Mama Pursues Murderous Shadows

by Nora Deloach

  We spent the next forty-five minutes searching every nook and cranny in the house. I was pawing through a jumble of old dresses, socks, pants, and skirts when I found a few pieces of torn paper. I started to push them aside when a name caught my eye. Leman Moody. It was written on a scrap that had been torn from a bigger piece of paper.

  “Mama, look at this!”

  I handed my mother what I’d discovered. She looked at it closely, then began going carefully through the pile of things I’d been examining. Finally, she unearthed a whole collection of torn scraps, all of the same kind of paper Moody’s name had been scrawled on.

  “Simone, help me try to put this back together,” she urged.

  We played jig-saw puzzle with the pieces of paper until we had put enough of it together. We’d found one of Leman Moody’s gambling IOUs—one that had been paid by Ruby Spikes only a week before she was killed. The look on Mama’s face told me she understood how the receipt fit into the big picture. She placed the note in her purse.

  It was almost four-thirty when we’d gone through everything in the little house. We didn’t find money. As a matter of fact, we didn’t even find loose change. Mama’s face had clouded. Disappointed, she suggested we go home. But as we started to leave, her face brightened again.

  “We didn’t look outside of the house,” she said.

  I followed her as we slowly walked around the front of the house, looking for a place where a person could hide a sum of money.

  Nothing.

  We started toward the back when Mama spotted an old Mercury at the edge of the yard. “It might be in that,” she said. “Get a stick so that we can test the grass around it. We don’t want our search to end up with a snake bite.”

  I used the handle of a discarded mop to jab through the thick grass. After a few minutes, it seemed that there was nothing creepy or crawly in the vicinity.

  Then, Mama, who’d already walked around to the passenger’s side, opened the door. I pulled on the latch to the door on the driver’s side and peered inside. The seats were covered with cat hair.

  The floor in the back netted us one of Charles Parker’s business cards. Mama glanced at the card with curiosity, then added it to the collection she was storing in her purse.

  I was beginning to doubt that we’d find any money. The signals I was picking up from Mama’s body language told me she might have been thinking the same thing. She checked the glove compartment, which was crammed with old, stained documents.

  I’d laid the mop across the front seat. After she’d closed the glove compartment, Mama reached for the old mop handle and used it to fish underneath the seat of the car.

  Folks, it was then that Mama hit pay dirt. The lady pulled out a brand-new, shiny metal box, the kind people around Otis used to keep their important papers and their money in.

  “This is it! This is what I’m looking for!”

  “Now will you share what you’ve discovered with me?”

  Mama shook her head. “Not until I’ve figured a way to bring a murderous shadow into the light.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  For an hour after we got back to our house, Mama didn’t say anything more. Instead, she rushed into the kitchen and began to pull out her baking utensils with such fury that I understood her silence.

  She was planning and she didn’t want to be disturbed. Whenever she puts such energy in her baking, oblivious to anything or everybody else, I know that she’s using her cooking skills to think—it’s an efficient way that works for her.

  I made a pot of chocolate almond coffee, deciding that it would go well with whatever comfort food she was throwing together. Then I joined my father and Cliff in the backyard to wait for the results of both her baking and her thinking.

  When the tantalizing smell of bread pudding wafted out to us, I knew we’d be in for a treat. Mama makes bread pudding to die for.

  Then she summoned us into the kitchen. But before we could be seated, we heard the doorbell.

  “I’ll get it,” Mama said as she hastily moved toward the front door.

  When she returned, Abe and his deputy, Rick Martin, were with her. “I called Abe and Rick,” she told us. “It’s important that they agree to work with us on this.”

  Then she told the five of us how she’d figured out who had killed Ruby and how she planned to get him to show his hand.

  My father jumped up from his chair like a grasshopper. “Candi, your behind will be grass and that man will be a lawn mower!”

  From the look on Mama’s face, she didn’t find my father’s analogy amusing. “James,” she shot back, “I’m not going to get hurt and you’ve got to believe that!”

  Daddy shook his head. “But why do you want to be the cheese in the rat trap?”

  “It’s the only way to get the killer to show his hand.”

  “There is no way I’m gonna let this happen!” my father shouted as he began pacing the floor. “My wife is not going to sit in a chair and let a maniac take a shot at her!”

  “He’s not going to shoot me,” Mama insisted. “Abe and Rick will have him handcuffed before he—”

  “Shoots you the second time,” my father interrupted. “Candi, baby, please be reasonable. You are not the cavalry … this is not your war!”

  “It’s the only way to get the man who killed Ruby to show his hand,” she insisted.

  “Abe,” Daddy said, “tell my wife that she shouldn’t do this!”

  Abe’s forehead wrinkled and he cleared his throat. “I’ve already come to the conclusion that even if I tried to get Candi to change her mind, she wouldn’t listen to me.”

  My father shook his head and turned toward me and Cliff. “Cliff! Simone!” he pleaded, his voice and eyes begging for our help in changing Mama’s mind.

  Cliff didn’t move—apparently he’d become dumbfounded by what my mother had just proposed.

  “Daddy,” I said, seeing that my boyfriend wasn’t going to be any use to us at the moment, “what do you think about me being the bait in Mama’s plan?”

  “No you won’t,” Mama said before my father had a chance to say anything. “This is not a matter to be pulling straws over. I’m confident that if everybody does what they are supposed to do, I won’t get hurt.”

  “Let Abe or Rick sit in the chair,” my father urged. “It’s their job to trap killers. You’ve done enough already!”

  “Ruby’s killer will be expecting to see a woman’s shadow,” Mama said. “If Abe or Rick sit as bait, he’ll become suspicious.”

  My father’s right hand pounded the kitchen table with such force that everything on it shifted. “I ain’t gonna let you do it! There’s no need to talk about it anymore.”

  “James,” Mama said in her usual warm, confident tone, “you know that I’m not a woman to take unnecessary chances. That’s why I want you close to me. With you close by my side, I know everything will work out fine.”

  Daddy’s face didn’t lose its obstinacy as he walked over to the window and gazed out of it in silence.

  I took a deep breath. I couldn’t help but wonder how my father would react if he knew that this would be the third time Mama had sat like cheese to this particular rat. As it was, I’d hardly ever seen him this upset. Still, I realized that despite my father’s pleading, Mama hadn’t changed her mind. I decided to intercede. “Daddy,” I said, joining him at the window, “Mama’s plan will work if we see to it that the rat is caught before he snatches her.”

  My father turned to face me. “Simone honey, your old man has looked more than one killer in the eyes. I ain’t never been accused of losing my cool under fire, but I ain’t so sure that I can just sit there quietly while a murderer takes a shot at your mother.”

  Mama walked over and put her arms around my father. “James, I promise—nothing is going to happen to me.”

  Daddy stepped back and threw up his hands in disgust. “Okay, okay! So now, after thirty-five years of what I considered a de
cent marriage, you’re telling me that you, my wife—the mother of my children—is Superwoman!”

  The silence became thick; for what seemed like an eternity nobody said anything more.

  Finally my father looked into Mama’s eyes. His shoulders slumped, his voice lowered. “Candi baby, I don’t want you to do this, but if you insist on doing it anyway, tell me—what do you want me to do?”

  Mama kissed my father on the cheek. “This is my plan,” she started, seconds before the timer went off that signaled that the bread pudding was ready to be taken out of the oven.

  It took several hours to get Mama’s plan operational. Mama called Susy Mets and got her to agree to participate in the ruse. It was about ten o’clock when people had been moved, the phone call to the killer had been made, and we pulled up in front of the small house. The moon rose, only a sliver less full than it had been the night before. A dog barked from the woods on the right, and a second dog picked up the cry.

  The heat from the night felt like a suffocating blanket. I couldn’t help but wonder—what if the killer didn’t come? What if he was smart enough to slip past Rick and Abe? I wanted to share my doubts with Mama but decided against it; she had enough to worry about already.

  We were inside where a ceiling fan sent warm air throughout the living room. Mama looked around, then picked her spot. It was an upholstered chair next to the window, one of two windows that, in the daytime, looked out onto the front porch, the yard, and the road beyond. But now the shades were drawn.

  My father shook his head as if he couldn’t believe he was going along with this, then he crouched behind Mama’s chair, within arm’s reach of her body.

  I had been instructed to find the light switch to the front porch and be ready to turn it on. I took a deep breath, and crouched down on the floor directly in front of the switch. It was an awkward position, one that had me sitting with my back against a wall ready to spring up like a frog at the sound of Abe’s or Rick’s voice. “Suppose he doesn’t come,” I whispered, forgetting my earlier inclination not to throw water on Mama’s fire by sharing my doubts.

  “He’ll be here,” she whispered back impatiently. “Now don’t say another word!”

  Abe and Rick were out there, supposedly hiding within a few yards of wherever the killer chose to take a swipe at Mama. Cliff was behind the sofa. He had come out of his comatose posture of not believing what Mama was going to do, and had agreed to accompany us. I was trying to figure what he could do to save Mama from behind the couch.

  The stillness was punctuated by another dog’s bark. Mama sat straight up in the chair. The light from a small lamp threw the shadow of her silhouette against the window shade, giving the killer a clear target.

  I sat, wondering how long we’d have to wait before things started to pop. A squirrelly feeling in the pit of my stomach started when I began to imagine the killer slithering behind a tree, the moonlight revealing the sinister look in his eyes. I strained to listen for the sound of a twig breaking, a leaf rustling, but the only sound was my heartbeat.

  I drew my knees tight against my body and held my breath. My imagination started up again: In my mind’s eye I could see the killer wipe his mouth, then move closer to his prey—my mother!

  Nervously I put my finger to my mouth, as if to remind myself to keep quiet. Again I began to imagine the killer, to see his lips pulled back tight in a half-crazed smile as he eased up to the uneven stone steps that led to the front porch. I swallowed hard past the lump in my throat.

  I imagined the killer lifting his gun and aiming it at Mama’s head. My imagination became reality when I heard Abe’s voice. “Put it down easy and nobody will get hurt!”

  My heart pounded like a drum. Drops of sweat rolled down my face. I swear the next thing I heard was the killer’s finger tightening on the trigger.

  I jumped up and switched on the porch light.

  My father pulled Mama to the floor.

  A bullet zinged through the room and lodged in the wall above the sofa.

  Mama wasn’t hurt, and Herman Spikes would never kill again.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  “ ‘I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure,’ said E. B. White,” Mama said, smiling.

  We were in the Otis Community Center putting the last-minute touches on the decorations twenty minutes before the guests were due to arrive. Yasmine, Ernest, Rodney, Will, Stacey (Will’s “special lady”), Cliff, my father, and I had stopped working. We were all listening to Mama tell how she had figured out that Herman Spikes had killed his wife. Daddy and Cliff and I had heard it before, of course, but we were enjoying hearing Mama tell it again.

  “I touched a little capsule of truth when, as I listened to Sarah’s story and looked at the scarf around her neck I realized that the cloth Simone had wrapped Sparkle, Curtis and Mack’s cat up in, was identical to a red and brown scarf I’d seen in Ruby’s bathroom floor in a pile of discarded clothes,” she told them. “Jeff Golick, the manager of the Avondale Inn, told us that Ruby wore a reddish brown scarf the night she checked in. Inez Moore told me that the plant manager at the garment factory allowed every employee to take two scarves from each lot. I asked myself, how did Ruby’s scarf get to Betty Jo Mets’s house? Simone picked up the soiled and wrinkled scarf from Betty Jo’s house thinking it was a piece of rag.

  “Sarah’s story of how she’d spotted Laura Manning’s killer because he’d picked up a special pen made me wonder whether or not Ruby’s killer picked up her scarf to wipe his fingerprints from the gun and the room. Suppose he took it away with him but then left it at a place where he stashed the money. Suppose he didn’t realize what he’d done until he saw Simone bring it out of Betty Jo’s house and wrap poor little Sparkle in it.”

  “And,” I interrupted, “he might have shot at you to draw me away from the car so that he could get the scarf back.”

  “Exactly,” Mama said.

  “What?” My father asked. “Herman Spikes had shot at you once before?”

  Uh-oh, here we go, I thought. We’d managed until now to keep him in the dark about that.

  “We didn’t know it was Herman at the time,” Mama told him.

  I wasn’t about to mention the hood flying up on the Honda. I knew my father’s blood pressure was already going up. There was no reason to upset him further by telling him we suspected Herman had released the latch on the Honda and that Herman might have bumped us and sent us flying into the ditch. We couldn’t prove it anyway.

  Mama continued. “Then there were the brand new twenty-dollar bills that Betty Jo gave her boys. Where did she get the money from? Now, I knew Betty Jo very well. She had low morals but she was neither a thief nor a liar. Then I remembered our last conversation the night before her death. She told me she was confused by something, and she asked me to meet her at Portia Bolton’s house. I assumed she wanted to ask me something about the care of Curtis and Mack. But when I started thinking about it, I remembered Susy, Betty Jo’s cousin, telling me Betty Jo had mentioned having a dream that seemed so real. She told me she stopped talking about the dream when Herman walked up, and that Betty Jo moved into his house right around then.

  “Suppose, I continued thinking, that Betty Jo Mets fell asleep after she and Herman had sex at the Otis Motel. Suppose Herman slipped out, went to Avondale, killed Ruby, stole her money, and stopped by Betty Jo’s house, which is located between Avondale and Otis, to stash the money for the time being. Suppose, as he slipped back into the motel room, Betty Jo roused and he quieted her, telling her that she was dreaming.”

  “Then Herman killed Betty Jo?” Will asked.

  “Yes,” Mama answered. “The truth will come out in the trial, but once I’d talked to Inez Moore and let it out that Ruby might have been murdered, Herman started becoming uncomfortable. I think he overheard Betty Jo talking to me on the phone and deci
ded she wasn’t going to be as good of an alibi as he’d first thought.”

  “He suffocated her like he’d done Ruby,” I interjected.

  “Problem is, he didn’t have time to make it look like she’d killed herself, so he pretended that she died in her sleep,” Mama said.

  “He didn’t know that the autopsy would show that she’d been killed,” I said.

  “No,” Mama admitted. “Still, I had to come up with a way of catching him trying to murder again. It would have to be something that linked him with Ruby and Betty Jo. I decided that link was Betty Jo’s concern about a dream that she thought might have been real.”

  “So after Mama convinced us to let her sit as bait, she called Susy Mets,” I said.

  “Susy agreed to call Herman and tell him that she’d been thinking about the dream that Betty Jo had mentioned to her,” Mama explained.

  “Of course, Mama had Susy add a bit more to the conversation that she’d had with her cousin than actually took place,” I said.

  “It was the only way to get Herman to react,” Mama said.

  “What did you tell Susy to say?” Ernest asked.

  “I asked her to tell Herman that Betty Jo had told her that she saw him come into the motel room sometime after midnight but that Herman had told her she’d been dreaming. Susy assured Herman that she hadn’t told anybody what Betty Jo had told her but said that she was thinking about mentioning it to Abe the next morning.”

  “Then you sat in the chair and waited for Herman to try to kill you?” Rodney asked Mama.

  “I couldn’t put poor Susy into that position, now could I?”

  “Your mama had to be the hero!” Daddy chided.

  Mama smiled at my father. “No, James, you were the hero. You pulled me out of the line of Herman’s fire, remember.”