Closer than the Bones (12 page)

“You can’t blame yourself for the man’s death, Miss McElroy.” My voice was mild and matter-of-fact. “Whatever little game Mr. Packer was attempting to play wasn’t your fault. Neither was the outcome. He flung down the gauntlet, not you. He, and the person who killed him, bear the responsibility in this.”

My words, chosen with care, did not appease the woman. “There is some truth to what you say,” she said. “Nevertheless, Hamilton’s blood is on my hands, just like poor Sukey’s.” I had little patience with her determination to play the martyr, but there seemed little I could do, for the moment, to sway her from it. She was the one who, in our initial interview, said that she had to know the truth, whatever the cost. Instead of reminding her of this, I concentrated on more immediate concerns.

I briefed her on what I had learned from Mrs. Greer and her helpers, but I didn’t voice my suspicions of Katie. I figured if I told Miss McElroy what I suspected, she would summon Katie immediately upstairs and demand that the girl cooperate. I didn’t think those tactics would work, and I preferred to approach Katie on my own.

“Any one of us could have taken that knife, then.”

I nodded. “I can’t rule out anyone.”

“Not even me.” A ghost of a smile played on her lips.

I wouldn’t have said so, though I appreciated her being direct. “Not even you.”

“Good,” she said. “We can’t afford to overlook anything, or anyone. What do you propose we do next?”

“I suggest that you follow your daily routine, as much as possible. I’m sure Jack Preston will be back this morning, with more questions, and he’ll want to talk to both of us again. Right now, though, I’m going to drive into town to talk to someone at the library. One of my former students is the head of the reference department there, and I think she can help me with some questions I want answered.”

Though her eyes narrowed, Miss McElroy didn’t ask me about those questions. “I suppose I should count myself lucky you’ve got such a network of former students. Like Jack Preston.”

“When you’ve taught at one school for over thirty years,” I said, smiling, “you get to know a lot of students and their families. That can be very useful when there are problems to solve.”

“Very well,” she said. “Carry on, and if you need to inform me of anything, you’ll do so.”

Thus dismissed, I nodded and turned to leave the room. Glancing back over my shoulder as I opened the door, I saw her staring once again out into the back garden. For a moment, no more, she looked utterly defenseless and every second of her age. Then she realized I was still in the room, and her eyes burned with their accustomed fire as she commanded me with a glance to get moving. I made a strategic retreat, shutting the door quietly behind me.

I crossed the hall to my room to retrieve my handbag. Though my comfortable bed invited me to make up the sleep I’d missed last night, I grabbed the handbag and headed back into the hallway. As I approached the end of the hall, near the stairs, Brett Doran came down from the third floor with a laptop carrying case in his right hand. He was wearing a pair of well-worn jeans and a faded, collarless shirt. He could have graced the cover of GQ, despite the fact that his clothes were a bit on the threadbare side. No wonder both Katie and Betsy were making goo-goo eyes at him.

He wished me a good-morning as he accompanied me down to the first floor.

“Are you going to write?” I asked, a bit taken aback, I must admit.

He sighed. “Yes, though I’d rather not, right now. But you know how it is with deadlines. I’m already behind, as it is. And I might as well try to work, take my mind off all this mess.”

“Where will you be?” I had thought he might just work in his bedroom. Where else could he get any peace in this house right now?

“I can’t smoke in the house,” he reminded me, “and I have a hard time writing if I can’t smoke and walk around the room, telling myself I’m a complete idiot for thinking I have what it takes to write another book.” He grinned at me as we stopped at the foot of the stairs. “So Mary Tucker lets me use that little summerhouse out back whenever I’m here. I can smoke as much as I like, and no one complains. They air out the place for a week after I leave.”

“You might get interrupted today,” I warned him.

He grimaced. “Until I am interrupted, I’ll try to write, though it’s going to be hard to get into the right frame of mind.”

I had a number of questions I wanted to ask him, but they could wait until later. “I have some errands to run in town, but when I get back, maybe we can talk. By then you might be in a mood for some interruptions.”

“Sure,” he said. “Just come on out back and knock on the door. You should see that place, anyway, while you’re here.”

It wasn’t until I was in my car and halfway down the drive that I felt myself begin to relax. I didn’t see Mr. Detweiler or his Dobermans anywhere, but I supposed they’d made their presence felt. I didn’t see any signs of the local press, either. Thank goodness we weren’t being besieged by gawkers or thrill seekers. Yet.

The atmosphere in the house had been more oppressive than I realized. I scrunched up my shoulders to ease the knots in the back of my neck, and I began to feel better as the tension lessened. The farther from the house I drove, the lighter my mood seemed.

I raised a hand in greeting at a car approaching me. It didn’t matter that I had no idea who was driving it; it was just one of those things we still did here. There wasn’t much traffic on the highway this morning, or I’d have been waving a lot more.

In town, traffic was heavier and it took me about fifteen minutes to get to the library and find a place to park. A number of cars were already in the parking lot, even though it was about three minutes till the library’s opening time of nine o’clock. I waited behind several mothers and fathers with young readers in tow, no doubt here for one of the summer reading programs. A high-school-age library assistant was unlocking the door of the library, and the small crowd surged inside with me in its wake as soon as the door was opened.

Like most voracious readers, I love libraries, and I had a great fondness for this one in particular, having seen it grow substantially over the years. It had outgrown its original building about a decade ago, and the county erected a wonderful new structure to house the collections and personnel which served a county population of about thirty-five thousand.

The smell of thousands and thousands of books is intoxicating, and I could stand there for quite some time, just inhaling the fragrance of my favorite addiction. I had an appointment, however, and I couldn’t waste the time of someone who was doing me a favor. I headed through the stacks to the offices at the back of the library.

Farrah Lockett, a bright and promising student of mine at the high school about ten years ago, had gone off to college, gotten a degree in English literature, taught for two years, and then had gone off again, this time to graduate school. Once she had earned a master’s degree in library science from the University of North Texas, she came home to Tullahoma and had been here the last three years. She was the chief reference librarian, and library patrons quickly learned that, if they had some bit of information they needed, no matter how arcane, she could track it down for them.

I had called her last night from Idlewild and given her a list of some of the things I wanted to know, and she had promised to come in early this morning and pull together whatever she could find in such a short amount of time.

Farrah was sitting at her desk, sipping something out of a mug and looking through a pile of papers, when I knocked on her open office door.

“Ernie!” Her elfin face lit with pleasure as she stood up. I had finally convinced her that it was okay for her to address me by the name my family and close friends used. “It’s so good to see you! How’ve you been?”

“I’m doing just fine,” I said, as I took a seat in the chair across from her. “I must say you’re looking wonderfully well. That honeymoon in Spain sure did agree with you.”

She laughed and blushed. I hadn’t seen or talked with her since she’d come back from her honeymoon a couple of weeks ago, until our phone conversation last night. We spent a few minutes discussing her trip and her handsome new husband, another one of my former students who was now the coach of the football team at the high school.

“Now, enough of that,” she said, “or else I’ll drag out my pictures, and then we’ll never get to what you really came here for.”

“I’d love to see your pictures of Spain sometime, though. It’s been about ten years since I’ve been there,” I said. “But you’re right, we’d better get to the business at hand. I really do appreciate your helping me like this, and at such short notice.”

Farrah laughed again and shook her head. “When I think of all the times you went out of your way to help me! Don’t you even think twice about asking me for help, Ernie. Besides, it’s my job.” She picked up a file folder of material and handed it across the desk to me. “I haven’t quite finished searching some of the databases I wanted to get to, but I should have some time today to finish checking through them and see if there’s anything else worth bothering with. I think, though, you’ll find a lot of what you need there.”

I looked at the pile of papers in my lap in amazement. “My goodness, Farrah. Were you up all night? This looks like a lot of work!”

“It’s not if you know where to look. That’s what librarians do. Besides, I had to get up early this morning to get Mitch up and out the door. He had to drive down to Jackson for a meeting, and he had to be there by eight-thirty. So I just came in early and got to work on your searches.”

“No matter what you say,” I told her, “I owe you for this. So some night soon, when you and Mitch are ready to spend time with someone besides each other, let me know, and I’m taking you both out to dinner.”

She laughed and blushed again. “It’s a deal. And the way Mitch eats, I think we’ll be getting the best of it.” Her husband was six-five and weighed about 275 pounds of solid muscle. I laughed with her.

“You’re welcome to sit here in my office, if you like, and look through what I’ve dug up. And if you think of anything else you want me to look into, just make a note of it for me.” She stood up.

“You go on and do what you need to do,” I assured her. “I’ll just sit here a few minutes, then, but I’ll let you know before I leave.” I declined an offer of coffee, though I wouldn’t have minded another cup, truth be told. Time for that later, though.

Many of the pages in the folder were printouts from a computer; others had been copied from books. I decided I probably ought to send in a nice little donation to the Friends of the Library fund to help offset the cost of the paper Farrah had used in compiling all this information for me.

I skimmed through rapidly. She had found biographical information for me on every one of Miss McElroy’s guests, including the late Sukey Lytton. There were also articles on them from various sources, like
Publishers Weekly, The Southern Review
, and a number of newspapers and literary journals. Somewhere in all of this there might be information which would help sort out what had happened at Idlewild, but it would take me some time to work my way through all of it.

Toward the bottom of the folder, I found pages devoted to Miss McElroy herself. I really knew very little about her, except the meager stuff of local folklore, and I had thought I might as well know as much as I could about my enigmatic employer. Almost as an afterthought I had asked Farrah to find out what she could about Morwell Phillips, too, and at the very bottom of the pile of papers in the folder, I found several pages devoted to him. One page had been xeroxed from
Who’s Who in the South
, and I scanned the rather lengthy entry with some surprise.

I had had no idea that Phillips was a lawyer of some repute, nor that he had spent several years at Ole Miss as a professor at the law school. But what really threw me for a loop was the fact that he had been—and still was—married.

To Mary Tucker McElroy.

Chapter Ten

To say I was stunned would be a gross understatement. I thought it a bit odd that Morwell Phillips always addressed Miss McElroy casually and familiarly as “Mary Tucker,” rather than as “Miss McElroy,” but I had dismissed it as simply the familiarity of a long mistress-servant relationship. Now I knew better, but that didn’t make the relationship any less strange, at least to my way of thinking.

According to the biographical information I held in my hand, they had been married nearly fifty years. I would have been too young at the time they married to have paid any attention to what passed for a society column in our local paper; and later on, if I had ever run across a reference to them as a couple, I had no memory of it. Miss McElroy had always kept a rather low profile here in her hometown, so perhaps the knowledge of the marriage wasn’t all that common.

Phillips had grown up in Mobile, according to one article. As I read further, I figured out, by what the article carefully skirted around, that he also came from a poor family. The Phillipses of Mobile were not in the same socioeconomic category as the McElroys of Tullahoma. That could explain a few things about their relationship.

Still, I felt like a fool. Either Miss McElroy had assumed I already knew, or else she didn’t think it any of my business. Or anyone else’s, for that matter.

What bearing did their marriage have on the two murders at Idlewild? It might have none at all, or it might be important. I felt like thumping my head against the wall to clear it.

Instead of denting the walls of Farrah’s office with my thick skull, I thumbed back through the collection of papers in my lap. I found an interview with Sukey Lytton that had appeared in a poetry magazine a few years ago and began to read.

The girl’s beginning in life had been nearly as tragic as her end, or so it would seem from the tale of woe she had spun for her interviewer. She had been born in Itta Bena, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, the only child of parents who scratched out a living on a small farm. Her parents had died in a house fire when she was only three, and no relatives could be found who would accept responsibility for the orphaned girl.