What Are You Wearing to Die?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “Okay, but nothing except their possessions.”

  He propped himself against the doorjamb, looking dead on his feet.

  “Go on home,” I commanded. “You can trust Martha, if you don’t trust me. And this door can be locked from the inside. We’ll lock up when we leave. We won’t be long.”

  I could see he was tempted.

  “Go!” I gave him a shove and he let himself be persuaded.

  Inside, the heat was so low that we left our coats on. Martha headed toward the bedrooms at the back of the house. “Could you get me something to put these clothes in?” she called. “I forgot to bring a suitcase.”

  I almost didn’t hear her. I was staring at the living room and dining room in astonishment. They were full of antiques. Not the kind of antiques we have, bought several generations ago for durability and not yet worn out. These were the gorgeous kind—the sort that Maynard sells—which I would never trust around children.

  Come to think of it, the rooms didn’t look like they had been lived in by children—or by anybody else. I did not see one book or magazine, one toy, or one photograph. The pictures on the walls were oil paintings in wide gold frames that looked like they ought to be in a museum. Two even had lights above them, although their cords dangled down the wall unplugged.

  The floor creaked beneath my feet as I moseyed to the kitchen to look for grocery bags. The place felt creepy even with Martha opening drawers and rattling hangers in the girls’ room.

  I couldn’t find the kitchen light switch at first, but in light reflected from the dining room I finally saw a double switch across the kitchen beside the back door. The place must have been wired by the man who did our new house, because none of these switches were where they’d be most convenient, either. When I flipped what would logically be the kitchen switch, a light came on outside, illuminating a back patio. Something that looked like an antique quilt lay folded on a chaise out there. It would be ruined if it stayed out in the frost and sun very long, not to mention what squirrels and birds would do to it. Since there was no crime tape on the patio, I opened the back door, retrieved the quilt, and set it on a dining room chair.

  “Are you bringing me bags?” Martha called.

  I shut the back door, pulled my coat tighter around me, and found four paper bags folded and stacked in a paper box beside the refrigerator. I also found three plastic bags stuffed into another plastic bag hanging on the inside of the pantry door. If I’d hung our plastic bags inside my pantry door, their bulk plus the food on the shelves would have kept the door from closing. Robin had one single shelf of food, containing only a box of Cheerios, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, an unopened jar of applesauce, and a couple of cans of peaches. It looked like Anna Emily had been right: The girls had been raised on peanut butter and applesauce. Had that woman spent her money on antiques instead?

  I went to take Martha the bags and met her in the living room, coming to see what was taking me so long. While she headed off to fill the bags, I peered around the living room. There was something I had forgotten in there, something about Buster. What was it? I couldn’t remember. Memory is a funny thing. You can remember you have forgotten something, even remember what the thing was about, and still not remember what it was.

  I moseyed into the dining room and inspected the china cabinet, which held two sets of china. Feeling a bit furtive, I opened the doors and took a quick look at the bottoms of plates. Robin had a set of Lenox for twelve and a set of Royal Doulton for ten. She must have done either a lot of entertaining I hadn’t heard about or have preferred to invest her money in valuables rather than trusting a bank.

  I was still bothered that I had forgotten something.

  While I tried to remember, I decided to explore Robin’s cabinets. You can tell a lot about a woman by her kitchen. Martha, for instance, has practical, childproof dishes and is a saver. I think she’s got every plastic container she ever carried home from the grocery store. She uses them to store leftovers and for freezing fruits and vegetables each summer. Walker’s wife, Cindy, is a thoroughbred who has china everyday dishes and stores leftovers in fancy containers she bought at a gourmet party. And me? That’s my business.

  Robin’s cupboards astonished me so much that I called, “Martha, come here a minute. I want you to look at something.”

  Martha arrived with a small shirt in her hands.

  “Stand there and tell me what you think.” One by one I opened the cupboard doors.

  The shelves were full of gray flannel lumps. I touched several lumps on the bottom shelf and described their contents, one by one. “A Paul Revere sterling silver bowl. A sterling silver vase. A silver coffee service: coffeepot, teapot, sugar bowl, creamer, and slop bowl. Over here”—I opened another cabinet where the contents were self-evident; I named them anyway—“a set of Waterford crystal for twelve.”

  I pointed toward the china cabinet behind her in the dining room. “One set of Lenox china and one set of Royal Doulton.” I moved to the pantry. “Here you’d expect to find food, right? You would find very little.” I opened the door and pointed to the solitary shelf containing foodstuffs. “But that mahogany box on the top shelf? That’s a Gorham silver flatware service for twelve. I climbed on a chair to look. And that”—I pointed to a large flat object wrapped in gray flannel, standing on the floor beneath the shelves—“is the tray to the silver service. There’s not a single dish in the place that children could eat on, except the stack of paper plates on the counter and a few plastic forks and spoons in one drawer. There is milk and a half-empty jar of applesauce in the fridge”—I opened the door to demonstrate—“and a good supply of frozen dinners.” I closed the lower door and opened the upper one. Most of the freezer space was taken up with dinners, but the compartment also held ten medium cans of frozen juice.

  “Now look at this.” I took out one of the cans and pried up the lid with my fingernails. “Voilà!” I pulled out a wad of paper towels and carefully unfolded them on the counter. Diamonds sent sparks all over the kitchen as I dangled a necklace in the air.

  Martha’s eyes were wider than salad plates. “Do you reckon Buster saw all this?”

  “Not the jewelry. If he’d seen the silver and dishes, he’d most likely have said to himself, ‘The woman had some nice things.’ I doubt he’d wonder where the dishes were for her children, or think to take the tops off her frozen grape juice cans.”

  “Why did you?”

  “I’m short. I was trying to see if she had any meat in the freezer, and I had to move this can to see what was behind it. It didn’t feel like solid juice, so I wondered if the freezer was thawing and I lifted the can to shake it. That’s when I noticed that the white strip that connects the top to the can was gone.”

  Martha came over and lifted another can. “This one isn’t juice, either. I think we ought to call Buster.”

  “I think you ought to put that right back where you found it and get out of here,” said a male voice.

  The young man I’d seen around town back in the fall and again more recently, searching for his wife, came through the back door. I’d forgotten to lock it in my haste to find Martha some bags.

  He wore a brown leather bomber jacket and gloves. His red hair gleamed in the kitchen light.

  I remembered the other things I had forgotten, too—to lock the front door behind Buster. How stupid could I get, leaving two doors unlocked when we were prowling around the home of a recent murder victim? I shot Martha a look to say, “I’m sorry,” but her attention was on the young man.

  “That stuff is mine,” he told us, stepping into the kitchen. “All the jewelry, silver, dishes, and furniture. Bertie took it when she left.” Our skeptical looks must have registered, because he nodded toward the cabinet shelf. “Take down one of those bags and look on the bottom of what’s in it. Go ahead. Look.”

  I pulled out the Paul Revere bowl and turned it over.

  He didn’t come near enough to read it. “IWH 1734
75910. Right?”

  I nodded.

  “My mother was Iris Wilson Handley, and the numbers are our family’s birthdays. You’ll find that engraved on brass plates attached to all the furniture and etched onto all the silver, except the coffee set. That has SSW 122345. Sara Shelton Wilson was my grandmother and she got married on December 23, 1945. The jewelry isn’t marked, but I have pictures of it on file with my lawyer. I did that before I went overseas, while I was updating my will.”

  He started across the room with his gloved hand out for the necklace. I put it behind me. Martha was eyeing the wall telephone beside the fridge, but it was too far away for either of us to reach it first.

  “Look, I don’t want to hurt you. I just want my stuff.” As he moved, something bulged in his pocket. It looked like a gun.

  I reminded myself that he hadn’t threatened us—yet. Besides, he had eaten a meal on my tab at Myrtle’s. He had no reason to hurt me, or so I hoped. “You gave me your card, but I’ve forgotten your name,” I told him.

  “Grady Handley, ma’am. Formerly Captain Grady Handley, of the U.S. Army.”

  “And you think Robin Parker was your wife?”

  “I don’t think she was my wife. She was my wife.”

  “But you called her Bertie.”

  “Her name was Roberta. At least, that’s what she told me. After all the other lies, I don’t know what’s true anymore.”

  “The children are yours?”

  He gave a short, not-funny laugh. “That’s one of the things I don’t know. The little one must be, but I never knew a thing about her. It gave me a real shock to see her on the sidewalk that day, asking if she could go home with me. It was like looking at my own picture at that age. I guess Bertie was pregnant when I left to go overseas, but she never mentioned it. Never said the kid had been born, either—just like she never mentioned she was pregnant when she married me. For years I actually believed Natalie was mine and born early, even though she never looked a thing like either one of us. Can you believe I was that dumb?” Again he barked that sarcastic laugh. “You’ll believe anything when you’re bewitched.”

  “Her name is Anna Emily,” I told him. “The little girl.”

  “No kidding? That’s weird. Anna was my sister’s name. She died last year.”

  “Did your wife like her? Were they close?”

  “No, on both counts. Anna did everything she could to convince me not to marry Bertie, saying that she was only after my money. I wouldn’t listen.” For the first time I saw his smile. It was lopsided and could have been endearing in other circumstances. “She’s probably leaning over the edge of heaven right now calling, ‘Told you so, Bro.’”

  “What happened to her—your sister, I mean?”

  His expression darkened. “That was the other mess I came home to. While I was in Afghanistan, they found her body in a hotel room in Charlotte. The official report says she died of a drug overdose, but that’s a lot of hooey. Anna never used drugs.”

  “What did your parents think?”

  “They were killed in a car accident while Anna was in grad school at Carolina. That’s why I had all the family stuff. Anna didn’t have any storage space, so I stored the furniture and put the jewelry in a bank safe-deposit box until Anna and I could both get settled and decide who wanted what. I figured when I got out of the army, Bertie and I would build a house worthy of some of it.” His lip curled. “I guess Bertie couldn’t wait. While I was overseas, she took the furniture out of storage, cleaned out the safe-deposit box, and emptied the bank account. Then she disappeared.”

  Martha and I exchanged a look. His story echoed that of Kaye Poynter. What we had not known about Robin Parker would fill a flash drive.

  Still, a houseful of antiques, silver, and jewelry made an awfully good motive for murder. I wanted to get out of there and call Buster, even if I woke him up.

  I rewrapped the necklace in the paper towel and dropped it back in the juice can. “Well, Captain Handley, I’m afraid this is currently a murder scene and nothing can be removed from it. We were given permission to get clothes for Robin’s children. Unfortunately, she was murdered last night.”

  I expected him to be shocked or at least to pretend to be. Instead he nodded. “I know. I’d been staying over at the motel, and I got back around midnight and found the elevator draped with crime scene tape and the parking lot full of law enforcement types. I asked some dude who looked like a newspaper reporter what was going on, and he said a woman named Robin Parker had been killed in the elevator. I already knew Bertie was using that name, so I decided to hightail it out of there and lay low. I didn’t want anybody to know I was connected to her. I went back over to the taxidermy convention around noon today to see if there was any more news, and folks were saying Bertie had been going to meet some man on the third floor. I knew then that they must have found a note I’d taped to her front door yesterday afternoon telling her we needed to talk. I thought about going to the sheriff, but I don’t have an alibi for last evening, so I decided I’d stake out the house to be sure nobody took out my stuff, and wait to see if they came up with another suspect before I talked to the sheriff. When I saw you find the jewelry, though, and recognized you as the woman who offered me a free meal, I figured I ought to step up and stake my claim.”

  He sounded credible, but I’ve known a lot of credible criminals. “Go down to the sheriff’s detention center and tell them your story. They can come over with you and release the stuff. We only have permission to take the children’s clothes and toys.”

  To emphasize my point, I put the can back in the freezer and shut the door. “Martha, let’s take the clothes and let’s all get out of here.”

  Grady Handley didn’t budge.

  “If you have a connection to Robin’s stuff, go down and tell the sheriff about it,” I urged.

  When he still didn’t move, I added, “I’m a judge, remember. I cannot let you remove anything from this house without the sheriff’s permission.”

  His eyes flickered. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “I’d like to, but I hear all kinds of believable stories, and not all of them are true. And when a young woman gets all gussied up for a date with her ex-husband—”

  “As far as I know, I’m not her ex. She never filed for divorce.”

  “That’s worse. When she’s heading for a date with her estranged husband, whom she’s done wrong, and she gets killed on the way to that date—and when nobody else in the area is known to have any reason whatsoever to do her harm—you have to admit there are grounds for skepticism.”

  “I’m not admitting a thing, except I want my stuff and to find out about the girls.”

  “So go talk to the sheriff.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Buster stepped into the kitchen and blocked the door. “Grady Handley? I want you to come down to my office and discuss the death of your wife, Roberta.”

  Grady had gone white to the gills.

  “You’d better hold him up,” I warned. “He looks likely to faint.”

  Buster stepped forward, but Grady was faster than any of us expected. He crossed the kitchen in two strides, flung open the back door, and dashed into the woods.

  Buster ran to the door and looked after him, but there were no lights back there. “I remembered when I was halfway home that we didn’t lock the front door,” he said. “Thought I ought to come back to be sure you all were okay.”

  “We were okay. That young man claims all the furniture and stuff in the cabinets is his, that Robin was his wife and cleaned him out while he was in Afghanistan, but he swears he didn’t kill her.”

  Buster scratched his ear, a sign that he was thinking. “It’s as good a motive as any. His fingerprints were on a note in Robin’s purse and on two elevator buttons, the one to hold the door open and the one for the first floor. He seems to have been the last person to use it before she was found. Get what you need and come on out. I’ll be calling for backup.”r />
  “You’d better post a guard out here, too. Robin had some really valuable stuff, and whoever owns it now, you don’t want it disappearing on your watch.”

  Martha carried out several bags of clothes from the girls’ room. “I can’t find any books, toys, or stuffed animals,” she reported. “The only thing in their room besides clothes is a television.”

  I took that load to the car while she went back for another. My cell phone rang as I stuffed the bags into my trunk. It was Joe Riddley.

  “You all need to get back over here. Anna Emily has gone missing.”

  21

  “What happened?” I had to hold on to the door of the car, I felt so weak.

  “Ridd went up to check on the kids, and she was gone. We’ve searched the house, but she’s not here, and the front door was cracked. He’s searching the barn and the yard right now. We need you to come home and help us look.”

  I drew a sharp breath. “We’re loading the car. We’ll be right there.”

  Neither of us mentioned what we were both thinking: Ridd’s place was surrounded by acres of cotton fields, a small pine forest, and Hubert Spence’s cattle pond.

  While I waited for Martha to bring out her load, I hurried to the sheriff’s cruiser. “That was Joe Riddley. Anna Emily has wandered off.”

  Fields, woods, and the cattle pond were mirrored in Buster’s eyes. He heaved a mighty sigh. “I’ll see if I can send some folks out to help you look.”

  “No, your plate is already more than full. We’ll find her.” I nodded toward the woods. “I think that young man who escaped might be her daddy.”

  “If so, she may be about to lose both her parents in one fell swoop.”

  As soon as Martha returned, we threw the things in the backseat and I scratched off. Normally I love driving fast. That night I only wanted to arrive.

  We were passing Hubert’s watermelon patch when Martha screamed, “Stop!”

  Ahead of us, Anna Emily sat smack in the middle of the road, wearing only her flannel gown.