Can’t Never Tell

by Unknown

  Today, Frank had been the one guy among the bunch who stepped up. The fact that he held my elbow until my legs quit wobbling was another plus in his favor.

  “I might have seen her shoe, or something,” I told him. “Nothing else.” No one could hear our conversation.

  He nodded. “Let’s go get you something to drink.”

  “They’re on their way,” Spence said as we approached him, pointing to his cell phone. “Yes, ma’am,” he said to the phone.

  Frank and I crossed the stream to a deluge of questions.

  “Did you see her?”

  “Are you sure she went off? Maybe she’s just wandering in the woods.”

  “Maybe Rog made a mistake.”

  “Somebody call her cell phone. She’s always got that blasted phone to her ear. See if she answers.”

  That wasn’t a bad idea. “Frank, you got your cell phone?”

  He still hovered at my side as if he feared I might topple over and he’d have to explain to Lydia how I hit my head on a rock.

  He fished it out of his pocket. “Anybody know her number?”

  They all looked at each other.

  “Wait, I’ve got it programmed in,” a woman in a yellow sundress and strappy sandals said. “It’s on the table with the food.”

  She headed down the path, the skirt of her sundress swaying.

  “Why don’t some of you take turns calling her name?” Frank said. “The rest listen. If she’s just gone for a walk or if she’s stumbled onto a ledge or something, maybe we can find her.”

  That gave them something important to do while we followed the sunny yellow sundress back to the now almost deserted picnic spot.

  Rog sat on a boulder, holding a plastic sandwich bag filled with ice to the back of his head.

  Lydia, who’d probably fixed the makeshift ice pack, had Jack smearing together peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Emma stacking lunch meat on mayonnaise bread. Didn’t matter who’d eat the sandwiches. Keeping the right people occupied was the real goal.

  “You want some tea?”

  I nodded, taking a seat in one of the folding chairs near where Lydia and her galley slaves were hard at work.

  Answering Lydia’s questioning gaze, I shook my head. “Spence has called for the Rescue Squad.” I took a long draw on the sweet tea.

  Rog’s eyes grew large and I thought I saw tears well up, but he didn’t say anything, whether from shock or from respect for the little ears, I wasn’t sure.

  Until that moment, I hadn’t thought what calling the Rescue Squad meant: Pudd Pardee and his merry band of misfits, guys who signed up so they’d have an excuse to clamp mail-order emergency lights to the roofs of their pickups and go racing around the county performing daring feats—or ogling blood-and-guts accident scenes so they’d have stories to tell at Tap’s Pool Room while waiting for the next call.

  The sundress lady flipped her phone shut and joined us. “No answer. I’ll keep trying, though.”

  She disappeared back down the path. I noticed that Jack’s parents weren’t around. I hadn’t noticed them in the crowd at the falls, but I hadn’t paid much attention to individual faces.

  “Rog,” I said, keeping my tone gentle. “You feel like walking with me for a minute?”

  I didn’t want to upset him or tire him, especially if he’d gotten a concussion or something when he fainted. But if he could pinpoint the spot where she went off, it might help the rescue guys narrow their search area.

  He took the dripping plastic bag from his head and stood, looking around as though he didn’t quite know what to do.

  I took the bag from his hand, the ice almost melted in the thick July heat, and tossed it in a garbage bag someone—likely Lydia—had clipped to the edge of one of the folding tables.

  I led him into the trees, just out of Jack’s and Emma’s earshot.

  “Rog. I know this is difficult, but we need to know what happened. The Rescue Squad is on its way. Anything you can do to help locate her . . .”

  Tears welled on cue and his bottom lip quivered, slight but unmistakable.

  This was going to require leading questions. “She fell off the top of the waterfall?”

  He nodded.

  “Where was she standing? As you face the falls, was she on the right bank of the creek or the left?” I spoke slowly and simply, as if to a none-too-bright child.

  He looked puzzled and shook his head.

  I repeated the question. “Where was she standing?”

  “In the creek.”

  “She was in the creek?”

  That had looked like the only way the accident could have happened, but why would she do that?

  “Why was she in the creek?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. But that must be what happened.”

  I moved so that we stood face to face. Rog was at least half a head taller than my five-foot-three inches, but he’d slumped into himself. He seemed to have trouble focusing. I blamed shock because I couldn’t smell alcohol.

  “Did you see where she was standing?”

  He shook his head, more tears welling up.

  “You didn’t see her?”

  Another shake.

  “Where were you?”

  “On the path, farther up the creek. A little glade there, quite peaceful, with the water on the rocks. I heard her scream. Just once.”

  “So you didn’t see her fall?”

  “No.” His chest deflated like a balloon with air escaping.

  “How do you know she fell?”

  He looked at me with a blank expression. I needed to slap some sense into him. “That scream. One scream . . .”

  “Where was she standing when you last saw her?”

  “Near the top of the falls.”

  “On which side? The side closest to the parking lot path or to the picnic area?”

  “On a rock. In the creek.”

  “Near the path? Or closer to the waterfall?”

  He thought for a blink or two. “In between.”

  “What was she doing?”

  “Talking on the phone.”

  “With whom?” She must have been closer to the trail crossing than to the falls, else the noise would have drowned out her conversation. Who the heck comes to a peaceful place like this with her ear glued to a cell phone? Maybe she was one of those moms who can’t bear to leave her kids. Did she have kids?

  An expression I didn’t quite understand crossed Rog’s face, but he didn’t answer with anything more than a shrug.

  “Did she say anything to you?” I was trying to find a gentle way to ask about her state of mind. Was she angry, out of control? Happily unaware of where she was? What was going on with her?

  He just shook his head.

  “What happened next?”

  “I walked up the stream to the glade. Waiting for her to quit talking.”

  “You don’t know who she was talking to?”

  His brow creased as though he’d had a painful cramp somewhere, and he shook his head. He stared off into the trees, where the green closed in thick around us.

  “So you didn’t see her fall?”

  His head slumped forward. “No.”

  I patted his upper arm, the spot where I’d earlier grabbed him to get his attention. “I’m so sorry. They’ll find her. They’re very good at this kind of thing.”

  I walked him back to the picnic spot. “Do you need another ice pack?”

  He hesitated before he answered, everything on a slight time-delay for him. “No.”

  Lydia took charge. “Rog, you need to sit down. Let me get you some tea.”

  She led him away, and I turned back toward the faint roar of the falls, feeling helpless. The rescuers would be searching in a very tall, very wet and slippery haystack—and they’d need to search in a hurry.

  Friday Afternoon

  The Rescue Squad arrived in their individual pickup trucks, followed closely by the idle members of the Ghouly Boys—the guys
who have nothing better to do on a Friday afternoon than jump in their trucks as soon as a dispatch comes over their radio receivers. Some of the Ghouly Boys, spurred only by ghoulish but leisurely curiosity, managed to get there before the last of the rescuers arrived.

  Setting up the search and rescue was a painfully slow, methodical operation. I wanted to jump in and start barking orders because it looked as if too many of them were just standing around with no clear purpose. Pudd Pardee, his belly straining his khaki shirt and the few remaining hairs on his head standing as if electrified, had the judicious good sense to defer to a somber, stick-built man who looked the part of a rappeller and swift-water rescue expert. Pudd, on the other hand, looked like a redneck jabber box, good for bellying up to a bar. The only purpose he could serve, in a water rescue, was if they needed a large, round float for some reason.

  The picnic food would’ve gone to waste but for Lydia offering the sandwiches and potato salad and homemade cookies to Pudd and the guys. The potential tragedy had no discernible effect on the appetites of the Rescue Squad members who hadn’t been assigned a task or any of the Ghouly Boys. True, they didn’t know Rinda Reimann personally. Her friends and acquaintances, anxiously awaiting word that she was safe, could do little more than sip tea or beer.

  Three of the rescuers left to drive down the mountain and make the demanding hike up the falls from the bottom, two others were scouting how to rappel down either side, and Pudd was on the phone seeing if a helicopter could approach the falls and provide “aerial reconnaissance,” as he called it.

  I sat on the flat boulder we’d used as a side table when the picnic began, bent over trying to pick a blackberry briar out of my sock. A pair of leather and linen loafers stopped within my low field of vision.

  “You okay?” Spence asked, his voice soft.

  “You have a tear in your pants.” I sat at eye level with the inch-long rip in the beige silk near his knee.

  He glanced down. “If that’s the worst that happened. You didn’t answer my question. You okay?”

  “Yeah.” I looked up. His eyebrows were knotted in concern. “You?”

  He nodded.

  I dusted my hands on my knees and stood. “I think Lydia’s all packed up.”

  “I’ll see you later?” He presented it as a question, not as a casual farewell. And I swear he shuffled his feet.

  “Um, sure,” I said.

  He smiled and ducked his head, making me think of a shy third-grader as he turned and joined the mechanical engineer on the path to the parking lot. He stopped to speak to Lydia, apparently offering to carry something. She shook her head and gave him a pat on the arm.

  As he left, I joined Lydia, and we stayed just long enough to make sure we couldn’t do more to help. We crossed the creek one last time carrying a final load to the car, making sure Emma and Jack were in tow.

  Rather than acting either panicked or fixated on what had happened, Emma and Jack asked a few questions before discussing whether they’d play two-person soccer or have a club meeting in the tree house. I credited Lydia’s calm vibes for that.

  “Wow, Jack,” said Emma as I checked their seat belts. “You made it through the whole picnic without spilling anything on yourself. That’s good.” Her tone implied for you, but carried no malice or meanness.

  Jack fixed her with a round-eyed stare. “Not quite,” he said. He tugged at the hem of his T-shirt, uncovering a jelly stain that had been hidden in a fold.

  Emma studied it with a solemn expression. “Still, that’s good. You can’t hardly see it.”

  He nodded, accepting the compliment.

  Lydia returned from giving Frank instructions about the rest of the picnic supplies and checked that both kids were settled in the back of the van. Emma waved at me, and Jack solemnly followed suit with a cocked open hand.

  I drove off alone. As soon as I slipped in the clutch and shifted into reverse, my legs started shaking. I hoped the search and rescue went quickly and would not have had reason to become a recovery operation.

  Friday afternoon before Fourth of July week felt like a holiday in Dacus. I’d given myself and Shamanique, my new assistant, today and all next week off. Melvin was out of town. I had no appointments, nothing to prepare for, nothing pending next week. Dacus is an old cotton-textile mill town and, years after most of the nineteenth-century plants were shuttered and replaced by high-tech jobs, many in the county still took off the first two weeks in July, just like they and their grandparents did when the big textile mills closed for summer vacation.

  The junk shops dotted along Main Street were full of tourists, the folks who’d headed to the hills to escape the heat in the low-lying parts of Georgia and South Carolina as well as those who’d come home to visit family but who’d already enjoyed enough of being cooped up together. My usual haunts, though, are not on the tourists’ paths and seldom suffer from crowds.

  When I walked in, I was surprised to find the light on my office answering machine blinking. Surely it was too early in the day for calls from celebrants who’d found their way to the Law Enforcement Center intake.

  “Miz Andrews? This here’s Pinner Pliny. Could you call me as quick as you can? I’m in a steaming pile of trouble and all I hear is you’re a good one to call.”

  Pinner Pliny? The voice, though husky, sounded female.

  “Oh, I’m with the carnival in town. The sheriff’s shut us down, which leaves me in a world of hurt. And my husband. Please call me soon as you get this.” She repeated the phone number for good measure.

  I dialed Pinner Pliny’s number and, on the second ring, got the same smoky voice.

  “Thank gawd. We’re in a pure nervous fidget here, let me tell you. Nothing like this has ever happened. Well, not since the peep shows, says E.Z. My husband. Can you hear him in the background? Says they used to have to pay off the sher’ffs in the little towns, to keep the girlie shows open, but nobody runs those no more anyhow.”

  “Just go to the movies for an eye full now.” A voice in the background carried over Pinner Pliny’s end of the line.

  “We’d offer to pay ’em off on this, but something tells me that wouldn’t work. They’re acting like we kilt somebody. Which we didn’t.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, more to break the flow than to agree. “What exactly would you like me to do for you?”

  “Get us opened back up. We’re gonna starve to death otherwise. Miss this whole stop, the whole Fourth of July. We can’t rebook the date. It’s already too late. Even if we could, the sher’ff made noises like she might hold us here anyway. As some kind of witness or something. E.Z. said he didn’t think she could do that but, to me, she didn’t look like somebody I’d want to mess with.”

  Mrs. Pliny had that figured right. I wouldn’t mess with Sheriff L. J. Peters. I’d known L.J.—Lucinda Jane—since grade school, but familiarity had not bred fondness. Wariness, but not fondness.

  “Tell me about—what you know.” I’d never had a client who’d been carting a dead body around in a carnival attraction. I didn’t offer that I was the one who’d reported the body.

  “We don’t know nothing. They say that was human, not a mannequin. How the hell were we supposed to know that?”

  “Where’d you get the mannequin?”

  “In with a bunch of props we bought from this guy when he died. We knew him in Gibtown. Decided a one-off would be easier to operate than some of the center joints we’d been running. So we bought it off his daughter, refurbed the trailer, added the automation. Pretty tame before E.Z. got hold of it. We’ve been doing good with it, though. This’ll kill us.”

  “What’s the sheriff told you?”

  “She ain’t told us nothing. Mostly she’s just eyed us all squinty, with her hand fondling that gun of hers like she was itching to use it. She ain’t told us nothing except we couldn’t run our show. Until further word, she said. E.Z. threatened to open anyway. Told her he had a right to earn a living. He hadn’t done nothing wrong
. She said that’d be contempt and she’d arrest him. Can she do that? E.Z. can’t go to jail. That wouldn’t be good for him at’tall.”

  “Been in worst jails than this,” came the background voice. “And faced down better sheriffs than that towering tub of lard. I’ll show her what E. Z. Pliny’s made of.”

  “E.Z., calm yourself. You’re gonna flip yourself right outta that wheelchair, you ain’t careful. And I ain’t coming over there to pick you up off the floor.”

  “You have no idea who the—mannequin was?”

  “Not a bit. How would we know that? Who in their right mind would drive around the country totin’ a dead man?”

  I cut in and didn’t wait for her to catch a breath to start another diatribe. “Who’d you say you bought the show from?”

  “The joint’s ours. E.Z. put it all together. Got a guy to paint the canvases for the banner line, everything. But we got that mannequin—whoever he is—and some other props from Con Plotnik.”

  “You said he lived where? Gibtown?”

  “Permanently.” She snorted. “He retired to Gibsonton, Florida. Lots of carnies live there. Not so upscale as Sarasota, where Ringling used to winter, but we like it. Con Plotnick’s there for good now. He died pretty soon after he parked his trailer.”

  “Which is exactly why I ain’t never quitting,” said the male voice. “Too damned easy to die, you stop moving.”

  “E.Z. don’t understand why anybody’d quit, until you just can’t go no more.”

  “Any idea where Mr. Plotnik got the body?”

  “Nope. Not a clue.”

  “Does Mr. Plotnick have any family?”

  “Everybody’s got family, though some would just as soon pretend they didn’t. Nobody knew much about Con, except what we knew on the road. That’s the way most of us like it.”

  “All anybody needs to know about somebody else,” finished the Greek chorus.

  “Miz Pliny, I can talk to the sheriff for you, find out what’s going on.”

  The business reality hit me about then. Collecting a fee might be difficult. As far as I knew, Shamanique was still in town. I could send her over to get a fee agreement signed and collect an hour’s fee up front. My new assistant lacked my qualms about talking money with clients. In fact, she was just the opposite. With her talents, we’d do better to hire ourselves out as a collection agency.