“Are y’all going to tell me what you found, or just sit there congratulating one another?” I asked. I’m usually far more respectful of the dead, and of my elders, and certainly of anyone happens to be both, which account for four of the five people in my kitchen. But it was early. I blame my poor manners on lack of caffeine.
“The boots match,” Miss Faye said. Her voice was typically matter-of-fact, like she was saying the sky was blue, or that grass was green. I whipped my head around to her so quick my brain had to take a second to catch up.
“The print we saw in Sheriff Dunleavy’s camera matched the boots we found in Ian’s closet perfectly,” Jenny said. “That perv is definitely the one that killed me and Shelly.” She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me, simultaneously proud of herself for finding the culprit and pissed off about being dead. I couldn’t blame her. I kinda felt both those emotions right then, too.
“Well, I guess the next thing to do would be to call Sheriff Dunleavy and get him to interview Ian. Maybe we can find some reason to talk to him at school,” I said.
“Isn’t me telling you reason enough?” Jenny asked, her voice rising. I noticed the coffee cup rattling on the table in front of me, and I reached out to still the shaking porcelain.
“It is for me, honey, but I don’t think your testimony is a whole lot of good in a court of law,” I pointed out. Jenny scowled at me, but had no response. One benefit to being an old woman talking to young’uns is that sometimes they just shut up when they realize they’re wrong. This does not happen nearly often enough with grownups.
I walked into the kitchen and picked up the cordless phone sitting on the antique icebox I used as a catch-all flat surface to hold the phone, phonebooks, notepads, ink pens, and bills that come in the mail until I get around to paying them. I walked over to my purse and dug out my cell phone, then shook my head and hung the cordless back up in its cradle.
“I reckon if I’ve got his number in my cell phone, I could just use that to call him, couldn’t I?” I asked the air. Or I reckon I might have been asking the passel of dead people sitting in my dining room, but they ignored me, talking amongst themselves about all the “proof” they had that Ian was our murderer.
I pulled up Willis’s number in my contacts list and pressed the button to call him, putting the phone on speaker so everyone could hear the conversation. It rang three times before he answered, and his voice was thick with sleep when he did. “Hello?”
“Willis? Sheriff?” I corrected myself, but not quite fast enough.
“Lila Grace?” He sounded like he was starting to come awake. “What time is it?”
I looked at the clock on the stove. “Seven-fifteen,” I replied. “I’m sorry, I should have waited to call. I didn’t even think that you might not be up yet. I just tend to get up early. I’m sorry, we can talk later. Give me a—”
“Lila Grace.” His voice cracked over the lines. I stopped talking. “I’m awake now. What do you need? Did something else happen in the night?”
It took me a minute to figure out what he was asking. Of course, nothing else happened, he went home. Then I blushed a little at the direction my mind went, and I said, “No, no, nothing like that. But I think we might have caught a break in the case.”
“What do you mean?” His voice had not a single trace of sleep-fuzzy in it now. I had his complete attention.
“The ladies went over to Ian Vernon’s house last night, and they seem to think his boots match the print in my yard.”
“The ladies? Lila Grace, you can’t just go breaking into somebody’s house on a hunch. Not only is that against the law, it’s dangerous as hell. You know just about everybody around here has a shotgun. What if he’d shot you?”
“I think I’d be more worried about his daddy than Ian,” I said. “From what I’m hearing, if Ian shoots anybody, it’s with a camera. And I didn’t go into his house. I didn’t even know what they were doing until these crazy old biddies showed up in my kitchen this morning.”
That got a glare from the assembled self-appointed detectives and a confused grunt from the man on the other end of the phone. “Lila Grace, what in the hell are you talking about?”
“Miss Helen, Miss Frances, and Miss Faye went over to Ian’s house last night with Jenny. They walked through his bedroom walls and peeked at the his boots. Jenny says it’s a perfect match for the boot print in the mud in my back yard.”
“I say that because it is,” Jenny said. “Tell him to arrest that little panty-snatcher!”
“Jenny also says that the boy is a little bit of peeping tom, trying to catch pictures up the cheerleaders’ skirts,” I added.
“Lila Grace, everybody from twelve to twenty spends half his life trying to get one glimpse of cheerleader drawers. I ain’t arresting this boy on account of him being heterosexual. But I will go talk to Mr. Mitchell and see about getting an impression of the boy’s shoes. If he wears those boots to school today, and his parents agree to it, and the school lets us, maybe we can get him to step in ink and walk on a sheet of paper for us.”
“You don’t have to talk to his parents,” Jenny said. “He turned eighteen back in the summer. He got held back in seventh grade because he got the mumps and missed too many days.” I relayed her words to the sheriff and got a sigh of relief.
“Well, that’s one less bunch of asshats we have to deal with. I’ve already run into Ricky Vernon a time or two since I started. He’s a real piece of work,” Willis said.
“For somebody from out of town, you’re catching on to life in the Upstate real quick, Sheriff,” I said with a laugh. “You think Ricky’s something, you should have met his granddaddy.” Ulysses Vernon died when I was a little girl, but he made one serious impression the few times I met him. He was a huge man, with a long white beard that cascaded down over his overalls, completely covering up the t-shirt he wore. I never saw him wear shoes, even when he drove his old truck up to the house and dropped off a peach crate full of white liquor to my daddy.
Daddy would put cherries in that jar of liquor and let it sit on a shelf for about three weeks while he finished off Old Ulysses’s last delivery, and about the time Daddy was out of liquor, the cherries had soaked into the moonshine and cut the taste just enough to make it drinkable. Daddy got a case of ‘shine every two months from Ulysses until he drove his truck off the side of the road and wrapped it around a tree. Ricky took up the family business after his Granddaddy died, his own daddy having got killed in Vietnam, but the younger Vernon never had the nose for making liquor like his father did. I still got a case from Ricky every now and then, but half a dozen quart jars would last me almost a year, and I stuck cinnamon sticks in mine and let them dissolve all the way down before I drank the firewater.
“I’ll meet you at the schoolhouse at nine-thirty. That oughta give me enough time to get some breakfast and get a shower. Then we can talk to young Mr. Vernon about his fascination with cheerleaders.” Sheriff Dunleavy’s voice jerked me out of my trip down memory lane, and I took a sip of coffee.
“I’ll be there, Sheriff. Let’s get this boy behind bars and find some justice for those girls.” It all sounded so simple. But my life has never been simple.
Chapter 20
Nine forty-five saw us sitting in the principal’s office with Mr. Robert Mitchell behind his desk and Ian Vernon slumped into a chair facing us. We were crammed into the little office like sardines, since the office was dominated by Mr. Mitchell’s huge oak desk. I swear, you could have just about landed a helicopter on the thing, and it made me wonder what in the world he was trying to compensate for.
Robbie Mitchell had been the biggest hell-raiser in my Sunday School class for two years until his parents up and decided to switch to the ARP church and my life calmed down considerably. He never liked me much, since I didn’t let him run wild like some other folks did, and I made him recite Bible verses every time he misbehaved. He had about memorized every word of Song of Solomon and Ps
alms before he changed churches. I reckoned if he’d stayed much longer, he probably would have gone to the seminary, and the world would have been deprived of a man with absolutely zero skill in education or administration, so naturally he went into exactly that field.
“Now Ian, you know that you can request your parents be here for this conversation,” Mr. Mitchell said, but Sheriff Dunleavy held up a hand.
“Actually, Ian, according to these records—” He held up a file that I knew contained nothing but blank sheets of paper, since I had watched him pull them out of the copy machine in the main office and stick them into the folder. “According to these records, you’re eighteen. That means you’re legally an adult, and no, you cannot ask your mommy and daddy to be here when we’re talking to you.” Willis made it a point to make “mommy and daddy” sound as ridiculous and babyish as possible to keep the boy from asking for his parents.
“You can, however, ask for an attorney. Although, if you can’t pay for one, you’ll probably get a court-appointed lawyer from the ambulance chasers that hang out down by the emergency room,” Willis added.
I knew this was a lie since there wasn’t an emergency room for fifty miles, and there weren’t any court-appointed lawyers in Lockhart. If the boy needed an attorney, they’d have to come from Union, or probably Spartanburg. That would take several hours to round one up and get over to the school.
“I ain’t done nothing, so I don’t need no lawyer,” Ian said, his tone sullen and his words slurred. He looked everywhere around the room except at me, and I wondered why that would be. I didn’t remember ever having any interaction with the boy, unless he maybe was with his father when he delivered my liquor once or twice. But his daddy delivered liquor to half to houses in town, so it’s not like anybody cared.
“Then you won’t mind if we ask you some questions?” Sheriff Dunleavy asked. He pulled out a small digital recorder and clicked it on.
“Nah, y’all go ahead. Ask whatever you want.” Ian stayed slumped in his chair, working very hard to maintain his disaffected appearance. It wasn’t working, at least not with me. His eyes kept sweeping the room, taking in every detail. He was paying very close attention to everything; he just wanted us to think he wasn’t. I didn’t know if that was the demeanor of a guilty person, or just a boy who doesn’t want the adults to know he’s scared.
“You understand that anything you say to the sheriff can land you in jail, don’t you, Ian?” Mr. Mitchell asked, and I shot him a look that would have burned a hole right through his chest if I had anything like that super-hot vision that Superman throws around.
“Yeah, yeah,” Ian said. “Like I said, I ain’t done nothing, so won’t be nothing.”
I wasn’t sure what that sentence meant, or even if it was really a sentence, but I ignored it and focused my attention on the boy’s feet. Sure enough, they were clad in a pair of heavy black combat boots with thick rubber soles. I couldn’t see enough of them to see if the treads looked anything like the boot print we found in my yard, but they were definitely a military-style boot.
“Where were you last night?” Willis asked, setting the recorder on Mr. Mitchell’s desk.
“Home.”
“When did you get home?”
“After school.”
“Did you go anywhere between leaving school and home?”
“No.”
I could tell the brusque answers were annoying Mr. Mitchell, and they were having a similar effect on me, but Willis seemed unfazed by them. I assumed that in his time working in the big city he’d found ways to get information from recalcitrant suspects.
“What if I said I don’t believe you?” He leaned forward, dominating the skinny boy with his uniformed presence. Ian looked younger now, with the sheriff looming over him. His black jeans, black boots, and black t-shirt just made him look pale and nervous, not tall and intimidating like he certainly wanted. His spiky bright blond hair wavered a little as he shrank back from Willis’s sudden invasion of his personal space.
“I’d say I don’t give a shit what you believe because it’s the truth.” Ian jerked forward in the chair, almost nose to nose with the glowering sheriff.
Willis leaned back, a little smile tweaking the corner of his mouth. He got a rise out of the boy, got a full sentence out of him, which was some sort of progress. I enjoyed watching him work. He was good at this, working the push and pull of the boy’s resistance.
“Have you ever been to Ms. Carter’s home?” he asked.
Ian’s eyes went wide, then his brow furrowed as he looked at me. “Her? Why would I go over to her house?”
“I don’t know, Ian. Why don’t you tell me why you went to her house?” Willis asked. I pushed down a smile as I saw what he was doing, getting the boy to admit to going to my house, then spinning that around to him being there last night.
“I didn’t, man. I told you,” Ian insisted. “Or if I did, I went there with my old man to drop off some liquor.” He glared at Willis, all his hatred of authority restored in a blink. “Is that what this shit is about? You trying to use me to put the old man in jail? Shit, all you gotta do for that is ask. Yeah, he makes moonshine. Sells the shit out of it, too. Sells this old biddy a case whenever she calls, sells it to just about everybody in town. Except that asshole Sharky, he says Pop’s liquor ain’t good enough for his little pissant joint. Man, you want to get that old bastard on bootlegging, I’ll tell you anything you want. You want to know about them half a dozen scraggly-ass weed plants he’s got growing in the tool shed, too?” Ian leaned back, all smug viciousness at having turned coat on his father.
“We’ll come back to all that,” Willis said. I could see him mentally putting a pin in this point of the conversation. I knew from drinking with him at Stan’s that he could care less about a little moonshining, but growing marijuana might be a whole different operation in his mind.
“I want to know why you were at Ms. Carter’s place last night, poking around in her house. Why were you there, Ian?” Willis asked, his voice and eyes hard as flint.
“I wasn’t, man! I done told you, I ain’t never been there but to drop off liquor with Pops. What would I want in her house anyway? It ain’t like she’s rich or nothing.” He got a crafty look on his face. “You ain’t, are you?”
I almost laughed out loud at the clumsy boy, but managed to hold it in. “No, Ian,” I replied. “I’m not rich. I have some antiques, but most of them are too big to move easily. You’d need a truck and help to get them out of the house. That’s what makes this all the more confusing. Why would you break into my home?” I knew why, of course. I just wanted to keep him off-balance, to show him as few of my cards as possible.
“I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I ain’t a thief. I ain’t no kind of crook. I ain’t no pervert, neither, no matter what them two dead bitches did to my phone. That’s what this is about, ain’t it? Y’all think since I hated them snotty bitches that I killed them. Well I didn’t. I didn’t break into nobody’s house, and I didn’t kill nobody. I’m a good person! I just…I just don’t know how to talk to people sometimes, and sometimes people want to make out like I’m shit because my family’s shit, and that pisses me off, ‘cause I ain’t nothing like them assholes, and then I get mad, and then they say that proves they was right all along, and…and…and…shit, I don’t know. I just know I didn’t break into nobody’s house, and I didn’t kill nobody.”
He leaned back with his arms across his chest and a scowl on his face that only an aggrieved teenager can manage. I looked at Willis, but he didn’t return my glance. He was studying the boy, all his attention focused on Ian’s face, the set of his jaw, how he held his shoulders, whether his hands shook. He stared intently at the teen for several long moments, then leaned back abruptly, startling us both.
“Well, Ian, I reckon we can sort this all out real fast, if you’ll agree to it,” Willis said.
Ian cocked his head to one side, his distrust of Willis, all law enforcement, and every
body who could possibly be considered an adult evident in his face. “What you got in mind, Sheriff?”
“We took a photo and a mold of the boot print that the burglar at Ms. Carter’s house wore. It was fresh, so we were able to get a very detailed impression. I’d like to compare that with your boots. If it’s not a match, and those are the only boots you own, then you obviously didn’t break into Ms. Carter’s home.” I noticed that he very carefully did not mention Jenny and Shelly’s murders. It was one thing for him to throw away a burglary conviction, but if he mentioned anything about the boots in conjunction with the murders, and the shoes didn’t match, we could have ourselves a regular O.J. trial down here.
“Well, shit, Sheriff, why didn’t you just ask?” Ian said, leaning back in his chair and propping both feet up onto the table in front of him. My mouth fell open as I stared at the bottom of the boy’s feet. He had apparently carved all the tread from the center section of his boots, then epoxied or glued somehow letters down the center of each foot. They looked like the brightly colored letter magnets that children play with, except on his right foot, it spelled out “P-I-S-S,” and on the left foot, it read “O-F-F.”
This was not the boot print of the person who walked through my back yard the night before. The boot print we had was normal, nondescript, and almost pristine. Ian’s shoes were anything but. He was innocent, and he was our best lead.
“Are those the only boots you own, Ian?” Willis asked. I could read the disappointment in his every motion. His eyes were downcast, looking at his papers while the boy’s grin burned a hole in the top of his head.
“Nah, I got another pair,” Ian said with a smirk. Sheriff Dunleavy’s head snapped up, then his shoulders sagged at Ian’s next words. “I carved ‘Suck It’ on the bottom of them. Those are for the days when I’m feeling real bright and sunny. They don’t get much wear.”
Amazing Grace--A Southern Gothic Paranormal Mystery Page 13
