Missed You In Church: A Hunter Jones Mystery

by Charlotte Moore

  Sam felt sure that Scott Smith didn’t exist, but he decided to let it go.

  “Where did you spend the night?” he asked.

  “She looked at both of them, seeming angry for the first time.

  “I know what you’re getting at, but there wasn’t anything going on between me and Jack Bremmer.”

  “What time did you get home from Atlanta?” Sam asked.

  She stopped and bit her knuckles like a little kid.

  The door opened and a brawny, sunburned man in work clothes came in.

  “What in the hell is going on here?” he asked Sam.

  Amber ran to her father like a small child and he put his arm around her.

  “Daddy, they’re asking me all sorts of questions about the Bremmers,” she said.

  “You questioning my daughter in my house without so much as asking me?” Jared Winslow said to Sam.

  “She’s an adult, and we’re done,” Sam said. “We just needed some background.”

  “Well, let me tell you something,” the big farmer said. “This girl here ain’t no part of that background. She came home Friday, and she’s been right here ever since, ‘cept for spending Saturday night with her girlfriend over in Merchantsville. You want to talk to her again, it’s gonna be with me there and a lawyer too,”

  “She could have done it,” Taneesha said to Sam as they headed back past the peach orchard. “She could have driven right up to their house, gone in all sweet as pie, and shot Noreen as soon as she turned her back. Then she could have been on the interstate in 15 or 20 minutes.”

  “Right off hand, I’d say her acting so scared could just be because she spent the night up there with Jack Bremmer,” Sam said. “She may not know that’s not against the law. I’m not buying that story about her driving back Saturday night, but I don’t see her having the nerve to go into that house and shoot Noreen. She’s like a teenager. Jack ought to be ashamed of himself.”

  “She’s got her daddy fooled, so who knows how good she is at putting on an act. Maybe she figured that with Noreen gone, she can get her old job back with more pay,” Taneesha said, “and even be the next Mrs. Jack Bremmer. I mean, after all, wasn’t Noreen an employee of his when his first wife died?”

  Sam winced.

  “Well, she might figure on that even if she didn’t have anything to do with the killing,” Sam said. “And I wonder how much she’s really got her daddy fooled. He brought up getting a lawyer pretty fast. Thing is, I can’t see anybody committing murder to get a receptionist job back. I think we need to talk to the rest of the staff there,” Sam said. “Or maybe start with Janelle Harrell, since she got laid off at the same time, and she’s got nothing at stake.”

  Sam drove a while in silence and then said, “Amber’s a kid with real bad judgment, but we’ve got no reason to think she’d be violent. Rocker Barstow is the one I can imagine doing it if he went there to ask her for money and she wouldn’t give it to him.”

  “Maybe Skeet and Bub will find somebody in Merchantsville who recognizes his picture,” Taneesha said. “Let’s hope somebody saw him around here on Saturday.”

  At the newspaper office, Hunter checked her e-mail and found a message from Mallory.

  “Funeral will be at 3 p.m. Thursday, First Baptist. You should be getting the obituary soon. I’m planning to come in early tomorrow morning and finish up any layout by deadline, so don’t do it and make me have to do it over.”

  Hunter smiled at the warning, knowing that Mallory was really very possessive about designing pages.

  She hit reply and wrote, “I wouldn’t think of it. Glad you’re coming in. We miss you!”

  It was only after she had sent the message that she realized Mallory would be designing a front page with everything over the fold being about the murder of her own stepmother.

  She thought about doing it herself, and then remembered that this was the same Mallory who had managed to get her sister home, see about her father, tell her stepbrother that his mother had been shot, and accompany her grieving father to the funeral home to make arrangements.

  Even so she sent another e-mail to Mallory and asked the question on her mind.

  “Wouldn’t you rather I laid out page one? I’ve got the story about Noreen’s death written, and I can finish it up this afternoon.”

  “No,” Mallory responded a minute later “I’ll be fine. I can’t fall apart until next week anyway because everybody else is still taking turns. You just write the headlines.”

  Hunter smiled when she read that, and remembered something she had meant to mention to Mallory before.

  “Just in case you’re feeling up to it,” she wrote back. “My friend Nikki, the photographer from Atlanta I’ve told you about, is going to be here for the weekend. We’re going to go get some peaches on Saturday, and take Miss Rose Tyndale along, and then on Sunday afternoon, we’re having a big cookout starting at 4 p.m. for everybody. I’d love for you to come get peaches with us and come to the cookout if you’re feeling like it by then.”

  It was a few minutes before she got a return message.

  “I think I’d better stay around home Saturday. It’s a mess and I’m going to make Miranda help me clean up, and I need time with my Dad. But I’d like to meet Nikki and I’ll plan to come to the cookout on Sunday. Thanks.”

  CHAPTER 12

  SKEET AND BUB HADN’T HAD ANY luck going from one shop to another with the photo of Rocker Barstow, but Janelle Harrell was easy to locate. Taneesha got Skeet to go with him to talk to her.

  Janelle, who was married, lived a modest ranch-style house near the Merchantsville city limits, and was home with her children.

  “Please excuse the mess,” she said as she let them into a living room that looked as if it had been hit by a tornado. “You know it’s just too hot for the boys to play outside. She started pushing toys off the sofa and stopped, looking around.

  “Why don’t we go in the kitchen? It’s cooler in there, anyway.”

  She cleared dishes off the table as Taneesha and Skeet pulled out chairs, and a little boy came riding through on a bicycle with training wheels.

  Taneesha realized that she had seen Janelle Harrell a number of times, getting take-out meals from R&J’s Café, but she had been dressed for work with her brown hair pulled back neatly. Now she was in shorts and an oversized Georgia Bulldogs t-shirt and had apparently gotten a summer haircut. She might not be that much older than Amber Winslow, but she was from another planet as far as personal style went.

  Mentally, Taneesha crossed Janelle Harrell off the list of women who might have had affairs with Jack Bremmer.

  “Gavin Harrell, what did I tell you about riding that bicycle in the house?” Janelle said, “Oh, Lord, now the baby’s awake.”

  Gavin kept on riding while his mother went to get the baby. It was a good five minutes before she returned with a toddler wearing only a diaper, and screaming “Baba Baba!”

  “Let me get Kenny some juice in a bottle,” she said.

  “If that diaper’s dry, I’ll hold him,” Skeet said, and Janelle handed the child over happily.

  Taneesha, whose experience with children was limited, propped her elbow on the table, and realized immediately that she had put it in something sticky.

  “Oh, my goodness, I’m sorry,” Janelle said, coming back with a plastic bottle full of some kind of red juice for the baby. “Let me get a sponge and clean the table. There’s a bathroom right over there if you want to wash your arm.”

  “Just a wet paper towel would be fine,” Taneesha said as Skeet took the bottle and handed it to Kenny.

  Gavin came through on his bike again, and Kenny struggled to get down and follow his brother. Skeet got a good grip on him, flipped him over and placed him on the floor.

  Kenny dropped the bottle and laughed, forgetting the bike.

  “More!” he said to Skeet.

  Skeet said, “No. Go play with your brother.”

  Taneesha scrubbed what see
med to be peanut butter and jelly from her elbow with the paper towel, glad she was wearing short sleeves, knowing as she did so that Skeet would be telling everybody in the office about it. After all, she was known as a neat freak.

  Janelle asked, “Would you two like something to drink? I’ve got cranberry-apple juice, or I could make some instant tea.”

  “Water would be great,” Taneesha said. “We just had a few questions about the time you worked at Bremmer Insurance Agency, but first we wanted to see if you recognized the man in this picture.”

  Skeet handed over the clipboard with the photo of Rocker Barstow.

  “You know, he looks familiar,” Janelle said. “I’ve seen him somewhere… or else he sort of reminds me of Elvis Presley.”

  “It’s not Elvis,” Skeet said. “If you’ve seen this guy around Merchantsville, we really need to know it.”

  “I think he came in the office once,” she said, “but he was dressed better than this when he did. Well, he looked cleaner, anyway. ”

  She paused to think and clapped her hands together.

  “I remember it all now,” she said. “Absolutely. It was him. It was back in the spring and it was kind of a scene. He asked to see Noreen, and when she came out of her office, she took one look at him and walked straight past him and went outside. He followed her and they talked on the sidewalk, so we didn’t hear any of it, except you could see that she was laying down the law about something. So it looked like he had left. She came back in and went straight back to her office for about two minutes, and then out again. Yeah, I remember now. Judy Anne was sitting on the other side of the office, and she said she could see the man waiting there, and Noreen gave him an envelope.”

  “Did she say anything about who he was?” Skeet asked.

  “No,” Janelle answered, “And we didn’t ask, either. If you don’t mind my asking, who is he? Is that who killed her?”

  Skeet said, “Just somebody we’re checking out. Did he come back at any time?”

  “Not while I was there,” Janelle said. “That was the only time I ever saw him. You know Noreen didn’t volunteer any information, but I figured he must have been some embarrassing relative.”

  “That’s about right. Now let’s talk about your leaving the Bremmer Agency,” Taneesha said.

  “Well, I wasn’t fired, if that’s what you’re asking,” Janelle said, stopping to speak to her son. “Gavin, if you run through here one more time, you’re going to have a time out.”

  “We didn’t think you were fired,” Skeet said. “But what was it all about?”

  “Money,” Janelle said. “You know Burt Hilliard opened that other agency and his family’s got a lot of friends and connections. Some of them wanted to give Burt a chance, so maybe if they had their house insurance with Bremmer’s, they’d get their kids’ car insurance with Burton, and then people are going on-line, too. The agency hasn’t been bringing in as much business as it used to, and Noreen had to make some cuts. I know she really did because I helped her with the bookkeeping.”

  To Taneesha, Janelle seemed remarkably sane and sensible when she was talking about business.

  “So they were losing business?” she asked. “That’s why they let you and Amber Winslow go?”

  “You’re not recording this or anything, are you?” Janelle asked.

  “No,” Taneesha said. “We’re really just trying to get a sense of what happened.”

  “Okay then. You know salary’s the biggest cost in any business and they had to cut somewhere. Noreen said she was picking me and Amber because we had been there the shortest time. I had been there about a year – since pretty soon after the baby was born—and Amber had been there two years. Between me and you, I think Noreen was just trying to look fair about it, because I was contributing a lot more to the team than Judy Anne. I think she really did have to cut the payroll, but she wanted to let Amber go, and letting me go made that look more fair.”

  “What was your job there?” Skeet asked.

  “I’m a bookkeeper,” Janelle said. “I was more or less Noreen’s assistant with all the money management, and she figured she would go back to handling it herself, which she could. She was really sharp and organized. It just a lot of work on her.”

  She didn’t seem the least angry, just philosophical.

  “We didn’t need the money all that much,” she said, “I usually do taxes for a few people. I mean after you figure in daycare for a full time job, it didn’t make that much difference, and I like being home with the boys. Anyway, I’m just real sorry about what happened to Noreen, and I honestly don’t know how Jack’s going to run that agency without her. He’s a great guy, but, you know…”

  “Let’s get back to Amber Winslow,” Taneesha said, making it sound casual. “Did Noreen have a problem with her?”

  “I guess she did,” Janelle said. “Wait a minute. Let me check on the boys. They’re awfully quiet.”

  “I’ll go see about them,” Skeet said, and she nodded gratefully.

  “The thing about Amber,” Janelle told Taneesha, “Is that she was flirting with every man who came in the door, and you wouldn’t believe some of the get-ups she came to the office in, and how much perfume she wore. Noreen was one of those people who has lots of allergies anyway, and she finally talked to Amber about that, and about the low cut tops she was wearing. Instead of taking it like professional advice, Amber comes running out of Noreen’s office crying and makes this big scene, and I heard her say to Judy Ann that Noreen wasn’t the boss anyway, Jack was.”

  “So did she change the way she dressed?” Taneesha asked.

  “Yeah, she did for about a week,” Janelle said. “And she definitely laid off the perfume. I don’t know what that stuff was, but it wasn’t Chanel if you know what I mean.”

  “Do you think there was anything going on between Jack Bremmer and Amber?” Taneesha asked in a lowered voice, as if she didn’t want Skeet to hear, or as if it were just idle curiosity. “I mean like an affair?”

  “I’d rather not say what I think about Jack’s private business,” Janelle said, sitting up straighter. “I really don’t know, anyway. The thing is that I know he loved Noreen and he’s going to be lost without her. He and Noreen were both nice to me, and I might want to talk to him about coming back part time if he needs me. Somebody’s got to watch the money.”

  “Fair enough,” Taneesha said, convinced now that Janelle definitely thought something was going on between Amber and Jack or she would have said there definitely wasn’t. “Let me ask you one more question. Do you have any idea who might have wanted Noreen Bremmer dead, or even anybody who was mad at her?”

  Janelle thought about it, frowned and thought a little more.

  “No,” she finally said, “Amber pitched a real crying fit when we were let go, and she tried to talk Jack into going against Noreen’s decision. But she got another job up in Atlanta, so I expect she got over it. I’m thinking y’all ought to follow up on that man in the photograph, though, because whoever he was, I know it upset Noreen that he came to the agency.”

  “He was Noreen’s first husband,” Taneesha said to get Janelle’s reaction.

  Noreen was open-mouthed with surprise.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “I mean, I met her son by her first marriage, and I guess I figured that his dad was a businessman or something. Well, maybe that explains why she didn’t want him to come into the agency. She was embarrassed by him. Or maybe afraid of him. Do you think he had something to do with… I mean, is he a suspect in her murder?”

  “He’s a person of interest,” Taneesha said, and thanked Janelle for her time.

  They made their way into the living room, where Skeet had both of the boys on the sofa and was reading “The Cat in the Hat.”

  “Only a few more pages,” he said to Taneesha. “You go get the air conditioning going.”

  CHAPTER 13

  HUNTER HATED FUNERALS AND USUALLY MANAGED to avoid them, but she went t
o this one out of respect for Mallory and found the sanctuary packed. As she arrived, she saw Taneesha and Bub Williston in uniform at a side entrance to the church, waiting to provide an escort for the procession to the cemetery after the service. Sam was inside and had saved her a seat beside him on a back pew

  The sanctuary of the Baptist Church was deeply traditional with polished mahogany pews, jewel-toned stained glass windows, and gleaming brass organ pipes, but it had one concession to modern times: air conditioning that was downright cold to those coming in from the 100 degrees outdoors.

  Hunter shivered and leaned against Sam who put his arm around her shoulder.

  From where they sat, she could see a portion of the closed casket at the end of the center aisle, piled high with flowers. She saw Clarissa Scarbrough come in quietly from a door near the choir loft and take her seat in the second row, and it struck her that the funeral for Clarissa’s sister, Jack Bremmer’s first wife, had undoubtedly been here, too and that his youngest daughter would be walking down that aisle in a month.

  The congregation stood as the family entered from a side door. Miranda, wearing white, with a young man who had his arm protectively around her shoulder, followed by Mallory, also in white, then Jack Bremmer, and then a strikingly handsome dark-haired young man.

  “That’s Noreen’s son, Ben,” Sam whispered to her, as they took their seats again and the service began.

  After the service, in which the pastor and three church members spoke of Noreen’s faith and devotion to church and family, Hunter rode with Sam to the cemetery, following a curving road between towering oaks and statuary that gave way to a newer portion where the markers were simpler and the trees smaller.

  “Is Jack Bremmer’s first wife buried here?” she asked.

  “I think we just passed her grave,” Sam said.

  “I wonder where Jack will be buried,” Hunter said. “I mean with which one of them.”