by Anne George
Yellow plastic CRIME SCENE DO NOT ENTER tape was stretched across the front of the Skoot ’n’ Boot as well as across part of the parking lot. Mary Alice parked in the far corner and we got out. The ambulance pulled into the highway in front of us and the driver waved as he passed. We both waved back, then looked at each other and put our hands down quickly, as if ashamed of the casual gesture.
“No blood,” I announced. “I will not go inside. I mean it.”
“I’m not going in, either, until it’s cleaned up. Come on. We’ll just talk to the policeman in one of the cars. We don’t know anything to tell them anyway.”
“Who are you supposed to see?”
“A man named Jed Reuse called me.”
“You called Fred to tell him Jed said Ed was dead?”
Mary Alice stopped and glared at me. “Shut up,” she said. “Just shut up, Patricia Anne. I can’t take your mouth now.”
She meant it. The truth is that I babble when I get nervous.
Babble and crack jokes, while inside I’m scared to death. I guess it comes from all those years of teaching.
“I’m sorry.”
“Okay, but watch it.” Mary Alice stomped over to the first police car and asked the young policeman in the driver’s seat for Jed Reuse. He pointed vaguely in the direction of the front door of the Skoot ’n’ Boot.
“Get him for me, please,” Mary Alice said. “Tell him Mrs. Crane is here.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The young policeman hopped out and hurried toward the building. Mary Alice nodded at me. That the young man’s mother had done a pretty good job of raising him went unsaid. I nodded back. She was probably right. On the other hand, my sister has no idea how formidable she can be. I would have been very surprised if the young man had not jumped when she said jump.
“Mrs. Crane?”
Jed Reuse was nobody’s Columbo. About forty, he was tall and thin, with sharply ironed creases in his uniform and shoes polished so highly you could see yourself in them. Every reddish-blond hair on his head was in place. He held out his hand to Sister and then to me, offering both of us a firm handshake.
“My sister, Mrs. Hollowell,” Mary Alice said. “She doesn’t want to see any blood.”
“I can’t say that I blame her.” Jed Reuse gave me a smile that was as warm as his appearance was crisp. I automatically looked down at his left hand, where a huge wedding ring shone as brightly as his shoes. Sister caught the glance and rolled her eyes. She says I ought to quit dragging men in for Haley, that Haley will find someone when she’s gone through all the stages of grieving over her husband. Tom Buchanan was killed in an accident just about the time they started talking about having a family. Mary Alice says she is an expert on grieving over husbands. But every time she starts talking about the steps to take, I get an image of actual steps marked Denial and Anger, etc., and I wonder where Haley is on the staircase. In the meantime, her biological clock is ticking so loud, it must surely keep her awake at night.
“I’m going to have to ask you ladies to come in, though, to see if anything is out of place or missing since you were here last.” Jed Reuse turned his smile on Sister.
“I’m not that familiar with it, Mr. Reuse.” She frowned.
“Sheriff.”
“Sheriff.” Sister poured respect and dignity into the title. “I just bought the place yesterday, almost on impulse, and to tell you the truth, I haven’t even looked at the inventory Ed got together for my lawyer. You know, when you come out to line dance, you don’t pay any attention to what’s around you.” Mary Alice paused. “Long as it’s clean.”
The smile again. “What we’re hoping, Mrs. Crane, is that there will be something that just strikes you as being wrong. You see, considering such a violent act, very little was disturbed.
“No chairs overturned, no sign of a struggle. There’s even money left in the cash register.”
“Maybe it was suicide,” I said.
“Hardly.” His eyes could turn steely, I saw.
“I don’t want to go in there,” Sister admitted. “It gives me the creeps.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Crane.” Sheriff Reuse turned and held up the yellow plastic tape for us to duck under. Sister had met her match.
The door of the Skoot ’n’ Boot had been propped open. It looked dark inside, just as it had the day before, when we were coming in from another sunny October day. Once inside, though, we saw that the lights were blaring. Over the wishing well, which had ceased its trickling, was a spotlight. I averted my eyes and looked at the neon boot above the bar. I felt slightly nauseated as well as claustrophobic.
“I think I’m going to have a panic attack,” Mary Alice said, echoing my thoughts exactly.
“No, you’re not,” the sheriff said gently. “You’re going to look around very carefully and tell us what you see that might be even the slightest bit different. Please. It will help,” he added.
I looked away from the neon boot, allowing my eyes to wander over the room. Every light was on, the spotlights, the recessed lights around the dance floor. I remembered the feeling I had had the day before of hominess. Forget that! Not now! Even the Spanish moss on the Swamp Creatures sign seemed threatening. I made myself turn and glance at the wishing well. It looked just as it had the day before. No blood, thank God.
“It looks the same,” Mary Alice said, also looking at the wishing well.
“Take your time.” The sheriff pulled out a chair. “Here, sit down.” Mary Alice sat down and folded her hands on the table like a proper schoolgirl. Sheriff Reuse pulled a chair out for me. “Mrs. Hollowell.”
We sat for a few minutes, not saying anything, just looking. I looked at the dance floor and the dark drapery across the side window; I looked at the bar and the shiny glasses.
“You see anything?” Sister asked.
“No. You?”
“No.”
“I didn’t even know his last name.”
“Meadows. His name was Edward Meadows.”
“Nice name.”
“Yes.” Sister drummed her fingers on the table. The sheriff drummed his fingers on the table. So did I. We sounded like the game where you have to guess what song a person is playing. I drummed the William Tell overture.
“Lone Ranger,” the sheriff said. We all smiled at each other.
“I see something different,” Sister suddenly said, looking over my shoulder. “The rope and bucket are gone from the well!”
“The rope went with Mr. Meadows and the bucket is already at the lab. We found it at the bottom of the well.”
“Oh.” Mary Alice sounded deflated.
“Why don’t you just tell me all you can about Mr. Meadows and buying the Skoot?”
“Well, my friend Bill Adams and I learned to line dance in Branson, Missouri—”
“Excuse me,” I said, “but is the rest room open?”
“Sure,” the sheriff said. “We’ve already been over it.”
They certainly had. Not only had they chipped a small piece out of the corner of the mirror with the etched boot on it, but they had also loosened the toilet-paper holder, so that it was just hanging on. I got my Swiss army knife (a gift to myself years ago) from my purse and tightened the screws. The holder needed a little more work, but it would be okay for a while. I came out feeling proud of my handiwork and saw that a man had joined Sister and the sheriff at the table.
“No way!” he was saying as I approached. “No way!” He looked up at me and the expression on his face changed to surprise. “Mrs. Hollowell?”
“Henry? Henry Lamont? It is you, isn’t it?”
“Lord! Mrs. Hollowell.” Henry jumped up and engulfed me in a bear hug. “Mrs. Hollowell. How about that!”
Henry Lamont had matured into a handsome young man. Like my son Alan, he had grown a couple more inches after graduation from high school and was at least six feet tall. His blond hair had darkened some, but in his late twenties, he still had the face that some men are blessed with
that keeps bartenders asking for I.D. until they are forty.
“You two know each other,” Mary Alice said.
“She taught me AP English for two years.” Henry hugged me again. “Lord, Mrs. Hollowell, you remembered me.”
“Of course I do, Henry. You were the best. Absolutely.”
“No, you were the best. I still remember when you took us to see Macbeth. The way they brought his head out on the sword at the end and how they kept shaking a piece of metal for thunder.
“And Banquo’s ghost. That was really something.”
“Mutual admiration society meets at the Skoot ’n’ Boot,” Mary Alice said.
“Yeah. Speaking of murders, how about you people joining us for a few minutes?” The sheriff pointed at the chairs. Henry and I sat down, still beaming at each other.
“But what are you doing here, Henry? Last I heard, you were at the writers’ workshop in Iowa.”
“He’s the cook,” Mary Alice said.
“She was bragging about you yesterday,” I said, patting Henry’s hand. It was true he had been one of my most promising students, a gifted writer. I wondered what had brought him to become a short-order cook at the Skoot ’n’ Boot.
“It’s a long story,” he said, reading my thoughts.
“You were saying ‘No way’?” the sheriff said.
Henry turned to him. “That’s right. Ed was straight as an arrow. I’ve been here six months and, take my word for it, he liked the ladies. All of them. But I never saw him coming on to one so much that it bothered their boyfriends.”
“Regular customers?”
“Sure. Lots of them. I worked in back, so I wasn’t out here much, but I would sometimes see faces I recognized.” He smiled at Mary Alice. “Like Mrs. Crane here.” Sister beamed back. “Bonnie could tell you more about that. Bonnie Blue Butler.
“Or Doris Chapman, except Doris quit a few weeks ago. I think she was moving somewhere. And then there’s a new girl, Sadie somebody. She’s only been here a few days, though.”
“Anyone else in the kitchen?” Jed Reuse had his notebook out and was writing.
“We have two part-time people that help. Usually students from the junior college. Right now we’ve got Mark and Ted, and that’s all I know about them. Mark helps me with the cooking and Ted cleans up. I don’t even know where they live. Bonnie Blue probably does, though. She finds out about everybody.”
The sheriff looked up from his notes. “We’ve already called her. She’ll be in soon.”
“Interesting name,” I said.
“She swears she was conceived during the burning-of-Atlanta scene. Must have had a tremendous effect on her parents.” Henry laughed. “May be true.”
“Casablanca caused one of my kids,” Mary Alice said. “You know, when she’s getting on the plane and looking back at Humphrey Bogart. That just does me in. Late movie one night.”
Jed Reuse cleared his throat loudly. We all looked at him. “Please. I’d like to continue.”
“Go ahead,” Sister said, having a hard time getting off the subject. “The other two were just vacations or carelessness or something.”
A good disciplinarian, the sheriff used the old schoolteacher trick of being totally quiet and still for just a moment too long. None of us moved.
“Mr. Lamont,” he said, “do you know of anything unusual that has happened here in the last few weeks? An argument Mr. Meadows might have had with someone? Anything that comes to mind?”
A dead body in the well, I thought. That’s pretty unusual.
But I kept my mouth shut.
“No.” Henry took his time trying to remember. “He told me yesterday he had sold the place to Mrs. Crane and that he was going back to Atlanta in a week or two. He was always very nice to me, paid me on time, sometimes a little extra if we’d had an especially busy week.”
“What were you doing here yesterday? The place was closed.”
“He called me.”
The notebook came out again. “Whatever he had to say, he could have told you today, couldn’t he?”
“I suppose so. I guess he was just excited that he had sold the Skoot and wanted to tell somebody.”
“What time was it?”
“About two, I guess.”
“We saw him after that,” I said. “We left here just before dark, and he appeared alive and well then.”
The sheriff looked at me. “Mrs. Hollowell, I’m just trying to get some information. I’m not accusing your best student of murder.”
Mary Alice kicked me under the table. I gave her a go-to-hell look.
“It’s just that this was not a robbery or some random killing. This was murder, obviously, which means that someone, maybe one of you, is sitting on some information that you don’t think has anything to do with the case but which might be just the key we need. Mr. Meadows didn’t live in a vacuum, wasn’t murdered in a vacuum. Someone wanted him dead. And from the way they did him in, I’d say someone really didn’t like him.” Sheriff Reuse spread his hands as if he were doing card tricks. “Now, Mr. Lamont, suppose you tell us why you left Iowa.”
Henry cracked his knuckles, a habit of his I had forgotten. “Selling drugs,” he mumbled.
There was a commotion at the door. “Woo-hoo, Henry!” It was as if a photographic negative of Mary Alice stood there. Six feet tall, two-fifty (at least), platinum hair and skin the color of dark chocolate.
Henry jumped up so quickly, his chair turned over. “Bonnie Blue!” He disappeared in the vastness of her embrace.
“The admiration society grows,” Mary Alice murmured.
Three
Bonnie Blue Butler maneuvered through the crowded tables with an ease that belied her size. You could tell it was something she was used to doing. We caught glimpses of Henry following her as she made her way toward us.
His admission, just before Bonnie Blue’s appearance, had startled me. Henry Lamont selling drugs! Any teacher will admit that occasionally a child touches her heart. He or she may not be the prettiest or the smartest or the neediest. But there is something that clicks, and both lives are enriched for it. Sometimes it is perilously close to the love you feel for your own children. During thirty years of teaching, there were perhaps four or five children I had totally lost my heart to. Henry was one of them. The thought of him not fulfilling his potential was painful enough. But selling drugs! He was right. There was a long story here, and one I wanted to hear.
“Mrs. Butler.” Sheriff Reuse got up and pulled out a chair for Bonnie Blue. “Please join us.”
“I got a choice?” Bonnie Blue did not sit in the chair. Instead, she seemed to squat over it and fall. The chair creaked but held. The sheriff did not even attempt to push it back toward the table. He introduced himself and then us. Henry had eased warily back into his chair. He seemed uneasy. I glanced at him, but he avoided my eyes.
“I know Mrs. Crane,” Bonnie Blue said, looking at Mary Alice. “You are one wicked line dancer, girl.”
“Thank you.” Mary Alice smiled, more a smirk.
“That Mr. Crane can move, too.”
“Mr. Crane ceased all motion about twenty years ago,” I said.
“Fifteen,” Mary Alice corrected.
“I stand by what I said, Sister.”
“You sisters? Lord, Lord! You don’t look one thing alike. Henry, you know they’re sisters? You think they look one thing alike?”
“Maybe around the eyes. And no, I didn’t know they were sisters.”
“And that man’s your boyfriend.”
The sheriff tapped his hand against the table. We all jumped. “Please,” he said, sounding exasperated. “We’ve got a dead body down at the morgue. I’m sure this is all fascinating, but could we please get down to business?”
“Ready when you are,” Bonnie Blue said. “Henry, honey, will you go get me a Coke? I swear I’m dry as a bone.” Henry started to get up. “Diet, honey. And maybe everyone else would like something, too.”
Mary Alice, Jed Reuse and I shook our heads. While Henry was at the bar, Jed held the tips of his fingers pressed against his forehead.
“I think he has a headache,” Mary Alice whispered. “You got any aspirin?”
I reached into my purse and found a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol. I handed it to Sister, who nodded and placed it quietly in front of the sheriff. Henry came back with Bonnie Blue’s Coke.
“Get the sheriff one, too, Henry,” she said. “He needs to take something for his headache. Acting just like a man, not wanting anybody to think he has feelings.”
Henry put the second Coke in front of the sheriff, who promptly opened the Tylenol bottle and took several.
“Now,” Bonnie Blue said, “you want to know what I know about Ed Meadows and who killed him, don’t you?”
“Yes, it would be appreciated,” Jed Reuse said as he got out his notebook again.
“Diddly.”
“Who?”
“That’s what I know about it. Diddly.”
I swear I think the sheriff wrote “diddly” in the notebook. At least he wrote something. Then he got up, drank the rest of his Coke in one gulp and excused himself, saying he had to go check on his men but no one was to leave, he would be back in a minute.
“Nervy,” Bonnie Blue said, watching him walk out the door. “You see his hands shaking?” She shook her head in sympathy. “That man’s got one hard job.” Bonnie Blue sighed. “Least he’s got a job. What you gonna do here, Mrs. Crane?”
“Oh, I’m planning to open up soon as I can. I’ve got to get organized and see where we stand and where everything is. I’m not planning on anybody missing a payday, though.” Sister folded and refolded a Kleenex she held in her hand. “One thing that I’ve thought of is whether the murder will scare people away.”
“Lord, no. Bring them in by droves. Halloween we won’t be able to move.”
“Bonnie Blue!”
“It’s the God’s truth, Henry, and you know it.” She reached over and patted Sister’s hand. “Let that be the least of your worries.”
What Bonnie Blue had said was so terribly true that I started giggling. The others looked at me. “Tickets to sit in the well,” I said, and laughed harder.
