The Angel Whispered Danger

by Mignon F. Ballard

  “And you told Casey this?” I’m afraid I grabbed his arm a little harder than I meant to.

  He didn’t seem to notice. “Just before I left to go out tonight, Casey came by to ask Uncle Ernest what time he needed him—her—whatever—tomorrow and I told him he was spending the night at Ma Maggie’s.” Grady’s face was almost as pale as the Annabelle hydrangeas on the table behind him. “Dear God, I had no idea—”

  “Of course, you didn’t,” Aunt Leona said, putting a motherly arm around him.

  I just couldn’t help it—I covered my eyes with my hands, wishing, I guess, that the gesture would make this rotten predicament go away. Even though I hadn’t been to bed that night, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until we were sure Uncle Ernest was safe, but I felt what Ma Maggie calls “bone weary.” Weary of a husband who apparently had deleted me from his life, weary of people getting killed, or almost killed, and of having almost lost my child in a wilderness—not to mention old bones coming to light and the elusive Rose turning up.

  Then I felt a light touch on my shoulder and knew Augusta was nearby. The air, heavy with the scent of funeral flowers, suddenly seemed summer-morning fresh with just a hint of the angel’s delicate strawberry scent. And then it was gone—and so, I sensed, was she. But where?

  “Leona, are you sure Casey was in the kitchen today?” Violet asked. She looked so wobbly, I eased her into a chair. Augusta was trying to assure me that everything was going to be all right, but I couldn’t tell my cousin that. I wasn’t sure I even believed it myself.

  Aunt Leona thought for a minute. “Why, yes. In and out . . . with all that food and people coming and going, it was like a circus in there. Don’t you remember, Violet?”

  My cousin Violet chewed her lip. “Did you notice if he ever went into the pantry?”

  “I hate to interrupt,” I said, “but shouldn’t we—”

  “I’m sure he did.” Grady looked at his mother. “Said you asked him to bring out some watermelon pickles . . . you did, didn’t you?”

  My aunt’s silence gave us the answer.

  Uncle Lum stood at the foot of the stairs twisting the loose knob carved like an acorn on top of the newel post. Now he gave it a final spin. “That’s where Ernest keeps that can of Chocolate Comfort. If it’s there, it should be in the far left corner on the top shelf,” he said, hurrying toward the kitchen. “I just hope we’re not too late!”

  But our uncle’s Chocolate Comfort was gone.

  “I knew he must’ve taken it!” Grady said, trailing after his father. “You don’t really think Casey might have—”

  “Look, we don’t have time to argue about this!” I stomped my foot for attention.

  It didn’t do any good. “Not Casey, Grady,” Violet said. “Rose. Ernest has been drinking that stuff since we were children. It’s almost a ritual with him, and when they stopped carrying it in the stores several years ago, he began ordering it from a specialty catalog.” She turned to Lum. “You know what a creature of habit he is—always has been. And Rose knows it, too. He’s been keeping Chocolate Comfort in the same place since before he and Rose were even married.”

  “But the woman’s been gone almost forty years, hasn’t she?” Grady backed out of the kitchen, followed by the rest of us. “Why would she come back now? And what reason does she have to do away with Uncle Ernest?”

  But nobody took time to answer because all of us except Aunt Leona, who stayed behind to call the police, were racing to crowd into the car.

  I didn’t hear the horse until we were speeding down the driveway. At first I thought it was part of the nightmare I was living and I must be imagining it, but the others heard it, as well.

  Grady, who was driving, threw on the brakes. “Will you look at that? Shortcake’s out! Look at her—must be breaking the speed limit. Something must’ve spooked her.”

  “There’s nothing we can do about it now,” his father said. “Guess she jumped the fence back there, and wild as she is, she’ll be the very dickens to catch.”

  Violet leaned over me to look out the window. “Funny, though, she’s keeping to the shoulder. But look at her run! Acts like the devil himself is on her back!”

  I laughed. Not a devil, an angel! Penelope, long skirt flowing behind her, leaned low over the horse’s neck as Shortcake galloped over the top of the hill and out of sight.

  “Maybe we’ll catch up with her a few miles down the road,” Grady said as we turned in the same direction. But there was no sign of the horse or her rider on the other side of the hill—only a trail of gossamer mist and the sound of fading hoofbeats.

  Small, shy Penelope, so gawky and klutzy I wouldn’t trust her in the same room with my few pieces of fine crystal, rode like a jockey and looked like the Sugar Plum Fairy. It was a shame, I thought, that the others couldn’t see her.

  Cousin Violet tapped her foot as if she could make the car go faster. “Ernest might as well kiss that horse good-bye. I doubt he’ll see Shortcake again.”

  But I was just as certain he would, because I thought I knew where Penelope was headed.

  Ma Maggie’s two-story brick sat a few yards from the road behind a scattering of sycamore trees, but even through the dark foliage I could see a light in the kitchen window.

  “Somebody’s up!” Violet pointed out as we careened into the driveway and came to a gravel-scattering halt by the front steps. Grady and I vaulted onto the porch and hammered on the door, leaving Uncle Lum to cope with hauling Violet out of the backseat.

  A light came on in the hall and another on the upstairs landing, and at the same time, I heard again the sound of galloping hooves, this time rounding the corner of the house.

  “Good Lord, it’s Shortcake!” Uncle Lum shouted from behind us. “Has that horse gone completely crazy?”

  I stood and watched as Penelope, with a blissful look on her face, flew past us and sailed over the clump of holly bushes in my grandmother’s yard in a perfect jump. Then, settling for a more sedate pace, horse and rider trotted out of sight.

  “Did you see that?” My cousin Violet gasped. “Looks like she’s headed back home.”

  Grady pounded again on the door and leaned closer to look in the glass panel at the side. “Here comes somebody,” he said. “It looks like—it’s Uncle Ernest!”

  My uncle’s hair looked even scruffier than usual and his face was bare without his glasses, but he was still alive.

  “What on God’s green earth is going on here?” he asked, jerking open the door. “First some girl rides a horse right under the kitchen window, and now here you are making all this racket in the middle of the night! Would somebody mind telling me what this is all about?”

  “You can count me in on that, too,” my grandmother echoed behind him. With her hair covered in what we called her pink “sleeping bonnet,” and modest lace-trimmed robe, she looked like an illustration from Dickens. “Is somebody sick? What’s wrong?”

  “No, no, we’re fine,” Uncle Lum assured her. “But we were afraid something might have happened to Ernest and couldn’t reach you by phone.”

  We followed her through the dining room with the familiar bird-print wallpaper where we usually congregated for family dinners, and into the kitchen where a coffee mug sat on the blue Formica counter.

  “Oh, that! We turned off the ringer so that fool woman wouldn’t keep us awake,” she said. “And what’s the matter with Ernest? He looks fine to me.”

  “You didn’t drink any of that Chocolate Comfort, did you?” Violet asked Uncle Ernest, snatching up the empty mug.

  My uncle grabbed the mug right back. “I was about to—if everybody would just leave me alone.” Uncle Ernest reached for the can of Chocolate Comfort sitting on the counter, but I slid it out of his reach and zipped it to Grady, who clamped it to his chest with both arms.

  “It seems a hell of a time of night to be playing keep away!” My uncle banged his empty mug on the table. “First, that girl who’s been hanging around mak
es enough racket to wake the dead just under the window—and on a horse that looks an awful lot like Shortcake—and now this.” He frowned. “I wonder—does that child’s parents even know where she is?” Uncle Ernest pulled out a chair and sat, looking up at us with his stern professor glare. “And just what do you have against my having some warm milk with chocolate so I can finally get some sleep?”

  I saw Grady and his dad exchange puzzled glances at the mention of the girl on horseback, but the comment seemed to go right past Violet.

  Lum sat next to his uncle and drummed his fingers on the table. “We think someone might have put something in there that doesn’t belong,” he said finally.

  “For the love of God, who?” Uncle Ernest looked from one to the other of us as if he thought Lum was joking.

  I told him how Casey had come looking for something in the toolshed that night, and how I had followed the caretaker back to the cottage, but I could tell my uncle was getting more and more impatient.

  “Kathryn, my goodness, child, is that all? Don’t tell me you’ve all come over here in the wee hours just to tell me that?” he said.

  I glanced at Violet, who nodded. “There’s more,” I told him. “Casey’s gone—packed and gone.”

  “Gone?” Uncle Ernest frowned and shook his head. “Not surprised. Strange fellow, that one.”

  I took a breath and plunged in. “Not fellow, Uncle Ernest. Casey’s a woman.”

  I thought he was going to laugh until Violet put a hand on his arm, and I’m sure he could tell by the look on her face that this was no laughing matter.

  “Ernest, it was Rose,” she said. “The man we knew as Casey is Rose.”

  “Rose!” My grandmother grabbed the back of a chair, and I grabbed her—with one eye on Uncle Ernest.

  My great-uncle is getting up in years and I was afraid he might keel over with a heart attack or something. I mean, think of the shock of having one’s spouse return after an absence of forty years—and with evil intent, at that! Uncle Ernest, however, surprised us all.

  “I suspected she must be around here somewhere,” he said, speaking in a low voice, “but Casey! Casey Grindle. I’ll swear I never would’ve thought it.” He looked at me. “What makes you think Rose might have put something in my chocolate mix?”

  “We’re not sure, but we didn’t want to take any chances,” Grady said, and told him about Casey’s going into the pantry on a fabricated mission.

  “We’ll have to have the ingredients tested, of course,” Uncle Lum said.

  Uncle Ernest sighed. “I think you’ll probably find you’re right.” He looked at the mug, still in his hands, and came as close to crying as I think I’ve ever seen him. “And to think she’s come to this.” He shoved the mug aside, then quickly stood and shook his head as if he meant to shake away the past. “I think we’d better phone the police,” he said.

  “Aunt Leona’s already taken care of that,” I told him, and at the same time we heard a car drive up out front. I could see the swirling blue light from the window.

  The two young officers who stood in the doorway looked as tired and perplexed as I felt. “Somebody at your place called and said they thought you might be having some kind of trouble,” the taller of the two said to Uncle Ernest.

  “That could very well have been the case if I hadn’t had a jolt of the truth,” my uncle said. “I have good reason to believe my caretaker—who seems to be on the run, by the way—might be responsible for the death of Ella Stegall, and God only knows who else before her!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  My grandmother marched immediately to the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. “What makes you think that Casey . . . Rose . . . would want to kill poor Ella?” she asked Uncle Ernest.

  Violet answered for him. “Ella recognized her voice—I’m sure of it. You know how blind she’d become, and they say people tend to make up for that with other senses. And remember what she said to me about a voice or voices? We thought she must’ve been talking about hearing somebody in the woods back there, but I think she was beginning to remember where she’d heard Casey’s voice before.”

  “I don’t know how,” Uncle Lum said. “I never heard Casey say much of anything.”

  “And since I don’t hear too well, she must’ve known she was safe with me,” Uncle Ernest said. “But people tend—tended to ignore Ella. Poor thing, she was always just there in the background. I expect Rose forgot about her and let her guard down. We’ve had repairmen from time to time, and that crew came to spray the orchard not too long ago. Casey usually dealt with them and Ella might have overheard.”

  “Or she might have heard her speaking to the cat,” Violet said. “Casey didn’t like Dagwood. He dug in her flowerbed, got in her way, all those things cats do. Once I heard her tell him to stay away from the mower or he’d be mincemeat, and Casey sounded like he . . . she wouldn’t be all that upset about it, either.”

  Ma Maggie frowned. “What did you do? Did you say anything?”

  “I told Ella I thought she’d better keep a closer watch on Dagwood,” Violet said.

  “Knowing how outspoken Ella was, I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t confront Casey about her identity,” Uncle Ernest said. “And that signed her death warrant.”

  “But we can’t arrest someone on supposition,” the younger policeman said, reaching for his radio. “I’m afraid we’ll need more than that.”

  “I’ll show you more than that—a lot more than that. Meanwhile I suggest you run a background check on Casey Grindle and see if it matches up with Rose Dutton—who, by the way, is probably over the county line by now.” Uncle Ernest spoke with authority, and when he stood and looked at the two, I understood why his students had called him “Emperor Ernie.”

  “I believe if I were you, I would get in touch with the powers that be right now, and put out an APB before she gets any farther,” he told them.

  I wasn’t surprised when they did.

  I was surprised a little later, however, when the sheriff himself showed up at Bramblewood, leaving the two deputies in charge of seeing that my uncle’s can of Chocolate Comfort got to the lab. It was barely daylight and Violet had gone to bed as soon as we got to the house, but I had downed two mugs of my grandmother’s “stand-alone” coffee and was good for another hour or so at least. Besides, I wanted to know just what Uncle Ernest had in mind when he told the police he had something more to show them.

  “If this is as important as you seem to think it is, I want to have a look at it myself,” Sheriff Yeager told my uncle. He was a stocky, balding man who looked to be in his fifties. I had seen him the day after Ella’s fall and again with the searchers when Burdette and the others led us out of the woods. This morning his khaki uniform was neatly pressed, his black shoes gleamed and he smelled of woodsy aftershave. I marveled at how quickly he had managed to look regulation spiffy at such short notice.

  Aunt Leona was still asleep, and I doubted if we’d see Violet all day, but Grady, Ma Maggie, Uncle Lum and I followed the two men outside where Uncle Ernest unlocked the trunk of his ten-year-old Chevrolet that looked every bit as new as the day he bought it. Expecting to be shooed away at any minute, I stayed in the background as he carried a large cardboard box to the porch and set it down.

  “What in the world is that?” my grandmother asked as her brother opened the box.

  The sheriff carefully lifted out something wrapped in shredded black plastic that fell apart in minute tatters to reveal what looked to have once been a canvas backpack, black with dirt and decay. “Where’d you find this?” he said.

  “Under a rose bush in the garden,” my uncle said.

  “You mean somebody buried it there?” Sheriff Yeager peered closer. “Do you know who it belonged to?” he said, speaking in my uncle’s ear.

  Uncle Ernest looked at the rest of us like he wished we’d go away, but it was too late. Unless threatened with dire punishment—like having to iron while watching table tenni
s—I was there for the duration. “Do you remember reading about the hippie couple who disappeared on the river back in the sixties?” he asked the sheriff. “I believe this belonged to the man—Shamrock, I think he called himself—and I’d be very much surprised if that skeleton they found in Remeth-churchyard wasn’t his, too.”

  “Have you looked inside the pack?” the sheriff wanted to know, but my uncle shook his head. “Thought it best to wait, I was afraid I might destroy something.”

  The rest of us stood restlessly while the sheriff went to his car for gloves. “You couldn’t pay me to touch that nasty thing,” Ma Maggie said. I felt the same.

  From the expression on his face, I don’t think Sheriff Yeager relished the idea, either, but he lifted the flap after the buckle fell away in his hands, and reached inside.

  I don’t know what I expected him to find, but I found myself backing away as if something grisly might jump out at me. Instead he drew out what was left of a pair of moccasins, rotted remnants of what could have been clothing, a rusty key chain with a shamrock enclosed in plastic and a tarnished, waterstained wristwatch with the crystal miraculously unbroken.

  The sheriff held the watch to the light and squinted at something on the back. “Still a little too dark to see out here,” he said. “Let’s take it inside. Looks like some kind of engraving.”

  Uncle Ernest switched on a lamp in the living room and the sheriff held the watch under the light. “Q.E.P., 1962,” Grady read aloud, since he obviously had the best vision in the bunch.

  Uncle Ernest ran his fingers over the engraving. “Quincy Puckett—don’t know what his middle name was, but I’ll bet this watch was a high school graduation gift.”

  Sheriff Yeager looked up. “If all this is true, who do you suppose put him over there in Remeth Cemetery?”

  My uncle’s face was solemn—more than solemn—his expression made me want to throw my arms around him and protect him from all this. Uncle Ernest was such a good man, and innocent in so many ways. How could this be happening to him?