by June Shaw
Why not? I wouldn’t be able to think straight about murder, romance, and suspects while I was so hungry.
I unzipped an inch or so from each bag, zapped them in the microwave with the defrost button, and soon sat with a tall glass of milk. I stirred the red beans and gravy in with the rice and sliced the smoked sausage into small pieces. If I wasn’t in a bit of a hurry this morning, I would have baked sweet cornbread sticks to go along with the meal.
Ready soon afterward, I walked to Eve’s. A humid breeze pushed in from the south. Even though foods didn’t normally bother my stomach, I started to feel sorry I’d eaten so much with each step I took. I didn’t need to think hard to know this discomfort came more from getting closer to the home of the woman I’d found murdered. She would no longer be in that house beside Eve’s, but her son would. The back of my neck tensed when I recalled the fury in his eye with his assertion that I killed her.
He’s feeling better now, I told myself, while I forced positive thoughts to my mind. Royce would have had time to consider and know that neither Eve nor I could be a murderer.
Since my street ran parallel to Eve’s, I needed to only cross the road and walk through a two-foot wide space between fences to reach her place. Her patio held comfortable cushioned furniture and a burbling, bleach-scented water fountain. I rushed my final steps to her back door. Trying to remain positive but still fighting apprehension, I gave her doorbell only one ring and then used my key.
“Hey, it’s me,” I called out.
From the den, she stepped into her kitchen. “I know who you are, Sis.”
“You’re a much happier person this morning,” I pointed out, pleased to see the spring in her step and hear the light tone in her voice. “You must have talked to your grandson.”
The smile on her lips widened. “Nicole called. She put the phone to his ear, and I cooed to him. I think Noah might have cooed back to me.”
I was fairly sure the little guy was still too young to let out many sounds except the burping he’d done when we were with him or the crying or expelling gas.
“He was probably trying to say your name.” I spoke with a grin.
The sounds of someone close hammering intermingled with a whining noise. “Let’s see what’s going on outside,” I said. “Maybe if we’d paid better attention, we would have noticed who went around Mrs. Wilburn.”
We stepped out the back door. I glanced at what made the only current nearby sound—the angel pouring her clear water on the plastic goldfish in her fountain. In the yard to the left, Jake walked near the fence behind his place carrying a weed whacker. With a pale blue cap, snug T-shirt, and shorts, he looked appealing, especially once he noticed us and waved. His wide smile created dimples in his cheeks.
“Nice day, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Very nice,” Eve replied before he returned to slicing the tall grass edging his land.
If he still wasn’t attached to another woman since his divorce, I wished he and Eve would get together. Or possibly she was already interested. I knew she had borrowed bread from him at least once. Maybe she’d borrowed other things, or he had borrowed from her. Surely she had gone back to return the items, not because he would need them but so she’d have an excuse to get close to a good-looking man again. The gleam in her eye when she waved back at him gave me hope that a relationship between them might be progressing. That would solve all of my problems about not hurting her if Dave and I started dating each other.
The pounding of a hammer came from the right. It sounded like it came from the front of the Wilburn house. We walked along the side of Eve’s house toward the street, and she and I stared at each other, mouths open at what we saw.
HOUSE FOR SALE BY OWNER. The sign was large and the print bold and also held a phone number. Royce finished hammering it on a post in the front yard.
He straightened when he saw us. Lifting the hammer higher than his head, fury tightened on his face, and he seemed ready to throw that tool. A carol rolled up my throat. I grabbed Eve’s hand and rushed to her front door.
Slamming us inside, she locked the door and we backed away from it. “He really believes we did it,” she said.
“Or I did. What’s wrong with him?”
“Well, I think he’s frightening. I’m going to dread going out there when he’s around.”
“You could come and stay with me.” Even before I’d completed the words, she shook her head. I wouldn’t have wanted to run away from my neighbor like that either.
We stepped into the den. I glanced through the open doorway into her art room, where two canvases on easels displayed her earlier dark mood. At least now, with murder to distract us, she wouldn’t submerge herself again in such deep gloom. Murder was horrible, and even if I hadn’t really known Eve’s neighbor, I was sorry someone exterminated her. I was sorry for anyone who loved her, and—“Wait a minute. I’ll bet he killed her.”
Eve pointed toward their house. “That young man out there who says we did it?”
“Yes. I don’t believe he thinks we killed his mother. I think he did it.” While Eve shook her head, I continued my thought. “We’ve learned that he’s a big gambler, and he probably owes a lot of money he can’t repay. He doesn’t seem to have any kind of job ever since he’s come back to his mother’s home. He doesn’t own a car and uses hers. Now he can sell her house and take the money.” I ran out of steam and reasoning.
Eve’s eyes pinched tighter, her expression sad. “Would you kill Mom if you needed money?”
“What a horrible thing to say.” My chest pumped up with outrage. Just as quickly, it deflated. “I’m sorry. That was a wretched idea.”
“Whether he owns the house yet or not, he’s probably putting that sign out there to let us know he wants to get away from us. I can’t blame him if he really believes we’re responsible. After all, we did find her.”
“So I imagine she didn’t have any other children.”
Eve shook her head and shrugged. “She and I never spoke enough for me to find out. She always seemed to want to keep to herself, so I left her alone. I just happened to be in the front yard that day a taxi dropped Royce off, so he asked me if she still lived there. I had only seen him go there about a year before but don’t believe he stayed long then. When I assured him that was still her residence, he rang the doorbell and minutes later went inside.”
“Let’s check online to see if Royce owns that property now. If he does, and he can hurry and sell it and move, that would be wonderful.” The thought of that happening anytime soon wasn’t realistic but gave me great hope that we wouldn’t need to be apprehensive with him so near. We hurried to the office down the hall, and she sat at her computer. She did a search on various sites that told who owned property in town. All of them showed Mrs. Clara Wilburn as the sole owner of the land next door.
“Did you ever know of a Mr. Wilburn?” I asked.
“No. I’ve gotten a few pieces of her mail, and all of them said Mrs. Clara Wilburn or Clara Wilburn.”
“Nothing for Royce?”
“Not even one bill.”
I pointed to listings on her computer. “And none of these sites show Royce or any other children she might have as co-owners of the property, so Royce might need to wait until a will is read or a succession is open that would pass the land down to him. Or his siblings, if he has any.”
“Darn it.” Eve’s face pinched up.
I ran my mind through various scenarios. “She’s probably listed in the obituaries today. That should tell us about any other children and also about her services. I’d like to go.”
“Me, too. We need to pay our respects to her.”
“We do.” An ache sat in my heart for this mother dying. And she was murdered and stuffed in a trash bag. I couldn’t imagine how horrible that would make her child feel.
Eve checked the online edition of our small local paper. The obituaries showed four people, none of them he
r and, thank goodness, nobody else that I knew. Eve turned off her computer and lifted her cell phone. Maybe she was calling a person who would know something about Mrs. Wilburn. “We need to see how Dave is doing.”
Yes, I wanted to know.
“Hello, this is Eve Vaughn. Is Dave there?”
I watched, heart racing, while she waited and then spoke.
“How are you? Sunny and I are worried about you.” She listened briefly, took steps away, turning her back on me, said a few soft words, and hung up. “The police told him he’s under suspicion.”
My heartbeat jumped a notch. “Where is he?”
“He’s at work and really busy, trying to keep up with jobs and focus on them.”
“But he’s innocent, so they can’t prove he did anything.”
“Right.” She placed her hands on the desk and pushed herself up. “Okay, I need to get my head on straight so I can think about trying to discover a killer.” She looked at me. “We need to help find him, right?”
“Of course. Mrs. Wilburn was dumped at Dave’s camp. She lived close to you. We were there and found her. The police are surely looking into what happened and probably getting a heck of a lot more information than we could, but we can’t just sit back and do nothing about finding who actually did it.”
Eve nodded, eyes hooded, face sad. “What can we do?”
I wasn’t sure. “Don’t you have line dance classes this morning? You could clear your mind there and might find out some things.”
“I quit going to them.” She walked toward her art room. In her state, she probably would paint. The color she’d use would not be a bright one.
“I’ll let myself out,” I called. “And maybe you’ll come up with ideas while you’re being creative.” Before I stuck my head through the back doorway, I found myself pulling back. A carol grabbed at my throat, but I willed it to stay there. I anticipated that Royce could be standing right outside, hammer above his head, ready to slam it down on either of us who stepped out.
I peeked out and found no sign of him, locked the door from inside, and slipped out. This is no way to live, I told myself walking toward home. We, or more hopefully the police, would find the killer soon so that all of our lives could get back to normal.
A splash came from beyond the wooden fence on the right, followed by a woman’s giddy laughter. The couple who’d moved in back there barely looked twenty years old. The woman must be enjoying a cool dip in their pool. That couple had surely been questioned about Mrs. Wilburn, but I doubted they or any other neighbors knew much about her. I wondered whether anyone did.
Mrs. Hawthorne, my friend and former customer from Fancy Ladies, was normally working with flowers in her front yard two doors down from me but wasn’t out there today, so I would wait to question her about the death.
Making a decision about what I might do, I jumped in my truck and drove to the only funeral home in town. A one-story gray brick, it provided much parking space that I was pleased to see only partially filled. I hoped the only people inside worked there and weren’t in mourning and wanting to inquire about their services. Possibly I would find Royce and a sibling inside making arrangements for his mother’s funeral. Oh, but maybe that wouldn’t work well. If he was there, he might yell at me and accuse me again of killing her.
That consideration made me pause. Perhaps I shouldn’t go in.
I glanced back at the parked cars but didn’t see Mrs. Wilburn’s sedan. Maybe she would already be laid out. If so, I might learn more from someone who worked there. I pulled the door open and walked inside.
No one was in the wide foyer. The straight lines that crossed each other in the low-pile tan carpet let me know it was newly vacuumed. A fresh mint scent hinted that air freshener covered up the cloying smell of the many funeral flowers often displayed here on coffins. A paisley-print sofa and pair of chairs with matching prints waited for visitors to sit on them. The podium that normally held prayer cards and an open book for the deceased’s visitors to sign held only a long white pen in a white holder.
The doors to the office I had been in once and also Viewing Room Two at the far end of the hall were shut. The door to the largest viewing room was left open. Perhaps they were setting up Eve’s neighbor’s casket in there.
I walked to the room, peeked in, and was disappointed to find no person or casket.
A hand laid on my shoulder made me jump. “May I help you?”
I turned to find a man wearing a gray suit with a sad expression that he probably always wore when a person entered his business. That expression quickly turned to annoyance. His lips and chin tightened. His eyes pinched closer together. I imagined, “Oh, it’s you” ready to blast from his mouth when he saw me. What assuredly stopped him was an awareness that I might have a newly deceased that I wanted to have displayed here.
“Hello, Toby.” I put my hand out to this undertaker who I’d had a run-in with.
He gripped my hand and placed his opposite hand on top of mine. Surely he did this with potential clients and not people like me who only wanted some information he wasn’t always happy to give.
“I don’t have a body to bury.” The minute I said it, I squeezed my mouth shut. The words I’d used came out so wrong.
His hands pulled away. “But,” he said, “you wanted to know more about burial vessels?” He drew his shoulders back. Veins in his neck stood out.
Yes, I had once come to ask him about adhesives for urns, which he didn’t seem to appreciate. But now when I shook my head, Toby’s shoulders relaxed. “I’d like to know if you have someone here who isn’t laid out yet.”
His jaw muscles worked and tightened. “You can check the newspaper to find out anything you want to know about deceased locals.”
“Okay, here’s what happened. I know someone from town who died yesterday, and I haven’t seen her death listed yet.”
He watched me and waited instead of filling in the information he must figure I wanted to know. When he didn’t respond, I needed to ask questions. “Does anyone ever die around here and not have information about their deaths put in our local paper?”
“Yes.”
His answer surprised me. He offered nothing else.
“Why wouldn’t a family have the death of a loved one placed in the paper’s obituary?”
“Some people can’t afford to have the write-up.”
“You’re kidding me. It costs to have someone’s death announced in the obits?”
“Yes, and the longer the piece, the more it costs.”
“Okay, I can understand that. A lot more words take up space where other information could be written.”
“And sometimes people close to the deceased really don’t like the person.”
This statement stunned me and also reminded me of what Mrs. Wilburn’s nephew outside the manor told me. Surely saying nobody in the family cared for her couldn’t be true.
While I stared at the space to the left of him as this idea sank in, Toby leaned forward. “Are you a close family member of a newly deceased person?”
“No, thank goodness I am not.”
All semblance of sympathy washed away from his face and his stance. “Then I’ll walk you out.” He gripped my forearm and turned me toward the foyer.
I slid my arm out of his grasp and strode to the front door. “Thank you,” I said and stepped out into air that didn’t stifle. This time I purposely hadn’t mentioned my friendly neighbor, his grandmother Mrs. Hawthorne, whom he had insisted was his step-grandmother, probably because his beloved Catahoula hound she’d been keeping in her fenced yard for him had gotten out and never found. His anger toward her said he held it against her, although that elderly woman would not have let a dog out where it might get hurt.
The urge to call Eve struck before I pulled out of the funeral parlor’s long driveway, and I grabbed my phone from my purse. I knew, however, that she would have called me if she’d come up with so
mething, and I hadn’t found out anything worthwhile to report.
I left with thoughts scattered about what to do next. At home, I pulled out the plans for what Eve and I expected to do with Jeff and Georgia Andrews’s house after the garage remodeling was complete.
Since the couple had contacted us for the job, we were the contractors and would hire as many subs as we needed, especially while my shoulder finished healing. Georgia wanted to widen the existing dining area, so we’d need to take down the wall to the bedroom on the opposite side of it. That bedroom could be made smaller, she’d said, since it would become their workout room. It was the only place they wanted carpet instead of hardwood or ceramic.
Although many larger builders had their blueprints drawn on computers, neither Eve nor I was proficient doing that. While our firm grew, we planned to learn. I stretched out the blueprints and set the ideas we had come up with for the project beside them. The small, drab guest bathroom left much to be desired, and I had proposed a pedestal sink to suggest more space and shelving built into the wall. Images of wall studs and locating electrical wires ran through my mind, along with hammers and electric saws. Those pictures turned into recollections of being at Dave’s new place and the man at the camp beyond his using such tools. Probably most adults did use some of them at one time or another, I realized, my imaginings leading nowhere.
I took out my mixing bowl and ingredients I needed to bake angel food cakes to bring to the manor in the morning. While I put everything together and the kitchen heated and began to smell like the pinch of vanilla I added to the mix, my mind wandered, going after thoughts of death, finding Mrs. Wilburn, and protecting Dave. It wouldn’t help to try and tell Detective Wilet anything since Eve and I had told him everything we knew while at Dave’s camp.
I made three of the cakes and by the time my day ended, I had come up with more ideas for remodeling the Andrews’ house but gained little insight into finding a killer. I looked forward to getting out and learning more in the morning. Maybe in the obits? Surely I’d hear gossip from the manor.
