Closer than the Bones (10 page)

A heated argument was in progress when I walked into Miss McElroy’s sitting room.

“... can’t seriously expect us to remain here, after this!” Alice Bertram’s voice rose in shrill protest.

Miss McElroy was rubbing her forehead, as if it ached.

“I doubt you’ll have much choice,” I said.

Alice turned her hostile gaze on me. “And why not? Why should we have to remain here? Only to be murdered, like that idiot upstairs?”

“Oh, come off it, Alice,” Lurleen said, her voice dripping with venom. “Even you can’t be that stupid. Granted, you’ve done enough vicious things over the years to cause any one of us to want to kill you, but the chances of that happening now are slim to none. Whatever caused someone to kill poor Hamilton doesn’t necessarily apply to you.” She paused, as if struck by a new thought. “Unless, of course, you know something the killer thinks you shouldn’t.” An evil grin spread across her face.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alice snapped. “I know you’d like nothing better than to have me out of the way so you could hop into bed with my husband.”

“Really, Alice, you’re getting more tiresome by the minute,” Brett said in disgust. “First you accuse Lurleen of being a lesbian, and now you make out that she’s lusting after poor old Russ over there. Which is it?”

I didn’t give her time to answer. “No matter what you might prefer, Mrs. Bertram,” I said, “I doubt the sheriff’s department is going to allow any one of us to get far from Idlewild until a suspect is in custody. So you might as well sit down and shut up, right now.” I had no patience left to deal with her, and my voice gave ample proof of that.

“Good advice for all of us,” Miss McElroy said, and Alice subsided. Though the look she shot me was full of acid, for once she must have decided to cut her losses and give in.

I sat down in a chair near Miss McElroy while the others got themselves situated. Once they were all sitting, I looked to Miss McElroy. She nodded.

“I don’t know whether any of you have ever been involved in a homicide investigation.” I waited a moment, but no one spoke. “Well, I have been, and it’s not a pleasant experience. I urge you all to cooperate with the investigators, answer their questions, even if they don’t seem pertinent. Let them decide what is important. If you think you know anything, however innocuous it might seem, tell them. The sooner this is resolved, the happier we’ll all be. Trust me.”

“Very sensible advice, Miss Carpenter,” Miss McElroy said. “I urge you all to do as she says.”

No one replied, and we sat in silence for a moment. Then came the sounds of cars arriving and doors opening and slamming shut, and the doorbell rang. Morwell Phillips must have answered it. Moments later he came to the door of the sitting room, accompanied by a young man in uniform. “I’ve sent them upstairs,” he said. “The officer in charge asked that we all remain here, and he’ll be down soon to talk to us.” I recognized the young man as one of my students who had graduated from the high school in Tullahoma about three years ago. His name was Robbie Davis. He nodded in recognition at me before announcing his name to us, then he requested us not to talk about what we had seen or heard until his superior came down to talk to us.

The result of that request was that no one said anything, and we waited in silence for perhaps another fifteen or twenty minutes before the officer in charge of the case walked into the room.

“Afternoon, folks,” he announced, “I’m Lieutenant Preston, and I’m in charge of this investigation.” He took his time, getting a good look at each of us, and his lips twitched slightly when he saw me.

Maybe this wasn’t going to be so difficult after all.

Dressed in street clothes, Jack Preston might at first have passed for a businessman. He had the easy assurance of a successful salesman, and after you were around him even for a few minutes, you’d be aware of his natural charm. Then maybe you'd notice the keen, intelligent, assessing gaze of his eyes, and soon you’d realize that here was a man who missed little and understood perhaps more than you wished he did. He had been my favorite student fifteen years ago, and I had watched his career in the sheriff’s department with great interest.

Striding forward, Jack held out a hand to Miss McElroy. “Miss McElroy, though it’s always a great pleasure to see you, I regret it had to be under circumstances like these.”

She looked up into his face and returned his smile, though hers was considerably more strained. “Thank you, Jack,” she said. “I’m pleased to know you’ll be in charge. I know you’ll sort this out very quickly.”

He nodded. His smile betokened deference and respect, but Miss McElroy was no fool. Jack was a natural politician, and I fully expected to see him elected sheriff one day soon. But he had uncompromising views on justice, and he wouldn’t let Miss McElroy’s status sway him from carrying out his investigation however he deemed best. Even if Miss McElroy’s distant cousin, his boss, disagreed.

The fact that he knew and respected me didn’t hurt, either. I could talk to him about my own theories and impressions, and he wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand. Thank heavens for small miracles, that he’d gotten the call and not someone else in the department.

“Miss Carpenter”—he inclined his head toward me and, I swear, winked—“always a pleasure.” He stood beside Miss McElroy and surveyed the rest of the group. “Folks, I know this is going to be an extremely difficult day for all of you, but I'm going to ask you to be as patient as you can and cooperate with me and my men to the fullest extent possible.”

He waited a moment, as if expecting a protest from some quarter, then continued. “I need to talk to each of you in turn, and while I’m doing that, I have to ask you not to talk among yourselves about what you’ve seen upstairs. Or about anything to do with this whole situation, at least for now. Will you help me on this?”

Everyone nodded.

‘Thank you,” Jack said. He turned back to Miss McElroy. “If there’s a room on this floor I could use for now?”

“I would suggest that you use the library. Morwell?”

“Yes, Mary Tucker.” Morwell Phillips moved forward. “If you’ll follow me.”

“No need,” Jack said. “I remember where it is. Miss Carpenter, I’d like to speak to you first.”

“Certainly.” I stood and followed him out of the room. He nodded in Robbie Davis’s direction as we went out of the room, and Robbie stood even straighter than before. Behind us, the room was quiet.

In the library, Jack went to the desk and stood behind it, waiting for me to make myself comfortable in a chair across from him. “Quite a mess you're in the middle of,” he said, grinning a little bit as he sat down and took a notebook out of his jacket pocket.

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said, my voice grim. “Where do you want to start?”

“How about you tell me why you’re here in the first place. I never figured you for one of Miss McElroy’s cronies.”

I wasn’t sure just what Jack Preston would think of my new sideline in problem-solving, so I stuck with the fiction that Miss McElroy had devised. “I’m assisting Miss McElroy with her memoirs.”

He raised his eyebrows at that but didn’t comment.

“The group you saw in there with Miss McElroy,” I said, “was all here at Idlewild at Christmas, when one of her guests, Sukey Lytton, was found dead on the grounds.”

He nodded. “I remember. I was on leave at the time, but I know about the case.”

I took the plunge. “Well, Miss McElroy doesn’t think that death was suicide, or an accident. She thinks Sukey Lytton was murdered, and by one of the people in that room.”

“What do you think?” His eyebrows rose again.

“I think she’s right. Especially in light of what happened today.”

He scribbled something on his notepad. “How are the two events connected?”

After taking a moment to organize my thoughts, I launched into a summary of the day’s events, explaining briefly who each person was and his or her connection to Miss McElroy and to Sukey Lytton. I gave as thorough a recounting of what had happened at lunch as I could, and I prided myself on not leaving anything out. I even told him what I had said to Hamilton Packer, and Jack did his best not to laugh.

“You think the knife used on the victim is the same one you found in your bedroom?” he asked, making more notes.

“Unless the killer wiped it clean before he or she used it,” I said, “you’ll probably find my fingerprints on it.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Now, tell me why you and Miss McElroy think Miss Lytton was murdered.”

I gave him a quick recital of the facts, and he nodded when I finished. “Sounds pretty plausible to me,” he said. “Especially since this time the killer didn’t take any trouble to make it look like an accident. Not a smart move.” His grin was wolfish.

“No,” I said. “But this time I think the killer was desperate. In a big hurry.”

“And you think this manuscript is what they were after?”

“They had to be. It just doesn’t make much sense otherwise, far as I can see.”

“Right.” He stood up. “Excuse me a moment.”

I sat there, waiting—not very patiently—until he returned. I assumed he was giving orders for his team upstairs to start looking for the missing manuscript. The killer couldn’t have had much time to hide it, so it had to be somewhere in the house. Finding it, and reading it, would help point the finger at the most likely suspect. Or so I was assuming.

Jack came back and sat down behind the desk.

“What’s next?” I asked.

“I have to keep interviewing folks. And you,” he said, grinning, “just keep your ears and eyes open and try not to end up with a knife in your back.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, shivering a bit.

“Seriously,” he said, his face darkening, “don’t do anything that might put you in danger. Call me immediately if anything else happens.” He pulled out his wallet, extracted a card, and scribbled a number on the back of it. “Here’s my cell phone number. If you can’t reach me through the department switchboard, try that.”

“Thanks,” I said, tucking the proffered card into my handbag. I stood up. “Where should I go now? Back in the room with the others?”

“No.” Jack was firm. “I know I can trust you not to talk to them just yet, but I think it would be better for you not to see any of them until I’ve finished my preliminary questioning. But I’d also rather you didn’t go upstairs to your room right now, either.”

“I’ll wait next door, then. It’s another sitting room, and it has the only television set in the house.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “The others can join you there as I’m finished with them. At least until my men have finished upstairs.”

“Who’s next?” I couldn’t contain my curiosity.

“Cousin Betsy.” Jack smiled.

I shook my head. “I should have guessed. There was something oddly familiar about the girl.”

“She does have the Preston nose, doesn’t she?”

I thought for a moment. “Let me guess. She’s your uncle Cyrus’s daughter, I expect?”

He laughed. “Got it in one.”

“That explains why I hadn’t taught her at the high school then.” Cyrus Preston lived on a farm in the edge of the neighboring county, and his children went to school there. No wonder, then, that I hadn’t recognized Betsy, though she was of an age to have been one of my students, just before I retired from teaching last year.

Leaving Jack, I went next door. Closing the door behind me, I felt for a light switch and flipped it on. The room had a slightly musty, unused smell to it, which I had noticed earlier on my tour of the house. Evidently the residents of Idlewild didn’t watch that much television.

Checking my watch, I saw that it was too early for the evening news, though it wouldn’t be long now. What to do? A selection of magazines fanned out across the coffee table near a comfortable-looking sofa. I sat down and glanced through the available browsing material, various issues of
Architectural Digest, Southern Living,
and
National Geographic
. I settled for the old warhorse and started skimming an article on azaleas.

Somehow I didn’t find the article particularly riveting reading, so I gave up trying and dropped the magazine back on the table. How I itched to be upstairs, watching what Jack’s men were doing. I could imagine one of them, even now, finding the missing manuscript.

Aargh. This inactivity was giving me a headache. Such are the burdens of the truly nosy. I might as well cogitate on the problem and see where that might lead.

The timing of the murder intrigued me. There were a number of variables. Did the killer strike after he or she had swiped the manuscript? Or did Packer die first? The latter meant that someone had committed murder, then even more cold-bloodedly gone into Packer’s bedroom and rifled through his things. I shivered. Either way, it was nasty.

As far as I knew at the moment, I was the only one who had an alibi. I had been with either Brett Doran or Morwell Phillips since Packer went upstairs to his room and got himself murdered. Brett could have done it after I left him; Phillips could have done it before he came to fetch me for the tour of the house.

Those thoughts creeped me out, as my former students might have said. But it was just as likely that Lurleen Landry or one of the Bertrams was the killer. I didn’t think it could be Miss McElroy herself, though I couldn’t really rule her out. Maybe Jack would be able to narrow down the list of suspects at some point, which would be a big help. But it would be a while before he could do that. If he could.

I sat and fumed—I wasn’t making much progress trying to think this through. Occasionally I picked up a magazine and tried to interest myself in it, but to no avail. My mind kept going in circles, refusing to settle on anything. I checked my watch; nearly forty-five minutes had passed while I sat consumed by fruitless speculation. By now, I had expected someone else to join me here in the after-interview room.

Just when I was on the point of getting up and going in search of human contact, the door opened, and Jack walked in. The grim look on his face alarmed me.

“What’s wrong?”

He rubbed his nose. “That blasted manuscript is nowhere to be found.”