Thoroughly 10 - What Are You Wearing to Die? (17 page)

“Her name is Anna Emily,” I told him. “The little girl.”

“No kidding? That’s weird. Anna was my sister’s name. She died last year.”

“Did your wife like her? Were they close?”

“No, on both counts. Anna did everything she could to convince me not to marry Bertie, saying that she was only after my money. I wouldn’t listen.” For the first time I saw his smile. It was lopsided and could have been endearing in other circumstances. “She’s probably leaning over the edge of heaven right now calling, ‘Told you so, Bro.’”

“What happened to her—your sister, I mean?”

His expression darkened. “That was the other mess I came home to. While I was in Afghanistan, they found her body in a hotel room in Charlotte. The official report says she died of a drug overdose, but that’s a lot of hooey. Anna never used drugs.”

“What did your parents think?”

“They were killed in a car accident while Anna was in grad school at Carolina. That’s why I had all the family stuff. Anna didn’t have any storage space, so I stored the furniture and put the jewelry in a bank safe-deposit box until Anna and I could both get settled and decide who wanted what. I figured when I got out of the army, Bertie and I would build a house worthy of some of it.” His lip curled. “I guess Bertie couldn’t wait. While I was overseas, she took the furniture out of storage, cleaned out the safe-deposit box, and emptied the bank account. Then she disappeared.”

Martha and I exchanged a look. His story echoed that of Kaye Poynter. What we had not known about Robin Parker would fill a flash drive.

Still, a houseful of antiques, silver, and jewelry made an awfully good motive for murder. I wanted to get out of there and call Buster, even if I woke him up.

I rewrapped the necklace in the paper towel and dropped it back in the juice can. “Well, Captain Handley, I’m afraid this is currently a murder scene and nothing can be removed from it. We were given permission to get clothes for Robin’s children. Unfortunately, she was murdered last night.”

I expected him to be shocked or at least to pretend to be. Instead he nodded. “I know. I’d been staying over at the motel, and I got back around midnight and found the elevator draped with crime scene tape and the parking lot full of law enforcement types. I asked some dude who looked like a newspaper reporter what was going on, and he said a woman named Robin Parker had been killed in the elevator. I already knew Bertie was using that name, so I decided to hightail it out of there and lay low. I didn’t want anybody to know I was connected to her. I went back over to the taxidermy convention around noon today to see if there was any more news, and folks were saying Bertie had been going to meet some man on the third floor. I knew then that they must have found a note I’d taped to her front door yesterday afternoon telling her we needed to talk. I thought about going to the sheriff, but I don’t have an alibi for last evening, so I decided I’d stake out the house to be sure nobody took out my stuff, and wait to see if they came up with another suspect before I talked to the sheriff. When I saw you find the jewelry, though, and recognized you as the woman who offered me a free meal, I figured I ought to step up and stake my claim.”

He sounded credible, but I’ve known a lot of credible criminals. “Go down to the sheriff’s detention center and tell them your story. They can come over with you and release the stuff. We only have permission to take the children’s clothes and toys.”

To emphasize my point, I put the can back in the freezer and shut the door. “Martha, let’s take the clothes and let’s
all
get out of here.”

Grady Handley didn’t budge.

“If you have a connection to Robin’s stuff, go down and tell the sheriff about it,” I urged.

When he still didn’t move, I added, “I’m a judge, remember. I cannot let you remove anything from this house without the sheriff’s permission.”

His eyes flickered. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I’d like to, but I hear all kinds of believable stories, and not all of them are true. And when a young woman gets all gussied up for a date with her ex-husband—”

“As far as I know, I’m not her ex. She never filed for divorce.”

“That’s worse. When she’s heading for a date with her estranged husband, whom she’s done wrong, and she gets killed on the way to that date—and when nobody else in the area is known to have any reason whatsoever to do her harm—you have to admit there are grounds for skepticism.”

“I’m not admitting a thing, except I want my stuff and to find out about the girls.”

“So go talk to the sheriff.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Buster stepped into the kitchen and blocked the door. “Grady Handley? I want you to come down to my office and discuss the death of your wife, Roberta.”

Grady had gone white to the gills.

“You’d better hold him up,” I warned. “He looks likely to faint.”

Buster stepped forward, but Grady was faster than any of us expected. He crossed the kitchen in two strides, flung open the back door, and dashed into the woods.

Buster ran to the door and looked after him, but there were no lights back there. “I remembered when I was halfway home that we didn’t lock the front door,” he said. “Thought I ought to come back to be sure you all were okay.”

“We were okay. That young man claims all the furniture and stuff in the cabinets is his, that Robin was his wife and cleaned him out while he was in Afghanistan, but he swears he didn’t kill her.”

Buster scratched his ear, a sign that he was thinking. “It’s as good a motive as any. His fingerprints were on a note in Robin’s purse and on two elevator buttons, the one to hold the door open and the one for the first floor. He seems to have been the last person to use it before she was found. Get what you need and come on out. I’ll be calling for backup.”

“You’d better post a guard out here, too. Robin had some really valuable stuff, and whoever owns it now, you don’t want it disappearing on your watch.”

Martha carried out several bags of clothes from the girls’ room. “I can’t find any books, toys, or stuffed animals,” she reported. “The only thing in their room besides clothes is a television.”

I took that load to the car while she went back for another. My cell phone rang as I stuffed the bags into my trunk. It was Joe Riddley.

“You all need to get back over here. Anna Emily has gone missing.”

“What happened?” I had to hold on to the door of the car, I felt so weak.

“Ridd went up to check on the kids, and she was gone. We’ve searched the house, but she’s not here, and the front door was cracked. He’s searching the barn and the yard right now. We need you to come home and help us look.”

I drew a sharp breath. “We’re loading the car. We’ll be right there.”

Neither of us mentioned what we were both thinking: Ridd’s place was surrounded by acres of cotton fields, a small pine forest, and Hubert Spence’s cattle pond.

While I waited for Martha to bring out her load, I hurried to the sheriff’s cruiser. “That was Joe Riddley. Anna Emily has wandered off.”

Fields, woods, and the cattle pond were mirrored in Buster’s eyes. He heaved a mighty sigh. “I’ll see if I can send some folks out to help you look.”

“No, your plate is already more than full. We’ll find her.” I nodded toward the woods. “I think that young man who escaped might be her daddy.”

“If so, she may be about to lose both her parents in one fell swoop.”

As soon as Martha returned, we threw the things in the backseat and I scratched off. Normally I love driving fast. That night I only wanted to arrive.

We were passing Hubert’s watermelon patch when Martha screamed, “Stop!”

Ahead of us, Anna Emily sat smack in the middle of the road, wearing only her flannel gown.

I slammed on the brakes. We fishtailed on the gravel. I fought the wheel and managed to roll into a pine tree instead of the child. I was shaking too hard to move.

Martha scrambled out. “What are you doing out here, young lady?”

Anna Emily held up her arms. “Can I go home with you?”

“You certainly can. What do you mean by going out of the house in the middle of the night? Without even a coat!” She picked up the child and wrapped her inside her own coat so tightly that she squealed. Martha brought her back to the car and held her in her lap while I backed away from the tree, hoping I’d done no more damage than bend the fender, and headed toward the house. I didn’t say a word about seat belts. We were so close we could see the lights.

When we turned in, Ridd came up from the barn and Joe Riddley came out onto the back porch. Three small people clung to his pants.

When I climbed shakily out, Natalie let go of Joe Riddley and more flew than ran down the steps. “Me-Mama! Anna Emily is lost! Nobody can find her. She’s not in the house—” She jumped into my arms and flung her arms around my neck. Accustomed to Cricket’s weight, I felt like I was holding air.

“It’s okay. We found her.”

Her head whipped around and she saw Martha climbing out with her sister. “Anna Emily,” she warned, “you are gonna get a whipping. You know you’re not supposed to run off like that.”

Anna Emily buried her face in Martha’s neck and didn’t say a word.

The sheriff called out the bloodhounds, and they literally treed Grady Handley in two hours. “Got him up in the branches of a pine hardly big enough to hold his weight,” the sheriff told me when he woke me up at one thirty and asked if I’d come down and hold a hearing.

“You charging him with murder?” I asked when I got there. “You better have some real good evidence.”

“At the moment I’m charging him with trespassing and interfering with a crime scene, but I’m urging you to deny bond until we can investigate the murder charge. I want him where I can get to him for questioning.”

Grady was not at his best for the hearing. His pants were torn and his shirt filthy, and he still had leaf scraps in his hair. He also looked plumb exhausted. The only time he roused from a stupor was when I asked, “How do you plead?”

“Not guilty!” His face was white, his skin taut over his skull. “I never killed her. I was mad, sure, but I never killed her!”

“You aren’t being charged with murder, son. Sheriff, repeat the charges.”

When they were read, he shrugged. “I was there. You both saw me. I guess I can sleep in jail as well as anywhere else tonight.”

When it was over, I told him what I would have said to my own sons. “Go get some rest. Things ought to look better in the morning.”

I hoped it was true.

Martha called early the next morning. “I just overheard the oddest conversation between the girls. It sounds like they’re worried about a dog. Anna Emily said, ‘Daddy angel will feed him,’ and Natalie said, in that exasperated tone she gets with her sister, ‘Daddy angel doesn’t even know he’s there. He’s Uncle Billy’s dog. He’s gonna starve.’ Then Anna Emily said, ‘Good. He can’t eat us up.’ I went in and asked what was the matter, but Natalie said, ‘Nothing’ at the same time Anna Emily said, ‘Mama said not to tell.’ I didn’t see or hear a dog, did you?”

“No. Go and ask them what kind of dog they have and if we need to feed it. Maybe a direct question will work.”

Martha came back in a minute. “They didn’t want to tell me, but I got the information. He’s big and black, according to Anna Emily, and Natalie says he lives in the basement and only barks if somebody tries to go down there. Then he eats them up.”

“No wonder they’re terrified of Lulu and Cricket Dog, if that’s what they’re used to. The place is pretty isolated, so Robin may have felt she needed a guard dog. It’s odd that he didn’t bark last night, though, don’t you think?”

“And I didn’t know the house had a basement.”

“Come to think of it, the floor creaked under me last night, which means it’s not on a slab. I’d have guessed a crawl space, but if there is a basement, there could well be a dog in it.”

“Ridd and I have to teach Sunday school this morning,” Martha said. “Could you and Pop go over and check? If Buster has a deputy stationed there, he could let you in. You might want him to go down with you, in case the dog is as fierce as the girls say he is.”

I was all for calling the deputy and asking him or her to feed the dog. Hungry dogs can be mean, and big black dogs have never been on my favorite-creatures list since one took a chunk out of my arm when I was eight. However, when I called, the sheriff was home getting some well-deserved rest and the department was short-staffed and short-tempered after their long weekend. A grumpy deputy informed me that feeding dogs wasn’t in their job description. He would instruct the person assigned to watch the house to let us in, but that was all they could do for us that morning.

I promised myself to remember his cooperation the next time he wanted me to come down to the detention center in the middle of the night.

The only dog food we had was for Lulu, since Joe Riddley had left his yard dogs down at Ridd’s when we moved. As I carried the bag to the car, along with a bowl for the food and another for water, Lulu uttered sharp objections to her food going somewhere she wasn’t invited.

Joe Riddley started back to the house. “Be back in a minute. Wait here.”

It was nearly five minutes before he came out carrying a plastic sack. “Sorry. I had to microwave it.”

“Microwave what?”

“A treat I brought.”

“You think he’s going to object to a diet designed for a small, elderly beagle?”

Joe Riddley grunted. “If he hasn’t eaten since Friday, he may settle for a diet of small, elderly judge.”

“I am not elderly.”

“You’re not thirty any longer. I mean it, Little Bit. I want you to stop getting involved in these investigations. It’s hard on you and equally hard on me. I’d like to have some years when I didn’t have to worry myself sick about what you were going to do next.”

“I’d like some years when I knew we were going somewhere fun. I’m not asking for six-month cruises around the world, although I wouldn’t object to one. But how many good years do you think we’ve got left to travel overseas? How long will our stamina hold out—and our health? Not to mention our stomachs. Besides, I heard somewhere that once you are seventy-two, you aren’t allowed to drive in foreign countries.”

“I’ve never hankered to drive in foreign countries.”

“I have. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stop looking into murders if you’ll promise to take me somewhere special each year. How’s that?”

“I’ll have to think about it. Meanwhile, when I walked Buster to the car yesterday morning, I borrowed some cuffs again. Don’t forget I know how to use them.”

What I had forgotten was my promise to Cricket.

All right,
I vowed when I remembered it.
As soon as this murder is solved, I’ll stop for a while.

Marriage, I have discovered, is a process of shaping each other by decisions you make. You can’t set out to change your husband, but if you change yourself, he changes, too. Who knew? Maybe Joe Riddley would change into a world traveler.

He pulled into Robin’s yard. The way the deputy sat up straighter when we drove up beside him, I suspected he’d been napping, but he was parked so he blocked the drive for anybody coming in. He recognized us and lowered his window.

“Have you heard a dog barking?” Joe Riddley asked.

“Haven’t heard a thing, but it’s been freezing here all night, so I had the windows up. Only action I’ve had was a car that turned in around two a.m., got me in its lights, and backed out. Another—or the same one, I couldn’t tell—came around six, saw I was here, and disappeared. Here’s the front-door key. Be sure to lock yourselves in. Since you’re here, I’m gonna go get some breakfast. I hope you won’t leave before I get back, but if you do, be sure to pull the door shut behind you and lock it.”

“No problem. We’ll wait until you get back.” Joe Riddley was already climbing out. He reached into the backseat for his plastic bag.

We went in through the front door and I pointed out the antiques in the two front rooms.

“We aren’t here to admire the furniture, Little Bit.”

“No, but while we’re here, I want to look at the bedrooms. I didn’t get to see them last night.”

After I had, I wished I hadn’t. One contained a lovely walnut bedroom suite that could have been two hundred years old. As Buster had said, though, the room was a mess. Obviously Robin—Roberta, I corrected myself—had tried on several outfits before she found one she liked. The pillows still bore the imprints of two small heads.

The girls’ bedroom was a dump: stained carpet, a double mattress on the floor, a battered chest of drawers, and a television. No toy chest, no bookshelf, no stuffed animals. I was beginning to revise my opinion of Robin/Roberta as a devoted mother. She wasn’t destitute, for heaven’s sake. She’d surely had enough left over after paying bills to buy her girls a few toys and books, even if she got them at a thrift store.

“So where’s this basement door?” Joe Riddley interrupted my ruminations.

“I have no idea. Maybe in the kitchen?”

It had only the door to the backyard and the one to the pantry.

Joe Riddley went out the back door and walked around the house. “Looks like there could be a basement. The foundation is over four feet high where the hill slopes down in the back. I saw places where it looks like windows were bricked up, too, and a couple of things that look like air vents. There’s no door, though. It has to be inside.”

Doors in the small hall served the two bedrooms, a linen closet, a coat closet, and the bathroom. Joe Riddley leaned into the linen closet and the coat closet and rapped on the back wall. Neither sounded hollow.

“You could try the pantry, but it looked solid to me.”

Joe Riddley saw something I had missed. “These shelves lift right out, and the floor looks like it was put down before the pantry was built. I think the pantry was built at the end of the cabinets after the house was finished.”

He lifted out the lower shelves and uncovered a recessed handle hidden behind the shelf where the food had been. When he lifted down the silver and removed the top shelf, we saw the line of a door that had been concealed by the line of the shelf. He pulled the handle. The door didn’t open, but something threw itself against the door and gave a low, menacing growl.

“You’ve found the dog.” I shoved him out of the way and slammed the pantry door. “What are you going to do now?”

“The door must open inward.” He worked out the problem aloud. “The dog keeps it from opening as long as he’s there, unless he recognizes an order from his master or mistress.”

“Who aren’t around,” I pointed out. “But why keep a dog in a dark basement?”

“We don’t know that it’s dark, but he will be needing food if he’s been there more than twenty-four hours without attention. You get up on the counter there.” He jerked his head toward the counter next to the sink.

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Climb on a chair. Oh, heck. Here.” With one motion he lifted me at the waist and sat me on the counter. “Pick up your feet now.”

I saw what he was after. “If you think I’ll be safe from a big dog up here, you can think again. Any dog that size could stand on its hind legs, reach the counter, and make me his dinner.”

He frowned. “I need an observer to watch the animal.”

I wasn’t sure I was keen on being that observer, but I didn’t want him doing it, either. However, if I had to observe, I wanted to do so from as close to the ceiling as possible. “Maybe I could climb on top of the fridge. Let me try.”

I hoisted my legs onto the counter, climbed onto my knees, and worked my way to my feet. There are times when being short has its advantages. I scarcely had to stoop to stand erect.

Feeling like a tightrope walker, I inched along the countertop to the fridge and considered the problem. “It will be a tight fit. Will you get me down if I get up there?”

“If I’m still around. You have your cell phone? Let me have it.” He handed me my pocketbook, and I gave him the phone. He slipped it in his pocket.

Next he filled one bowl with Lulu’s food and another with water and set them far across the kitchen next to the dining room door.

I was liking the looks of this less and less. “Where are you going to be?”

“Hopefully outside calling animal control.”

“Why don’t we call them before you let the dog out?”

“Good idea.” He punched in the number. “We’ve got an abandoned dog down on Lower Creek Road. What’s the number here, Little Bit? Never mind, I’ll go look.” He ambled across the living room and read the number off the front of the house. I heard him say, “Yes, in a basement. You’ll be right out? Thanks.”