The Good Girl's Guide to Murder (31 page)

“What’s in Gunner, might I ask?”

“Marilee’s aunt.”

“Marilee’s aunt?” she repeated.

“I’ll explain when I see you.”

Honk, honk
.

Janet laid on the horn again, and I glanced at the kitchen clock. I’d run over my ten-minute time limit.

“I’ve got to go,” I said.

“What about Kendall?”

“Keep an eye on her, please, and don’t let her leave the house. If she needs me, have her call me on my cell phone, and tell her I meant every word I said.”

Honk, honk
.

“Andrea . . .”

“Bye, Mother.”

I hung up, snatched my cell from the charger (making sure it was turned on), shoved it inside my purse, and hurried out the door.

Fifteen minutes later, securely belted into Janet’s car, I braced my hands against the dash as she sped east on Highway 20. Wilco blasted from the stereo speakers, and she sang along at the top of her lungs, making me wish I’d worn earplugs. Alicia Keys she was not (she was more like Way-Off Keys).

At least I didn’t have to worry about small talk, I thought, as I risked peeling my palms off the dashboard and resting them in my lap. I watched the endless stream of scrubby trees and billboards rush by, before my eyelids drooped.

Janet screeched something about a casino queen being mean, before I tuned her out and drifted off.

The next thing I knew, her fingers were poking me in the ribs. “Wake up, sleepy. C’mon, we’re here. Doreen awaits.”

I wiped drool from my chin and gingerly raised my head from where I’d wedged it between the window and the seatback. Wincing, I did a neck roll, bones and cartilage crunching as I worked out the kinks. As I unfastened my safety belt, I squinted out the windshield to find the VW parked in front of a whitewashed one-story building.

A square wooden sign surrounded by wilted petunias read:

PECAN GROVE RETIREMENT HOME
.

As I dragged myself from the Jetta, I surveyed our surroundings but there was no pecan grove in sight, only a faded square of asphalt that served as the parking lot and a gray haze of exhaust from cars on the highway rushing by.

Well, it sounded nice.

After an hour of riding in an air-conditioned box, I welcomed the warm breath of outdoors. Besides, it wasn’t much past eight, so it couldn’t have been more than eighty-five degrees, ninety tops.

A few chickadees hopped around the ground nearby, poking at a flattened box of popcorn. Planters potted with red geraniums added color to the front porch, where a pair of gentleman in white undershirts played checkers.

“Morning, ladies,” the pair of them said, tipping imaginary hats at us as we ascended the wheelchair ramp, and Janet reciprocated their greetings.

When I opened my mouth, all that emerged was a yawn.

So much for all the gold stars I’d earned in my junior etiquette classes (but then I’d been five-years old at the time and got regular afternoon naps).

Once inside the front doors, Janet marched straight to the front desk, manned by a dark-skinned woman in white with her hair wound atop her head in the shape of a torpedo. She peered at Janet over a pair of spectacles perched low on her nose.

“Doreen Haggerty?” she was saying when I got near enough to hear. “Oh, you’re the writer who called up yesterday asking about her. Just a sec, hon, all right?” She picked up a handset and tapped a number into her phone. “Angelina, do you know if Doreen’s done with breakfast yet? She is? I’ll send her visitors back. Thanks, hon.”

I saw her nametag read:
EDNA DUPOIS
.

She hung up the phone and touched the gravity-defying beehive of brown spinning high above her broad forehead. It was mighty impressive, though I resisted the urge to comment on it. Sometimes those kind of things can backfire.

“Go on around the corner,” she said, looking at Janet, “up the hallway and take a right at the last door before the rec room, all right?”

“Thank you, Nurse Dupois,” Janet chirped, friendly as could be, earning a “you’re very welcome, hon,” from Miss Edna herself.

I yawned again and felt my ears pop.

“This way, sleepy.” Janet tugged on my hand, propelling me forward, which was a good thing since I’d already forgotten the instructions Edna had given us.

It was a widely known fact that I was directionally dysfunctional. My mother could find her way from Corpus Christi to Wichita Falls without a map. If I tried the same thing, I’d end up in the Gulf of Mexico, having taken a U-turn at Padre. As my daddy used to say, my mental knapsack was missing its compass.

After she’d dragged me through one hallway after another, Janet released me in front of an opened door, through which the strains of a televised Sunday service emanated. A voice cried out for us to repent, and Janet hesitated, tugging at the hem of her skirt to make sure it covered her thighs before she knocked on the doorjamb.

“Miss Doreen?” she said, stepping inside the room, and I followed so closely behind that I nearly tripped over her heels when she stopped, grabbed my arm, and pointed.

A tiny birdlike woman reclined in a La-Z-Boy chair, the thin frizz of her head tipped back on a pillow, her eyes closed, and mouth wide open. While the TV preacher called for her to “lift up her voice and shout ‘hallelujah,’” she snored instead, a noise not unlike the whistle of a teakettle.

“Miss Doreen?” Janet said again and bravely walked over to the television set and turned it down. Perhaps it was the softening of the preacher’s voice, but the snoring abruptly stopped, and the tiny woman shot straight up, her bulbous eyes blinking.

“Who’s there?” she asked in a shaky East Texas twang and reached to the tray table beside her, clutching at a pair of glasses that she promptly stuck on her face. The frames were black and round, and the lenses magnified her eyes about fifty times over. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve sworn she was Mr. Magoo in the flesh. “Do I know you?”

Janet took the lead, stepping forward with her right hand outstretched. “No, ma’am, we haven’t met. I’m Janet Graham, the society editor with the
Park Cities Press
newspaper from Dallas.” She flicked her wrist in my direction. “That’s Andrea, my associate.”

“Society editor from Dallas?” Doreen repeated, not paying me the slightest attention.

Hey, even I was impressed.

Janet pulled a straight-backed chair up beside the La-Z-Boy. “I’ve come to ask you a few questions, ma’am, about your niece Marilee.”

“Marilee?” The wizened face screwed up further. “Why? What’s she done now? Does she still have that TV show in the city? Did she get herself fired?”

Janet glanced over her shoulder at me, giving me an “uh-oh” look, and I realized, too, that no one had told Doreen Haggerty that her niece was dead. Though maybe no one even knew she existed. It had taken Janet weeks to run down an address on her.

When I shrugged, Janet turned back around and said, “I’m actually writing a story about Marilee, and I’m trying to find out more about her early years, like what happened when she left Stybr to live with you when she was sixteen.”

The big eyes behind the round glasses blinked, and the blue-veined arms crossed defensively. “Oh, no, no, I don’t talk about that, not with anyone. It’s family business, and Marilee made me sign a paper that I wouldn’t tell, not so long as she lived. Or else she said she’d stop my monthly checks, and they’d kick me out of this place.” The loose skin beneath her chin trembled. “And I couldn’t afford to go nowhere else ’cept those cesspools for folks on Medic-aid. You ever set foot in one of them places?”

“No, ma’am, I haven’t,” I heard Janet say.

I walked across the tiny room to the only window with its cheerful yellow calico curtains, avoiding Janet’s eyes, because I didn’t want to be a party to what I knew was coming next.

“Well, Miss Doreen, you don’t have to worry about those checks anymore,” I heard Janet say as I gazed out upon a small courtyard with a shuffleboard deck. “And you don’t have to stick to any contract you signed with Marilee, because”—she cleared her throat, and I felt mine close up—“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your niece passed yesterday.”

“She passed what? A stone? I had me one of those, and it hurt worse’n hell.”

“No, she didn’t pass a stone, Ms. Doreen. She passed
away
,” Janet explained, and I winced, afraid of what would happen next, how the poor woman would react.

“Marilee’s dead?”

“As a doornail. I’m so very sorry.”

“You’re sure about this?”

“Yes.”

I stood on the sidelines, watching Janet do her best to convince the woman about Marilee’s demise, though I was starting to think Doreen Haggerty would demand a death certificate as evidence.

“You’re positive?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m 100 percent positive,” Janet insisted. “I was present when it happened, ma’am.” Her cheeks were pink with her effort. “Again, I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Doreen leaned back in her easy chair, glassy-eyed with disbelief, her lips moving as she murmured to herself, words I couldn’t hear.

I cringed inwardly, wondering what kind of damage hearing the news from a stranger would do to the woman. I expected the sound of sobs, maybe moaning or a pitiful wail, but not the whoop of relief that blew past Doreen’s lips.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” She slapped a hand against a polyester covered thigh. “And I thought only the good died young. That girl was ornery as her pa.”

I heard the preacher on the television shout, “Say, Amen, brothers and sisters! Say, Amen!”

“Amen, amen, amen!” Doreen chanted like a mantra, and I turned away from the window to see her reach for Janet with a clawlike hand.

“Well, that changes everything, don’t it?” She squinted behind those huge magnifying lenses. “So what is it you want to know about my dear departed niece? ’Cuz there ain’t no cause to keep quiet now, is there? And I’ve got a mind like a steel trap.”

O
nce she got started, Doreen Haggerty didn’t stop talking for over an hour.

The story that unfolded from her chapped lips wasn’t pretty, and the ending wasn’t anything close to “happily ever after.” It was more like a big fat question mark. But neither Janet nor I stirred until she was finished, right as Nurse Edna strode into the room with her torpedo-shaped ’do, clutching a container of Metamucil and announcing it was time for Miss Doreen’s midmorning fiber.

After Janet had kissed the old woman’s cheeks and thanked her profusely, we departed in the Jetta. No Wilco blasting on the stereo this time. Just a tension-filled silence. Behind those cat’s-eye shades, I knew Janet’s mind was going a mile a minute, already writing her bombshell of a feature on the life and times of Marilee Mabry.

Exposing Marilee’s dirty laundry to the world.

Ensuring that two lives would never be the same.

I wasn’t so sure how I felt about that.

So I gazed out the window, barely seeing the blur of pasture, trees, and road signs, watching a picture come together in my head, pieces I hadn’t realized fit so neatly together. Or maybe not so neatly, considering all the jagged edges.

I heard the shaky voice of Doreen Haggerty as I replayed snatches of her monologue over and over again.

“
 . . . her good for nothing daddy left her alone on the farm for days or weeks at a time, though nobody told me what was goin’ on until it was too late to do any good because the girl went and got herself pregnant by a boy headin’ off to the Army. A Negro boy, if you can picture that, and she was afraid to tell a soul until she knew she was in trouble. So she came to me until it was over. Bore herself a child with dark eyes and black nappy hair to remind her of her sin. Mari cried and cried and cried, knowin’ she couldn’t take that baby home or everyone would know what kind of a girl she was . . . that she was no better than trash . . . oh, it might not sound like such a tragedy now, with teenagers havin’ babies like they’re dolls to play with and everybody actin’ like they’re colorblind . . . but it was thirty years ago . . . mixing races like that wasn’t tolerated, not in Stybr . . . she wouldn’t have been able to show her face in that town again and her father would’ve beat her to a pulp had he known what she’d done . . . so we did the only thing we could’ve . . . once it was born, delivered in my house by my hands, we turned the child over to a foundling home that didn’t ask too many questions . . . we prayed together and washed our hands of the whole mess like it had never happened . . . I didn’t think Mari was ever gonna tell the baby’s father, but she must’ve or else he got wind of it somehow . . . ’cuz he came looking for his daughter some years after and I couldn’t tell him where she was because I didn’t know and Mari didn’t know either . . . besides Mari had moved on by then and didn’t want to look back. . 
.”

The young black soldier who’d fathered Marilee’s baby was named Ronald Hull.

Beth Taylor’s brother.

Renata’s deceased daddy.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave
, I mused, still finding it hard to believe.

Renata Taylor was Marilee’s by birth.

A daughter she’d been too afraid to keep; a child she’d kept mum about for thirty years. My God, how much pain she’d caused with her deception!

How Ronald must’ve wept when he’d learned he had a baby somewhere out there. It was a miracle he’d even found her without much of a trail to follow. But he had tracked her down eventually. Sometime after he’d been discharged from the Army and before he’d been killed in a car wreck—at least according to Kevin Snodgrass’s article—at which point Beth and Richard Taylor had raised the little girl as their own.

I couldn’t imagine they hadn’t felt angry at Marilee for what she’d done, for the lies she’d told that had kept a child hidden from its rightful family for so long.

I leaned my head against the seat rest and sighed, sure that Marilee had assumed her secret would die with her and Miss Doreen.

But now Janet and I knew what had transpired.

And we weren’t the only ones.

My cell started ringing as Janet pulled onto my quiet street in Prestonwood, and I eyed the number on the CallerID before I picked up.