrible for you to be so afraid to say it.”

  “A university professor is in town doing research on the Lady in Red.”

  “That old grave they found out in a field?” Tinkie opened the closet door. “Whatever for? And more importantly, why is this news? Folks have speculated about the woman in that grave for fifty years and nothing has ever come of it.”

  I wanted to broach the subject with finesse and calm. Those were not my strong suits. The end result was silence.

  “Well, what is it?” Patience exhausted, Tinkie put her hands on her hips. “You look like you’re constipated. Tell me or let me get dressed.”

  “There’s a crazy bitch in town who claims the Lady in Red is a relative of Oscar’s and that she intended to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. She’s a university professor and she’s come here to prove her theory.”

  Tinkie’s cheeks turned pale, then flushed. I could see her body temperature rising with every passing second. “Who is this person? Surely not someone from Ole Miss. The history professors there have far more breeding than to try to stitch together this ridiculous tale.”

  “No, not Ole Miss.”

  She caught the scent of the story. “Where the hell is she from then, and who is she?”

  “Her name is Olive Twist. She’s a—”

  I got no further. Tinkie burst into her tinkling trademark laughter. “You are pulling my leg, aren’t you? Olive Twist. What is she, a martini garnish?”

  “A toothpick would be more apt. Her parents were Victorian scholars.”

  “Olive Twist. Like the Dickens character, only female.” She caught on fast.

  “Correct. Or so I’ve been told.” One thing about the education we’d received from our literature teacher, Mrs. Nyman—we knew our classics.

  “So she’s from where? Duke? Emory? Vanderbilt?”

  “Camelton College. In Maine. It’s an up-and-coming Ivy League—”

  “I know where it is. But why is someone from there interested in the Lady in Red?” She caught the fabric of the whole quilt. “Oh, I see. She believes one of Oscar’s relatives was mixed up in the assassination of Lincoln. This is a big deal. She can come down here and dig up crap on prominent families and hope she gets enough notoriety out of it to publish a paper or get tenure.”

  “Not just Oscar’s ancestors, but Cece’s, too. And she said something about a bestseller. Her ambitions go beyond academia.” Oscar was the most even-keeled man I knew. Olive Twist wouldn’t get under his skin, because he wasn’t invested in the past. Cece was another matter. Her past was a wound. She lived with it, but I knew how deeply she hurt. “If Twist gets wind of Cece’s background, she is going to have a heyday.”

  Our friend Cece Dee Falcon had once been Cecil. Now he was a she and she was the head of the society pages and the best investigative reporter at the Zinnia Dispatch. When Cece had demanded the right to be her own person, her family had disowned her. This would all be grist for the mill of Dr. Twist’s book. Cece had lived through this once. She shouldn’t have to confront it again.

  “I don’t like this one little bit.” Tinkie snatched clothes out of the closet without even looking. “Where is this person staying?”

  “The Gardens B and B. I’ve already been there and tried to talk to her. All she did was run up a bar tab and thumb her nose at me.”

  “One call to Gertrude and Miss Sassy Britches will be out on her ear.” She slid in
to a cute pair of capris and sandals. “You’ve seen her. What’s she like?”

  “Really skinny. Like a number two pencil. And glamorous with a peculiar sense of fashion. And mean as a pit viper. She enjoys upsetting people. She disrupted the meeting of the Daughters of the Supreme Confederacy. That’s how I got on to her. Frances Malone came by Dahlia House and asked me to speak to her, for all the good it did.”

  “Then I guess I’ll have to take a swing at her. I’ll cancel my appointment.”

  That was exactly what I feared Tinkie might do. “First, let’s go out to the Egypt Plantation and see what we can find out. Maybe if we talk to the folks there we can find a reason to make Olive Twist go away.”

  * * *

  The drive to Holmes County was beautiful. Fall temperatures wouldn’t arrive in the Deep South for another four weeks, but I could see hints of approaching cooler weather in the quality of light. The sun was still brutal, but the pale yellow of approaching October edged the horizon and seemed to linger in the green leaves of the trees. I loved this time of year, the last, lingering days of summer’s heat. When I was a child, September had meant excitement. A new school year filled with potential and fun—though everyone wore shorts to the Friday-night football games.

  I wasn’t a geek or a bookworm, but I liked school. I loved the workbooks in which language and math problems could be solved with a sharpened pencil. September included the dizzying smell of a new box of crayons, opened for the first time. It was as if each color had its own special scent. Recess was kickball and jumping rope.

  If I could go back in time for a week, or even a day, I would halt life and step into the past. I’d had no cares, no worries, no guilt, and no regrets. What a shame we grew out of utopia and into adulthood.

  Tinkie’s manicured fingers touched my shoulder. “You’re far, far away, aren’t you?”

  “The past.” I could confess such things to Tinkie. She had a kind and understanding heart.

  “Not a bad place to visit, but don’t put down roots. People who live in the past are doomed to unhappiness. You have me, Graf, and all your friends anchoring you right here in the present.”

  “Thanks.” With so little effort, she’d pulled me into the moment. “I think we’re almost there.”

  The little town of Cruger, population under five hundred, was really only a blink. Holmes County had the lowest life expectancy of any county in the United States. The soil grows excellent cotton and soybeans, but the people struggle.

  I’d driven my antique roadster, and we tooled down a two-lane road bordered by fields and kudzu. The kudzu vine, originally introduced to halt erosion, had taken to the Southern states like a tick to a dog. The vines could grow twelve inches in twenty-four hours. They wrapped around fences, trees, lampposts, buildings—anything that couldn’t move away. Some farmers considered it good fodder for cattle, but most did everything they could to eliminate it because of its propensity to take over.

  “That looks like a dragon,” Tinkie said, pointing to several trees and possibly a billboard buried under kudzu. “I wish I could breath fire. I’d toast Olive Twist’s hair.”

  I caught the incredible scent of the purple kudzu flowers in bloom. It was so intense I could almost taste grape. “They’ve virtually eradicated kudzu in Sunflower County.”

  Oversized sunglasses shaded Tinkie’s blue eyes, but consternation hardened her features. “Just like I intend to eradicate this Olive Twist person. She has no right to be here tampering in our history.”

  She was aggravated, and I understood. Tinkie didn’t mean legal right, she meant something far more difficult to pin down. The legends, stories, and places were ours. Not personally hers or mine, but the collective “ours” of the state. We passed folklore and tall tales down from generation to generation. This community knowledge partially defined us. The Lady in Red was part of this, a story every Delta child knew, and most of us had made up our own interpretations of where she’d come from and who she was. And none of them involved Abraham Lincoln.

  My mother had told me the Lady in Red legend when I was nine. She and my father had driven me to Egypt Plantation to see the manager’s house where the coffin had been accidentally unearthed.

  I could still hear my father’s voice. “They were digging a field line for the septic tank here at the manager’s house when they hit the casket. They brought her up and discovered she was a beautiful woman. Lots of red hair piled up on her head. And she wore a red velvet dress with a white collar. Whoever buried her had loved her, because the casket was cast iron and made to order. It was shaped to her body and then sealed with a glass top. The coffin was filled with alcohol, and the body was perfectly preserved, but only for a short time. The backhoe cracked the seal on the coffin, and as the alcohol leaked out, the body decayed.” My father had put a hand on Mama’s back. “Something sad transpired to bury her here, alone, without any of her loved ones around.”

  My father had been a lawyer, and he didn’t spare me from the realities of life and death. He protected me, but he didn’t try to paint a pretty picture when it didn’t fit the scene.

  “When did you first hear about the Lady in Red?” I asked Tinkie.

  “I was maybe seven. I was at the bank spending the afternoon with my father. Mr. Sampson from Holmes County came in for a visit. He and Daddy were friends, and the subject of the Lady in Red came up. They both told me about it and how no one knew who she was. I remember thinking how sad it was. She was buried in the yard of a house with none of her people around her.”

  “That’s exactly what my father said.” I pondered another question. “Do you think she’s one of Oscar’s or Cece’s relatives?”

  “Anything is possible, but I doubt it. If she were a cousin, the Richmonds would have gotten her body to Sunflower County for burial. They wouldn’t have left her in a backyard. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Remember the stories we made up about her? She was always exotic, always a woman of wealth.” The memory came from that point of innocence that made childhood so wonderful. Children seldom fantasized about starving or ugly people, at least not little girls in the Delta. It was always princesses or movie stars or women who had a grand destiny.

  “It doesn’t matter where she came from, she’s ours now. She isn’t up for inspection or dissection by outsiders.” Tinkie pushed her sunglasses up her nose. “I won’t have it.”

  “Legally, I don’t know how to stop Twist. She can write what she wants.” I had to be up-front. Once Tinkie dug in, she didn’t give up.

  “Do you think she was murdered?” Tinkie asked.

  “Murdered and then preserved? The casket had to be expensive. Probably shipped up from New Orleans.” In a weird way, it made sense. Sometimes people killed the very thing they loved the most. The expensive funeral preparations and the unmarked grave would follow that train of thought.

  “Maybe she was running away from her wealthy New Orleans husband,” Tinkie said.

  “Maybe she was meeting her lover. A tryst that went wrong.”

  “Maybe she was foreign, like a mail-order bride.” Tinkie pulled down her sunglasses so she could look at me. She really liked that theory. “And she got here and met her husband-to-be and hated him and ran away. Maybe she got to the plantation and they tried to help her, but he caught up with her and killed her.”

  “Surely if there had been a gunshot or knife wound the law would have investigated.”

  “Not if she was buried without anyone ever notifying the law. People could do a lot of things back then. Folks believe she died right after the War Between the States, from what I can remember of the story. There was a lot happening around here. Union and Confederate troops had been all over the area. Remember, Sherman burned Jackson to the ground, and Jackson isn’t that far away.”

  Tinkie had a point. Anything could have happened. Our dead woman could have been a prostitute, or a thief, or a con artist, even a card sharp. People had been shot for a lot less. As far as t
hat went, she could have been the wife or sister of a soldier searching for a lost relative.

  “Maybe there’s more solid information at Egypt Plantation,” Tinkie said.

  “Let’s start there. They reburied the Lady in Red in a cemetery in Lexington. But maybe someone at the plantation knows the history.”

  The flat land of the Delta broke at Holmes County and became more rolling. We drove to the plantation—six thousand acres of cotton, corn, soybeans, and peanuts. There had been a time when the plantation was like a small town. Workers had lived on the property. Churches and stores had sprung up within walking distance. The community of Egypt Plantation, like all of the large plantations in the Delta, would have been self-sustaining.

  Things had changed. Folks had cars and drove into Lexington for shopping and supplies. Huge pieces of equipment did the work of hundreds of hands. But the land was the same, and the crops growing were lush, abundant, and well tended.

  The manager had no new information for us and wasn’t aware of any recent interest in the woman once buried there. He sent us on to Lexington, the county seat, to the Odd Fellows Cemetery where the Lady in Red was reinterred. Tinkie and I found her without any trouble.

  “I wonder who paid for the gravestone?” Tinkie asked, her finger tracing the lettering on the marker. “Nineteen sixty-nine … that’s when she was found … 1969. I guess they judged her age by the clothes she wore.”

  My family members were all buried at Dahlia House in the family plot. Mama, Daddy, Aunt Loulane, Great-great-great-grandma Alice, Uncle Lyle Crabtree, and Jitty rested among the markers with names I didn’t know. This woman was all alone. “I don’t want to be buried,” I said.

  “Well, it’s not something we have to worry about today, Sarah Booth.”

  “Excuse me, ladies. Are you here about the exhumation request?”

  Tinkie and I both started and whirled around. A distinguished-looking gentleman stood only ten feet away. He wore a suit and a starched shirt even though it had to be over ninety degrees. “Who are you?” Tinkie asked.