Divas and Dead Rebels (33 page)

“Randall has a solid alibi for the time period of the professor’s death, being with several other students at the Student Center who vouched for his presence. The Caldwell boys were with them, as well as Bret Hartford and Heather Lightner.”

“
Bret
Hartford?” I echoed. “Any kin to Breck Hartford?”

Rayna nodded as she paused to take a breath. “Yes. His son. He’s a freshman this year.”

“How on earth did you get all this information?”

Rayna smiled. “I’m a snoop and very good at it. I’ve managed to find out quite a bit just by asking questions and doing computer research.”

“Oh, that skip-trace thing you do?” Bitty said.

“Uh, not quite, but close, hon. In this case, I limited my legwork to a few cops I know well enough to ask questions. Rob wants me to stay out of these things, you know.”

She said the last almost apologetically. We all knew her husband’s point of view on our “extracurricular” activities. He held the same view as most of the Holly Springs police force. “Yes, yes, we all know what Rob thinks,” Bitty said. “Not that he’s always right, but I do understand that we have to keep some things quiet. Let’s get straight to the point of why we’re here. We all have to group together. Safety in numbers, last zebra feeds the lion, blah, blah, blah. Basically, Trinket’s life has been threatened, and we can’t take that lightly.”

She looked around at all of us. Her cheeks were slightly flushed, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the fire or the wine. Someone had gasped, and I looked over to see Deelight Tillman with a hand over her mouth. Her eyes bugged out, and she looked upset.

“Trinket, you’ve been threatened?”

“Basically,” I said. “I got a phone call warning me to stop snooping, or I’d end up like my friend. I’m pretty sure they were referring to Catherine and not Bitty.”

Gaynelle nearly choked on her wine. “I should think so,” she was finally able to say, “since ending up like Bitty wouldn’t be such a bad fate.”

“Tell me about it. Being blonde, beautiful, and rich doesn’t sound bad at all,” I said, mostly to keep Bitty from punishing me or Gaynelle for making fun of her. She has her methods.

“Back on topic,” Rayna said when Diva giggles subsided, “we need to have a plan. And we need to do any investigating in groups of at least three or more. Whoever is behind the murder of the professor and Catherine is obviously intent upon getting away with it, and if that means another murder, I don’t think he or she will hesitate.”

“So who do
you
think it is?” Sandra Dobson asked Rayna. “You’ve done some investigating on your own, so you must have at least an idea of who might be behind the murders.”

“Not really. I hate to form an idea until I have a lot more pieces of the puzzle. I have a tendency to get wedded to my suspicions and sometimes miss important clues.”

Carolann Barnett had remained uncharacteristically quiet during our discussion, but now she suddenly spoke up. “I never went to college, so I don’t know that much about the relationships between students and professors, and between all the teachers. But if you ask me, there seems to have been a lot of rivalry between Sturgis and Hartford, from what I heard.”

“What did you hear, Carolann?” asked Rayna.

Flushing a bit, Carolann toyed with one of the wild curls that always looked alive on her head, and said, “People come into the shop, you know. Well, sometimes they say things and don’t think about who might be around. I don’t mean to eavesdrop, I swear I don’t, but there are times I can’t help but hear them.”

“So what did you hear?” I leaned forward and asked. “You know it won’t go any further. What’s said to the Divas, stays with the Divas.”

Carolann glanced over at Cady Lee and took a deep breath. I understood her qualms. Cady Lee does get carried away sometimes. She doesn’t do it to be malicious. She just can’t help herself.

So I said to the group, “We all promise not to tell where we heard what Carolann is about to tell us, right, Divas?”

Of course we all agreed, and Carolann nodded. “Okay. It may mean nothing, of course. I mean, we have to consider the source and all, and even if she is a dear old thing, her information isn’t always reliable.”

Ah. A
“dear old thing.”
I knew what that meant: old as the hills and nutty as a fruitcake. In my childhood, most “dear old things” wore flower-print dresses with lace collars, clunky shoes, small hats, and carried embroidered hankies. Now they’re just as likely to be wearing Spandex and carrying a tennis racket. Modern medicine isn’t always an improvement, in my opinion.

Nevertheless, we all encouraged Carolann to go on telling us what she’d heard by eavesdropping.

She gulped down more wine and continued. “Well, I was standing over by the display of the new Laura Ashley line, and Mrs. Jarvis came in. Well, she had her great-granddaughter Fronie with her, and while Mrs. Jarvis was looking over the silk chemises, they started talking about the murders of the professor and Catherine Moore. It seems that Fronie—her given name is Sofronia, but no one calls her that—goes to Ole Miss and had Professor Sturgis for her ancient history class. Fronie stood right there and told her great-grandmother that it was a well-known fact that Sturgis and Mrs. Hartford were having an affair. Someone caught them in a clinch in the law library, although why they were both in there no one has a clue, since neither one of them were law professors.

“Then Mrs. Jarvis said, ‘Why Fronie, you know that Victoria threatened to beat Catherine Moore to death if she caught her with her husband again, and I vow she must have done it this time.’”

“Is this Victoria Hartford?” I asked when Carolann paused to take a breath. “Breck Hartford’s wife?”

Carolann nodded. “Yes. Maybe everyone already knows this? That the professor and Victoria were having an affair?”

“Not everyone,” said Gaynelle. “There were whispers about Catherine and Breck, but not as much about those two, to my knowledge.”

Cady Lee flapped a hand. “Oh heavens, I thought it was common knowledge. Vicky and Spencer were hot and heavy for a while. That was right after Catherine and Breck got together, I think.”

“Why am I just now hearing about this?” I asked no one in particular. “This could change things, you know.”

“Really?” asked Bitty. “How?”

“For one thing, it adds another name to the suspect pool.”

Bitty shrugged. “They should all already be in that pool up to their adulterous little necks, if you ask me. They’re all guilty of something, even if it’s just poor judgment. Not that Emily has a shortage of flaws. I tell you—”

To keep from having to hear her state that Emily Sturgis was the murderer again, I said quickly, “Bitty may actually be right. Do they all have alibis for the time of Sturgis’s murder?”

Rayna said, “Emily’s alibi is rock solid. Victoria Hartford has a pretty good alibi as well. She was away at some triathlon event. Breck Hartford, on the other hand, doesn’t have an iron-clad alibi. There’s a space of a half hour he can’t account for, but I don’t think he’s at the top of the official suspect list. At least, not according to the information I got.”

“Is a half hour long enough to get into the professor’s house, kill him, then cart his body over to the student dormitory where it was found?” I asked dubiously. “It seems to me it would take a lot longer than that. Even the most organized killer would have to be moving pretty fast to get that done. And how would he disguise the body? Surely someone had to notice if he had the professor slung over his back.”

“Unless he used the same method you and Bitty used to get Sturgis out of the dorm room and into a moving truck,” Gaynelle pointed out. “Don’t you find it a bit too convenient that the laundry cart was right there in the twins’ room?”

I nodded. “It has to be what the killer used to get the professor into the dorms and up the elevator. I’m still curious as to why Brandon and Clayton’s room was chosen, but it could have been a random choice.”

“Of course it was,” said Bitty. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to cause trouble for them deliberately.”

“Wasn’t using a wire coat hanger a bit too much of a coincidence?” asked Cindy Nelson. “I mean, he was strangled with a wire coat hanger, he has fresh laundry hanging in the hallway, and then he’s carted over to the dorms in a laundry cart. Are we sure it wasn’t a laundry man who killed him?”

“We’re not sure of anything at this point,” said Rayna. “Except that two people are dead, and both of them were killed with wire coat hangers. There has to be a common connection.”

“Three people,” I said, and when Cady Lee turned to look at me, I added, “Cat told me that her son was hung from his closet rod. Does anyone know if he was hung with a wire coat hanger?”

Silence fell. Then Rayna said, “I’ll check on that. It would definitely mean that these murders are all related, and that Monty’s death was ruled a suicide when it wasn’t.”

It was something to think about. Catherine may have been more right than she realized.

Then Rayna said, “These are facts I’m sure the police have already considered. I don’t think we know more than they do.”

I thought about that. It’s usually true that the police are nearly always way ahead of us in solving murders. But this time maybe we had—or we believed—facts they didn’t. It hadn’t seemed to impress them that Catherine had named Breck Hartford as the intruder, but then, it hadn’t impressed them when she said he’d killed her son, either.

“So,” I said aloud, “it sounds like Breck Hartford is the common denominator in all these relationships. He and the professor had a history. He and Emily have a history. He had a history with Catherine Moore. And his wife had a history with Spencer Sturgis. It all seems to revolve around him.”

“Or around Sturgis,” Gaynelle pointed out. “I wonder what kind of history he had with Hartford that would lead to wife-swapping?”

“Do you think that’s what they were doing?” Cindy Nelson asked with a gasp. “In
Miss’sippi
?”

Gaynelle bent an amused gaze on Cindy. “It’s not exactly restricted to certain areas of the country, dear.”

“But I mean—
here?
It just doesn’t seem proper, that’s all. Not so close to where we
live.
”

I regarded Cindy with a feeling of amusement mixed with faint regret. When had I become so jaded as not to be so shocked by immorality? Maybe it was after finding my first corpse, but to be honest, I’d already seen a lot of the seamier side of humanity when working for hotel chains. The things some people did when they thought themselves anonymous or unobserved were amazing, I’d discovered. None had ever led to murder, however, and I considered that crime the most shocking immorality of all.

“It’s not like we have it going on here in Holly Springs,” drawled Cady Lee. “I mean, that’s all the way down in Oxford.”

“True enough,” Deelight commented. “Not that it couldn’t happen here. Could it? Happen here? Why, it might be happening right now, for all we know!”

“Trina Madewell would be right in the middle of it, I’ll bet,” said Bitty with her usual gift for insulting yet another arch-enemy. “Except that she can’t find anyone else to marry her.”

“I heard she’s dating Rowdy Hampton,” Sandra Dobson said around a bite of cheese ball and cracker. “You know, the guy who runs the towing service.”

Bitty looked thoughtful for a moment. “Isn’t he the one who just did twenty down in Parchman?”

“No, that was his daddy,” chirped Marcy Porter. She took a sip of wine before adding, “Howdy let Rowdy run it while he was doing his time, and now they run it together.”

“Howdy and Rowdy?” I couldn’t help asking. “Is there a Doody in there somewhere?”

“You’re dating yourself, Trinket,” said Bitty. “Of course, the
Howdy Doody Show
was way before my time.”

“Why, don’t you remember watching it with me when you got your first color TV?” I asked sweetly.

“Oh, I remember that,” said Cady Lee. “Bitty’s parents were the first in Holly Springs to go up to Memphis and buy a color TV. We all came over to see it.”

Bitty drained her glass. “I’m sure I don’t remember that,” she said loftily. “You must be mistaken.”

“No,” Cady Lee said thoughtfully, “I’m right. Don’t you remember us watching the
Howdy Doody Show
the next morning after we slept over one Friday night?”

“We were only five or six, Cady Lee. How do you remember that?”

Apparently Gaynelle decided to drag the conversation from wife-swapping and wooden puppets back to murder, because she said, “Ladies, I think we should find out if Breck Hartford’s alibi stands up. If he’s responsible for Catherine’s death, it’s a good possibility he also killed Spencer Sturgis.”

“I remember,” Cady Lee answered Bitty, “because my daddy went up to Memphis and bought
two
color TV sets the very next week. Mama was appalled he’d bring such bourgeois appliances home, but Daddy said we had to keep up, or people would talk.”

“Ladies?” Gaynelle interrupted. “Hello? Please remember why we’re really here today. We need to figure out our game plan to keep Trinket safe and be sure the killer is caught.”