Eine Kleine Murder (13 page)

Chapter 23

Marche Macabre: Death march (Fr.)

The droning of the tractor motor awakened me: a comforting, prosaic sound after the torturous drama in the night. I lay snug in drowsy contentment for a few moments, sniffing the freshly mown grass. Then the snapping of the traps in the night sprang to mind.

Reluctant to face the inevitable, I lolled awhile, but eventually struggled out of bed and tiptoed over to inspect the carnage. One mouse, presumably the first one, had been pinned by the neck. The other, the one that had struggled for so long, had been caught across his little tummy.

Oh my god. They look so cute with their tiny pink paws and precious little faces.
They seemed peaceful despite the agony they'd been through.

I picked up the traps, swallowed the bile rising in my throat, and carried them outside. I managed to empty the sad contents into the dense growth on the hillside.

The woods drew me to them through the haunting thoughts of the clash I had heard in the night. It was a different world by sunlight. I poked around in the damp underbrush for a trace of the fierce life-and-death struggle I had heard in the wee hours, but could find no signs of it.

Nothing in the cabin looked good for breakfast, so I took a couple of Eve's cookies out of the baggie and looked at them. They smelled okay. A few bites went down well, but I left it at that, not wanting a recurrence of yesterday's sour stomach. For now, my tummy was behaving. I was getting to be overly paranoid, suspecting the worst of everyone. Even suspecting that gentle Eve would give me poisoned cookies. Still, I quit eating the one I'd started.

Daryl, true to his promise, came by early and drove me into Alpha to fetch my car. He came to my door and put his warm hand on the small of my back, guiding me to his car. His hand felt strong and safe. We chatted about his job and my classes on the way to my car. After professing myself still in his debt, I drove back to the lake. On the way, I was surprised at how Daryl lingered in my thoughts.

Bright, brittle sunlight flooded into the cabin when I returned.

Chief Bailey's Alpha police cruiser was parked on the road in front of my cabin, but I didn't see him anywhere. I went inside and tried to decide what to do with my day. Was my stomach upset again because I knew Gram's funeral was this afternoon?

Chief Bailey decided what I'd do with my next half hour when he knocked on the door, showed me a warrant, and said he needed to search my cabin.

“What are you looking for?” I asked, completely bewildered by this development.

He didn't answer my question. “Step outside, please, Cressa. It won't take long. And I'll have to ask you to stay in the area for a few days.”

“Wait,” I said. “There's something I want you to see.”

He ducked to get through the door and I showed him the note I'd found.

The chief scowled at it, then slid it into a paper bag and told me to wait outside.

I hadn't decided what I'd do after both the funerals, but now I would be forced to stay here until the chief said I could leave.

Al was outside his place and we joined each other on the road.

“He just searched my place, too,” he said, stooping down to speak softly to me.

“Why? What's he looking for?”

“Evidence, I suppose, that either you or I killed Grace or Ida. I think it's just something they have to do.”

“I've read,” I said, “that the close relatives become the first suspects, but I never thought it would apply to me.”

When Chief Bailey came out he gave me a grim wave, folded himself into his car, and drove off. I assumed he hadn't found anything to prove I had murdered anyone. I still had to fill the hours between now and Gram's service.

I needed to think about Gram and Grace and Mo and decide which course I should take, and what I could do about the murders, if anything. The Alpha chief had searched our houses, but no one was going back across the lake to where I'd found them—and Grace's glasses. If I went over there on foot, instead of rowing across the lake, maybe I could find something additional. Maybe something of Gram's would be there, too.

The sun had burned the dew off of the grass, the air was still humid, and the ground with its puddles reminded me we'd had a night rain.

As I leaned down to put bug repellent on my legs—remembering Mrs. Toombs's comment about the mosquitoes—my head started to pound and my stomach became even queasier. I popped two aspirins for my head, an antacid mint for my gut, grabbed my pepper spray, in case, and started out.

I was met by a tall, beefy, worried-looking man on the road in front of my cabin. He strode along, concentrating on the ground before him.

“Good morning,” I called. He looked like a man who needed help.

He looked up with a deeper frown. I drew back at his fierce expression, then he stepped closer and gave me a sheepish grin.

“Sorry to give you a scare. I don't look too friendly today, do I? Don't feel too friendly, to tell you the truth. My kids are all sick, all five of them. I don't know when they've all been sick on the same day. I'm Freddie Fiori, by the way. We live in the trailer at the end of the campground. Over by the fence.”

He stuck out his large, meaty hand and I shook it.

“Hi, I'm Cressa Carraway. Ida Miller's granddaughter.”

“What a tragedy to lose her. And then Grace, too.” He shook his head. “She thought the world of you. I haven't known her long—we moved here recently—but she was a super person. We all miss her.”

“Thank you,” I gulped.
Someday it won't hurt to talk about her.
As far as I knew, the autopsy results hadn't been released yet. He didn't seem to know, and I didn't think I should spread the news about them being murdered.

“What's the matter with your children?” I knew, from his abundance of black glossy curls that, as Martha had told me, the noisy kids playing at Eve's yesterday were his.

“Stomach flu or something. They're not too sick, it's just that they're
all
sick.” He smiled at his predicament. “My wife is at work today so I get to nurse them all by myself. I walked part way down to Toombses' to use the phone to call the doctor—ours is disconnected—then I decided not to. They're really not that bad. I'll tend to them myself today and see how they are tomorrow. Pat'll take over when she gets home tonight. My wife's a nurse.”

“They were at Eve's yesterday, weren't they?”

“Were they? I know they like to visit her. She usually gives them cookies.”

“So they eat her cookies often?”

“Just every time they go there.”

I bit my tongue. If they'd had her cookies before, that probably wasn't what was making them—and me—sick. Al Harmon did say Eve shouldn't be around children, though. And her chopping those rhubarb leaves… I wondered if some of those leaves could have ended up in the cookies.

“They've never gotten sick from her baking before? I wonder if her cookies …”

He gave an uneasy glance back toward his trailer. “They don't get a lot of goodies at home lately. I'm unemployed and today, with the kids sick, that cuts into my job-hunting time. I'm doing a few errands and odd jobs for Toombs and he's supposed to be taking some of the fees off for staying here. Plus he's supposed to be paying me. Have you met him?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Hard man to deal with. Don't get along with him too well. The less I see of him the better. I'm hoping to find a real job pretty soon, get out from under him.”

“Good luck,” I offered as he walked on. This wasn't the right time to talk to him about mowing the grass at my cabin. “Let me know if there's anything I can do.”

“Thanks,” he called back to me and continued back to his home.

Songbirds serenaded me as I descended the crude steps that led down to Gram's boat dock. At the bottom of the hill the heat was stronger, the air close and hard to breathe.

Maybe there will be a breeze out on the dam, and surely it'll be cooler in that dense growth on the other side of the lake.

In the middle of the flat grassy space, I spied a rabbit, grazing in the sun. I paused, but he soon saw me and whisked away. A rhythmic sound from the other side of the clearing, over by the dam, caught my attention. Hoping to spot a woodpecker, I tiptoed toward the tapping. On the far side of the meadow, a path led through the bushes to a set of four wooden steps that would take me onto the dam, which sat a few feet higher than the meadow. A small man in denim overalls and a plaid shirt knelt in front of the stairs, nailing a new board onto one of the steps. Not a woodpecker after all.

He stopped working and looked up at my approach. He didn't smile, but didn't look unfriendly either, just curious. I told him who I was.

“Oh, yes, the missus said she saw you. I'm Wayne Weldon. Sheila met you yesterday, she said. How do you do?”

He attempted to rise, but lurched sideways on his way up. He was more successful on the second try, and stuck out a dirty hand, his breath coming hard out of his open mouth.

When I approached within handshaking distance, the smell of whiskey on his labored breath was evident. His lack of sobriety accounted for the rather glazed, dropped-chin, expressionless look.

“Sheila said you was asking if she was down by the lake when Ida died.” Wayne was a Jack Sprat counterpart to his wife, dry and lean.

“Well, I'm trying to find out more about her death.”

“She drowned.” His nod of emphasis almost destroyed his precarious balance.

“Yes, I know.” Time to change the subject before he fell over. I was reminded again that the fact of murder hadn't been announced yet. “I told your wife I think this is a beautiful place. Everything is so well tended.”

“Well, you know, I used to come here every once in a while when I was a boy. When Sheila's family had their cabin here, of course, nice big one. They'd invite me over sometimes in the summer.”

He gripped the rail as he looked past me, his vacant eyes focusing on the unseen past. “That was when it was really nice here. Old Man Grey took real pride in this place. He didn't let a day go by he didn't look the whole place over.” Then he came back to the present and bored into me with his bloodshot eyes. “Toombs, now, he don't even get outdoors some days. It's okay, I guess, but there's a lot of things that don't get done. Makes Sheila upset when she thinks about it.” He shook his head sadly, contemplating the ground.

“Well, it looks fine to me.” I decided to end this conversation. I had things to do. Besides, it sounded much like the one I had already had with his wife. Except she was sober. “It was nice to meet you,” I lied with a slight smile, then edged past him up the steps onto the dam.

The lake lay about three feet below the dam, but the shallow creek running through the trough on the other side was about ten feet down. At the edge of the lake, the water was swampy. I wondered if this was where the bullfrogs I heard at night would gather. On a partially submerged log, one end poking out of the shadows into the sunshine, was a bump I thought might be a sunning turtle. I waited a few seconds, willing it to move and prove me right—I wanted something nice to happen today—but it refused to budge. Maybe it was just a knot. I needed to get across to the place I'd found Gram. I turned to move on.

Splash!
I whirled around. The bump was gone and ripples spread from the log into the lake. Another loss.

When I got to the middle of the dam, I could see pudgy Sheila still mowing the steep hillside below from my cabin. That must be the chore she was arguing about with Toombs the day before. I didn't think she had done any mowing after that, in spite of the orders I had heard him giving her, but I wasn't sure. The sound of the tractor was becoming so familiar I hardly noticed it any more. Sort of like background music. I waved to Sheila and she waved back.

I was grateful to feel a slight breeze out on the dam. The wind carried the sweet scent of the white and yellow wildflowers that grew there, as well as a faint smell of grass from the distant hillside.

Even the grass that grows here on the dam is trimmed. It would have to be done by hand, maybe with a weed-whacker. Wayne and Sheila have a great deal to do.

I made my way across the earthen dam, the sunlight and sweet-smelling air beginning to dissolve my headache and ease my roiling stomach.

As I walked, one of the themes from my composition wound through my head, but lay lifeless in my mind.

Why doesn't it sing? Why does it just plod along? Is there something I'm missing that prevents my music from coming alive?

If no one ever found out who killed her, this would have to be my memorial to Gram. But for my memorial to make up for failing to find justice, it would have to be magnificent. And this was far from magnificent. I wondered again: was I even capable of it?

First, I had to have something of myself to put into it. I lacked inner focus. My musical thoughts were all over the place; there was no coherence. One idea would come, then another would spring up, but there was nothing to bind them together. Were any of them any good?

I reached the other side of the dam, almost without realizing it, lost in my thoughts.

That's good. It's nice to have a few minutes' break from the trouble in paradise. Although there's a new woe, Freddie Fiori with five sick children.

I put that thought down as best I could, shoved it into the back of my mind, behind Gram and Grace, and started humming one of the themes from my composition again.

The area at the end of the dam was a smooth grassy bank for a short distance. The grass here had been recently mown, also. There was a road beyond the dam that the tractor would use to get here. I even spied distinctive, large-ribbed tire tracks in the soft dirt where the grass was thin at my feet. They led to an obscure dirt trail, behind a screening wall of vegetation that wound off through the woods. This, I thought, must be the trail.