“Sarah, good morning. What brings you out on this rainy day?”
“Mama asked could I get my hair cut this morning,” she said.
“I’m sure you can,” I said looking her over. She was wearing the red dress I’d seen her in at open mic the night before. “Didn’t you get your hair cut last week? You’re not exactly desperate for a cut with a capital D.”
“Mama is the one with the capital D. That’s what she said last night.”
“Last night after your open mic performance? That was very good, by the way.”
“Thank you, Miz Jefferies. I wish Daddy had been there to see it. He was busy having one of his ‘Damn’ days.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and get up in the chair, Sarah. I think I can trim your hair before my 9:30 gets here.”
“I guess that’s the way Daddy takes care of business,” she said, climbing into the chair. “Everything is damn with a capital D.”
“Well, we need not worry about that,” I said.
“I suppose you’re right,” Sarah said. “Mama worries about it some. That’s why she was using the capital D last night when she and Daddy were discussing her red dress again. ‘I’m done with you with a capital D,’ she told him. I went out in the yard and took a nap.”
“In the rain?”
“I have a tarp.”
We talked about the weather then and whether they were having the same weather in New Orleans. Nellie came in and said that all her boys were back home at last, and the house was back to its usual chaos. Sarah observed that Nellie’s boys were wild animals, so living in her house must be like living outdoors. Nellie allowed as how that was true.
“Fun,” Sarah said. “And you don’t even need a tarp.”
Nellie told me that since she had seen Aubrey and Norris earlier in the week, they had discovered more photos on Annie’s laptop.
“Who was August with this time?” I asked, glancing down at the little blonde person in my chair.
“Nobody,” she said. “They were the same photos they had found of Burl and Dr. Cason, only with a different woman — a different woman’s face, anyway.”
“I’m totally confused,” I said. I wondered if Nellie was leaving out stuff that she didn’t want to say in front of Sarah.
“What happened was that Annie had the photos of Burl and Dr. Cason, and she Photoshopped August’s face into the photos. That’s the word they used, ‘Photoshopped.’”
“That’s a picture-editing program,” Sarah explained.
“So Annie edited the pictures to make it look like August was, ah, involved.”
“Apparently,” Nellie said. “So August was only half as involved with her flower child activities as we thought.”
Nellie was telling me what Rudy had said about the new distillery when Woodley came in. He began by thanking me for discovering Annie’s phone. He said it was curious that the phone had one number in it and that was for Connor — whom he was on his way to speak with — and that someone had used the phone to call that number yesterday.
“Some amateur?” I suggested.
While he was thinking of a follow-up question, he recognized the little person in my chair and asked her if she’d brought her thirty-ought-six.
“Not today,” Sarah said. “Daddy told me he needed it.”
“Has he gone hunting?” Woodley asked. “Nothing’s in season, is it?”
“I believe you’re right about that, Investigator Woodley,” Sarah said. “He just said he needed it and ran off.”
Woodley took a professional interest in people running off with guns. “Sounds like he’s in a hurry to do some target shooting,” he said.
“I’d hate to be one of those targets today,” Sarah said, “since he’s having a ‘Damn’ day.”
“That’s a day when the only thing he says is ‘Damn’ all day,” I explained.
“You never know what might cause a ‘Damn’ day,” Sarah observed, “although it often involves some activity of Mama’s. That’s probably the case today, since she went to check out some things in New Orleans. When I mentioned it to Daddy, he got all excited.”
Woodley gave me a startled look with a question in it, as if I might know what Lester Jameson might be thinking of doing with that thirty-ought-six. I gave back his startled questioning look with a little shrug, and he rushed out the door.
I told Sarah that Nellie would finish the last of her trim and then find her a treat in the café area.
“You’re not going after Bee?” Nellie asked.
“No, I have another errand to run before Woodley gets around to it.”
“Connor? Are you sure you want to go there?”
“No,” I said. “I just have to.”
“I’d offer to go with you, but somebody has to stay with Miss Sarah,” Nellie said with the clear meaning that she wasn’t about to go see the man who could be the murderer.
I’d driven out Waycross Road many times but never with eyes for murder. If the killer had come along here, what did he or she see? Why was the killer carrying a rifle? Was he or she hunting Annie? Or did this person just happen to see Annie and just happen to be carrying the rifle and happen to have a reason to chase her down and shoot her?
When I got to the point where the nameless lane — the “unifying element” — intersected Waycross Road, I pulled over and looked down the lane toward the mulberry tree. The area along here was sparsely wooded, and I could easily see the mulberry tree. Annie may have felt as though she was hidden in the darkness underneath that tree, but the light from the phone’s screen would show her face to anyone coming along Waycross Road, just as I had seen her from Tennessee Street.
I drove on to Connor’s. He was at his forge on the side of his house. He looked up as I pulled into the drive and then went back to hammering the white-hot metal he held with a pair of tongs. He kept at his hammering as I walked up to the forge.
“Hey Connor.”
“Hey Savannah.”
I watched him hammer the metal. His blue T-shirt was plastered to his body with sweat, and his wild red hair and beard shuddered with every clanging blow of his hammer.
“Watcha making?” I asked.
“A poem,” he said.
He turned the metal and hammered it. Held it up, turned it, hammered.
“It’s as Blake said,” and he hammered the cadence as he recited:
Here alone I in books formed of metals
Have written the secrets of wisdom
The secrets of dark contemplation
He held the metal up, put it back on the anvil and hammered:
One command, one joy, one desire,
One curse, one weight, one measure,
One King, one God, one Law.
He held up the metal and then plunged it into a trough of water. The steam hid his face. He put down the hammer and tongs.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” he asked, wiping his face with a towel.
August was in the kitchen, and Finnegan came up to me as I came through the door.
“Finnegan, you look all better!” I crouched down and ran my hands along both sides of his long-eared head. He wagged the rear third of his body.
August was wearing jeans and a T-shirt rather than some exotic outfit — a little disappointing. But I was so happy to see her alive that I almost cried. She told me she had fully recovered, thanks to Connor. She’d been sick in bed for most of the past couple of weeks.
Connor was making tea. I apologized for scaring him with the call from Annie’s phone.
“Gave me quite a shock, it did,” he said. “After I had time to get my wits about me, I decided the police must have found the phone.”
“So Annie was threatening to poison Finnegan using that weird voice, so you didn’t know who it was?”
“I’d get a call almost every day. I didn’t take it too seriously at first, but then somebody left poisoned hamburger meat outside the house. Finnegan must not have cared for the taste of the stuff, be
cause he didn’t eat much of it. What he did eat made him pitiful sick. You saw how he was.”
August put cups out for us, and Connor set the teapot on the table.
“Then I heard that Old Man Feazel’s dog’d been poisoned. I kept getting the threatening calls. About that time August had the allergic reaction. She was in the other room there struggling to breathe. I was going more than a little crazy with all this, as you might imagine.”
He poured tea in the cups.
“So you went to August’s and got her rifle?” I asked.
“I felt like I had to defend my castle, you know? I didn’t know who I might be dealing with, but I knew it was someone cruel. I’ve never thought of shooting another human being, but I wanted to shoot whoever was threatening Finnegan, a poor creature who couldn’t defend himself.”
“Did you walk to get the gun?” I asked.
“Yes, I don’t know why. I didn’t want my truck seen at August’s. I didn’t want to deal with Sanders.”
“And you saw Annie under the mulberry tree.”
“Didn’t recognize her at first, but I was suspicious of somebody sneaking around out there with a cell phone.” He stared into his tea. “When I got closer, I heard that weird voice and knew I’d found the person who was tormenting me. I confronted her, and she ran out to your street. I followed her and caught her there. She told me August was a slut. She told me she would come back and finish off Finnegan and finish off August.”
He looked up at me. “So I shot her.”
August put her hand on his arm.
“Now I need to find that Woodley fellow and quit all this,” he said.
Chapter 20
Knockemstiff has not quite returned to normal yet. We need a new doctor and some highly principled people will not do business with Burl Botowski.
But I’m walking to the salon again on days when the weather is fine. Sometimes Sarah and Finnegan walk with me to the salon. Sometimes I drop both of them off at Mrs. Chabert’s.
Because Connor was instrumental in saving the lives of several patients whom Annie was gradually killing with bogus prescriptions, the judge gave him a lenient sentence. It turned out that Dr. Cason had indeed been defrauding insurance companies, so he lost his license and is doing some jail time.
August moved to San Francisco but found that all the flower children had moved south to a town on the coast called Santa Cruz. Before she could move there, August fell in love with a software billionaire and married him within a couple of weeks.
Woodley hasn’t located the Jamesons yet, so Sarah has been living with me along with Finnigan. Sometimes we weed the garden and talk crow-talk with the crows that perch on the fence until Finnegan barks at them and they fly away. Sometimes I hold Sarah up so she can pick mulberries from the mulberry tree. And sometimes Woodley shows up and we have lunch at the Bacon Up. At least he's gotten rid of that wrinkled sports coat.
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These books are all from my Caesars Creek Series
A Frozen Scoop of Murder (Caesars Creek Mystery Series Book One)
Death by Chocolate Sundae (Caesars Creek Mystery Series Book Two)
Soft Serve Secrets (Caesars Creek Mystery Series Book Three)
Ice Cream You Scream (Caesars Creek Mystery Series Book Four)
Double Dip Dilemma (Caesars Creek Mystery Series Book Five)
Melted Memories (Caesars Creek Mystery Series Book Six)
Triple Dip Debacle(Caesars Creek Mystery Series Book Seven)
Whipped Wedding Woes(Caesars Creek Mystery Series Book Eight)
A Sprinkle of Tropical Trouble(Caesars Creek Mystery Series Book Nine)
A Drizzle of Deception(Caesars Creek Mystery Series Book Ten)
Sweet Home Mystery Series
Creamed at the Coffee Cabana (Sweet Home Mystery Series Book One)
A Caffeinated Crunch (Sweet Home Mystery Series Book Two)
A Frothy Fiasco (Sweet Home Mystery Series Book Three)
Punked by the Pumpkin(Sweet Home Mystery Series Book Four)
Peppermint Pandemonium(Sweet Home Mystery Series Book Five)
Expresso Messo(Sweet Home Mystery Series Book Six)
Whispering Pines Mystery Series
A Sinister Slice of Murder (Whispering Pines Mystery Series Book One)
Sanctum of Shadows (Whispering Pines Mystery Series Book Two)
Curse of the Bloodstone Arrow (Whispering Pines Mystery Series Book Three)
Mad River Mystery Series
A Wicked Whack
A Prickly Predicament
Eden Patterson: Ghost Whisper Series
The Mystery of the Courthouse Calamity
The Mystery of the Screaming Elms
The Mystery of the Morbid Moans
The Mystery of the Ominous Opera House
Witchy Women of Coven Grove
The Witching on the Wall
A Witching Well of Magic
Witching the Night Away
Witching There’s Another Way
A Hair Raising Blowout: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) Page 16
