“So she was at her home when you called. What time was that?”
“Five twenty-six,” Winnie responded in a voice that sounded raw. She lifted her blotchy, tear-streaked face to look up at them over her shoulder. “She beat my alarm clock by four minutes. Why are you asking questions like that?”
“’Cause if that’s really a bullet hole, and it’s not self-inflicted, we’re going to be asking everyone who knows him that same question.”
Winnie’s chin trembled and silent tears began another slow trek down her flushed cheeks. “It could have been an accident,” she said in a voice that was far from steady. “He would never have done that to himself, and why would anyone else hurt Roy Lee? He was a good man. A little shiftless sometimes, but that’s nothing to kill somebody for.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am,” Marla said gently. “And I’m sorry for the questions. But it’s quite a coincidence, your being here and all when the body was found.”
Winnie threw back her head and drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “It’s almost like he w-w-wanted to tell me something, a-and he came looking for me to d-do it. Oh-h-h.”
With that, she collapsed into herself again with a long moan that turned into a wail. Jesse took that opportunity to ask, “How did you know about the bullet hole? You’ve barely looked at him.”
“Sheriff called just before we got here.” Deputy Todd Angeles picked up his equipment and moved back around behind where Jesse and Marla stood, putting more distance between himself and the grieving widow. “Maybe we should take a better look at that fishing boat,” he suggested. “Where were you all standing when this, um?” He cleared his throat and looked around. “Well, when the tornado, uh…”
Jesse would have helped him if she could, but there seemed to be no easy or even polite way to describe the events of the morning. What had happened was raw, ugly and sad, and there was no way to escape that. Instead, she pointed to the other end of the levee. “We were down there. Winnie was fishing from the bank when we saw the tornado start to form over there.” She pointed to the line of trees farther down in the same direction.
“When it starting moving this way, we took shelter in that clump of willows.” She shifted to indicate the dense and varied growth that crowded the lake’s shoreline nearer to where they currently stood. “You can’t really see them from here, but when you get down by the water, there’s a stand of young willows in there behind the bigger trees.”
“Could you see anything from there?” he asked, squinting in that direction.
“No. It was hailing, raining so hard you couldn’t see through it, and those tree limbs were flailing around so bad you didn’t dare look up.”
Todd glanced over his shoulder to where Winnie’s sobs still rose and fell in a mournful dirge. “So you didn’t see anything.”
“Like I said, my eyes were pretty much closed. I just heard a whole lot of confusion and noise.
“Maybe we can go take a look down that way,” he suggested.
“Sounds like a good idea,” Marla agreed. “We can go ahead and get your statement while we’re there.” She looked to Jesse hopefully, almost smiling in her eagerness.
“Sure.” Jesse was as happy as anyone to give the grief-stricken ex some space. She had been friends with Winnie since grade school and had never known her to be so emotional, but this morning had been extraordinary on a lot of different levels, especially for Winnie.
“So, what kind of stuff did you hear?” Todd continued as they walked.
Jesse stifled her impulse toward sarcasm and refrained from reminding him that there had been a tornado going by at the time. Instead, she tried to replay the sounds in her head.
“There were a lot of different things happening at once,” she said slowly, coming to a halt while she sorted the sounds from the emotions. “Wind first, getting closer and louder. Then hail, pinging and clattering. Then the rain started, and the wind was a roar so loud you could hardly hear anything else. By then, the hail had stopped, and the trees were groaning and cracking. Where we were hiding, the limbs were whipping around us, and the rain was pounding. Then there was metal and glass shattering, and a screech like fingernails on a chalkboard, a thud and something crashing through trees. And then it was quiet.”
Jesse paused. The effort of reliving it was almost overwhelming, and her final words faded to a whisper. “So quiet.”
“But you didn’t see anything,” he persisted.
“There was a tornado going by overhead,” she snapped more sharply than she would have liked, but unable to contain herself. “It was dark. It was loud. And it was scary. And there were things trying to poke my eyes out, so I pretty much saw the inside of my eyelids until it was all over.”
“So you think you may have heard the motor and whatever hit the truck?” Marla asked very sweetly, while getting them moving again toward the other end of the levee.
“Yes. I could hear the metal tearing, the impact, the glass breaking, but it didn’t make any sense until I saw the truck.” Jesse could feel herself relaxing. The other deputy had struck a nerve, asking what seemed like a stupid question on the heels of her recounting the most terrifying minute and a half of her life.
“And the boat? Do you think you heard that?” Marla continued with a verbal nudge.
Jesse nodded. “I think that was the thud and the scraping sound maybe. But don’t ask me about the body. I don’t think I heard that. I don’t think I could have.”
Todd paused a short distance past where the truck had been parked and pointed toward the trees along the shoreline. “Is this about where you waited it out?”
Looking around, and happy to smooth over the feathers she might have ruffled, Jesse spotted the boulder that was closer to the road and smaller than she remembered.
“There.” She pointed to what only a frantic person would have viewed as shelter. “We stopped there first. Then we moved down into those trees.”
Her finger continued moving, and once again, she was surprised by how small the willows were that they had crouched behind. The thin, supple limbs were bare of leaves in places. She touched a raw slash on her cheek, remembering the sting of the branches as they whipped the air around her.
“Wow,” he said softly. “You’re lucky that thing stayed aloft.”
A chill danced down Jesse’s spine, not the first of the day. Lucky, yes, she supposed they were lucky. Or maybe they could have just bought some fish from the market and had their discussion on Winnie’s front porch over a glass of wine. That would have been even luckier.
“Are you all right?” Marla asked quietly.
“It’s been a long morning.” The presence of death and the destruction that came with it pressed in on Jesse. For the second time that morning she felt tears rise out of nowhere, weighing her down with a sadness that threatened to drive her to her knees.
“Do you need to sit down?”
“No. I need to go home.” With an effort, Jesse shook off the nameless grief and mentally squared her shoulders. “Let’s get this over with.”
By now they had reached the slope leading down to where Winnie’s fishing gear was strewn along the rocky shoreline like toys flung by an angry child. The sight was one more reminder of their narrow escape.
“You okay to get started with that statement?” Marla asked, looking around her as she jotted a quick note in her steno pad.
“Pull up a rock, and I’ll tell you everything I know.” Jesse settled onto the log she had perched on earlier while the two deputies found similar seats, Todd choosing a large rock to lean against while Marla lowered herself awkwardly onto a sturdy driftwood branch and balanced her notepad across her knees.
Jesse began at the beginning, telling of their arrival and her first, amazed sight of the thorn tree, emphasizing that she had taken a good, long look at it, and that it had contained nothing but limbs and leaves and those frightening, but bare, thorns. Then she described her long walk with Winnie down the length o
f the levee, during which Jesse had surveyed the area in close detail and would have noticed an aluminum fishing boat buried nose-down along the relatively bare slope.
From that, she moved on to a mention of their conversation while Winnie prepared to fish, then to the alarming change in the weather followed by the funnel that suddenly dropped from the wall cloud. Cold crept into her with the memories as Jesse told how the developing tornado had stretched lower until its tail had disappeared out of sight behind the line of trees on the horizon.
“Wait,” Todd interrupted. “You watched it develop? And then you watched it lengthen until it dropped out of sight behind those trees?” He pointed to the solid line of trees in the distance.
“Yes.”
“And then you watched it draw back up. And then it came toward you without ever dropping back down again?” he asked with his face clenched in a frown and his whole body arched toward her.
“Yes.” So tense she had to fight to keep her teeth from chattering, Jesse was pretty sure she knew what he was thinking, but she wasn’t going to say it for him.
“So, if the tornado picked up the boat with the body in it, it had to have been then,” Marla said, taking up the thought as she turned to face her coworker. “And the original crime scene has to be on the other side of those trees.”
Since tornadoes don’t usually carry debris, especially heavy debris, for any distance, it had already occurred to Jesse that the best, and probably only, opportunity for the tornado to have picked up the boat and its contents would have been when it must have touched down behind those trees. It was the only time it could have happened, and from there, the distance it would have carried those contents before spitting them out like so much shrapnel was within reason.
“Man,” Todd said with a wince and a shake of his head, “that is just such a coincidence.”
“Yeah,” Marla agreed with an expression that wasn’t much happier. “It is that.”
There it was again, and even Jesse had to admit that it sounded a little too convenient. The coincidence of the entire event, especially the relationship of the deceased to one of the witnesses, was something that a suspicious mind might have trouble believing. But there was nothing Jesse could do about that. A coincidence was exactly that, a coincidence, and it wasn’t supposed to be logical. It was something you just had to accept. But Jesse had an uncomfortable feeling that the people she was talking to weren’t going to make it that easy.
“The only thing is,” she began quietly, knowing that she should probably just keep her mouth shut, but, of course, wouldn’t. “That even if Winnie and I could have faked a tornado, we could never have shoved that boat motor through the door of the truck and down through the passenger seat. And even if we could have managed to pick that boat up and drive it nose-first down into the dirt several inches deep, we could never have managed to get that body up into that tree. Have you taken a good look at where he is?”
“We didn’t say that,” Todd protested.
“We didn’t mean that,” Marla joined in. “It’s just…”
“It’s just a freak of nature,” Jesse interrupted. “Get over it. And this interview is done.” She shoved herself to her feet and was halfway up the embankment before she stopped and turned back for one last word. “And, by the way, coincidence pretty much means ‘what are the freaking chances?’”
With that, she turned on her heel again and marched the rest of the way up the slope and down the roadway for all of maybe ten feet before she spied what appeared to be a parade turning from the paved roadway onto the bumpy, dirt lane that led to the levee.
First in line was a white van with writing on the side that, with the aid of squinting, appeared to identify the occupant as the Waite County Medical Examiner. That would be Arnie Holt, whom Jesse had never actually met, but about whom she had heard enough to be wary. Gossip described him as generally grumpy, with little use for humans who were still breathing, and who spent his leisure time watching sports or fishing, preferably alone.
None of this seemed compatible with Jesse’s interests, since she preferred her people alive and spent most of her time either antiquing, gardening, or cooking, mostly with friends, which is how she came to co-own an antique store and a tearoom with two of those friends and her mother.
And since her feelings were a little tender after the events of the day, Jesse decided not to push her luck and to stay as far away as possible from the man who was currently pulling his van into the unoccupied space in front of the deputies’ car.
Following in the wake of the white van was a large utility company truck with a heavy-duty hydraulic lift supporting a human-sized, metal basket known as a cherry picker. It looked big enough to do the job, but getting it down to the end of the narrow levee might be a bit of a trick. The very thought of the cherry picker’s purpose was enough to make Jesse weak-kneed, so it was with unbelievable joy that she recognized the third vehicle in the conga-line of arrivals.
Literally, unbelievable… The garnet red Mercedes convertible that pulled onto the rough, rutted dirt road in the wake of the utility truck was the last thing in the world Jesse had expected to see. What on earth had Joe Tyler been thinking to send Vivian Windsor out to rescue Jesse and Winnie from the purgatory this day had become? And how could she ever thank him?
∙∙∙•••●●●•••∙∙∙
“Hey, look who’s here,” Todd said, drawing even with Jesse. “I guess I’d better go show them where the body is.” He turned to Marla, who had come up on Jesse’s other side. “You coming? Or you staying to take more statements?” He glanced toward Jesse, then past her, not including her in the question.
“Dead guys in trees aren’t my thing,” Marla replied. “You go take care of it. And you can send the, um, widow this way if you’d like. I’ll need her statement before I can let them go.”
“Yeah, good luck with that.” Video and recording equipment dangling from him, he took off at a trot.
Watching Vivian park behind the deputies’ vehicle while the utility truck waited at the base of the levee for further directions, Jesse realized that she should probably say something to smooth over her last remarks. It seemed that she spent far too much of her time saying things that she later had to make amends for, preferably without offering any outright apologies. She herself had never really paid much attention to this tendency, but her mother had recently suggested it as an area for possible self-improvement.
“It’s our job to be suspicious,” Marla said quietly, easing toward conciliation.
“My mother has suggested that I sometimes overreact,” Jesse offered as her own non-apology.
“I believe the Sheriff has mentioned that himself.”
“Yes. Well, yes.” An internal grimace accompanied Jesse’s memory of her recent, repeated misunderstandings with Sheriff Joe Tyler, most of which were now in the past, and all of which grew out of her tendency to rush to the defense of the people she cared about, sometimes a bit too enthusiastically.
The instigating case in point was when Jesse’s mother, Sophia, decided to walk home from the dentist’s office while she was still woozy from sedation. And Sheriff Tyler, seeing her weaving down the street, albeit on foot, stopped to question her. Then Jesse, who was already feeling guilty because she was late to pick up her mother, swooped in to rescue Sophia, and managed to escalate the situation while apparently “interfering with and antagonizing an officer in the performance of his duty.”
Eventually forced to apologize, Jesse had almost repaired the damage when she stepped in again to help identify the real killer of Bliss Kerr’s husband as a favor to Vivian. Jesse’s attempts to help in that situation were interpreted as “trampling all over a murder investigation,” and apparently that time she had interfered with the performance of the entire Sheriff’s Department.
Luckily it had all turned out well, and she and the sheriff had finally reached an amicable agreement—he swore he would jail her if it ever happened agai
n, and Jesse had sworn not to interfere with another investigation, no matter what. It was just her luck that the ex-husband of her best friend from the first grade appeared to have been the victim of foul play and already suspicions were flying.
A small whimper from the woman beside her swung Jesse’s attention back to the present. Following Marla’s gaze, fixed firmly on the commotion below, Jesse saw Vivian striding purposefully through the confusion, pausing to dip her head in greeting toward Arnie Holt, who appeared to be momentarily transfixed.
Dressed in magenta and gray, with a nubby-weaved, subtly plaid jacket that was vintage Chanel over a flawlessly tailored, form-fitting dress of raw silk in magenta, Vivian’s wheat blond hair was drawn into a Grace Kelly chignon at the base of her long, elegant neck. The woman was a force of nature and rich as Croseus, and Jesse understood Marla’s reaction. With the passing of her husband, Vivian Windsor had assumed control of an oil fortune dating back to statehood and the power that came with it. And at times like this, very few people were happy to see her arrive.
“She likes you, you know,” Jesse said.
“Really?”
Jesse could feel the other woman’s relief. During the investigation of Vivian’s niece Bliss, the sheriff had chosen Marla Murphy as the deputy to liaison with the widow of the murder victim, and therefore, with the widow’s very protective great aunt.
“Vivian was very sorry that we kept getting you into trouble,” Jesse said. “That was mainly my fault, I’m afraid. Not on purpose, of course, but…” She let her words die away, not really knowing what else to say.
“You were persistent,” Marla offered politely.
“That’s a nice way to put it, and you were kind. Anyway, Vivian noticed, and she appreciated it. I know it was a lot easier for Bliss to deal with you than with one of the other deputies.”
Drawing nearer, Vivian waved and their attention returned to watching her progress as she picked her way up the levee through ruts and spots still damp from the rain. Her inappropriate shoes were almost certainly handmade Italian, their heels alarmingly high and narrow. Her slim ankles, and legs still trim from years of gardening, looked dangerously delicate for such terrain.
Murder Most Thorny (Myrtle Grove Garden Club Mystery Book 2) Page 6
