5 Death, Bones, and Stately Homes

by Valerie S. Malmont

  Haley put one arm around me, and with his other hand, pressed something against my side. He led me back to the van, waving at a couple of truckers who smiled and tooted in reply.

  Haley opened the driver's-side door and told me to get in. "Don't try anything stupid, Tori."

  I slid across the seat.

  "Don't forget your seat belt," Haley said.

  I snapped it over my chest and glared at him.

  Haley tossed a ballpoint pen onto the seat.

  "There's your knife," he laughed. "You should know I can't carry a weapon, being an ex-con. And you didn't really think I would hurt you, did you?"

  "If you don't want to hurt me, take me to the Lickin Creek police station," I demanded.

  "That's just what I was planning to do. We need to tell them Marvin's lost out there. He could need help."

  I was ashamed that I hadn't once thought about Marvin Bumbaugh in the past nightmarish hours. The poor man could be lying hurt in a ditch by the side of the road. Or even worse, he could still be in the tunnel.

  Although I still half expected Haley to carry me off to a secret place and turn me into his sex slave, he drove straight to Hoopengartner's Garage, where he insisted on coming inside with me. I wanted to laugh at the look on Luscious's face when we walked into his office. "Your clothes," he gasped, turning beet-red. "Where are your clothes? Oh no...it was you."

  "What are you talking about?" I asked.

  "About twenty minutes ago something came in on the scanner about a half-naked woman running down the highway. I never dreamed... What on earth was you doing out there, Tori?"

  "I was trying to get the attention of the state trooper parked in the middle of the road."

  "You didn't need to take off your clothes to do that," Luscious said slyly.

  "I'll say. Not when it was just a stupid dummy."

  "Cardboard Charlie," Haley said by way of explanation.

  "Oh yeah. Everybody knows about Cardboard Charlie, Tori. State Police don't have enough troopers to have one sitting there watching traffic all day, so they done put a dummy in a cruiser, hoping it'll scare people into slowing down. Trouble is, everybody knows he's not a real trooper, so it don't work. Why did you take your clothes off?"

  "There's a simple explanation," I said. "I left my clothes in Marvin Bumbaugh's car in a tunnel somewhere."

  "Not that Tunnels and Trails place Marvin wants to buy?"

  I nodded.

  "He oughta be ashamed of hisself, taking you there. It needs cleaned out bad."

  "I know that now"

  "Where is Marvin?" Luscious asked, peering around the room as if expecting to see the borough council president hiding in a corner.

  "We don't know," Haley said. "His car broke down in the tunnel, and he left Tori there while he went for help."

  Luscious looked at Haley, seeing him for the first time. "Aren't you Reverend Haley?" he asked.

  Haley smiled ever so modestly and inclined his head.

  "It's a real pleasure to meet you, Reverend." Luscious was out of his seat, shaking Haley's hand. "Won't you please sit down. I've heard a lot of good things about you'uns and your ministry"

  Haley took the chair Luscious had practically thrown at him and held it for me. "Tori's had kind of a bad day," he said. "I think she needs to rest."

  After I sat down, Luscious threw a blanket over my bare legs. Considering that I was showing less flesh than the garage receptionist usually did, I thought that was both unnecessary and amusing.

  "Excuse me," Luscious said when the phone rang. He answered, listened quietly, then said, "You don't need to worry about her. She's here. Yup. Brought in by that minister fellow what has the Church on the Go." He hung up and retrieved his hat from the tarnished brass rack by the door. "That was Marvin," he said. "He's in the Carlisle Hospital emergency room."

  "Why?" Haley and I chorused.

  "Evidently he had a bad fall and was knocked unconscious. Some trucker found him on the side of the road and brought him in. I'm going down to get him."

  "Can you please drop me off at Ethelind's house on your way?" I asked.

  Luscious glanced at Haley. "Okay with you, Reverend?"

  "I don't need his permission, Luscious," I said, but he paid no attention. Luscious was so impressed by having Haley in his office that I knew there was no point in telling him Haley had been stalking me. He would never believe me.

  Nineteen

  I needed to confront Alice-Ann with something that had been bothering me for a while. It had been Alice-Ann who had begged me to keep secret our discovery of a corpse, and I had done as she wished until our corpse's fiancee had turned up dead in a trunk. However, when I took Luscious to the springhouse to show him where we'd found the body, she'd been noticeably absent from the scene. And she'd been silent throughout the rest of the week, leaving me to deal with criticism from my boss and disapproval from my landlady, the police, and just about anyone who ran into me on the street.

  When I called to ask if I could drop by, Alice-Ann was her usual cheery self. "Come on over, Tori. I can use your help."

  I drove out to Silverthorne, the estate where Alice-Ann's deceased husband's family home was located, and parked next to the sandbox. Her son, Mark, waved at me but was too preoccupied with his miniature crane and tractor to come over and give me a hug.

  The front door was open, and I walked in without knocking. Alice-Ann sat on the floor of the living room amidst an enormous heap of pinecones and a tangle of florist's wire.

  "What are you doing?" I asked, kneeling on a bare section of braided rug.

  "Making pinecone pigs to sell at Lickin Creek Day." She must have seen the disbelief on my face. "Don't give me that superior `New York' look, Tori. Pinecone pigs are very popular. Grab a pinecone and do what I do. It's not difficult once you get the hang of it."

  I thought I "got the hang" of making pinecone pigs rather quickly and made three or four before Alice-Ann remarked that they looked too amateurish to sell and suggested I give up my efforts and get us some iced tea instead.

  My fingers were sticky with pine sap and sore from the prickly ends of the pinecones, so I didn't object to stopping. In the kitchen, I found a pitcher of iced tea in the refrigerator. After opening a few cabinet doors, I located some tall glasses, filled two of them with tea, dropped a pinch of calorie-free sweetener in each, and carried them back into the living room.

  "I'm glad for the break," Alice-Ann said, as we sat side by side on the sofa, facing the tall windows. Poplar leaves danced in the summer breezes and splintered the sunlight into dappled splashes of brightness and shadow on the sloping lawn. I could barely make out the tips of the towers of historic Silverthorne Castle in the distance, on the far side of the pond.

  "You're upset with me, aren't you?" Alice-Ann asked.

  I was relieved that she had brought the subject up. "You left me in the lurch," I said. "You deserted me when I needed you. I said I was going to tell the police about our discovery, and I asked you to be there, and you weren't."

  "I'm so sorry. It's that I felt like such a complete idiot. I kept thinking about how it would sound: first we found a body, and we hid it and didn't tell anyone, then we lost the body and we didn't tell anybody about that, either. If that wasn't bad enough, another body turned up, and I knew we really should tell about the first body, but I thought maybe we'd broken the law by keeping it a secret, and we'd be thrown in jail or something.... I'm a single mother, Tori. What would happen to Mark if I went to jail?"

  "So you let me face the consequences alone."

  She hung her head and peered up at me through the streaked hair that had tumbled in her face. "I wouldn't have let you go to jail alone, Tori. I'd have'fessed up if it had come to that. `I'll kneel down and ask of thee forgiveness: and we'll live, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies....' Am I forgiven?"

  "Of course. I'll always `laugh at gilded butterflies' with you." Who wouldn't forgive a best friend
who could apologize with a quotation from King Lear? Alice-Ann had been an English literature major in college where we first met, and her ability to dredge something appropriate up from her memory for every occasion was truly amazing. The only reason I knew this particular quotation was from King Lear was because she'd used it on me several times before. And each time I'd excused her behavior. Sometimes you just have to accept a best friend for who she is, instead of who you'd like her to be.

  That dispute settled, Alice-Ann took our empty glasses into the kitchen and brought them back full. "I've been worried about you," she said, as she placed the frosty glasses on the table.

  "Why?"

  "You've got to be really upset about your father. People are saying that's why you went kind of crazy out on the highway and..."

  "What did you hear?"

  "That you were found running around the highway with no clothes on and Reverend Haley rescued you. There are some people who said you must have been high on cocaine."

  "That's absolutely not true," I stammered. I knew that even if I told Alice-Ann the whole story, the Lickin Creek Grapevine would perpetuate the more interesting version. However, I still felt I had to make an attempt at clearing myself, so I told her about being stranded in the snake-filled tunnel while Marvin Bumbaugh went for help, and of Haley finding me there after following me everywhere I went.

  She was more interested in learning why I was naked than in hearing about my terrifying ordeal. She actually seemed a little disappointed when I told her I hadn't been naked at all, but had on my bra, panties, one shoe, and a leather jacket.

  "That's not the only thing that's happened to me," I pointed out. "I was shot at a few days ago at the BL Deer Hunting Preserve."

  "Oh my." Alice-Ann's hand fluttered around her heart for a moment, then dropped to the table where it picked up her iced tea glass. "Odd things do seem to happen to you. Like finding Wilbur Eshelman dead in the creek. I've never found a dead body." She corrected herself. "Except for Rodney Mellott. I guess I should have said I've never found a freshly dead body. Would you like some cookies? I baked this morning."

  I was so used to Alice-Ann's sudden changes in topic that I found nothing unusual in her thinking about cookies in conjunction with dead bodies.

  "I'd love some," I said.

  While she was out of the room, I thought about what she'd said, not about her never finding bodies, but before that when she'd said odd things happened to me.

  When Alice-Ann came back with a pewter platter piled high with chocolate chip cookies, I said, "Odd things have been happening to me lately, and they've not only been odd but also dangerous. I can't help but think there have been too many odd events."

  "Other than finding Wilbur, what?"

  "My father's embassy has been invaded, and he and his family are trapped God-knows-where. And I've been stalked, shot at, and left alone to fend off deadly serpents."

  "Serpents? When did they change from snakes to serpents?"

  "It doesn't matter," I snapped. "Also, I think it's very peculiar that the one time I go by the drugstore at night to fill a prescription I find the pharmacist has been murdered. And he just happened to be one of the few people in town who has always been kind to me. If you look back, you'll see it all began with us finding Rodney Mellott's skeleton in the cave at Morgan Manor. Which was odd enough without everything else happening."

  "Do you think there's some connection?"

  "I can't see how, but it does seem strange that all these things have occurred at about the same time."

  "Let me get this straight. Are you suggesting somebody shot Wilbur Eshelman to hurt you? Isn't that a rather far-fetched idea? I don't think anybody in Lickin Creek dislikes you enough to shoot one of the borough's favorite citizens just to irritate you."

  I sighed. "I know ...I know. But I keep thinking it has something to do with me. I just don't know what."

  Alice-Ann helped herself to a cookie. "I don't like to worry you, Tori, but it sounds to me as if you're turning paranoid. It isn't always about you, you know."

  The beehive on the end table by the sofa rang softly, and AliceAnn lifted it and uncovered the telephone. She listened a moment, then said, "Just a second," and handed it to me.

  I heard Ethelind's voice screech out of the telephone. "Tori, is that you?"

  I moved the receiver away from my ear and said, "I often wonder why you bother with the phone, Ethelind. At your decibel level, you could simply hang out the window and converse with people in the next town."

  "Sorry," she said, a little more softly. "You had a weird phone call from a truly hysterical-sounding female, and I thought I should let you know right away rather than waiting until you come home. I think she said her name was Jenny"

  "Jenny Varner?" A mental alarm went off.

  "Yes, I do believe that's what she said. She was carrying on so I could hardly understand her. But she said something about being locked in her bedroom while her ex-husband was trying to break into her house. She couldn't reach the police. Said she was scared to death of what he'd do to her if he got in."

  "Thanks." I hung up quickly and dialed Hoopengartner's Garage. According to the receptionist, both Luscious and Afton were out. When I told her that Vonzell Varner was back in town and trying to get at his wife, she said she already knew about it and was doing her best to reach Luscious.

  "Did you call the state police?"

  "I know what I'm doing," she snapped and hung up.

  I glanced at my watch, and thought about what it must be like for Jenny Varner, huddled alone in her bedroom, hiding from her crazy husband. "I've got to go," I said. "Maybe I can scare Vonzell away by driving up to the house."

  "I wish I could go with you, but I can't leave Mark."

  "That's all right. I wouldn't ask it of you. Do you have a gun?"

  "Heavens, no. I wouldn't consider having a gun in the house with a small child around. Why do you need one?"

  "Vonzell Varner is on the FBI Most Wanted list. He's not going to give up easily."

  "Wait a minute." She ran from the living room and a few minutes later returned with a Swiss Army knife. "Take this," she said, holding it out.

  Although I doubted it would be of much use in subduing one of the country's most dangerous criminals, I thanked her and stuck it in the pocket of my jeans.

  "Be careful, Tori. Don't try to play Wonder Woman."

  "I'm always cautious."

  Her laughter followed me to the truck.

  Since it was Sunday morning and most good Lickin Creekers were attending church, I was able to drive across the borough in record time.

  When I reached the little street of old but neat row houses where Jenny Varner lived, I found it unusually quiet. There were absolutely no signs of life anywhere, which was decidedly odd, I thought. Surely not everybody was in church. There were cars parked along the curb, but the agent or agents in the black pickup were gone.

  I drove slowly down the street and saw that the front door of Jenny Varner's house stood open. This alarmed me. If she'd been as terrified as Ethelind had described, she would never have left her door open. I abandoned the truck in the middle of the street, jumped out, and ran up the steps to jenny's front porch. Before I was halfway to the porch, I could see that the door had been kicked in.

  "Hello," I called, cautious, afraid to enter. "Anybody home?"

  There was no answer, but I didn't know if that was a good sign or a bad one. I glanced over my shoulder in the hope that a neighbor or two would appear, but all I saw was a gray cat strolling slowly across the street. I knew I'd have to go inside. Jenny could be in there hurt ...or worse. I pushed the door wide open with one foot, waited a moment, then edged through the door.

  The living room showed signs of a fierce struggle. Furniture was overturned and broken, curtains had been pulled from the rods, broken knickknacks were strewn across the floor. And the house was so silent I was sure there was nobody alive in there. Still afraid for my own safety, but
more frightened for jenny, I ran into the kitchen. Everything looked normal there. I went back into the living room, and looked at the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. My stomach churned when I saw a few drops of what could be blood on the worn carpet.

  I went upstairs. Off the landing were three bedrooms. Two appeared to be children's rooms, with neatly made bunk beds and no toys in sight. The door to the third bedroom was splintered and hung from just one hinge. Although I was positive there was no one in the house, I took Alice-Ann's Swiss Army knife out of my pocket and unfolded the large blade. It didn't look particularly threatening, so I popped it back into place and pulled out the corkscrew, which I thought might be more useful if I were attacked.

  The bedroom with the broken door was obviously where jenny had been trying to hide from her husband. The telephone, which she must have used to call for help, had been jerked from the wall. The dresser was upended, lamps broken, even pictures pulled from the walls.

  But where was Jenny? I felt no fear at all now, only urgency. I had to find her. I refused to let myself think that she was already dead. But after several minutes of throwing open closet doors, checking under beds, looking behind smashed furniture, I realized jenny Varner was no longer in her house.

  Outside I looked desperately up and down the street, hoping to see someone, anyone, but it was still deserted. I ran next door to a house that would have been identical to jenny's, if jenny's small front lawn had been littered with toys, and pounded on the door. After an eternity, a woman's voice called through the door, "Who's there?"

  "My name is Tori Miracle. Something's happened next door. Can you let me in?"

  I heard the metallic clink of a lock being turned, and the door opened just enough for me to see that it was on a chain. A woman peered through the crack at me. "You'uns is that girl from the Chronicle, ain't you?"

  I nodded impatiently. "Jenny Varner's been hurt. Maybe kidnapped. Did you hear or see anything this morning?"

  "Just a sec." The door swung nearly shut, the chain rattled, and then the woman opened the door wide enough to admit me. She slammed it shut behind me and relocked it.