Murder Carries a Torch

by Anne George

  The ambulance doors closed, and I got the hell off of Chandler Mountain.

  All ambulance drivers should be women. The one who was actually doing the driving took the hairpin curves gently. The other woman sitting in the back with Luke and me introduced herself as Tammy Parsons. Around thirty and pretty with dark curly hair, she held Luke’s hand and told us about the new house she and her husband were building up near Gadsden on the river. A real log cabin from a kit.

  “Must be a big kit,” Luke said.

  Tammy smiled. “Now, aren’t you doing fine.”

  “Luke? You awake enough to tell me what happened?” I asked.

  “I saw Virginia.”

  “In the church?”

  “Yes. In the church.”

  I leaned closer because his voice was getting fainter.

  “Are you sure it was Virginia? What happened? Did you fall and hit your head?”

  There was no answer.

  “He’s gone again,” Tammy said, checking gauges. “He’s okay, though. If he’s got a fractured skull, it’ll be tomorrow that we have to worry about. The swelling.”

  I could have done without that news.

  “How long have y’all been married?” Tammy asked.

  “We’re not. He’s my cousin.”

  “He one of the snake handlers?”

  “What?”

  “At the church. Is he one of the snake handlers? We get called up there every now and then. Last time the fellow’s arm was the size of an elephant’s leg, I swear, before they called. Wasn’t much we could do for him. Course he’d been drinking strychnine, too.”

  Tammy looked up and saw the expression on my face. I’m sure my mouth was open.

  “What?” she asked. “Y’all aren’t handlers?”

  I found my voice. “Of snakes? Good God, no.”

  “Well, I just figured maybe you were since you were at the Jesus Is Our Life and Heaven Hereafter church.”

  I was having trouble breathing. “People handle snakes there?”

  “Oh, sure.” She studied me. “You really didn’t know?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Didn’t you see that box at the front? That’s where they keep the snakes.”

  And the paramedics had seen that box and that was why they were falling over each other wanting to know if the snakes were up. And I hadn’t put two and two together.

  My Lord. I put my head down on the gurney. It was too surreal. Four days ago, I had been on the Concorde zipping back from Europe. Today I was riding in an ambulance down Chandler Mountain from a snake-handling church.

  “You okay, ma’am?” Tammy asked.

  “I think so.” I just hoped the ambulance didn’t have too many more curves to swing around.

  “They say that Chandler Mountain has the most and the biggest rattlesnakes in the world,” Tammy said proudly. “I wonder if that woman in the church was bit.”

  Not even thoughts of a sale at Bed Bath & Beyond could rescue me, especially when Tammy said, “Your cousin here looks like the Chandler Mountain booger got a hold of him.”

  “The Chandler Mountain booger?”

  “Yes, ma’am. You never heard of it?”

  I shook my head no; Tammy seemed surprised.

  “Sort of a cross between a bear and a wildcat. I’ve never seen it, but lots of folks up here have. It makes an ungodly noise. Kind of a whine and a screech and a moan all at one time.” Tammy shook her head. “You don’t want to get in the way of the booger. No, ma’am.”

  For a moment I thought she was teasing, trying to see how much a naive flatland foreigner would believe.

  “A cross between a bear and a wildcat?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. You hear that noise, you want to get away quick.”

  She was serious.

  The staff of the Blount County Medical Center emergency room was expecting us. Luke was whisked off and I was ushered into a small glass cubicle to answer all of the questions that I could.

  “Bye.” Tammy stuck her head in the doorway. “She don’t know about the snakes, Irene. The booger, neither.”

  Irene waved. “Just as well, Tammy. Bye.”

  Irene was a middle-aged woman whose head fit right on her shoulders. Whoever had broken the girl’s neck at the church would have had trouble with Irene. I shivered, pushing the thought aside.

  “You want some coffee, Mrs. Nelson?”

  I nodded. We’d get the name straightened out soon enough. When Irene got up, I saw that she was built like a box. Not only was there no neck, there was no discernible waist. She was back in a moment with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, though, and the nicest smile. Irene, I decided gratefully, was the perfect person for this job, sturdy and comforting.

  It took several minutes after I explained to her that I was Luke’s cousin, not his wife, for her to locate his insurance cards. She called the treatment room where they had taken him, and a nurse brought Luke’s wallet out. Irene had me go through it to find his cards. The first card I pulled out was his driver’s license. Luke looked startled in the picture. Vulnerable. I suddenly felt like crying.

  “Here.” I handed Irene the insurance card.

  “Trash!” she said.

  “Blue Cross?”

  “Of course not. Look what just walked in. Don’t turn around. Just look.”

  Between jet lag and everything that had already happened that day, I was totally confused.

  “What?”

  “Well, just turn around a little bit and look. You won’t believe this.”

  A tall bearded man had walked into the emergency room. He was wearing a black short-sleeved T-shirt that had KILL THEM ALL. LET GOD SORT THEM OUT emblazoned in large white letters below a death’s head that was wearing a pirate’s hat.

  “My God!”

  He was here to rob the emergency room of its drugs. And there was nothing between us and his semiautomatic but glass. This was it. This was Death. I waited.

  Death sat down and glanced through a Southern Living magazine.

  “Comes in here every afternoon to pick up his wife,” Irene sniffed. “She’s nice as she can be. One of our best nurses. Just no sense.”

  My heart began to beat again. I could feel it drumming against my ribs.

  “Well, it’s none of my business she wants to be a fool,” Irene said. She picked up the card. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  The outside door opened again and two young women came in brushing off their coats.

  “It’s snowing, Irene,” one of them called as they headed down the hall.

  Irene waved in their direction. “Snow. Just what we need.”

  I thought of the hairpin curves on Chandler Mountain. Surely the policemen would let Sister leave before the roads got too icy.

  “Things ice up around here in a second,” Irene said as if she were reading my mind. “Causes all kinds of problems.”

  Guilt. I had left my sister on top of a booger-occupied mountain in a snowstorm in a snake-handling church with a dead body.

  “What happened to your cousin?” Irene asked.

  “I’m not sure. We were at this church up on Chandler Mountain, and he went in to look for his wife, and when he didn’t come back we went in to look for him and he was unconscious and bleeding and there was a dead woman on the bench across from him. A dead woman with a lot of red hair and a broken neck.” I paused for breath.

  “Is that right?” Irene pushed some papers toward me. “Here, sign these.”

  “Her head was on backward.”

  “Have mercy.” Irene handed me a ballpoint pen. “Sign right here and,” she lifted the top sheet of paper, “here.”

  I signed.

  “Okay,” she glanced at my signature, “Mrs. Hollowell. Somebody will be out in a little while when they find out what’s what with your cousin.”

  Backward heads didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Irene. They sure as hell did on me, though. I sat in the waiting room with my teeth
chattering. Fortunately Death had left with his pretty young wife, who had fussed at him for not wearing a jacket.

  I wondered how Luke was doing. I wondered what had happened to him. The most reasonable scenario I could come up with was that he had seen the dead girl, fainted, and hit his head on the corner of the bench. That made sense. And he had been talking out of his head when he said he had seen Virginia. We had been sitting in front in the car and hadn’t seen anyone come out of the church.

  But there was a back door. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the details. On the right-hand side was a door and if anyone had left that way, we wouldn’t have been able to see them. I remembered thinking that the door should have been on the other side, the side that the house was on so the preacher wouldn’t have to walk around the back.

  Holden Crawford. Monk Crawford. Lord, how had Virginia Nelson who played golf at the country club in Columbus and who had a son in the House of Representatives gotten mixed up with a snake-handling preacher?

  I thought of the box at the front. Surely there weren’t any snakes in there now. It was cold in the church. Snakes hibernate. But would that matter? Drowsy snakes might be better to deal with. Unless, of course, they hated to be awakened. A riled rattlesnake would be a challenge.

  And it didn’t make sense that someone had killed the girl so violently and then laid her out neatly on a church bench. They could have dumped her almost anywhere on Chandler Mountain and she would never have been found. They could have walked out on one of numerous rocky precipices and thrown the body into a sea of kudzu that would have covered her forever. Instead, there she was on a pew at the Jesus Is Our Life and Heaven Hereafter church, her long skirt tucked neatly around her boots.

  I glanced at my watch. I was going to have to call Fred in a little while. There was no way I was going to make it home before he did and he would be worried. I got up and looked outside. The snow was coming down steadily. Fine, dry flakes that looked like rain. The streets were still clear, but the grass beside the emergency room parking lot was beginning to turn white.

  Lord, I was tired. I stretched but snapped to attention when Luke’s Lincoln pulled into the parking lot. Mary Alice stepped out, purple hood over her head (I hadn’t realized the cape had a hood) and hurried toward the emergency room. I opened the door for her. Might as well get the fussing over with. After all, I had left her up on the mountain to deal with the police and a dead body.

  “Hello, sweetie,” she said, hugging me. “How’s Luke?”

  Let the record be clear here. In sixty-one years I never remember my sister calling me sweetie. And the hug was so unexpected, that I breathed and was nearly overcome by White Diamonds perfume.

  “I haven’t heard,” I said when I could breathe. “He’s in the back.”

  “Well, is there a cafeteria or something around here? I’m starving.” She looked around at the waiting room and the glass cubicle where Irene was still on duty. “This isn’t a very busy emergency room, is it?”

  “Maybe it will pick up after a while if the roads get slick.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed. Sarcasm is lost on Sister.

  “Excuse me.” She stuck her head around the door of the glass cubicle. “Could you tell us where to get something to eat?”

  “Joe’s,” Irene answered.

  “And here in the hospital?”

  “Some vending machines down the hall.”

  “Thanks. We’d better stay here. We’re waiting for the sheriff.”

  “Why are you in such a good humor?” I ventured.

  “I’m not.” Sister sat down and started rummaging through her purse. “You got any change?”

  “The vending machines will make change.”

  “Of course they will. What am I thinking of?”

  I was damned if I knew. She was acting weird.

  She handed me several one-dollar bills. “Get me some kind of sandwich and potato chips and a Coke.”

  “Okay.” I wasn’t about to push my luck and tell her to get it herself.

  I found the vending machines and got back with the food just in time to see the reason for Sister’s good mood. The emergency room door opened and a man in uniform swept in. He looked a lot like Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf with a little Willard Scott thrown in. He paused, Sister got up, and then they walked toward each other. I swear if this had been a movie they would have been playing something like “Unchained Melody” in the background.

  They stopped about a foot apart and smiled.

  “I got pimento cheese,” I said. “Is that all right?”

  “Mouse,” Sister said. “This is Virgil Stuckey, the sheriff of St. Clair County. Sheriff, this is my sister, Patricia Anne Hollowell.”

  He turned to shake my hand, realized I was balancing Cokes and sandwiches, and said, “Here, let me help you.”

  Sister pushed magazines to one end of a coffee table and we put the food down. She and I sat on the sofa and Virgil Stuckey pulled up a chair.

  “Do you know, Mary Alice,” he said admiringly. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen purple boots before.”

  The man was hooked.

  Chapter

  Six

  E-MAIL

  FROM: HALEY

  TO: MAMA

  Philip says the testicle is called a neutercal, which sounds nutritious, like some kind of a drink with vitamins. He says obstetricians swear by them here. Debbie says she will send me a picture of David Anthony on the Internet right after he’s born. The hospital does it somehow. I can’t wait to see him.

  I hope your jet lag is fine by now. I finally got an E-mail from Alan. He says they’re fine and had a good Christmas. Thank the Lord he came to his senses and he and Lisa are doing okay. They are, aren’t they?

  We are. Last night we rented Fargo and had popcorn and hot chocolate.

  Any news?

  Give Papa a kiss for me. Aunt Sister, too.

  I love you all.

  Haley

  Any news? I turned off the computer. Maybe later in the day I would have time to tell Haley all that had happened. In the meantime, I had to get dressed and go back up to Oneonta. I had checked with the hospital, and they were releasing Luke in the afternoon.

  It had been almost ten o’clock the night before when we got home. We wanted to talk to the doctors and be sure Luke was all right. No fracture, they assured us, but a bad concussion. They wanted to keep him twenty-four hours for observation.

  Virgil Stuckey had torn himself away from admiring Sister’s purple boots long enough to ask Luke some questions. Yes, Luke had seen Virginia in the church. That was all he remembered. His head hurt and how come he couldn’t open his eyes good?

  “You hit your head,” the sheriff told him. “There’s a bandage on your forehead and your eyes are swollen.”

  “Why would I hit myself on the head?”

  “We think you fell.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Luke closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

  “I’ll need statements from both of you,” Sheriff Stuckey informed Mary Alice and me. “We can do it over dinner at Joe’s.”

  We walked about a block through fine, powdery snow to Joe’s Family Restaurant. My statement, told while we were waiting for our dinner (fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans), was that I had gone into the church, found Luke unconscious and bleeding, and tried to stem the bleeding. And yes, I had seen the dead woman lying on the bench.

  Sister’s statement over pieces of lemon meringue pie and coffee touched slightly on the truth. She had thrown her cape over Luke because she had seen the symptoms of shock, had rushed to call 911, stayed behind to clarify things for the authorities while I had left. And neither of us had seen Virginia or any sign of life, for that matter. Just the poor dead girl, so obviously dead that she, Mary Alice, hadn’t touched her because she wouldn’t want to contaminate a crime scene.

  “Good thinking,” Virgil said.

  “Hand me one of those little milk things,” I told Sister. “A
couple of them.”

  I waited until she had them in the air. “We didn’t even know it was a snake-handling church.”

  Nondairy creamer squirted all over the table.

  “Damn!” Sister hopped up and grabbed my sleeve. “Excuse us a minute, Virgil.”

  “What the hell do you mean, a snake-handling church?” she demanded as soon as she closed the restroom door. “We were in there with snakes?”

  “That’s what that box was for up at the front. The woman in the ambulance told me. She says they get called up there sometimes when folks get bitten.”

  Sister looked pale. I was beginning to feel a little guilty. So she had altered the version of the role she had played at the church. Who would want to admit they had been upchucking all over the parking lot? Especially to a man you were obviously attracted to.

  “I’m sorry. I thought you knew,” I lied.

  “Biggest rattlesnakes in the world on the mountains around here.” A voice from a stall. The toilet flushed and a plump, very blond woman stepped out, buttoning her pants. She turned on the water and soaped her hands. “Lots of folks like to play with them. They’re not slimy like you think they’d be.”

  Neither of us said anything.

  “Y’all have a good evening now.” She dried her hands on a paper towel and left.

  “What the hell was Virginia thinking of? A snake handler?” Sister opened her purse, took out a comb, and began to comb her hair, looking at it from several angles. She hadn’t had it colored since before we went to Warsaw and it was turning slightly orange.

  “Maybe she was looking for excitement.”

  “Sounds like she found it. I wonder if Luke knows.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Another woman came into the restroom. “How y’all doing?”

  “Fine,” we said together.

  “We’d better get back,” Sister said. “He’s nice, isn’t he?”

  “Married?”

  “Widowed. Two years.”

  We left the restroom and headed back toward the table.

  “Graduate of Annapolis, retired from the navy after twenty years, sheriff for fifteen, three grown children.”