Murder Carries a Torch (11 page)

She picked up a tin can by her chair and the camera moved a second before the Channel 6 audience was treated to her spitting snuff into the can.

“What on God’s earth?” Fred asked.

I couldn’t remember how much I had told him. Apparently not much. He sat at the kitchen table saying, “What? What?” while I told him the whole story and scrambled us some eggs. The Brunswick stew I put back in the freezer. I know you’re not supposed to refreeze food, but if I nuked it long enough, it should kill the bacteria. And it was too late for spicy food.

“Don’t you get messed up in this, Patricia Anne. These sound like strange people.”

I handed him some buttered toast. “Betsy Mahall, Susan Crawford’s sister, isn’t strange. She and her husband, Terry, are going to raise Susan’s children.”

“Well, it’s good the children have somebody.”

I nodded. “Somebody who really wants them.”

The lights went out just as we were finishing our eggs. And I hadn’t checked since I got home to see if we had an E-mail from Haley. Given our track record with electricity, it could be days before I could use the computer.

“She’ll be home in two months,” Fred said, reading my thoughts.

This time we lucked out. The lights were back on the next morning, had been off only four hours. Ice still coated our skylight and deck, though, and a fine mist was falling, almost like a fog, coating the tops of pine trees. I slid across the deck with Woofer’s breakfast, a good way to break a hip, but I had to see if he was all right.

Which, of course, he was. Snug and happy in his igloo, money well spent.

I was watching Virgil Stuckey on TV, a repeat of the story of the night before, when Fred came into the den, dressed for work.

“The roads are too icy for you to go out,” I exclaimed when I saw him. “Wait a while. It’s supposed to get above freezing during the morning.”

“I called Mark. He’s got a four-wheel drive. He’s going to pick me up.”

Mark Taylor was a young man who worked for Fred. A very nice young man whose hobby happened to be stock-car racing, a fact which didn’t comfort me on an icy morning.

“It’ll be fine.” He pointed to the TV and Virgil Stuckey. “That guy looks just like Willard Scott.”

A few minutes later, I watched nervously as he slid across the deck. The sound of Mark’s car motor roaring in our driveway was not comforting.

“You call me when you get there and don’t you let Mark drive fast.”

“Don’t worry.”

Yeah. I closed the door, picked Muffin up, and went into the boys’ old bedroom where I had set up the computer.

“Maybe we’ve got a message from your Mama,” I told the cat.

We did.

I hit the send button, rubbed Muffin between her ears, and looked out at the mist, ice motes suspended in the air. In a couple of hours, Betsy Mahall would be burying her sister Susan. On such a morning.

I clicked on the
WHITE PAGES
and typed in
TERRY MAHALL
in
STEELE, ALABAMA
. The message came back that there was no such person listed. I typed in
TERRENCE
and the number and address came up. So easy. And to think I had lived for sixty years without a computer.

“Betsy?” I said when she answered. “This is Patricia Anne Hollowell. I just wanted you to know that I’m thinking about you this morning.”

“Mrs. Hollowell. Oh, Mrs. Hollowell, thank you so much.” A pause and then a long breath. “Everything’s icy up here. Terry thinks we ought to put it off. It’s a graveside service. But I don’t want to. It’s like I’m caught somewhere and so is Susan.”

“Then do what you need to do.”

“I need to put her to rest.”

“I know you do. And you’re in my thoughts.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hollowell. Thank you for calling. I appreciate it more than you know.”

I hung up and looked out of the window until Fred called saying he was safe.

At the age of thirty-nine, Richard Nelson, Luke and Virginia’s only child, is a handsome man. Especially, Mary Alice says, since they tacked his ears to his head. Every time she says it, I get a painful vision of a hammer and upholstery tacks. The truth was that Richard’s ears did stick out so far when he was a child, that light would shine through them, and our kids were under threats of painful punishment if they called him “Dumbo,” which I’m sure they sneaked around and did.

The Richard who sat in my kitchen later that day had grown to match his rather large nose, though, had neat ears attached to his head, and was a very handsome man. He looked more like an L. L. Bean cowboy wanna-be than a congressman in his denim shirt, jeans, and boots. Which was fine. He looked good. I’m sure he had carried most
of the female votes in Columbus. I hate to admit it, but it’s so much easier to vote for a good-looking man, even one with bird brains. The people of his district were lucky that Richard was smart.

“The problem is Mama’s car, Cousin Pat,” he was saying. “Sheriff Stuckey said they’re going to release it tomorrow in Pulaski and I need to go get it. Cousin Sister said she would take me up there so I could drive it back to Birmingham, but Daddy’s getting out of the hospital tomorrow, hopefully.”

“I’ll go get your daddy, Richard,” I volunteered. “Don’t give that another thought.”

I placed a cup of coffee in front of him and handed him the sugar bowl. “You want a cookie?”

“No, ma’am.” He put a couple of teaspoons of sugar in his coffee and stirred it.

I poured myself a cup and sat down across from him. I had finally had time that morning to clean the house, and the comforting noise of tumbling clothes came from the utility room.

“How come you’re going to get the car?” I asked. “I thought it belonged to Holden Crawford, the guy who was killed, that there was a bill of sale in the glove compartment.”

“There was. A handwritten bill of sale. The sale hadn’t been recorded.”

Richard picked up his coffee and took a sip. “Um. Hot.”

The steam should have alerted him to that fact.

“And the handwritten bill won’t suffice?”

“Ordinarily it would. But Mr. Holden is dead and Mama’s disappeared, so we don’t know the circumstances
of the sale. We need Mama to say she wrote it, that she actually received the money from Mr. Crawford.”

He took another sip of coffee, whispered, “Whew, that’s hot,” and said, “Mama. Therein lies the problem.”

Therein lay part of the problem; there were a couple of bodies lying around, too, which were problematic.

“And you don’t have any idea where your mother might have gone?”

“Beats me.” He shrugged and put his coffee down. “I thought she and Daddy were getting along fine. Christmas she seemed happier than I’d seen her in a long time.”

But Holden Crawford hadn’t come to paint their house until after Christmas. Hmmm.

“Happy how?”

“You know. Smiley. Not bugging me all the time to get married.”

Richard had had an unfortunate marriage right out of high school to a girl who was employed at the Boobie Bungalow. Enough said. Fortunately, the people of Columbus had forgiven him. And Richard had worked hard to remain a bachelor.

Now he said, “I should have known something was wrong.”

“Don’t blame yourself.” I poured Coffee-mate into my cup and watched it swirl out. “What about that phone number I gave Sister? The Gordons in Seattle.”

He shook his head. “They didn’t know what I was talking about. Daddy hadn’t heard of them, either. He still swears he saw Mama up at that snake-handling church where you found the dead girl.”

I looked at the clock. Susan’s funeral should be over by now. The freezing drizzle had stopped here in Birmingham. I hoped it had up in Steele.

“You didn’t have any trouble coming off the mountain from Sister’s, did you?”

“You mean the ice? No, it’s melting. I’m used to driving on icy streets in D.C., anyway.”

Ice was ice, Birmingham or Washington. Slippery as hell. But I didn’t say anything.

“About the car, though,” Richard continued. “I sure don’t want it. I’d be expecting a snake to crawl out from under the seat all the time. But it’s a nice car. Leather seats. Not too many miles.”

“But what if it was a legitimate sale?”

“Then the Crawford family can have it. I don’t know why they would want it, though. Seems like every time they got in it they’d think of that guy being eaten alive by snakes.” He shivered as if a rabbit had run over his grave. “God, I can’t think of anything worse. Talk about your nightmares.”

“They could sell it. There are two small children involved who are going to have to be raised and educated. I’m sure anything would help.”

“I suppose so.”

“Are you going up to Oneota to see your daddy today?”

Richard nodded. “In a little while.” He sipped his coffee. “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to take a look at that church and house, see if any of Mama’s stuff is there.”

He looked at me. “Do you think there’s any chance that Daddy really saw Mama?”

“I don’t know how.”

I explained how the church was sitting against a huge rock and how we could have seen anyone who came out through the side or front door.

“Couldn’t you have looked away for a minute or just not have been paying attention?”

“I suppose.”

I knew he desperately wanted to find his mother, to know that she was safe.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said, as much to appease him as anything else. “I’ll call the lady who probably has the key to the house. They’re having her sister’s funeral today and I don’t think we could get up the mountain anyway in the ice. But we can go day after tomorrow and you can look around. Maybe we’ll find something that’ll tell us where your mama is.”

I didn’t believe it for a minute, but it seemed to make Richard feel better.

“Maybe Daddy will feel like going with us,” he said.

A concussed, seeing-double Pukey Lukey going around those mountain curves in Mary Alice’s Jag? Or my Chevy?

“What kind of rental car do you have?” I asked.

After Richard left, and after I had folded the clothes, grateful to have everything clean, I decided to go to the library. Cars were passing by the house every few minutes. The roads should be no problem.

What I was looking for was a book by Dennis Covington, a Birmingham native. Entitled
Salvation on Sand Mountain
, it was about snake handling and had been one of the top three finalists for the National Book Award several years earlier. Everyone had said how wonderful it was, but the subject hadn’t appealed to me. Now it did. I wanted to know how people like Holden Crawford, his son Ethan, and his daughter-in-law Susan could be drawn into what seemed to me such a bizarre religious practice.

The book was checked out.

“You haven’t read that book yet?” Edna Thomas, the librarian asked me. “You don’t know what you’ve missed. You need to go buy it, Patricia Anne.”

Which I did. I stopped by Alabama Booksmith and got the same reaction.

“You haven’t read that book yet? You don’t know what you’ve missed.”

Several hours later, I did. I had missed an incredible insight into a world I had known nothing about. I had also learned how one could be drawn into this strange world where one celebrated and tested his faith by handling snakes and drinking strychnine. I was so mesmerized that the phone had rung a couple of times and I had let it ring. The answering machine would pick it up.

Handling the snakes and not being bitten proved that you were powerful. That you were in God’s favor.

Scary.

When I finally put the book down, I knew one thing. What I had thought impossible, that Virginia Nelson from the Lutheran Church and the country club could be drawn into such a group, wasn’t impossible. Like Betsy’s Aunt Pearl, she could have been carried away in religious fervor, believed this was the way to touch God, the way to redemption.

Night had fallen, and it was very cold. I walked into the kitchen and turned the back light on. The outside thermometer was sitting on thirty-two.

I threw on a jacket, went out and got Woofer, and brought him into the house for company. When Fred came in, I hugged him so tightly and for so long, I surprised him. I felt as if I had been away from home and from him for a long, long time. And several times during
the night, I woke up, listened to his breathing, and watched the shadows on the wall cast by the streetlight.

Needless to say, I woke up with a headache. I downed a couple of aspirin and looked out at a world of light. Ice still coated everything, and a bright sun was bouncing off every crystal of that ice. Bouncing, ping, right between my eyes.

I groaned, crawled back into bed, and pulled the quilt over my head.

“You all right?” Fred asked. I could hear the whir of his electric shaver and knew he was doing his morning routine of wandering around the house while he shaved.

“Headache.”

“You want some aspirin?”

“Just took some.” I drifted back into a deep sleep.

Two hours later I woke up again, this time feeling much better. A look through the window rewarded me with bright sunshine, melting ice, and no pain.

Muffin was stretched out on the kitchen table in the sun. She answered with a yawn when I told her good morning.

“Lazy cat,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes. Who was I to call her lazy? Hadn’t I just crawled out of bed?

I glanced at the clock. Almost ten. I poured a cup of the coffee that Fred had made, went into the den, and called Luke at the Blount County Medical Center.

He had been dressed and waiting for me for an hour. Where was I?

“I’ll be there at one o’clock,” I said. Damned if I was going to hurry.

“But I told them I’d be gone before lunch.”

“One o’clock,” I repeated. “Are you still seeing double?”

“Just sometimes. Most of the time not. I’ve got to get out of here, though. I ran into a man who knows Virginia, who saw her up there at that church.”

“What do you mean he saw her up there? Is he one of the snake handlers?”

“I don’t know. He just came in and said he saw my wife.”

“How did he know you were looking for her?”

“Hell, Patricia Anne. I didn’t ask him that. He said she was all right, though. Said his name was Thomas Benson. Old man. Here for dialysis.”

Probably blew his kidneys on strychnine and snake venom.

“Did you ask him if he knew where she is now?”

“He said he didn’t. He said some other folks up there might know, though. He said a lot of them were going to a big meeting up in West Virginia this weekend, so we need to get up there real quick, Patricia Anne, and ask around.”

“Did he give you any names, Luke? We can’t just go up to a door and knock and ask if they saw Virginia or if they’re snake handlers. It’s against the law you know.”

“Asking about your wife?”

“Snake-handling, Luke.” He wasn’t being too quick here.

“Then how come they don’t arrest them?”

“I think they have to be endangering others.”

“Well, hell, Patricia Anne. That’s what they’re doing carrying those copper-tailed-rattle-mouthed-moccasins around.”

“One o’clock, Luke.” I hung up and went to take a shower.

I hadn’t checked my messages the night before, so as soon as I dried my hair, I turned them on. An invitation to join the Angel Sighting Society, a reminder of a dental appointment (damn, I’d forgotten that), and Mitzi from next door. She had a present for David Anthony and she and Arthur wanted to see our Warsaw pictures.

Hell, I hadn’t even had them developed.

I called her, apologized for not getting back sooner, halfway explained what had been going on, told her that David Anthony was now Brother, and invited her to go to Oneonta with me to get Luke.

“Pukey Lukey? You’re driving him home from the hospital?”

“Yep.”

I thought I heard a snicker.

“Patricia Anne, much as I’d love to keep you company, I can’t do it today. I’ve got all sorts of running around to do.”

I didn’t blame her.

At one o’clock, straight up, I walked into Luke’s room. He looked at his watch.

“They brought me lunch.”

“Good.” At least I hoped it was. “You’re ready then?” I asked.

“All I’ve got is this Georgia suitcase.” He held up a plastic Rich’s bag. “Richard brought me some pajamas and clean clothes.”

Guilt. I should have remembered that he needed things like toiletries and pajamas and that his clothes had been covered in blood.

“You’re checked out?”

“Had to promise them my first-born child. Damn, Patricia Anne. You been in a hospital lately?”

“No, thank God. Do they have to take you out in a wheelchair?”

“I suppose.” Luke mashed the call button.