Going Through the Notions (A Deadly Notions Mystery) (9 page)

I
stumbled out of the prison, the memory of Angus’s wry, defeated expression burned into my brain. No wonder he felt as though the situation was hopeless. If the detective on your case held a major grudge against you, did you really stand much of a chance, no matter how good your attorney? In a small community like this, where the police, the judge, the DA, and other officials were so tight, it made the odds against him stacked even higher.

On the way home, I stopped for gas on the outskirts of Sheepville.

Betty’s brother, George Hildebrand, owned the garage, and he came over to the car when he saw me, wiping his hands on a rag.

I told him about visiting Angus at the prison.

“How’s he doing?” he asked.

“He’s okay, I guess, I—”

“Oh, it’s just terrible, isn’t it? Terrible situation. We’ve had Betty over a lot lately. Don’t want her to sit home brooding by herself. I go and pick her up, you know. She doesn’t like to drive at night. Neither does my Annie. It’s really something to get older, isn’t it? Everything starts going on you. The knees, the hips, the eyes. No idea why they call it the Golden Years . . .”

George was one of those people who could talk and talk, and talk some more, whether he had an audience or not. I watched the dollar amount on the gas pump click higher and higher. I pulled the nozzle out when I couldn’t stand it anymore, even though the tank wasn’t completely full.

He was still carrying on, something about Angus bringing the car in for an oil change on Friday. “Don’t you know he forgot to pay? Good old Angus. But that’s par for the course lately.”

“Wait—what did you just say?” I stared at the sticker on my windshield and its mileage reminder for the next service.

“About what? Not paying?”

“About Angus coming in for an oil change? On Friday?”

“Yes. Friday afternoon.”

Before he went to the pub with Jimmy Kratz.

“Thanks, George. Thanks for your help!” I barely remembered to rip my credit card receipt off the machine before I jumped in my car and waved good-bye to a startled George.

I clicked my odometer to zero, drove to Angus’s house, and turned around. I drove back to Sheepville, stopped in front of the pub, and drove back to his house again.

Exactly 2.1 miles.

I got out of the Subaru, ran over to Angus’s Ford F-150 pickup, and peered through the window at the odometer and the sticker. About two miles difference between the two, which proved that he didn’t drive the half mile to Jimmy’s the next morning and back again.

“Yes! Daisy Buchanan, you’re a genius!”

Hold on, genius. If Jimmy walked home, why couldn’t Angus have walked to Jimmy’s, too? That’s what the police will say.

I frowned, smoothing out a patch of kicked-up gravel with the bottom of my shoe.

But why
would
Angus walk? His first instinct would be to jump in the truck and get there as fast as possible, assuming he’d found the pens missing and was pissed off at Jimmy. He’d have sobered up enough to feel like he could drive, and wouldn’t be thinking about subtleties like oil change stickers.

I glanced at my watch. I still had time to visit the detective and tell him about this new discovery. Knowing what I knew now, I wasn’t assured of a great reception.

*

“T
he desk sergeant punched a button on his phone, and held a muttered brief conversation before gesturing to the hallway behind the reception desk. “You can go on back.”

I hurried down the hall toward an open doorway at the end. Ramsbottom didn’t actually have an office, more like a piece of the back room. I ran the gauntlet of the other officers glancing my way—some with casual interest, others with more pointed stares—as I picked my way through their desks to where the hefty detective sat in the far-right-hand corner.

“Well, this is a pleasure, Mrs. Daly,” he said, his tone indicating the opposite. To my surprise, he wasn’t sitting around stuffing his face today. Only nursing a giant plastic cup of iced coffee with a straw.

He waved for me to sit down in front of the desk as his cell phone rang. “Lemme call you back,” he murmured to whoever was on the other end and slipped the phone into the holster on his belt.

I quickly explained about the oil change and how it proved that Angus never drove back to Jimmy’s on Saturday morning.

Ramsbottom took a long suck of his drink. “Backstead could of walked to Jimmy Kratz’s place.”

“
Could
have,” I said. “But why would he? Angus would have sobered up enough by then to think he could drive. He’d want to get there as fast as possible. Assuming he went there at all. Which he didn’t.”

Ramsbottom shook his head. “You can’t know the exact route Angus Backstead would of driven that day. Sorry, ma’am, but it’s not a strong enough piece of evidence.”

His cell phone rang again. “Excuse me, I have to take this call.”

Staggered by his politeness in actually excusing himself for the phone call, I got up and took a few steps away from the desk to give him some space, although in this open room no one had much privacy.

I wandered over to the pictures and awards on a wall that had been painted white at one time. One of the photos caught my eye. It was a thinner version of Ramsbottom—about the same age as the detective was now. A picture of a handsome man with his young son. This must be his father, Hank Ramsbottom. The man Angus had almost beaten to death.

Ramsbottom was talking so low I could hardly hear. He was leaning away from me, the love handles on his back spilling over the top of his pants and testing the limits of his pale blue cotton shirt.

During school-exam periods, I had perfected the art of appearing to be engrossed in the work on my desk, but could pick up on the rustle of a note being passed, or even feel a glance or words being mouthed between students.

I did it now as I studied the photos and listened to Ramsbottom’s end of the conversation. Something about a big event going down on Saturday night. It sounded like he was making sure everyone knew to show up on time, and to keep the plans top secret. Must be a drug bust or something.

Another photo showed more clearly the young detective at his high school graduation, again with his father smiling proudly next to him.

A few moments later, I sensed Ramsbottom standing behind me.

“I know that your father was the man Angus had the fight with years ago,” I said quietly, staring at the pictures.

He cleared his throat. “My dad was never quite right after that. He was what they called ‘slow’ back then. Today, we’d say ‘brain damaged.’”

I felt queasy picturing the scene as Angus had described it. The man prone on the sidewalk, unconscious, his face a hideous bloody pulp.

“Angus Backstead couldn’t remember much about
that
fight either. Said he saw red, and next thing he knew, he was being led away in handcuffs. I’ve read the report. It’s like he blanks out about the part where he goes apeshit.”

I remembered Angus talking about seeing red.

“My father’s symptoms didn’t show up right away.” His voice was softer now. “It started with some slurred speech, occasional blackouts. Sometimes he’d just fall asleep without warning and then he’d be fine for a while. Then he started having epileptic seizures.”

I turned to face him. “Did the brain damage from the fight cause the seizures?” I whispered.

He shrugged. “The doctors said it was hard to tell. Irregardless, a few years later he had an accident with a combine harvester. I seen it happen. I was twenty-three years old.”

Ramsbottom looked over my shoulder, gazing at the pictures on the wall. “The starter motor stuck. He got down to fix it, but he forgot to leave the stopper out.”

I swallowed. I wanted to ask him to please stop telling me the story, but my throat closed up tight.

“A seizure dropped him to the ground and that’s when the machine fired up and ran over him. Took both his legs off. I managed to pull him free. My mother called the ambulance, and they were there in a matter of minutes, but there was nothing anyone could do. He died from a massive loss of blood.”

Oh no
.
Not now.
I could feel myself spiraling down to that dark place—full of pain, terror, and premature, senseless death.

As those familiar black wings flapped around my head and the walls wavered, I gripped Ramsbottom’s arm.

“Jeez. Are you okay, Mrs. Daly? You’re white as a ghost. Here, sit down. Put your head between your legs.”

He lowered me gently to the floor, and I sat there for a minute, head between my knees, sweating and clammy, fighting the spinning of the room.

The other cops were around me now, too. One of them handed me a triangular cone of ice water and I gratefully gulped it down. “Ma’am? Are you ill?” he asked.

“I didn’t eat breakfast. Must be low blood sugar or something,” I mumbled.

“You want that I should get you a donut?”

I was too sick to correct his grammar. “No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”

A couple of minutes later, after I had sucked down more cold water, and I was okay apart from the sheen of sweat still covering my body, I accepted Ramsbottom’s help as he lifted me to my feet.

I clung to him for a moment. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I managed. “I had no idea.”

He nodded, his heavy-lidded eyes full of remembered grief.

For the first time I saw him as a person, someone else with a tragedy in their life. I’d dismissed him as an ignorant oaf, but now all I saw was a fatherless young man.

I stumbled over to the desk and retrieved my pocketbook from where I’d left it on the chair. Ramsbottom picked up his cup and drained the last dregs of iced coffee out of the bottom of it, the sound like water swirling out of the bottom of a bathtub.

“The man’s a menace, Mrs. Daly. For all intensive purposes, my father died outside the movie theater that day. Now you see why I could care less what happens to Angus Backstead.”

“You
couldn’t
care less.”

He stared at me. “That’s what I said.”

*

“W
hen I got to Sometimes a Great Notion, it was well past opening time. Martha must have stopped by and left the covered plate that was sitting on the porch.

After the rain the day before, summer had returned, more determined than ever. The ninety-plus-degree humid air lay over the village like a hot, wet blanket, shutting down the supply of oxygen and making it difficult for its inhabitants to breathe. I hurried into the store, set the plate on the counter, and sank onto a stool behind the register.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, still struggling to process the events of the morning. I was convinced now that Ramsbottom would do nothing to try and find other suspects. If Angus was going to be saved, it would be up to me.

But seeds of doubt were prickling through my mind—from the last person I thought could have sown them. Things weren’t so cut and dried for me anymore.

Angus always talked about karma. This was karma with a vengeance.

Could the Angus Backstead I knew be the same person who, in a violent rage, had hurt someone so badly as to leave him brain damaged? Was it possible that Angus had mentally blocked out doing the same thing to Jimmy?

I squeezed my eyes shut against the insidious doubt creeping through my brain like the vines clambering over Reenie’s kitchen window.

The shop was blessedly cool. A UV film on the windows blocked the severity of the sun’s glare, providing filtered light to protect the fabrics. The hum of the powerful air-conditioning system Angus had installed was working full force.

Damn it, I needed coffee, but couldn’t seem to find the energy to get up and make it.

I glanced at the gold rococo mirror next to the counter. A reflection of an aging woman with swollen eyes, pale skin, and a thick gray stripe down the center of her hair stared back at me.

“But who the hell cares?” I said to her. I gathered my hair up into a bun, pulling the damp strands underneath off my neck and securing it all with a rhinestone hair clip.

I lifted up the edge of aluminum foil wrapped around the plate. Blueberry scones. They looked delicious. I folded the foil down again. Even though I hadn’t eaten breakfast, my appetite was gone.