Roll Over and Play Dead (16 page)

And next to her, his hair flopping in his eyes and his mouth curled in a mocking smile, was a photograph of Daryl Gallager, a.k.a. Daryl Defoe.

It was not a case of pregraduation nuptials, or even a case of serendipitous alphabetization. Daryl had the same forehead, the same wide-set eyes, the same dark hair. He also had the same last name; clearly it was a case of sibling-hood, as in fraternal twins or damn close to it.

I drained the glass of sherry as I continued to blink at the two photographs. Unlike his sister (sister!), Daryl had not belonged to any organizations or participated in any extracurricular activities. Considering his dearth of socialization skills, this was not surprising.

But what did it mean? I let my head sink back against the top of the settee and tried to think. Jan had given me a ridiculous story about being married, meant to explain why her visits to Daryl’s apartment were clandestine. She might have been married somewhere along the line, but she was now using her maiden name and it was hardly scandalous to spend time with one’s brother.

Who was using another name. Another poser, indeed. He could hardly claim to have been married and changed his name to suit his bride. He was using an alias, and he and Jan were determined to hide his true identity. That explained why there were no papers in his apartment, I supposed, although it didn’t explain much of anything else.

I opened the 1970 yearbook and ascertained they were seniors. Jan had been initiated in the high school chapter of the Humane Society; Daryl had not. The caption beside her photograph predicted she would save wildlife; Daryl’s caption predicted he would have one.

I returned the other volumes to the shelf, switched off the lights, and took the two relevant yearbooks to my car. I battled the impulse to drive to Jan’s house and confront her with my discovery, reminding myself that I could do so in the morning.

The second thing I wanted to do would require two of my innate talents: delicacy and tact. Daryl had been in the army, and they were notorious for keeping records (at the taxpayers’ expense). If I could persuade Peter to make inquiries, I might find out why Daryl Gallager preferred to be Daryl Defoe.

As I drove toward my apartment, I passed in front of the Maranonis’ house. A light shone in an upstairs room, which was neither here nor there, but it made me think of my earlier conversation with Helen concerning George’s peculiar behavior. She had mentioned arthritis. I was not a graduate of Johns Hopkins, but I doubted arthritis could produce that which I, in a burst of perspicacity, had diagnosed as mental confusion. And Vidalia had implied that George was behaving oddly when she’d encountered him on the sidewalk at midnight—while her explanation for being there sounded perfectly reasonable.

I still had no idea who killed Newton Churls, what happened to the contents of the cash box, why I was attacked at the animal sale in Guttler, who shot Daryl, and most importantly, where Nick and Nora and the others were. All I knew was that I needed answers.

The next morning Caron was subdued as she came into the kitchen. “Guess you’re going to the high school?” she said as she poured a glass of orange juice. “The Hornet’s kind of mad about all this.”

“I would imagine so,” I said, dressed primly for the impending conference and all the more resentful because of it.

“Well, it’s not my fault.”

“Is Rhonda Maguire’s mother going to be there—in a dark dress and panty hose?”

Caron put the glass in the sink. “I doubt it. Rhonda Maguire’s merely a self-serving bitch.” She paused for maximum effect. “I, on the other hand, am An Instigator.” Sniffling loudly, she went into her bedroom and slammed the door. She was still sniffling when she left for school.

When I arrived at the Book Depot, I pretended to do paperwork until I had stirred up the courage to call Peter at the police department. I let him reminisce about the previous evening, which had been lovely, then told him I’d had a teeny thought that might be significant.

“Does it have anything to do with a honeymoon?” he drawled, adding a few suggestions involving steamy tropical nights, champagne, and a potentially fascinating variation of that which we had perfected over the last few months.

Although I found his remarks intriguing, I refused to blush and coolly said, “In a way.” I told him what Jan had said, ignored his sputters, and then told him what I’d discovered in Miss Emily’s library of yearbooks. The sputters stopped. “Therefore,” I added, “we need to send an inquiry to the military and find out if there’s a reason why he’s using an alias—twenty years after he served in Vietnam. I thought about passing this information to Sheriff Dorfer, but I was afraid he might misinterpret my motives.”

“Very possibly,” Peter said. “The sheriff won’t have bothered with the victim’s prints. I’ll suggest it and do my best not to implicate you.”

He made more lewd remarks, but I ignored them and told him I had a customer, which was true if one categorized the wino as such. I gave the wino a dollar from the cash register, watched him shuffle away, and pulled out my notebook once more to stare at the pages of disconnected notes.

I called the animal shelter, but there was no answer. I couldn’t call Jan’s house, in that I didn’t have the unlisted number, and I wasn’t sure of the warmth of the welcome should I appear on her front porch. I moved on to the masculine half of the Gallager twins. The hospital reported that he was stable, which was encouraging in that Jan would be charged only with assault with a deadly weapon or attempted murder—if Daryl identified her as the assailant.

Something snapped, and I couldn’t tolerate the inertia any longer. Once again I closed the Book Depot (the frequency of said action was beginning to have a noticeably detrimental effect on sales), and drove to the hospital.

To my profound regret, there was a guard stationed in front of Daryl Gallager-Defoe’s door, and to make things worse, the guard was Deputy Amos, who by now could recognize me in his sleep. Any idea of donning a white coat, stealing a clipboard, and bullying my way into the room evaporated, and I was reduced to a more mundane approach.

“Hi,” I said as I came down the hall. “How’s the patient?”

Deputy Amos tugged on his collar and stared over my head. “He’s in protective custody, ma’am. No visitors allowed.” It would have been more impressive had his voice not cracked, but I could tell he was trying.

“I wouldn’t presume to disturb him,” I murmured, lying through my lovely white incisors. “I was visiting an old friend in another wing and thought I’d pop by for a minute to see how poor Daryl Defoe’s doing.” I emphasized the last name, and noted with interest that the deputy did not flinch. “Has he identified the person who shot him?”

“Mrs. Malloy,” he began plaintively, “the sheriff—”

“I was just asking,” I said with a sniff. “I wanted to speak to Jan Gallager, and I didn’t know whether to try the animal shelter or the county jail. If you’re under orders to shoot me on the spot simply because I asked a perfectly reasonable question, I understand.”

Red blotches appeared on his neck like the onset of hives, and he took a handkerchief from his back pocket to wipe his wet forehead. “I’m not supposed to shoot anybody. Defoe claims he doesn’t remember what happened, and he’s acting so weird the doctors are keeping him sedated. He keeps rambling about gooks and cages and stuff like that, and he almost strangled an orderly. I don’t know what the sheriff’s doing about charging the Gallager lady. I’m on duty, ma’am, so if you don’t mind…?”

Lapsing into a Columboish role, I nodded demurely and took a step, then spun back. “Did you find the ledger?”

“Ledger?”

“Never mind,” I said with a polite smile, and left the hospital before he could shoot me on the spot, since I suspected he did have orders to that effect and was waiting until the corridor was free of witnesses.

I had more than an hour before the showdown at the high school. Plenty of time, I assured myself giddily as I headed for the animal shelter. It was closed, and the sign beside the door informed me that it would not open until eleven.

I continued to Jan’s house, but her car was not parked in the driveway and no one responded to my knock. Feeling increasingly frustrated with my morning’s limited allotment of snooping, I started back to the Book Depot and the piles of files that awaited me. However, at the fateful moment (more commonly known as the intersection with the highway that went east), I took a hard right, set my sights on NewCo and my speedometer needle on the illicit side of fifty-five.

As I bounced down the dirt road, I looked at each house for signs of life, and parked in front of the first one that had a truck in the yard. The woman who came out on the porch was short, squat, and convinced I was a missionary sent to lure her from the path of righteousness found only at her own church down the highway a piece. After I’d denied it several times and agreed to attend the next prayer meeting, I asked her if she had seen any unfamiliar cars on the road the morning of the shooting. We determined that she’d seen Jan’s and mine, and then a whole darn parade of sheriff’s vehicles all screaming like wild injuns.

At the next inhabited house, I had a door slammed within inches of my elegant nose. There was no truck at Deputy Amos’s house, which wasn’t astounding in that I knew where he was…which was not in a position to see me continue past his house to the NewCo gate and park.

Without the slightest idea what I was doing, I walked up the rutted driveway and stopped to ponder the house and the kennel in the side yard. Arnie had driven into the front yard, and if I was to believe him, with three dogs and a cat in cages, all drugged. Newton Churls had come outside and watched him unload the animals, agreed to buy them, and then brought up the delicate issue of outstanding gambling debts. In the midst of the debate, Churls had noticed company and told Arnie to wait in the woods behind the house.

So Churls was there with the cages, and shortly thereafter the cages were gone and Churls was locked in the pen with his dear little doggies that he’d so meticulously trained to kill.

To some extent, I believed Arnie, but it occurred to me he might have detoured through the house on his way to the woods, if only long enough to break open the cash box and take what he felt was his. Unless, I thought grimly, he’d chanced upon a ledger and stolen it instead. If the ledger existed.

I was drawn to the house like guzzlers were drawn to the beer garden. The living room was still in disarray, and I gazed about blankly as I attempted to surmise where Churls would have hidden either of the two items of interest. After a moment, I went into the bedroom and moved aside the tacky landscape. I didn’t find a safe, but the hole in the plaster wall was the ideal size for a metal cash box. Having no idea about the size of the ledger, I had no reason to think it wouldn’t have slid in quite nicely.

If it existed, I repeated to myself as I warily explored the dark corners of the hole and ascertained that only dust and bits of plaster remained.

All this led to other ill-defined questions, and I wandered into the kitchen to frown at the table where the box had been. Arnie could have taken both the box and the ledger from the hole. Any one of the commandos, except for Caron and Inez, could have slipped in the house—if there had been adequate time. And assuming Churls had been occupied moving the cages to a very effective hiding place somewhere on or near his property.

Warning myself that I was imploding brain cells to no avail, I went into the living room and was about to go through the front door when I heard a car engine. I ducked back and moved to a window in time to see a truck come slowly up the driveway. It was a truck I’d seen before, although not at the animal shelter or in Churls’s yard or in front of Deputy Amos’s house. No such luck. I’d seen this truck outside the Red Bird Café in Guttler, and had had an unpleasant conversation with its driver—although not as unpleasant as the one we’d had at the animal sale later that morning. To make it all the more exciting, he’d brought his oversize, fuzzy friend along for the ride.

My comment was not ladylike, nor was my dash through the kitchen and out the back door. I yanked myself to a halt and looked for cover. Yellow Hair was somewhere between my car and me. Behind me was the pit bull pen, the fence, and the sloping hillside covered with scruffy, uninviting woods. I had no idea if the two would go into the house or around either side, which made all three possible routes unattractive, to say the very least.

I hurried past the pen. When I reached the fence, I discovered there was no conveniently situated gate, and was again making unladylike comments as I clambered over the top. I heard not only an ominous ripping sound, but also a shout from behind me, and I neither halted to inspect the damage nor turned around to wave, but instead sprinted into the woods.

The next ten minutes could have taken place on the bottom rung of Dante’s Inferno, if not in the basement below it. Things grabbed at me, slapped at me, scratched at me, squawked at me, leapt at me, and in general did little to enhance the encounter with nature. Every now and then I thought I heard a shout, but I was listening with equal intensity to my curses, some of which I’d never before allowed to escape from my lips. I was amazed that I knew them; it was not, however, the time to revel at how my graduate studies in Anglo-Saxon literature had remained in the darker corners of my mind.

I sloshed through a creek, clawed my way up the muddy bank, and was congratulating myself when I took an imprudent step, tumbled down a small ravine, and banged my head on the railroad tracks. A crow squawked at me, abandoned the distastefully pink remains of breakfast, and flapped away. A second took its place.

Peter might be curious about the origin of the oozing red welts on my arms, legs, neck, and face, but I was fairly certain everything was functional. I was no longer terrified out of my wits, but I was not in the mood to chuckle about the situation, either. The third problem was as thorny as the brambles in the woods had been. I was on foot in the middle of nowhere, and I seemed to recall Sheriff Dorfer mentioning a twenty-mile hike to Farberville. There were no pay telephones on the nearby trees, and in any case my purse was tucked under the front seat of my car and I had nary a dime on my person. I still had my watch—and it was half-past eleven. I’d missed two conferences in as many days, and I doubted Mrs. Horne would be impressed by my maternal concern.