Elizabeth Lynn Casey - Southern Sewing Circle 08 - Remnants of Murder (10 page)

“While I’m not one who enjoys giving someone like Dixie Dunn credit for anything besides being mean-spirited and holier than thou on more subjects than I care to count, on this particular subject, I have to grudgingly consider that she’s absolutely right.”

Stunned, Tori leaned forward against her desk and dropped her head into her hands, the enormity of what she was hearing giving her the added punch she needed when she finally sat down with Robert Dallas to make her case for an autopsy. But even as her mind began to swirl around the words she’d say to the police chief, a question formed in the foreground that made her sit straight up.

“Anyone in particular you’d finger as the culprit?”

“Can I borrow some of yours, dear?”

She felt her brows furrow. “Borrow some of my what?”

Leona pointed at Tori’s hand. “Your fingers. I don’t have enough to point at everyone who wanted Clyde dead.”

Chapter 9

Talking to Sweet Briar Police Chief Robert Dallas
was like walking through a minefield, each word she spoke, each inflection she used, one step closer to setting the man off on a veritable tirade. When he’d finally explode, though, was the real question.

Tori pushed the medical book across the man’s desk, tapping the section on arsenic poisoning as she did. “It’s all right here, Chief. The rapid decline in his weight, the yellowish color to his skin, the lines across his nails …” She took a deep breath, released it slowly. “It makes a lot more sense than old age.”

Chief Dallas leaned back in his high-backed leather chair and tented his fingers beneath his chin. “He was ninety-one, Miss Sinclair. Old age makes all the sense in the world.”

She pulled her hand back toward her lap and resisted the urge to scream. In the two years since she’d had her first run-in with the chief, she’d come to realize one irrefutable fact about the man. Robert Dallas liked face value. It afforded him time to fish, hunt, camp, and do whatever else it was he did when he hightailed it out of town virtually every Friday afternoon and for multiple weeks throughout the year.

Still, she of all people knew how dangerous face value could be. In fact, face value would have had her rotting behind bars with half the sewing circle as her cell mates. She met his tented fingers with a desk lean and a raised eyebrow. “I might be more apt to agree with you if he’d exhibited signs of this purported old age for longer than five or six weeks. Pets tend to deteriorate rapidly, not people.”

The chief’s eyes narrowed on her face as a ripple of irritation made its way across his own. “So because Clyde’s health went south quicker than you saw fit, you think I need to lock someone up?”

She took a second, deeper breath and held it for a moment as she tried to settle on a tone that wouldn’t be such a giveaway to her thoughts. After all, treating the chief like the buffoon he was could slow the truth-seeking process.

“No, but I think, perhaps, an autopsy might be a smart idea. Especially when so much of his decline matches that of someone who was being poisoned.”

For a moment, he pulled his gaze from hers and fixed it, instead, on the section she’d indicated by her finger, the side-to-side movement of his eyes evidence he was at least reading. When he was done, he went back to the top and read it again, the passive set to his jaw making it difficult to decipher what, if anything, he was thinking.

“I know it sounds crazy, I really do, but when you take that possibility and hold it alongside the fact that he’d irritated a good number of people in this town—”

“Like whom?” the chief barked.

Startled, she drew back, her mind racing to output even two or three of the names Leona had mentioned not more than an hour earlier. “I—uh … well, basically anyone and everyone who owns a shop along the square—or at least—a
struggling
shop along the square.”

A blanket of silence cloaked the chief’s office as he seemed to consider her words before looking, again, at the open book in front of him. “You mean because he wouldn’t sell his land to those resort places?”

She nodded.

“It was mighty selfish of him not to think of how a sale like that could have benefited so many others.”

“It was
his
land, Chief.”

He held up his hands. “Trust me, I know. He had no interest in letting anyone use that land to access the lake to fish, or his woods to hunt. Not even the chief of police.”

“So what did you do?” she asked.

Dropping his hands to the desk, he cocked his head as he studied her. “What do you mean, what did I do?”

“I mean, if he wouldn’t let you onto the lake via his property, how did you fish?”

“I drove twenty miles to the south and fished on a different lake.”

She glanced at the book then back at the chief. “And to hunt?”

He waved aside her question. “I prefer to head up into the mountains for that anyway. More peace and quiet that way.”

“But what happens if you couldn’t drive to another lake or into the mountains. Then what?”

A pause was quickly followed by a grudging tone and the words she was waiting for. “I guess I’d be a lot more angry at Clyde Montgomery.”

“Packing up a struggling shop and moving it to another town when your roots are in Sweet Briar would be sort of like not being able to drive to another lake to fish, don’t you think?”

There. She’d said it. Now all she could do was hope the chief would dispense with his take-the-easy-route default button and at least consider the merits of her concern.

When the chief didn’t respond, she stilled her trembling hands inside one another and made one final attempt. “I’m not saying I can’t be wrong, because I certainly could be. But I think there are too many question marks about this man’s death to be able to write it off as old age. And if you do write it off as old age and it wasn’t, Clyde’s murderer could very well walk past this building on a daily basis. Free as a bird and laughing at the perfect crime he pulled off right under your nose.”

• • •

It had taken every ounce of restraint she had to get
up, collect her purse, and bid farewell to the chief before learning his verdict, but sometimes it was best just to make your case and go. Less chance of saying or doing something that might end up being counterproductive. At least that’s what she’d told herself as she made her way down the hallway of the police department and out into the brilliant spring sunshine.

Now that she was outside sans a definitive answer, though, she wasn’t sure she’d made the smartest move. She liked answers. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t forgo so many hours of sleep each night racing to see how the latest book she’d chosen to devour actually ended. If she didn’t, she’d be bringing baked treats to her friends in a jail cell rather than at a weekly sewing circle meeting. It was the way she was. The way she’d always been.

Her cell phone vibrated inside her blazer pocket and she pulled it out, Dixie’s name on the display screen only making things worse.

“Hi, Dixie.”

“Well? Is Robert going to have Clyde’s body tested or not?”

She turned east when she hit the sidewalk and headed toward the library, her promise to be back in time to cover Nina’s lunch break quickening her steps. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? How could you not know, Victoria? You
did
talk to him, didn’t you?”

“Yes. But I didn’t press him for an answer.”

An exasperated sigh echoed its way through the phone and into Tori’s ear. “Why on earth not?”

“Because I didn’t think I should. I made our case, underscored it as carefully as I could, and then left him to make the decision on his own.” A second and more insistent sigh matched the one Tori managed to nibble back. “But if I had to take a guess, his wheels were definitely turning when I left.”

“His wheels were definitely turning,” Dixie mimicked. “Well, stop the presses! Robert’s wheels were turning!”

She did her best to ignore her friend’s sarcasm, choosing instead to remain calm. “It’s in his hands now, Dixie. If he thinks there’s a chance we might be right, he’ll order an autopsy. If he doesn’t, he won’t.”

“If he doesn’t, he won’t? You’d be okay with that?”

When Tori reached the edge of the library grounds, she veered right and headed toward the picnic table that served as a lunch spot for her and Nina, as well as the occasional patron craving a little afternoon sun. She dropped onto one of the built-in benches and stared up at the branches of the moss-draped tree that tempered the sun with a healthy dose of shade. “I’ll have to be okay with that. And so will you, Dixie.”

“You don’t
have
to be okay with anything, Victoria.”

She leaned her back against the edge of the table and tightened her grip on the phone. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you think Clyde died of old age?”

She thought back over everything she’d learned during the past sixteen hours or so and gave the only answer she could. “No.”

“So you’re telling me that if Chief Dallas decides not to autopsy the body, you can just put that belief aside and move on as if everything is okay?”

“I have a wedding to plan, Dixie. A honeymoon location to decide on with Milo. I can’t keep playing detective all the time.”

When Dixie didn’t respond, she pulled the phone from her ear long enough to see if they were still connected.

They were.

“Dixie? Are you still there?”

“I’m still here. I guess I’m just surprised that you could push aside one of your convictions. Shocked, actually.”

Tori sat up tall. “If he lets it go, it doesn’t mean I won’t always wonder.”

“Which means you won’t be enjoying all those plans like you should, Victoria.”

“Huh?”

“Wouldn’t you rather make wedding and honeymoon plans with a clear head rather than one filled with nagging should-haves and could-haves?”

It was her turn to sigh. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t give up until we know the truth.”

She let Dixie’s words settle in her thoughts, their pull more than a little surprising. “But Chief Dallas will figure out what’s true if the autopsy comes back the way we think it will.”

“
If
he autopsies.”

Dixie was right and she knew it. There were simply too many factors that pointed to foul play where Clyde’s death was concerned. And even if the chief did decide to pursue her claims, his investigation skills weren’t exactly fine-tuned. Especially when spring brought new opportunities for weekend fishing trips.

“What are you proposing?” she finally asked.

“We investigate.”

There was no denying it, Dixie’s words stirred up a healthy blend of hesitation and excitement inside her chest, with excitement winning out in the end. “By …” she prompted.

“By getting together and making a list of all the people who may have had both motive and access to kill Clyde.”

Motive and access. The two key ingredients to just about any murder investigation.

Once again, she pulled the phone from her ear long enough to check the display screen, this time narrowing in on the clock feature in the bottom-right-hand corner. “Okay. I can probably be out of here as early as five thirty. Where do you want to meet?”

Chapter 10

Dixie was waiting for her in the back booth of Johnson’s
Diner, a pair of brand-new notebooks carefully positioned on the wide Formica-topped table. Beside each notebook was a ballpoint pen and a glass of sweet tea.

Scooting onto the empty bench across from Dixie, Tori nudged her chin in the direction of the supplies. “What are those for?”

“Notes.” Dixie plucked two menus from the silver holder at the end of the table, passing one of them across to Tori.

She caught herself mid eye roll. “What kind of notes?”

“Possible suspects. Possible motives. Possible means.” Dixie paused long enough to run her finger down the senior dinner specials listed on the right side of the menu, her entrée choice coming halfway down the laminated page. “Basically a blueprint of sorts for how we’ll be spending our next few weeks.”