To Helen Back: A River Road Mystery

by Susan McBride

  “Well, I’m beginning to think you’ve got a Miss Marple complex. You know, the old lady snoop—”

  “Yes, I know good and well.” She arched her thick gray eyebrows, but he could see the twinkle in her eyes. Then she busied herself rolling down the window enough to allow the breeze in. “Some around here might call me a busybody,” she said, “but I’m just a people person with a curious soul.”

  Frank didn’t touch that one. He figured it might get him into trouble to speak his mind. If his twenty-year marriage to Sarah had taught him one thing, it was this: the key to getting along well with women was in knowing when to shut the heck up.

  So without another word, he took his foot off the brake and hit the gas, guiding the car out of town and onto the River Road.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, they entered Alton’s city limits, and that was with Sheriff Biddle driving somewhere between fifty-five and sixty—Helen had kept an eye on the speedometer. It took at least twenty minutes more before Helen saw the checkerboard sign for the truck stop looming over the interstate.

  The sheriff pulled the black-and-white into the lot filled with big rigs, garnering stares from several patrons exiting the restaurant. As she got out of the car, Helen noticed, beyond the plate glass, a good-sized crowd gathered within.

  “Looks like it’s a popular place,” she said.

  Biddle hurried ahead and pulled open the door before Helen could lift a hand. As soon as she entered, her nose filled with the welcoming odors of frying bacon and coffee, half a dozen pots of which merrily percolated atop a line of burners beneath a stainless-steel shelf that opened into the kitchen.

  She followed Biddle up to the counter, where a long row of men in plaid shirts were perched atop red vinyl stools. A few had their noses stuck inside newspapers. The rest bent over steaming plates of food, greedily shoveling in hash browns and pancakes.

  Biddle waved a hand in the air, trying to catch the attention of the waitress who buzzed back and forth behind the length of Formica. She breezed past them once, uttering cheerily, “Be with ya in a minute,” before she took off again.

  Helen took the time to peruse a plastic-coated menu.

  “Sorry t’ keep you folks waiting,” the waitress said, reappearing in a bustle of pink polyester, her netted brown hair pulled away from her face. In a blink, she had her order pad out of her apron and poised in her hand, pencil at the ready. “What’ll it be?”

  “Coffee, please,” Helen said, before Biddle had the chance to speak.

  “And you, Sheriff?” the waitress asked, eyeing his badge as she flipped over a cup for Helen, snatched a pot from the burner, and had it filled in a wink. “You want a shot of joe, too?”

  “Actually, I’m looking for Velma Simms,” he said, tugging off his hat. “I’m Sheriff Frank Biddle from River Bend. I phoned yesterday and spoke with the boss.”

  “Ah, yeah, so I heard.” She put away the pot and wedged the pencil above her ear. “Hank said a cop called asking some questions about Delilah’s shift last Thursday. So does it have to do with her ex-husband’s murder?”

  Biddle flushed. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are you Miss Simms, by chance?” Helen asked, peeling off the foil skin from a thimble of cream and adding it to her coffee.

  “In the flesh,” she said, only to be drowned out by the ding of a bell from the kitchen.

  “Velma! Pick up!” someone yelled, and with a shrug she slipped away, only to scurry past with her skinny arms agilely balancing—Helen counted—six steaming plates.

  Helen followed her pink form as she unloaded at one table then scurried over to an empty booth to pick up a tip and wipe the cluttered surface clean. She took an order here, another there, until again the bell dinged again madly.

  Helen felt tired just watching.

  Biddle got himself a doughnut from a nearby cake stand and devoured it in record time. He was just licking off the sugary tips of his fingers when Velma reemerged behind the counter.

  “So here I am,” she said, tucking a food-spotted towel into the waist of her apron. She wasn’t even breathing hard, Helen noticed with admiration, thinking there was much that motherhood and waitressing had in common. Only mothers never got tips. “I can only give ya about a minute. Is Delilah in trouble?”

  “Not yet,” Biddle replied, wiping his hands on a napkin. “I just need to check on her whereabouts last Thursday night. She worked the eleven-to-seven shift with you, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” Velma said, sticking her elbows on the counter and leaning over them. “Just like every Thursday.”

  Biddle nodded. He took a spiral notebook from his pocket and flipped it open to a clean sheet. He touched the tip of the tiny pencil to his tongue before asking, “So Delilah didn’t take off early?”

  “No, sir,” Velma said, almost too quickly, then bit her lip. “At least, I don’t think so, but one shift starts to blur into the next.” Her eyes drifted up toward the ceiling, and Helen found herself looking up as well. All she saw were several cracks in the plaster and what looked like a grease stain or three. “No, wait a sec, I take that back,” Velma remarked with a snap of her fingers. “She did scoot a bit early. She told me there was something she had to do, that it was important. I told her I’d cover for her. No problem.” She leaned in closer. “Hank was out that day with the runs, so I figured what the hell? Things were pretty slow.”

  Biddle scribbled in his book.

  Helen took a sip of her coffee then asked Velma, “Are you and Delilah close?”

  “We like each other well enough,” the waitress said, bobbing her head. “Not that we have much time to chew the fat, because this place gets crazy-busy. But when the old dogs are barking, we take a break outside and share a cigarette.”

  “So you know Delilah’s history?” Helen went on.

  Velma tipped her head. “Like where she’s from?”

  “More like, about her family,” Helen said.

  The woman’s eyes brightened. “Yeah, sure, Delilah tells me about her kids, how they’re doing at school”—she leaned in with a wink—“all the messes they get into. She says the boys are like their daddy, always lookin’ for trouble with the opposite sex.” She shook her head. “I told her she had to put her foot down but I don’t think she ever listened to me. I have a couple of young’uns myself, and if you don’t keep a close eye on them these days with all that sexting and bullying—”

  Ding went the bell.

  “Velma! Pick up!”

  The waitress sighed and wiped her hands on her apron. “Be back in a sec,” she said, and took off.

  Helen looked sideways at Biddle. He rolled his eyes, and she chuckled.

  In another minute or two Velma returned.

  “So, where’d I leave off?”

  “We were talking about Delilah and her ex-husband,” Helen said, steering Velma away from the subject of raising wayward children.

  “Oh, yeah, Delilah and Milton.” Velma pushed the pencil into her hair. “Sometimes you’d have thought from the way Dee talked that she was still half in love with him. Mostly, though, she just hated his guts. She said he’d screwed her out of what he owed her after they’d split. And when she got wind of him selling that riverfront land to the water park for all that bread—” Velma blew out a breath. “—look out.”

  “She knew about the land deal from the get-go?” Biddle asked.

  “Who didn’t?” Velma shrugged. “I mean, it was big news in the paper. Everytime there was a protest, the Telegraph had a front-page story. Delilah couldn’t miss the headlines, not with folks readin’ with their eggs and bacon every morning at the counter. It made her furious, knowing the old man was getting a fortune when she’d had to raise those boys alone on next t’ nothing.”

  “She threatened to get a lawyer,” Helen said, remembering what Delilah had told her after the funeral servic
e. “Maybe she figured with the land deal, she could finally get him to pay up.”

  “Oh, she had her dreams all right.” Velma sighed. “When she learned Milton sealed the deal with Wet ’n’ Woolly, it lit a fire under her like nothing else. She was married to him when his pop died and left him those acres. She thought half of it should be hers, or the kids’ anyway. She was on the phone a lot these last few weeks. It had Hank pretty pissed off. He told her t’ take care of her personal crap after work, not during.”

  Helen glanced at Biddle, but he was busy scribbling in his notepad.

  “Did Delilah ever hire that lawyer?” she asked.

  “She mouthed off a lot about it mostly and then something happened,” Velma said, but interrupted herself with a chirpy, “More coffee?” At Helen’s nod, she perfunctorily refilled the cup then continued. “She suddenly got real quiet about Milton. When I asked if everything was okay, she told me that she was finally taking care of things with him. So I assumed she’d found someone to take her on, maybe one of those fellows from those late night TV ads.”

  “Ambulance chasers,” Biddle mumbled as he tore into a second doughnut.

  Helen thought of a line from Shakespeare at that moment, one from the second act of Henry VI: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. . .

  She stifled her smile and asked Velma, “Did she meet with anyone here in the restaurant last week before her husband’s death?”

  “I wouldn’t say she met up with anyone.” Velma paused, hands on hips. She scratched at her hairnet. “But Delilah turned white as a sheet during lunch the week before last. I thought she’d seen a ghost sitting at one of her tables. I heard her say, ‘Aw, hell, what’d I do to deserve this?’ But then she tossed that red hair of hers and glued a smile on her face like nothing happened.”

  “You know a name?” Biddle asked.

  “Sorry.”

  “Can you give us a description?”

  Velma screwed up her face. “Let’s see, middle-aged, faded but kind of pretty.”

  “Pretty,” Helen echoed, and pushed away her coffee cup. “So it was a woman?”

  “A blonde.” Velma nodded. “Reminded me of Shirley Temple with a bad case of the frizzies.”

  Helen met Biddle’s eyes.

  “Velma! Pick up!”

  Velma smiled limply. “Off I go again.”

  “That’s quite all right.” Biddle hopped down from the stool and fished into his pocket.

  “Oh, no, it’s on me, Sheriff,” Velma said, but Biddle shook his head.

  He dropped enough bills on the counter to cover the coffee and doughnuts as well as Velma’s tip. “You’ve been a great help, Ms. Simms. Thanks again for your time.” He plunked on his hat before taking Helen’s arm and rushing her out of the place like it was on fire.

  Helen sat quietly in the car as he drove away from the rest stop and onto the highway toward Alton. When finally she could bear the silence no more, she asked, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Uh-huh,” Biddle said, though he didn’t take his gaze off the road.

  “My, oh my,” Helen murmured, and sank into her seat with a sigh, wondering what the devil was really going on between the two Mrs. Grones.

  Chapter 30

  ONCE BACK IN River Bend, Biddle pulled the car in front of the dented mailbox that said GRONE in faded white letters.

  He shut off the ignition but didn’t get out. Instead, he stared through the windshield at the broken-down house, a frown on his mouth. “So what do you think of this whole setup?” he asked Helen.

  She fixed her eyes on the patched screen door in the center of the rickety porch. “I haven’t a clue,” she confessed. “I had the impression that Delilah and Shotsie despised one another. If that’s not the case, then they certainly put on quite a show.”

  The sheriff absently patted the sheering wheel. “I’ve got dozens of townsfolk who’ll testify to seeing Shotsie Grone at the town meeting the night Milton was killed.”

  “I saw her there myself,” Helen said, though something about that night, something someone had mentioned recently, nagged at her brain. What was it? she wondered. She even closed her eyes, trying to jog her memory, but only drew a blank. She sighed. It would come to her eventually. It always did. She just had to be patient.

  “From what Ms. Simms said, it looks like Delilah might have made it to River Bend earlier than she’d like us to believe,” the sheriff said. “That makes her alibi awful shaky.” He scratched at his chin. “If only Milton could talk.”

  “You know a good medium, Sheriff?”

  He smiled thinly at her teasing. “It’s time I got a straight answer from Mrs. Grone. The both of them,” he hastily added.

  “So now they’re suspects?”

  Biddle reached for the door handle, then paused. “Hell, Mrs. Evans, I’ve got too many suspects to count on one hand.” He glanced at her. “What does your spidey-sense tell you about Milt’s women?”

  Helen had been pondering that all the way back from the truck stop. “What if they were meeting behind Milton’s back to try to work things out?”

  Biddle raised his eyebrows.

  “Maybe Shotsie was tired of Delilah haranguing Milt about the money he owed her,” she suggested. “Shotsie confided in me yesterday that she and Milton had been fighting a lot lately. She could have promised Delilah she’d pay her off once the land deal went through, just to get her off their backs.”

  “Okay,” the sheriff said, “I’ll admit that’s plausible enough. But if their getting together was so innocent, why did they keep it a secret once Milton was dead? Why did they continue to act like they hated each other’s guts?”

  “Perhaps,” Helen told him as she opened the passenger door, “because they do.”

  “You’ve got a point.”

  Helen followed him up the cracked walkway to the front door. As he knocked, she glanced to the graveled drive on the right, noting the presence of a beat-up pickup.

  Biddle banged some more before Shotsie appeared on the other side of the screen door, looking disheveled and notably perturbed.

  “Good Lord, Sheriff,” she said through the mesh. “And Mrs. Evans, too?” She made no move to invite them in. “What do y’all want this time?”

  Biddle doffed his hat, turning it around in his hands. “I’ve got some new information in your husband’s case that I need to discuss.”

  “Is she gonna eavesdrop?” Shotsie asked, jerking a thumb at Helen.

  “If I make you uneasy, I can go,” Helen said.

  “You can stay,” Shotsie said, but her frown remained. “I’ve got nothing to hide. Cripes, the whole town can listen as far as I’m concerned.” She pushed the screen door wide and gestured impatiently. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Helen sat beside Sheriff Biddle on a lumpy sofa upholstered in a green and brown plaid. Shotsie perched with crossed arms and legs on a lime-colored club chair, her posture decidedly unfriendly. “So what’s this new information you’ve got?” she asked. “I hope it’s that you’ve arrested Felicity Timmons, the old bag.”

  Helen bristled but stayed mum.

  The sheriff cleared his throat, setting down his hat on the scratched coffee table at his knees. He plucked the black notebook from his breast pocket and rifled through a few pages, finding a clean one. Then he retrieved his pen and clicked on the point. “Before I tell you what I know, I’d appreciate if you’d explain the extent of your relationship with the first Mrs. Grone.”

  “The extent of my what?” Shotsie snapped.

  “How close are you and Delilah?” Helen asked, putting it as simply as possible. “Do you see her often?”

  “Do I see Milt’s first wife?” she repeated, her back stiffening. She stared for a moment unblinking, then threw back her head and snorted. “If I had my way, I’d send Deli
lah to the moon, okay? She makes me sick from the top of her bottle-dyed red head to the toes of her ridiculous stilettos.”

  “Do you deny going to see her at her workplace?” Biddle inquired.

  “What, you think I dropped by the truck stop to chat and have lunch?” Shotsie said, not answering the question.

  “I’ll ask again, Mrs. Grone,” Biddle said, sounding tense. “Did you or did you not go to Delilah’s workplace and sit at her station the week before Milton was killed?”

  Shotsie pressed her plump mouth closed, toying with a yellow curl and staring off into space. Finally, she shook her head. “Nope,” she told them, “not that I can remember.”

  Helen caught Biddle’s eyes. He didn’t look as though he believed the woman any more than she did. They had caught her in a bald-faced lie.

  “That’s funny,” the sheriff said, and licked the pad of his finger to flip to a specific page in his notebook. “Because I spoke to Delilah’s coworker this morning, and she swears she saw a woman who looks exactly like you sitting in Delilah’s station mere days before Milton’s death.”

  Shotsie paled. “That’s not true,” she said, her voice sounding smaller than usual. “Someone’s making up stories. Maybe it’s Delilah. She always had it in for me, the witch.”

  “Stop playing games, Mrs. Grone.” Biddle shut the black notebook and slapped it on his thigh. “I know you met with Milton’s ex-wife behind his back, and if you won’t explain why, I’ll have to assume you were planning his murder.”

  “What? No!” Shotsie uncrossed her arms, waving them at Biddle. “It wasn’t like that at all! Delilah wouldn’t leave us alone. She kept calling and nagging. Miltie was ready to explode! Once Delilah knew about Wet ’n’ Woolly, it only got worse.” Shotsie fidgeted like a restless child. “She was on him like a tick. She refused to let go. Then she told him she’d tie up that land deal in court for ages if he didn’t pay up. She claimed half of it was rightly hers ’cause they were married when he inherited.”

  Now they were getting somewhere, Helen thought. That certainly fit with what Velma had told them this morning.