Authors: Brandilyn Collins
“Babe,” he said, “you don’t have to feel guilty about not answering.”
“I know but … they’re my friends.”
“You’ve been through enough tonight.” He took the phone from my hand and shut it down.
The five of us talked about Clara’s death. Did she have any enemies? Who would want to do this? None of us could think of anyone. The Crenshaws were loved in Redbud. Townspeople had watched Clara grow up. She was one of their own.
I faded in and out of the conversation, my mind churning through pictures of death, recent and old. Ever since I came to Redbud almost five years ago, I’d met each day with a strange mix of freedom and entrapment. Both of them self-inflicted. I’d built my life here, created the family I lacked. Was on the verge of realizing my dream, if Andy asked me to marry him. Maybe then, I’d thought, I could really leave my past behind. Forever.
Now this.
I couldn’t begin to sort it all out. What it meant. Why, on some cosmic level, I’d been chosen to lead a life stained with murder.
But how could I even be thinking
of myself at a time like this? Clara was
dead.
Her parents and fiancé, devastated. The town, blistered and scared. Redbud was
my
town now. These were my people. Somehow I had to help them.
But a small voice inside me—a voice that sensed what was to come—whispered,
At what cost?
That night I slept fitfully, knotting my covers in scrabbling fists. Fear and grief warred for first place within me. I could not believe Clara was dead. I could not believe any of this.
In the morning I turned on my phone. It started ringing by six-thirty. I ignored all calls except Andy’s. Told him I was okay. Which I wasn’t. By the time I stumbled into the kitchen around seven, still clad in pajamas, Nicole was already seated at the table, eating her bagel and cream cheese. Breakfasts and lunches were do-it-yourself meals at our house. Dinner was a sit-down-together affair, made by me and whoever else was around to help. I knew Colleen would show up soon. Not Pete. He liked to sneak into the kitchen early, fill a mug with the strong coffee I made just for him—set the night before to go off automatically—and take it back to his room. He’d linger there until the “ladies” cleared out of the kitchen. Often he worked on his memoirs. Through his closed door I’d hear him recounting his railroad stories into his little voice-activated tape recorder. After a few hours of that he’d head for the kitchen, where he could bang around making eggs and bacon with no one else in his way.
Nicole’s eyes looked puffy. Probably no worse than mine. I gave her a somber smile. “How you doing?”
She lifted a shoulder, clearly in one of her I-don’t-want-to-talk moods. Which didn’t tend to be good for her.
I laid my cell phone on the counter and set about making more coffee. When I hit the power button the machine’s loud bean grinder whirred on. I waited for the noise to die down. “This is Thursday. Which means you have a full load of classes, right?”
“Yeah.”
Since Nicole came to live with me she’d returned to college, attending the University of Kentucky. She planned to major in business marketing.
“That’s good. Gets you out of town and your mind on other things.”
“But how can I think?” She put down her bagel. “How can I do anything?”
The ennui that comes after someone close to you dies. I remembered those days all too well. Now here they were again.
I pulled out a chair opposite Nicole and sat. “You do it because you have to.”
Nicole looked out the kitchen window. She’d had plenty terrible days in her life. She should know how to push on. But she so easily fell into the victim mentality.
“Hey.” I tapped her hand. “You know I’m not telling you to do anything I haven’t done.”
“I know.”
Reservation coated her tone. From the stories I’d told of my past, she believed I’d lost my parents at a young age, as she had. An auto accident killed them both, I’d told her. Told everyone. But that’s all Nicole knew about my hardships. In her mind, her abusive childhood loomed so much bigger, which meant I couldn’t understand the extent of her pain. It was her excuse of choice when I nudged her to seize the world instead of letting it seize her.
If she only knew the truth of all I’ve lived through. But that was the irony of our relationship, of my relationships with everyone. Truth was everything to me. And truth was the one thing I could not give.
Still, Nicole clung to me as the mentor she longed for. And I wanted to help her all I could.
Colleen trundled in, wearing her hot pink robe, and headed straight for the coffee machine. Her bed-head hair stuck out all directions. Grief for Clara strained her face, but Colleen would not want to talk about it. “My phone’s been ringing off the hook.” She poured herself a cup of coffee, then headed for the refrigerator. “Everyone wanting to know what happened and how you are. Would you believe even my ex called? Like he has the right to ask me
anything.”
Colleen’s jerk of a husband had divorced her six months ago, but not before tricking her into signing papers that gave him everything they owned. If I hadn’t taken her in, asking for nothing more than money to cover her food, I don’t know what she would have done. Now at least she had a job working at Granger’s Gift Store on Main for seven hours every weekday.
“Did you talk to him?”
She snorted. “Not on your life.” She pulled a box of cereal from the pantry and plopped it and the milk on the table. Fetched a bowl and spoon, and brought over her coffee. Colleen seated herself with a muffled
harrumph.
“Delanie.” She pointed her spoon at me. “I think you should go shopping today. In Lexington.”
“Shopping?”
“Hit fancy stores, buy yourself something nice.”
“I don’t even like shopping, you know that.”
“What I know is, you need something to keep you occupied today. Otherwise you’ll think and grieve too much. You can only clean this house so many hours a day.”
“And do laundry,” Nicole put in.
“And pull weeds in the garden.” Colleen wagged her head.
“And go to the grocery store.”
“And do all the other errands this household needs.” Colleen sighed. “Okay, maybe you don’t have time to go shopping. Do it anyway.”
How odd, the way we talked about everyday things. While Clara was … where right now—in the morgue? I couldn’t grasp it.
I looked at my hands. “Maybe I should get a job.” We’d had this conversation before. With my inheritance, I didn’t need to work. In fact that money had made it possible for me to pay cash for this house. I probably would
be working if I didn’t run the household for three people. But I didn’t mind staying home, cooking for all of us and washing clothes. Made me feel useful. Not so alone. This was my family, and I wanted to take care of them.
Andy didn’t understand this part of me at all. He wanted me to get out and work somewhere, learn something new. The very thought overwhelmed me. I didn’t want to spend my time in some new environment. I was perfectly content in the one I’d created. Not to mention the huge problem inherent with applying for a job.
Sometimes I wondered what Andy saw in me.
My cell phone rang. I pushed up to check the ID.
Chief Melcher.
I steadied myself before picking up the phone. “Hi, this is Delanie.”
“Hi.” His voice sounded rough. In need of sleep. “I need you to come back down to the station.”
“Now?”
“Soon as possible. I have some additional questions.”
I didn’t like his tone. Dread needled my gut. “I … need to get dressed.”
“How soon can you get here?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Make it ten.”
The line clicked in my ear.
I hung up and tried to breathe. What had he seen in me, what had I done?
“Who’s that? You’re turning white.” Colleen’s spoon of cereal hung in mid-air.
“Chief Melcher. Gotta go down to the station.” I tried to keep my voice light. Didn’t work.
“Why?”
I pushed up from the table. “More questions.”
“Maybe he’s found something.” Nicole raised her eyebrows.
Maybe he had.
Heart tripping, I threw on some clothes and minimal make-up. Combed my straight blonde hair. Tiredness clung to my face. Only thirty-four, but today I looked a lot older. In the mirror my green eyes looked back at me, full of fear. I couldn’t let the chief see that. He’d wonder why.
Within half an hour of Chief Melcher’s call, I was walking into the station, anxiety clawing at my chest. Why had he brought me back here so soon—I, who’d found the body? What piece of so-called evidence might already be working against me? I prayed my face wasn’t giving me away, reflecting a guilt that shouldn’t be there.
Melcher greeted me without preamble and led me to the small room where we’d been the previous night. “Have a seat.” He gestured toward the table and took a chair on the other end. Melcher looked haggard. And weighted. Once again I sensed it—the pressure on him to solve this crime and return the town back to normal. Melcher wouldn’t want to disappoint anyone. Least of all himself. He had his macho reputation to keep.
Well, let him have it. As long as he found who did this to Clara.
He rubbed his face. “You know Billy King?”
The name blazed through me, if only because the question focused on someone other than myself. “Sure.” Billy went to our church. He was a tall young man in his early twenties, still living with his parents. Not quite mentally retarded, but somewhat slow. “He’s a nice kid. Well, not a kid, but … Works at McDonald’s.”
Melcher nodded. “Afternoon to evening shift, one to nine.”
In a flash I saw where this was going.
“You ever hear anything about Billy having a crush on Clara?”
I looked at the table. What if I refused to answer these questions? What if I just got up and left right now?
“Yes.”
“Did he talk about it to you?”
“He talked about it to a lot of people. It was no secret.”
“What did he say to you exactly?”
“Just that she’s pretty.”
Was
pretty. The thought hit me in the gut.
“Anything else?” Impatience tinged Melcher’s voice.
“That he wanted to ask her out. I think he even did a couple times, but she gently told him no. That was before she starting dating Jerald. I think that kind of broke Billy’s heart. After that he didn’t talk anymore about her.”
“Ever hear him make any kind of threats against her?”
“Never.”
I looked Melcher in the eye. “He wouldn’t do that. Billy doesn’t have one bit of violence in him.”
The chief surveyed me, as if wondering at my vehemence. He leaned back and sighed. “I need your help as the only one who possibly saw the suspect immediately following the murder.”
“Okay.” Fear for myself had morphed into fear for Billy.
“Billy King was seen running down Brewer Street about a block from where Clara was killed. According to the eyewitness it was right around nine-thirty, when you found her.”
“I never saw Billy.”
“You saw someone in the Graysons’ front yard.”
Grayson. So that was the name of the people who lived in that house. “It couldn’t be him. He wouldn’t do this.”
Melcher raised his hand. “I wouldn’t have thought anyone in town would do this. And maybe no one did. Maybe some tourist who came here to shop saw Clara and started stalking her. More likely it
was
someone from here. Someone who knew Clara. I have to sweep aside all preconceived notions. Just look at the facts.”
“Why do you think the murderer knew Clara?”
“Because of how precisely the crime occurred. You told me Clara left only about five minutes before you did. It’s almost as if someone targeted her. Knew she’d be driving up that street from her shower and waved her down.”
I thought of Clara’s car near the curb, still running, the driver’s door open.
“Wouldn’t he have a gun then, or a knife?” It took time to strangle someone. At least, from the marks on Clara’s neck, that’s how I assumed she had died.
“Not if he didn’t expect to kill her.”
“You said ‘targeted’—”
“Not to kill her. Just to stop her car. Then something could have gone terribly wrong.”
Terribly fast.
“You think Billy flagged down Clara’s car?”
“He was seen on that street. At that time.”
“I didn’t see him.” We’d been through this before.
“Delanie. You saw a man in the Graysons’ yard. You were very clear that you couldn’t see his face. But that he looked in your direction, then turned and ran.”
“What was Billy wearing?”
“A dark hooded sweatshirt.”
No. This couldn’t be.
“If he was wearing that hood up, how did the person see his face?”
“The hood was down.”
“Down.” I worked to logic through that. “So he’s running with the hood down, then in the middle of running, he stops to put it up?”
Melcher shrugged, as if the answer was obvious. “To hide his face.”
“But this person who saw him—or saw somebody—they didn’t see Clara? Her car?”
“They saw Billy a block away.”
So the answer was no. “What block? Above—farther away from the church? Or below?” Neither made sense.
Melcher wiped his hand down his face. He was the one who was supposed to be asking questions.
“Because … look. I was coming up the street. If Billy was one block below Clara, I’d have seen him. If he was one block above, supposedly fleeing the scene, he would’ve had to turn around, run back toward Clara’s body, pass her, then veer into that front yard. Why would he do that?”
“I think”—the chief’s tone hardened—“you need to leave the investigating to me.”
“Not if you’re headed in this direction.” The words slipped from me before I could stop them.
Chief Melcher raised his chin and looked down his nose at me. The air shifted. I saw nothing left of the man who’d felt empathy for me the previous night. This was the chief of police, suspicious and gunning to solve a homicide in his town. Fast.
I narrowed my eyes at Melcher, knowing defensiveness rolled off my shoulders. Clearly, he sensed the wall going up inside me. And right now he was wondering what I had to hide.