Elizabeth Lynn Casey - Southern Sewing Circle 08 - Remnants of Murder (6 page)

And she knew better than to make that statement lightly.

“Okay … okay.” She stayed on Dixie’s heels as they traversed the foyer’s charmingly scarred wood-planked floors and made their way toward the living room. “So what is it you’re hell-bent on showing me?”

Dixie stopped midway across the large room and pinned Tori with the kind of look that had starred in many of her early Dixie Dunn–inspired nightmares. “If you’d quit your yakking, Victoria, and just
follow
me, I’ll show you.”

Once again, the image of herself with a wet nose and a rapidly approaching newspaper filled her thoughts. Only this time she caught a glimpse of the iron-clad fist holding the paper …

“Before you got into the whole library thing, did you ever consider teaching an obedience class?” Tori mumbled as she fell into step behind Dixie.

“No.”

“How about something in the criminal justice field?”

“No.”

“Drill sergeant?”

“Has anyone ever told you that you talk too much?” Dixie tossed the insult over her shoulder with nary a look back, the woman’s singular focus on a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that ran along the east wall of the room. Like its twin on the opposite side of the room, the built-in unit housed a smattering of books, trinkets, and framed photographs. Grabbing hold of a frame on the fourth shelf from the bottom, Dixie shoved it in Tori’s hand. “See? What did I tell you?”

Tori looked down at the image of a man standing alongside a porch railing, gazing out at something beyond the camera’s frame, the expression on his face one of complete peace. At first glance, she placed him in his late sixties until a second, more thorough inspection had the previously unnoticed cane in his left hand pushing his age into the early to mid-seventies range instead.

“Is this Clyde’s son?” she asked even as her gaze returned, again, to the contentment the man wore with the kind of ease usually afforded a favorite bathrobe or a trusty pair of shoes. It made her wish she could see whatever it was he was seeing.

“That’s Clyde.”

“Oh.” She held the frame aloft and looked from Dixie to the picture and back again. “Wow. The colors are much better than the average twenty-year-old picture.”

“That’s because it isn’t twenty years old. It was taken five weeks ago.”

Tori pulled the frame back in front of her and stared down at the image of the man in the khaki-colored pants, off-white collared shirt, and loafers. “I don’t think so, Dixie. You told me Clyde was ninety-one.” She gave the frame a gentle shake for emphasis. “He can’t be more than seventy here.”

Dixie closed the gap between them and pointed at the bottom-right corner and the digitalized numbers barely visible beneath the interior edge of the frame. The date shown backed up the woman’s words, making Tori gasp in the process.

“But didn’t you say he was ninety-one?”

“I did.”

She studied the picture yet again, searching for any of the signs one would expect to see in a man of Clyde’s advanced age, but there were none. Except, perhaps, the cane. “I don’t get it. He doesn’t look ninety-one at all.”

Without so much as a word, Dixie spun around and retraced her steps back to the handbag she’d dropped on the sofa as they first entered the room, her wrinkled hand disappearing into its cavernous interior only to reappear clutching a small point-and-shoot camera. “Five weeks ago, there was no disputing that. But in the one I took Friday, he looked every bit his age and then some.”

Tori sidled up behind her friend and peered at the illuminated display screen on the back of the camera, a whoosh of air escaping her lips as she did. “C’mon, Dixie”—she glanced down at the frame in her hand and back at the camera with a similar time-date stamp depicted in the corner—“you seriously expect me to buy that these were taken
five weeks
apart?”

“Then
you
do the math, Victoria.”

She looked from the corner of one picture to the next, the reality in front of her negating any need for a pen and paper or even a calculator. The pictures were, indeed, taken a little over a month apart. And while the differences between the man in each image were vast, there was no denying the fact that they were the same person, thanks to a dime-sized mole on the left side of his neck.

“What kind of illness made him deteriorate that rapidly?” she finally asked while noting everything from Clyde’s extreme weight loss to the ghostly pallor of his skin and the dullness of his eyes.

“I don’t know, you tell me.”

Unsure of what to say, she stepped away from the camera and focused on the framed photograph in her hand. “Wouldn’t you love to know what he’s looking at in this picture? He looks so at peace.”

“You really want to know?”

She glanced at Dixie. “Wouldn’t you?”

Shrugging, Dixie gestured for Tori to follow, leading the way across the room and through an open archway to the left of the bookshelves. A hallway on the other side led to yet another archway—this one bathed in the kind of sunlight capable of chasing away the deepest of chills. “I knew from the first time I stepped in this house last week that this was his favorite room.”

Tori walked through the opening and sucked in her breath. For there, on the other side of a bank of windows that ran the entire length and height of the home’s western wall, was the most breathtaking view of Fawn Lake she’d ever seen. “Oh my gosh … Dixie … this is gorgeous! I had no idea the lake was this … this big, this
beautiful
.”

“That’s because all public access to Fawn Lake is on the other side of that island of trees you see over there”—Dixie extended her finger to the right—“and from that vantage point, it doesn’t look like a whole lot.”

She worked to make sense of her friend’s words, the reality they imparted catching her by surprise. “Are you saying he owns all of this access?”

Dixie nodded. “And since the limited public access is such rocky terrain, the uninhibited view you see is about as pristine as it gets. No boats, no crazy teenagers, no noise issues of any kind. Just uncompromised beauty.”

Hence the expression the man wore on his face in the framed photograph, the subject’s position in the room not much different from where Tori now stood. “Wow. Just … wow.” It was such a simple response yet it captured the view in front of them perfectly. “No wonder he looked so at peace in that first picture. This is magnificent.”

“It was his pride and joy. His heritage.”

She scanned the lake from one end to the other as the same kind of peace she’d seen in Clyde Montgomery’s face washed over her from head to toe. “How could someone who looked like he did go through so many Home Fare volunteers in the past four weeks?”

Dixie refrained from answering for so long, Tori finally had to pull her attention from the lake and plant it on the white-haired woman perched on the edge of the room’s only chair. “Dixie?”

Shaking her head, Dixie released a long, deliberate sigh before launching into one of her long-winded tirades. “It’s like I said earlier, Victoria. People have a perception of the elderly. We’re all supposed to have thinning hair and sit quietly in a wheelchair drooling all over ourselves. We’re supposed to have no opinions about anything anymore, and we’re supposed to be content babbling about things that happened in our youth. If we don’t make sense to the person listening, we get a reassuring pat on our shoulder or, if we’re really lucky, our head.”

“C’mon, Dixie, it’s not really that bad, is it?”

Dixie hit Tori with her best evil librarian glare and snorted. “From what I gather on the first few drivers assigned to Clyde, he didn’t fit the image of a homebound senior. He had opinions on the meal, expectations for delivery, and an appetite for intelligent conversation. Driver number one found his scrutiny of the meals to be offensive. Driver number two had issues with timeliness. And driver number three was insulted by the accusations Clyde hurled at him.”

“Accusations?” she echoed.

“Clyde was convinced Randy was a spy. That he was using Clyde’s sudden health issues as a way to infiltrate Clyde’s home.”

“Infiltrate his home? Isn’t that a bit extreme?”

Dixie took one last look out at the lake then led the way back down the hallway and into the living room. “If you knew how often that poor man was badgered about selling his land, you’d understand why Randy’s potential kinship to several of the town’s officials might have upset Clyde.”

“What do you mean
potential
kinship?”

“Same last name, no relation. But Clyde didn’t care.”

“The town really wanted this land that badly?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Dixie returned the frame to its spot on the shelf, then retrieved and hoisted her handbag halfway up her arm. “Either way, everyone thought it was best if I was assigned to Clyde. Which, in hindsight, was probably fate at work.”

“I’m sure Home Fare will assign you a new client. Maybe even a list of clients.” Tori stood in the center of the room, her heart torn between wanting to return to the sunporch for one last look at the lake and the need to get out of a house they hadn’t been invited to enter in the first place.

“That’s not the fate I’m talking about, Victoria.”

“It’s not?”

Once again, Dixie resorted to an exasperated eye roll to convey her feelings. “No. I’m talking about my being assigned to Clyde so I could be the one to raise the red flag over his death.”

Tori felt her shoulders slump under the weight of Dixie’s conviction—a conviction she still didn’t understand. Nothing Dixie had shown her so far gave any credence to the woman’s claim that Clyde Montgomery had died of anything other than age.

“You still think he was murdered?” she finally asked.

Dixie’s eyes led the way back to the built-in bookcase and the framed photograph of the man she’d found dead earlier that very same day. “Had those two pictures been taken a year apart, I wouldn’t think twice about Chief Dallas’s findings. I’d merely think old age caught up with him the way it’s destined to catch up with all of us. But they
weren’t
taken a year apart. They were taken just over a
month
apart. No one deteriorates that rapidly in a month, Victoria. Not even us old people.”

Chapter 6

Tori pushed the chocolate frosted brownie around
the powder blue plate and did her best to harness the upbeat mood she’d had as recently as that morning. But it was hard. Especially when she couldn’t help but feel as if the police chief’s unspoken words to Dixie held some semblance of truth.

No, she didn’t see Dixie as old. She didn’t think the woman’s lifelong devotion to books had birthed an overactive imagination. And she most certainly didn’t believe the woman was incapable of having a sane thought in her head. Those observations were preposterous.

But the other one? The one about Dixie being starved for attention? Maybe that one wasn’t so out of the realm of possibility …

“Okay, spill it.”

She lifted her gaze from her plate and fixed it, instead, on the part-curious/part-dejected face hovering just over Tori’s right shoulder.

“Debbie. I—I didn’t realize you were standing there.” Pushing her plate to the side, she patted the empty lattice-back stool to her right while simultaneously taking a quick visual tour of the bakery’s tiny but heavily utilized dining area. “Do you have a minute to sit and chat?”

“I do unless you’re going to tell me I left out a critical ingredient,” Debbie murmured before sliding onto the stool and sweeping her flour-coated hands toward Tori’s untouched brownie.

“Oh no—no, no, no. It’s not the brownie, or anything you did or didn’t do. In fact, I’m sure it’s as good as it always is.” She pulled the plate closer, only to push it away as her stomach sent up the kind of warning bells that shouldn’t be ignored. “I—I’m just not very hungry. For anything, apparently.”

Debbie flicked the end of her blond ponytail over her shoulder and leaned toward Tori’s ear. “Which leads me back to what I just said. Spill it.”

She stared at the brownie, willed it to work its usual magic, but to no avail. Instead, she set her elbows on the table and dropped her head into her hands. “I feel like a traitor, Debbie.”

Debbie’s soft, gentle laugh echoed around them, raising a few curious eyebrows in their direction as it did. “You? A traitor? Yeah, okay. Like I could ever even imagine that tag applying to someone like you.”

“It does now,” she whispered.

At the forlorn quality in her voice, Debbie’s smile disappeared. “What are you talking about, Victoria? How could you possibly see yourself as a traitor?”

How indeed.

Gathering all the courage she could muster, she put words to the guilt ravaging her heart. “Dixie came to me with something yesterday—something she believes with all her heart.”

“And …”

“I honestly think Chief Dallas is right.”

Debbie sat up tall. “Chief Dallas?”

“I think she’s so lost right now that she’s looking for anything she can find to prove her worth in a community where she’s feeling as if she no longer matters.”