A Bone to Pick (Teagarden Mysteries,2)

by Charlaine Harris

  ~ Charlaine Harris ~

  “Was there anything I could do to help you, did your note say . . . ?” I trailed off. I tried to manage a look of intelligent expectancy.

  “Well,” he said with an embarrassed laugh, “actu- ally, I . . . this is so stupid, I’m acting like I was in high school again. Actually . . . I just wanted to ask you out. On a date.”

  “A date,” I repeated blankly.

  I saw instantly that my astonishment was hurting him.

  “No, it’s not that that’s peculiar,” I said hastily. “I just wasn’t expecting it.”

  “Because I’m a minister.”

  “Well—yes.”

  He heaved a sigh and opened his mouth with a re- signed expression.

  “No, no!” I said, throwing my hands up. “Don’t make an ‘I’m only human’ speech, if you were going to! I was gauche, I admit it! Of course I’ll go out with you!”

  I felt like I owed it to him now.

  “You’re not involved in another relationship at the moment?” he asked carefully.

  I wondered if he had to wear the collar on dates. “No, not for a while. In fact, I went to the wed- ding of my last relationship a few months ago.” ~ 26 ~

  ~ A Bone to Pick ~

  Suddenly Aubrey Scott smiled, and his big gray eyes crinkled up at the corners, and he looked good enough to eat.

  “What would you like to do? The movies?” I hadn’t had a date since Arthur and I had split. Anything sounded good to me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Maybe we can go to the early show and go out to eat afterward.”

  “Fine. When?”

  “Tomorrow night?”

  “Okay. The early show usually starts at five if we go to the triplex. Anything special you want to see?” “Let’s get there and decide.”

  There could easily be three movies I did not want to see showing at one time, but the chances were at least one of them would be tolerable.

  “Okay,” I said again. “But if you’re taking me out to supper, I want to treat you to the movie.” He looked doubtful. “I’m kind of a traditional guy,” he said. “But if you want to do it that way, that’ll be a new experience for me.” He sounded rather coura- geous about it.

  After he left, I slowly finished my drink. I won- dered if the rules for dating clergymen were different from the rules for dating regular guys. I told myself ~ 27 ~

  ~ Charlaine Harris ~

  sternly that clergymen are regular guys, just regular guys who professionally relate to God. I knew I was being naive in thinking I had to act differently with Aubrey Scott than I would with another date. If I was so malicious or off-color or just plain wrongheaded that I had to constantly censor my conversation with a minister, then I needed the experience anyway. Per- haps it would be like dating a psychiatrist; you would always worry about what he spotted about you that you didn’t know. Well, this date would be a “learning experience” for me.

  What a day! I shook my head as I plodded up the stairs to my bedroom. From being a poor, worried, spurned librarian I’d become a wealthy, secure, dat- able heiress.

  The impulse to share my new status was almost irre- sistible. But Amina was back in Houston and preoccu- pied by her upcoming marriage, my mother was on her honeymoon (boy, would I enjoy telling her), my co- worker Lillian Schmidt would find some way to make me feel guilty about it, and my sort-of-friend Sally Alli- son would want to put it in the paper. I’d really like to tell Robin Crusoe, my mystery writer friend, but he was in the big city of Atlanta, having decided the com- mute from Lawrenceton to his teaching position there was too much to handle—or at least that was the reason ~ 28 ~

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  he’d given me. Unless I could tell him face-to-face, I wouldn’t enjoy it. His face was one of my favorites. Maybe some celebrations are just meant to be pri- vate. A big wahoo would have been out of line anyway, since Jane had had to die in order for this celebration to be held. I took off the black dress and put on a bathrobe and went downstairs to watch an old movie and eat half a bag of pretzels and then half a quart of chocolate fudge ripple ice cream.

  Heiresses can do anything.

  It was raining the next morning, a short summer shower that promised a steamy afternoon. The thunderclaps were sharp and scary, and I found my- self jumping at each one as I drank my coffee. After I retrieved the paper (only a little wet) from the other- wise unused front doorstep that faced Parson Road, it began to slow down. By the time I’d had my shower and was dressed and ready for my appointment with Bubba Sewell, the sun had come out and mist began to rise from the puddles in the parking lot beyond the patio. I watched CNN for a while—heiresses need to be well informed—fidgeted with my makeup, ate a banana, and scrubbed the kitchen sink, and then fi- nally it was time to go.

  ~ 29 ~

  ~ Charlaine Harris ~

  I couldn’t figure out why I was so excited. The money wasn’t going to be piled in the middle of the floor. I’d have to wait roughly two months to actually be able to spend it, Sewell had said. I’d been in Jane’s little house before, and there was nothing so special about it.

  Of course, now I owned it. I’d never owned some- thing that big before.

  I was independent of my mother, too. I could’ve made it by myself on my librarian’s salary, though it would have been hard, but having the resident man- ager’s job and therefore a free place to live and a little extra salary had certainly made a big difference. I’d woken several times during the night and thought about living in Jane’s house. My house. Or after probate I could sell it and buy elsewhere. That morning, starting up my car to drive to Honor Street, the world was so full of possibilities it was just plain terrifying, in a happy roller-coaster way. Jane’s house was in one of the older residential neighborhoods. The streets were named for virtues. One reached Honor by way of Faith. Honor was a dead end, and Jane’s house was the second from the corner on the right side. The houses in this neighbor- hood tended to be small—two or three bedrooms— with meticulously kept little yards dominated by large ~ 30 ~

  ~ A Bone to Pick ~

  trees circled with flower beds. Jane’s front yard was half filled by a live oak on the right side that shaded the bay window in the living room. The driveway ran in on the left, and there was a deep single-car carport attached to the house. A door in the rear of the car- port told me there was some kind of storage room there. The kitchen door opened onto the carport, or you could (as I’d done as a visitor) park in the drive- way and take the curving sidewalk to the front door. The house was white, like all the others on the street, and there were azalea bushes planted all around the foundation; it would be lovely in spring. The marigolds Jane had planted around her mail- box had died from lack of water, I saw as I got out of the car. Somehow that little detail sobered me up completely. The hands that had planted those with- ered yellow flowers were now six feet underground and idle forever.

  I was a bit early, so I took the time to look around at my new neighborhood. The corner house, to the right of Jane’s as I faced it, had beautiful big climbing rosebushes around the front porch. The one to the left had had a lot added on, so that the original simple lines of the house were obscured. It had been bricked in, a garage with an apartment on top had been con- nected to the house by a roofed walk, a deck had been ~ 31 ~

  ~ Charlaine Harris ~

  tacked on the back. The result was not happy. The last house on the street was next to that, and I re- membered that the newspaper editor, Macon Turner, who had once dated my mother, lived there. The house directly across the street from Jane’s, a pretty little house with canary yellow shutters, had a realtor’s sign up with a big red sold slapped across it. The cor- ner house on that side of the street was the one Melanie Clark, another member of the defunct Real Murders club, had rented for a while: now a Big Wheel parked in the driveway indicated children on the premises. One house took up the last two lots on that side, a rather dilapidated place with only on
e tree in a large yard. It sat blank-faced, the yellowing shades pulled down. A wheelchair ramp had been built on. At this hour on a summer morning, the quiet was peaceful. But, behind the houses on Jane’s side of the street, there was the large parking lot for the junior high school, with the school’s own high fence keeping trash from being pitched in Jane’s yard and students from using it as a shortcut. I was sure there would be more noise during the school year, but now that park- ing lot sat empty. By and by, a woman from the cor- ner house on the other side of the street started up a lawn mower and that wonderful summer sound made me feel relaxed.

  ~ 32 ~

  ~ A Bone to Pick ~

  You planned for this, Jane, I thought. You wanted me to go in your house. You know me and you picked me for this.

  Bubba Sewell’s BMW pulled up to the curb, and I took a deep breath and walked toward it. He handed me the keys. My hand closed over them. It felt like a formal investiture. “There’s no problem with you going on and working in this house now, clearing it out or preparing it for sale or whatever you want to do, it belongs to you and no one says different. I’ve advertised for anyone with claims on the estate to come forward, and so far no one has. But of course we can’t spend any of the money,” he admonished me with a wagging finger. “The house bills are still coming to me as executor, and they will until probate is settled.”

  This was like being a week away from your birth- day when you were six.

  “This one,” he said, pointing to one key, “opens the dead bolt on the front door. This one opens the punch lock on the front door. This little one is to Jane’s safe deposit box at Eastern National, there’s a little jewelry and a few papers in it, nothing much.”

  I unlocked the door and we stepped in.

  ~ 33 ~

  ~ Charlaine Harris ~

  “Shit,” said Bubba Sewell in an unlawyerly way. There was a heap of cushions from the living room chairs thrown around. I could look through the living room into the kitchen and see similar disorder there. Someone had broken in.

  One of the rear windows, the one in the back bed- room, had been broken. It had been a pristine little room with chaste twin beds covered in white chenille. The wallpaper was floral and unobtrusive, and the glass was easy to sweep up on the hardwood floor. The first things I found in my new house were the dustpan and the broom, lying on the floor by the tall broom closet in the kitchen.

  “I don’t think anything’s gone,” Sewell said with a good deal of surprise, “but I’ll call the police anyway. These people, they read the obituaries in the paper and go around breaking into the houses that are empty.”

  I stood holding a dustpan full of glass. “So why isn’t anything missing?” I asked. “The TV is still in the living room. The clock radio is still in here, and there’s a microwave in the kitchen.”

  “Maybe you’re just plain lucky,” Sewell said, his eyes resting on me thoughtfully. He polished his ~ 34 ~

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  glasses on a gleaming white handkerchief. “Or maybe the kids were so young that just breaking in was enough thrill. Maybe they got scared halfway through. Who knows.”

  “Tell me a few things.” I sat on one of the white beds and he sat down opposite me. The broken win- dow (the storm this morning had soaked the curtains) made the room anything but intimate. I propped the broom against my knee and put the dustpan on the floor. “What happened with this house after Jane died? Who came in here? Who has keys?”

  “Jane died in the hospital, of course,” Sewell be- gan. “When she first went in, she still thought she might come home, so she had me hire a maid to come in and clean . . . empty the garbage, clear the perish- ables out of the refrigerator, and so on. Jane’s neighbor to the side, Torrance Rideout—you know him?—he offered to keep her yard mowed for her, so he has a key to the tool and storage room, that’s the door at the back of the carport.”

  I nodded.

  “But that’s the only key he had,” the lawyer said, getting back on target. “Then a few days later, when Jane learned—she wasn’t coming home . . .” “I visited her in the hospital, and she never said a word to me,” I murmured.

  ~ 35 ~

  ~ Charlaine Harris ~

  “She didn’t like to talk about it. What was there to say? she asked me. I think she was right. But anyway . . . I kept the electricity and gas—the heat is gas, everything else is electric—hooked up, but I came over here and unplugged everything but the freezer— it’s in the toolroom and it has food in it—and I stopped the papers and started having Jane’s mail kept at the post office, then I’d pick it up and take it to her, it wasn’t any trouble to me, my mail goes to the post office, too . . .”

  Sewell had taken care of everything for Jane. Was this the care of a lawyer for a good client or the devo- tion of a friend?

  “So,” he was saying briskly, “the little bitty operat- ing expenses for this house will come out of the estate, but I trust you won’t mind, we kept it at a minimum. You know when you completely turn off the air or heat into a house, the house just seems to go downhill almost immediately, and there was always the slight chance Jane might make it and come home.” “No, of course I don’t mind paying the electric bill. Do Parnell and Leah have a key?”

  “No, Jane was firm about that. Parnell came to me and offered to go through and get Jane’s clothes and things packed away, but of course I told him no.” “Oh?”

  ~ 36 ~

  ~ A Bone to Pick ~

  “They’re yours,” he said simply. “Everything”— and he gave that some emphasis, or was it only my imagination—“everything in this house is yours. Par- nell and Leah know about their five thousand, and Jane herself handed him the keys to her car two days before she died and let him take it from this carport, but, other than that, whatever is in this house”—and suddenly I was alert and very nearly scared—“is yours to deal with however you see fit.”

  My eyes narrowed with concentration. What was he saying that he wasn’t really saying? Somewhere, somewhere in this house, lurked a problem. For some reason, Jane’s legacy wasn’t en- tirely benevolent.

  After calling the police about the break-in and calling the glass people to come to fix the win- dow, Bubba Sewell took his departure.

  “I don’t think the police will even show up here since I couldn’t tell them anything was missing. I’ll stop by the station on my way back to the office, though,” he said on his way out the door. I was relieved to hear that. I’d met most of the lo- cal policemen when I dated Arthur; policemen really stick together. “There’s no point in turning on the air ~ 37 ~

  ~ Charlaine Harris ~

  conditioner until that back bedroom window is fixed,” Sewell added, “but the thermostat is in the hall, when you need it.”

  He was being mighty chary with my money. Now that I was so rich, I could fling open the windows and doors and set the thermostat on forty, if I wanted to do something so foolish and wasteful.

  “If you have any problems, run into anything you can’t handle, you just call me,” Sewell said again. He’d expressed that sentiment several times, in several different ways. But just once he had said, “Miss Jane had a high opinion of you, that you could tackle any problem that came your way and make a success of it.”

  I got the picture. By now I was so apprehensive, I heartily wanted Sewell to leave. Finally he was out the front door, and I knelt on the window seat in the bay window and partially opened the sectioned blinds sur- rounding it to watch his car pull away. When I was sure he was gone, I opened all the blinds and turned around to survey my new territory. The living room was carpeted, the only room in the house that was, and when Jane had had this done she’d run the carpet right up onto the window seat so that it was seamlessly cov- ered, side, top, and all. There were some hand- embroidered pillows arranged on it, and the effect was ~ 38 ~

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  very pretty. The carpet Jane had been so partial to was a muted rose with a tiny blue pattern,
and her liv- ing room furniture (a sofa and two armchairs) picked up that shade of blue, while the lamp shades were white or rose. There was a small color television arranged for easy viewing from Jane’s favorite chair. The antique table beside that chair was still stacked with magazines, a strange assortment that summed up Jane—Southern Living, Mystery Scene, Lear’s, and a publication from

  the church.

  The walls of this small room were lined with free- standing shelves overflowing with books. My mouth watered when I looked at them. One thing I knew Jane and I had shared: we loved books, we especially loved mysteries, and more than anything we loved books about real murders. Jane’s collection had al- ways been my envy.

  At the rear of the living room was a dining area, with a beautiful table and chairs I believed Jane had in- herited from her mother. I knew nothing about antiques and cared less, but the table and chairs were gleaming under a light coating of dust, and, as I straightened the cushions and pushed the couch back to its place against the wall (why would anyone move a couch when he broke into a house?), I was already worried about car- ing for the set.

  ~ 39 ~

  ~ Charlaine Harris ~

  At least all the books hadn’t been thrown on the floor. Straightening this room actually took only a few moments.

  I moved into the kitchen. I was avoiding Jane’s bedroom. It could wait.

  The kitchen had a large double window that looked onto the backyard, and a tiny table with two chairs was set right in front of the window. Here was where Jane and I had had coffee when I’d visited her, if she hadn’t taken me into the living room. The disorder in the kitchen was just as puzzling. The shallow upper cabinets were fine, had not been touched, but the deeper bottom cabinets had been emptied carelessly. Nothing had been poured out of its container or wantonly vandalized, but the contents had been moved as though the cabinet itself were the object of the search, not possible loot that could be taken away. And the broom closet, tall and thin, had received special attention. I flipped on the kitchen light and stared at the wall in the back of the closet. It was marred with “. . . knife gouges, sure as shoot- ing,” I mumbled. While I stooped to reload the cabi- net shelves with pots and pans, I thought about those gouges. The breaker-in had wanted to see if there was something fake about the back of the closet; that was the only interpretation I could put on the holes. And ~ 40 ~