by June Shaw
* * * *
After a restless night, I dragged around getting myself ready and tried to shift my mind to a more positive outlook. At the appointed time, I went out to my truck. The rear end clattered and shimmied so much, it seemed in a fight to push itself off the rest of the vehicle.
There was no way I was going to sneak past Royce’s house to pick up my sister. I was grateful not to find him or her opposite neighbor Jake out in their front yards. Royce was a threat, and Jake probably wouldn’t become so fond of Eve if he thought of her as riding around in what sounded like a junky old piece of metal.
The minute she climbed in, I rushed away. We rattled down roads around town to find items we wanted to use in Cherry’s house. People in a few cars we passed turned back to stare, and a couple of drivers tooted and pointed behind my truck to let me know what was happening back there in the slim chance I didn’t know. On city streets that were fairly quiet except for a few people outside, we were the eyesore, the call to look at us while we traveled in my noisemaker.
Eve glanced at me some of those times when my noisy truck called attention to it and then hastily turned her face away as though she felt guilty for noticing. After a while, I silently vowed I would quickly earn enough money to have my truck repaired, even if I had to beg Fancy Ladies to let me sell a bunch of way overpriced brassieres that had been created to hoist objects that many older women thought made their sagging breasts as perky as those of most slim teens. I visualized thick gobs of boobs. Eew!
Pulling in front of the only paint store in town, I turned off the key. For long seconds I sat in place, waiting while my rear shimmies settled. “Now,” I said, looking at Eve, who also hadn’t unstrapped herself yet.
She seemed to know I didn’t need any more words than that. It was just that we’d finally experienced a moment of peace.
“I can back you on that until you’re able to take care of it. No rush to repay me.” She gave her head a small nod toward the rear as though she didn’t want to mention all that we’d heard. In that moment, I also realized how my body had just calmed. While I’d paid attention to the racket and stares as we rode, I had not done the same with my body. It was only now settling down, as though the hanging bumper had shaken everything, including me and her.
“No, thanks. I’m good.” Once we strode into the store away from my truck, she probably experienced the peace I did just to get away from that thing outside.
We had done business with Andre, the middle-aged manager, quite a few times. He greeted us with a grim smile. “Got a little problem out there, huh?”
Ignoring his words, Eve and I grabbed buggies and hurriedly went in search of items. We gathered drop cloths and the painters’ tape that would create crisp lines between colors. Shying away from cheaper rollers, we selected short-napped ones with synthetic fabric since Cherry’s walls weren’t textured. While we moved on to other areas, I pulled the wrappers off the rollers and gave each one a good rubdown that would prevent lint from coming off these new items and staying on the walls. I did this as we walked so I wouldn’t forget to get it done, and we would be getting to the job so soon.
We bypassed the paints with matte and flat sheens since what we planned to use would go in a kitchen, and kitchens picked up too many stains. Self-priming paints worked best. Moving past budget paints, we reached the color swatches of our favorite brand.
“If you ladies need any help, let me know.” With no other customers, Andre remained where he’d been seated at the sales counter. He kept his fingers running across the front of his phone, probably playing a game. Eve and I chose a pale teal shade for the walls of Cherry’s kitchen and a darker teal that would become an attractive focal point in the room for the stove’s long hood. While Andre began mixing the colors, we picked out the white we liked best.
He helped us load our purchases that we charged to the Twin Sisters Remodeling and Repair account that I hoped would soon have a bit of extra cash in it. With everything in my truck bed, he walked around the rear of my truck, glanced at the bumper, and swerved his eyes toward and away from mine. Business was never booming in his store, and he surely wanted to keep his job, so wisely Andre only thanked us and walked inside.
“Now,” I said, turning a smile on Eve, “that was good.”
“Yes, it did go well.”
At the lumberyard, we hoped to find what we planned to use on the side of the kitchen’s island to give it pizzazz. Even though they didn’t carry what we needed, they could get it in two days. Perfect. We made more charges to our business account.
After a morning filled with accomplishments, we stopped for a quick lunch at a burger joint. From there, we would make our trek to New Orleans, only an hour and a half away, so we could see samples of granite in person to select the one we liked best. We had already checked them online, but nothing beat seeing them under the light.
“Wait, these new shoes are pinching my toes.” Eve pointed to the red sling-back heels, which she never should have worn in the first place. “Let me run in my house and change to a more comfortable pair before we go to the city.”
In front of her house, I waited in my truck. She was taking longer than I’d expected. I turned off the motor so it wouldn’t clatter up her neighbor.
Stillness of the house to the right snared my interest. I stared at the window nearest the front where Mrs. Wilburn used to watch Eve, and later Royce perched right behind her, also keeping Eve in view. Curtains there were straight with not even a breath causing one to stir.
The driveway was empty that I could see, but who knew? Royce might have taken her money and bought himself something else he could ride—maybe a golf cart. Many people in the neighborhood owned them.
Okay, I was curious, and Eve would be out again in only a minute. I could slip out the door of my truck and take a quick peek into the rear of his driveway hidden from view by the tall hedges that separated his backyard from hers.
I eased my door shut so as not to get his attention in case he was outside where I couldn’t see him, although I didn’t believe he was home. I took quick steps behind my truck to its opposite side and rushed to the edge of the tall bushes.
No new vehicle stood in their driveway that I noticed. What I did see was Royce. His bent pose on the ground did not make me believe he was trying to take a tan.
“Are you okay?” I yelled, running across the yard to him. “Royce….”
“Sunny! Sunny, are you out here?” Eve’s frantic call came from the front area of her house.
“Here. Hurry!” I managed to get the words out my mouth as I bent to the crumpled young man with his eyes closed on the grass. “Call an ambulance,” I urged since she came rushing across, purse in her hand, and my purse and phone remained in my truck.
“What’s wrong with him?” Eve asked a second before she started responding to the person who answered her 911 call.
“I don’t know, but he doesn’t say anything.” I moved around to the other side of him and started to kneel so I could get closer to feel for a pulse in his neck. Blood on the grass and back of his head told me he had not had a heart attack or seizure.
While Eve told the person she spoke to the little she knew, she placed an index finger across her lips to tell me to tone down the song that swirled out of my mouth.
My fingers that felt the young man’s neck shook once they felt no sign of life in him. Whatever or whoever caused his demise had done a terrible thing, snuffing out his last breath. A cold helplessness seeped through me. It started from the pit of my stomach and ran through my legs. Along my chest wall and into my pinky fingers. I experienced such an icy feel that I threw my arms around myself and held on, trying to hold myself down while I shook. What had happened to this young person who’d lost his life? My gaze drifted to the back door of his house, where the woman who had given birth to him had also once thrived. Now she, too, was gone, although not deceased at this place.
I’d also found
her.
My song came out as a soft hum while Eve came close and hugged me. The same carol sounded peaceful to my ears as the sirens whined. More drew near.
We were on our feet while the medics ran up with their gurney and medical gear. Eve and I stepped away, and these trained people checked her neighbor for any sign of life. Without hearing any words, it was easy to tell from their demeanors that they found he was beyond help. They didn’t place him on their gurney but began taking pictures.
Police officers were running up, and we knew to wait. We would be questioned, me especially since I had found him. The detective in charge in our little town would not be pleased to see us at a murder scene once again. He was not the only person who would not find our experience a pleasant one.
Why us? Why me? Why would anyone kill Royce?
Voices barked orders and more doors slammed. This whole experience made the day feel surreal. A soft breeze found its way across the lawn and reached me. It gave me a strange thought. Low humidity. How nice. How pleasant on the skin.
My idea was so inconsistent with the whole scene it made me recall being near our sister Crystal when someone shot her next to me. While Eve spoke to the deputy who had been the first police officer to arrive, and Detective Wilet came stomping out from the driveway toward us, the neighborhood could surely hear me recall how a really bright red nose led Santa through what would have otherwise been a horrible night.
Chapter 18
Detective Wilet questioned me and Eve right in the deceased person’s backyard and wrote answers we gave him and possibly other notations in his pad. I tried to focus on everything he asked Eve, and what she answered, but found it most difficult with all of the people around us snapping pictures and making drawings, and all the while poor Royce remained dead on his grass.
No, it wasn’t his anymore. Or was it in the first place? He had posted that For Sale sign out front. It didn’t matter now.
“Huh?” I said, seeing the detective face me with his mouth moving. His words seemed aimed at me instead of my sister.
“When did you see him last?” Our inquirer’s tone and frown let me know he wasn’t pleased that I’d been so distracted while he started speaking to me. Or maybe he just didn’t like me at all. I knew he didn’t like to find me around murdered bodies. I didn’t like it, either.
“Oh, Royce,” I said, looking down at the young man on the ground. He seemed so youthful and innocent, and I could almost imagine his mother wanting to rock him when he was a babe. “When I last saw him alive…?” Uh-oh, I didn’t like where my mind went.
“Yes,” the officer said with a hard nod, “I want to know when you last saw the deceased alive.”
“Uh, that would have been yesterday.”
He nodded more and wrote. “What time yesterday?”
“Early evening, I think. Right, Eve?” I asked, and she nodded, her hooded eyes telling me she was reliving that experience as vividly as I was, and it wasn’t a good one.
What had I said to him? Yelled at him? Had I shaken my fist at Royce yesterday when he stopped his motorcycle he had roaring behind Eve’s car, blocking us in her driveway, revving up his motor while he wore that frightful helmet that made him look fierce. But I had shown him. Instead of backing down and singing a carol and hiding inside Eve’s car in her garage, I’d shoved out of her car and hollered at that boy. Yes, I did. I felt my chest swell with pride for not letting fear get to me yesterday. Right, it was yesterday evening, and I might have threatened him. And neighbors might have heard.
Thick, hairy fingers snapped in front of my face. “Ms. Taylor, are you still with us? Did you hear my question?”
“Mm, yes. What is it again?” I wasn’t going to be too specific if I didn’t need to.
“What time yesterday did you last see the victim?”
“Victim? So you think he was murdered?” The question seemed stupid even as I asked it. Like why else would anyone be lying around with his head bashed in?
The detective’s jaw tightened, indentures making their way into it. His eyes drew so close together, he now displayed a thick unibrow. His neck moved with his swallow before he spoke to me. “Not only do I think he was murdered, which is quite evident by his bashed-in head. I also believe you might have been involved.”
“Me?” A jolt ran through me with his accusation, although it wasn’t totally unexpected. “Why would you think I killed him?”
He slammed his fisted hands to his hips. “You found him and also discovered his murdered mother at someone’s camp.” As he obviously saw the question start to form on my lips, he said, “No, we haven’t discounted you from being a participant in that crime.”
I shook my head. Eve did, too. Protests left our mouths, but he shushed us.
He faced me. “The coroner will give us the approximate time of this man’s death, and once he does, you and your sister will both be answering a lot more questions that will need corroboration.”
Oh my gosh, they would be questioning people who lived around here. Had any of them heard my encounter with this dead man?
I tried to find words that would prove I didn’t do it and neither did my sister. My gaze flew wildly around this rear area then settled on the back fence.
“Look at that.” I pointed to a space I noticed.
The detective glanced there and stared at me. “So it’s a fence. All right, young lady—”
“Wait. I’m not trying to distract you. Please look closer at this section of the fence.”
Even Eve gave me a skeptical glance, and I would have felt that way myself, only I had spied something that didn’t seem right.
The three of us walked closer to the tall dog-eared wooden fence that surrounded the backyard of the young couple who lived right behind the Wilburns. I had walked beside that fence and noticed the panels and that some of them fit snugly against each other while a few others did not. Probably the people who lived there had it for privacy around their swimming pool, where the curvaceous wife liked to sunbathe. A rumor I’d once heard mentioned it was sometimes in the nude.
The detective, and even my twin, gave me inquisitive looks.
“Check this out.” I placed my finger beside the spot. “You see this little empty circle? It’s not a natural knot in the wood. The inner part is fresher than the rest.”
Again, the pair gave me strange looks. The hole was tiny. I hoped I was correct.
“Place your eye against the opening.” I used a pleading expression with the detective. “Do it please? It’ll only take you a second.”
With a huff, he placed his eye close to the space. His body’s posture lost its tension as his shoulders relaxed. He tilted his head a little and pushed his face against the wood.
The phone in Eve’s hand rang. Its noise blasted the silent moment, startling me and her and possibly everyone else back here. She shook her head like she wasn’t going to answer it but glanced at the caller’s name.
“I can’t talk now, Nicole,” she said once she answered. “I’ll have to call you back later.”
With the speaker on, my niece’s words carried. “Why? What are you doing, Mom?”
Eve’s eyes swung toward mine, the worry in them evident. Should she tell her I was being investigated for a murder?
Of course not.
“Just something I can’t stop right now.”
“Listen, Mom. He just started babbling!” Baby noises came from the phone, the sweetest unclear sounds I had ever heard. They dragged the tears that wanted to hide behind my eyes over my lower lids. Hot water touched my face.
I placed a finger on my sister’s cheek. Her happy tears could’ve steamed an oyster.
“Hey, baby bumpkins, how are you? I love you. I want to hold you and—yes, go ahead, keep on talking,” Eve told the baby who continued to make unintelligible sounds.
Detective Wilet drew his head back from the fence. His demeanor was no longer up tight or angry. He looke
d at Eve’s phone and held up a hand in a signal to stop. “You’ll need to get off now,” he said in a quiet tone.
She nodded and held on a moment longer. “Nicole. Nicole, if you can hear me—I need to run now. Call again. I love hearing him. And I love all of you.”
“Me, too,” I called out.
Once Eve clicked off, the detective did something surprising. He smiled. It was a crooked smile, a little one that showed only three of his narrow teeth, but it looked real. “Congratulations,” he told Eve. “Having a baby is a wonderful thing.”
Oh, obviously he had one, maybe more of them.
He didn’t want to discuss babies anymore. Instead, he told me, “I could see what you wanted me to look at. It looks like somebody drilled a tiny hole in the fence so it wouldn’t be noticed, at least by most people.” He almost smiled at me. “By putting your eye right against the wood, you can fairly easily see into that other backyard and their pool and its apron with an open lounge chair right inside.”
“I hate to say this, but I’ll bet Royce drilled that hole so he could watch the young woman sunbathing,” I said.
The detective stared at the dead man on the ground. “You may be right.”
No obvious weapon lay on the grass anywhere near Royce that I could see. Of course, if a person came into his backyard and struck him on the head with something, that person would not want to drop that object where it would be easily discovered.
“Detective Wilet,” I said, still not dismissed to go anywhere else, and my idea blooming, “I believe his mother was also killed by being struck on the head.” He didn’t respond to what had seemed obvious, so I continued. “Do you think the same object that was used to murder her was used here, kind of like mother, like son? And then that would mean the same person killed both of them, right?” My thoughts that blossomed seemed frightful, too awful to fully consider.
