Murder on a Girls' Night Out (15 page)

“You got a measuring tape?” Sister called.

“No.” I shook my head. “Get out of there!”

“In a minute.”

I walked around back, watching for downed power lines, to see how the old apple orchard had fared. I was agreeably surprised. The apples were all on the ground, but there were few broken limbs. The apples would need to be picked up soon, though. We should stop and tell Katie McCorkle on our way home.

“You ready?” Mary Alice said, coming around the building. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire.

“I think I’ll get a different kind of tables and chairs,”
she said as we turned out of the parking lot. “Those captain’s chairs take up so much room and they bruise your thighs.”

“Bulldoze it,” I said.

The curb market was open when we got back. Fly and Jackson Hannah were sitting on the end of the old pickup we had seen the third time we had gone to the Skoot, the one whose driver I had felt sorry for until Sister set me straight about who he was. Time and too much alcohol had taken their toll on him, but he was still handsome in a dissipated way. You could see that he had once had the charm and charisma his nephew, Richard, had now. Rougher edges, but that could be attractive, too. Today he had on a plaid flannel shirt and khaki pants that were freshly laundered and creased. I suspected it was because this was the first cool day and he had just moved into his seasonal uniform. But maybe that wasn’t fair. Fly wore a pair of Nikes, his concession to the season. No socks.

Both men got down off the truck and came over to speak to us. Fly introduced us to Jackson Hannah and said Katie was home with a migraine and he was keeping the store. Jackson was helping him.

“Y’all want a pumpkin?” Jackson Hannah asked. “Bargains.”

“No, thank you,” we both said.

“We’ve been out to the Skoot ’n’ Boot,” Mary Alice added. “What a mess.”

“You the new owner?” Jackson ran his hands down the creases in his pants as if he weren’t used to them.

“The snakebit owner.”

“Seems like it, don’t it? I rode by there this morning and thought, Lord, that place is nothing but trouble.”

“Did you have much storm damage?” I asked.

“A couple of trees in the pasture. Lost our lights for a while,” Jackson said.

“We’re okay, too,” Fly said. “But storms make Katie so nervous she can’t sleep. Walked the floor all night. Like that would help.” He scuffed at a small streak of dirt with his Nikes. “Just gave her a headache.”

“Sara has a headache this morning, too,” Jackson said. “Dick’s wife?” We nodded. “She’s having that big party out in her backyard Thursday and she says the yard’s a mess and it’s going to be cold.”

“We’re invited,” Sister said.

“Well, wear boots and a coat.”

Sister laughed. “I’ve met her. She’ll pull it off fine.”

Jackson grinned. “You’re right. Sara can take care of her problems.”

“Speaking of which—” Fly pointed toward Richard Hannah’s car, which was turning into the parking lot. Dick pulled up beside us and lowered his window.

“Morning, everybody. Mrs. Crane, I heard about the Skoot. I’m sorry.”

“I think the insurance will cover it,” Mary Alice said.

“That’s good.” He looked at his uncle. “Uncle Jackson, Sara says can you please come help her? She’s got a crew coming from a lawn-care company in Birmingham, but she’s got a lot of errands to run. She said she’d feel better if you were there supervising. I’d do it, but I’ve got about ten meetings today and I’m already late.”

“Consider it done.”

“Thanks, Uncle Jackson. I’ve got to run. Ladies. Fly.” He was gone so quickly, it was almost like he had never been there.

“Well, guess I better go see what I can do.” Jackson Hannah hiked his khaki pants up over his ample stomach and started toward his truck. He turned and grinned. “See? I told you Sara could solve her problems.”

We told Fly about the apples and he promised to pass the word along to someone in The Gleaners, Katie’s group. It looked like Katie would be out of commission for the day. But the apples would be picked up, and thanks.

“He’s such a nice man,” Mary Alice said as we headed home.

“Hmmm,” I said.

“Let’s stop at the chicken place for lunch.”

That suited me. The morning’s lemon wafers had long ago disappeared.

W
e stopped again at Kentucky Fried Chicken. The restaurant was extremely busy; a lot of people were still without lights. We finally got our order just as a couple was leaving a corner booth. Mary Alice made a beeline for it. Once there, she was considerably slowed, since booths are not made for people Sister’s size. She pushed her way in, though, managing as she was doing it to move the table at least a foot in my direction. I squeezed in and shoved against the table.

“I can’t breathe!”

“Of course you can,” Sister said. “I’m comfortable and I’m considerably larger than you are, Patricia Anne.”

I shoved the table again, succeeding in moving it a few inches.

“Quit that! You’re sloshing the coffee.”

I was still squeezed in tightly, but I could breathe. And I didn’t have to worry about spilling anything in my lap. I reached into the box and pulled out a drumstick. I had consumed enough fat over the past few days, I realized, to plug up arteries the size of a water hose. I really was going to have to start watching it.

Mary Alice poured two packages of Sweet ’n Low into her coffee and stirred it with a little swizzle stick. Steam came up in little puffs. “Umm, smells good,” she said.

I took a bite of the wonderful greasy chicken, which was so hot I had to grab for the water. I was still rolling it around on my tongue when I heard, “Afternoon, ladies.” I looked up and saw Sheriff Reuse balancing five boxes of chicken dinners.

“You been out to the Skoot?” he asked.

We nodded. I was still trying not to burn my tongue and Mary Alice was simply not being friendly.

“I was sorry to hear about the damage.”

Mary Alice scowled. “Tell me something I’ll believe. That place has been nothing but a pain in your butt.”

The sheriff smiled. “True.”

“What’s the status on Ed?” Mary Alice asked.

“Very cold.” He smiled as if he had said something clever; we just looked at him.

“You heard anything?”

“Not yet, but we will.” He nodded. “Y’all enjoy your lunch.”

“I think I hate that man,” Mary Alice said, watching him walk away in that ramrod way of his.

“He’s just doing his job.”

“He’s so damn serious about it. And he acts like he thinks we know something he doesn’t.”

“We do. A little bit.” It was as good a time as any. I put down my chicken and told her all I knew, starting
with my lunch with Bonnie Blue, when she had told me about Ed trying to rape Doris Chapman and Henry coming to the rescue and the trip to the hospital to have Ed’s head sewed up. I told her about going to Doris’s house and how nice it was and that she was spending the winter in Florida; about Fly keeping her dog and lying about it. I told her about Ed’s cut weenie and Henry’s dead wife, dead from an overdose, and that Henry had lived in Debbie’s house when he was a child and that he had almost been sent to prison but had ended up at a halfway house, which was where he learned to cook.

The whole time I was talking, Mary Alice didn’t say a word, just sat there sipping her coffee. Finally, out of breath and out of information, I leaned back. She still didn’t say anything.

“Well?” I said.

“Oh, I already knew all that.”

“What?” I said it so loudly, people in the next booth turned to look.

“Debbie told me last night. She and Henry have been doing a little investigating, too.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” I couldn’t believe this.

“You didn’t tell me, either.”

“I was going to yesterday when I went to your house and the Swamp Creatures were there.”

Mary Alice rubbed a finger between her eyes. “Ah, yes.” She looked out of the window for a minute. “You know, Mouse, there’s just one thing I can’t figure.”

“What?”

“What does it all mean?”

After sixty years, my sister could still surprise me. Not only could she keep secrets, she could actually wax philosophical about them.

“God knows,” I said. “Let’s eat.”

Which we did for a few minutes. Then I said, “I sup
pose you have Doris Chapman’s Florida address and know what she and Ed were arguing about, since it obviously wasn’t a rape attempt.” The sarcasm dripped.

Sister smiled her know-it-all smile. “Apartment 901, Emerald Waters Beach, Highway 98, Destin, Florida.”

“Know the zip code?” She couldn’t miss the sarcasm this time.

She grinned broadly. “Better. I know the phone number.”

“Did you tell Sheriff Reuse any of this?”

“Did you?”

I shook my head.

“He probably already knows it, anyway,” Mary Alice said. “At least he’s leaving Henry alone.”

I shivered in spite of the warmth in the restaurant and the coffee. “I think it’s time we told Sheriff Reuse everything we know, Sister. I was just trying to make sure Henry was all right, and he seems to be. Don’t you think we ought to butt out now?” A picture flashed through my mind of Ed’s body being loaded into the ambulance. I put my hands around my Styrofoam coffee cup to warm them.

I couldn’t believe she agreed with me. “You’re right. This is the sheriff’s job.” She bit into a biscuit. I felt an enormous sense of relief. We were dealing with violence here, something we were certainly naive about. Best to stay as far away as possible.

“I’ll call and talk to him,” she said. “But first, I think I’ll try and get Doris. I’ve called a couple of times and haven’t gotten an answer. Probably out on the beach.”

“Let the sheriff call her. What are you going to ask her anyway?”

“If she’ll come back to work when the Skoot ’n’ Boot’s finished.”

“Why don’t you just ask her if she knows who killed Ed Meadows?”

Mary Alice put the biscuit down. “You think she does?”

I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not.

The electricity was back on when I got home. I did some much needed housework. I mopped the kitchen floor, changed the sheets and began gathering a load of wash. And all the time I was thinking about Mary Alice not being surprised about the facts I’d told her, of her casualness. Of course Henry had been surprised when he found out Debbie was living in his old house. Delighted. Small world, wasn’t it? And she was beginning to see what I saw in Henry, how much promise the boy had. And, like Debbie said, anybody could make a youthful mistake and usually did. Henry had come through his stronger and wiser.

I hoped she was right.

Now I piled sheets and towels on the bedroom floor. The jeans and shirt I had on could go in the same load. Both had a considerable amount of mud on them. I stepped out of the jeans, automatically felt in the pockets and discovered the paper I had taken out of the glass boot. I started to throw it into the wastebasket but saw it was an envelope that had actually been folded several times. Inside was a thick paper, the kind legal documents are printed on.

I pulled it out, opened it and looked at Ed’s marriage certificate. The State of South Carolina duly declared that Edward Raymond Meadows and Wanda Sue Hampton were husband and wife, Charleston, South Carolina, February 17, 1980. It was signed by Edgar Bunyan, Pastor, First Baptist Church, and the witnesses, Helen Bunyan and Marilyn Cox. Folded within the certificate was
a picture, obviously taken right after the ceremony. A young Ed and Wanda Sue smiled at each other, standing on what must be the church steps. She had on a street-length white dress and there was a circlet of flowers in her hair. She was plump—probably still baby fat, she looked so young—and her dark hair fell over the shoulder that was turned to the camera. Ed was dressed in a gray suit and red tie. The crease where the picture had been folded came right between them as if foretelling what would happen.

“Whoa,” I said. “Whoa.” I sat on the edge of the bed and studied the document and the picture. Well, now we knew the name of Ed’s wife, and even if they were divorced, she should know the names of relatives. She was the one who had taken care of her in-laws’ belongings when they had died and Ed was in the Navy. I picked up the phone to tell the sheriff what I had found, but dialed Mary Alice instead. Here was something new she wouldn’t know. As usual I got her answering machine and told her to call me.

The certificate and the picture were still slightly damp from having been down in the glass boot. On the other hand, I realized, this was not debris that had blown into the boot during the storm. I looked at the creases in the paper and in the envelope. I had reached into the boot and pulled out what I thought was trash and hadn’t considered at the time that the “trash” was not only farther down than any wind would have blown it but also was far too neatly folded. A picture flashed through my mind, the memory of the dance floor and the lights, red, green, pulsing, and the boot that had a dark spot in it. That was what I had been trying to remember a couple of days before: something wasn’t quite right with the boot. While we were dancing to “Rockytop,” I had skimmed over the boot and thought something was
wrong with one of the lights, or that there was a flaw in the colored glass. It had seemed so unimportant at the time, a nothing.

I picked up the marriage certificate and looked at it again. This was the reason the light hadn’t shone through one small spot on the boot. Edward Raymond Meadows had folded the certificate four times over the picture and hidden them in the boot before the boot was inlaid in the floor.

“Shit!” I said to my reflection in the mirror. “Shit, shit, shit!” I knew I had discovered something important, something I should turn over to the sheriff immediately. I reached for the phone and nearly jumped out of my skin as it rang.

“Mama?” Haley said. “You okay? You sound funny.”

“I’m fine. I was just going to call Sheriff Reuse. I found out the name of Ed Meadows’s wife.”

“Who told you?”

“I found the marriage certificate in the glass boot from the Skoot ’n’ Boot. A picture, too.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Well, you still want to go shopping tomorrow?”

Haley may look like Fred, but sometimes she acts like Mary Alice. You would think from her reaction that a marriage certificate hidden in a glass boot was an everyday occurrence. “Call me when you get off from work,” I said.

I laid the certificate and the picture on my dresser, took a quick shower, then put the clothes in the washing machine. Afterward I called Sheriff Reuse, who was in and who picked up the call immediately.

“Enjoy your lunch, Mrs. Hollowell?” he asked.

“Yes. Did you enjoy all of yours?”

“They were great.” I remembered he didn’t have
anyone to fix him meals at home and my conscience hurt me. Just a little.

“Anything I can do for you?” he asked.

“I know the name of Ed Meadows’s wife.”

“Wanda Sue Hampton?”

I was totally deflated. “You already knew.”

“Mrs. Hollowell, all we had to do was feed Ed Meadows’ name into the computer of South Carolina’s public records, and there it was.”

“I thought you were looking for her.”

“We are. Mrs. Hampton-Meadows seems to have disappeared. Probably remarried and not using her maiden name. We lose ladies all the time like that. We’re working on it, though.”

I assumed he meant he was working on finding Wanda Sue Meadows, not on changing the archaic system of names that females have always been burdened with. Sheriff Reuse did not strike me as a feminist.

“Well, I just thought you ought to know,” I said.

“And we thank you for your help. You find out anything more, call us.”

I said good-bye and hung up. I could just see him sitting there at that perfectly clean desk, smiling that superior smile of his because I had actually thought I had some news for him. I kicked the washing machine, which was making an ungodly noise and succeeded in doing nothing but hurting my toe. And then I remembered I hadn’t told the sheriff how I had found out Wanda Sue Hampton’s name. Well, damned if I’d call him back! If he’d been any good at his job, he’d have asked.

“When you remarry, Haley,” I said, getting into the car, “I want you to keep your maiden name.”

“‘Haley Hollowell’ is too alliterative,” she said.

I bristled. “I happen to like it.”

“I know you do, Mama. You gave it to me.”

“Haley Marie Hollowell is all the name you need. I should still be Patricia Anne Tate.”

Haley looked over at me. “What’s your problem, Mama?”

“Sheriff Reuse says they lose women all the time because they change their names.”

“Bet Aunt Sister’s been lost a lot, then.”

“It’s not funny,” I said.

“I’m assuming you called and told him Ed’s wife’s name.”

“He already knew it. He just can’t find her.”

Haley nodded. “The name-change thing.”

“Yes.”

“Am I detecting a certain annoyance at one Sheriff Reuse?”

“He was patronizing. Like why was I telling him something he already knew. Didn’t even give me a chance to tell him the marriage certificate was hidden in the boot.”

“Seems to me that’s pretty important information.”