Hush My Mouth (13 page)

Shamanique looked unimpressed.

We stared at each other for a blink away from uncomfortable.

“Okay.” I led the way back down the hall. The dark wood floors popped underfoot.

The postman dropped the day’s collection through the slot beside the massive dual front doors.

“You can get started with the mail. Separate it here.” I indicated the round table in the center of the entry, probably left behind because it was too large to get out the door. “If Mr. Bertram’s office door is open, just leave his mail on the table inside his office. He’s not here right now, though.”

Off in Atlanta or Florida on business, I forgot which. “When he’s gone, leave his mail in the basket next to the refrigerator.” We each had a basket, and the system had worked well so far.

For me, what hadn’t worked so well was getting the mail where it belonged once it found its way into my office. Always something I had to think about or wait on or didn’t know what to do with. So I lived with stacks of papers. I liked things visible, so they’d remind me what needed doing, but my stacking habit was obvious as soon as anybody entered my office. No matter how
many file folders I labeled or where I’d worked, my horizontal filing system remained a constant. Good assistants had been the only thing that saved me from chaos.

Still no reaction or questions from Shamanique.

“Open the mail and sort it into two stacks: one if it looks important and one if it looks like junk. If in doubt, put it in the important stack.” I might toss the junk stack in the garbage with scarce a glance.

I sat the mail on my desk and turned to look at her. “Okay.” Again we stared at each other. Her face was impassive. Not challenging or angry. Pleasant enough. Just not—interested? No. Just—passive.

“What say we sit for a minute. Get to know each other.”

She scooped her skirt under her as she sat, demurely perched on the edge of one of the two wing chairs in the windowed alcove of my office. My reading nook. The drum table—the top rotated and the sides held small books—had been my grandfather’s. The collection of leather-bound literature shelved around the drum had also been his. The stacks of mail, legal magazines, and case printouts on top were all mine.

“Are you in school?”

She shook her head, her earrings rocking. “Took some classes at Tech. Thinking about going back.”

“What were you studying?”

She gave a right tilt of her head, her version of a shrug. “Nursing. But mostly general courses.”

“That what you want to do? Nursing?”

“No, ma’am.”

She was well spoken, her voice soft and rich. But reaching down her throat to pull out every word was tiring.

“Tell me about your family. Any brothers or sisters?”

A borderline question: close to the questions one couldn’t ask
in a job interview. Not that she’d sue me for discrimination, not when she could just sic Aunt Edna on me.

“One brother.”

“Older?”

She nodded.

“So. If not nursing, what would you like to do?”

She ducked her chin and picked at one of her elaborate fake fingernails. “Be an investigator.”

“Like Edna—your aunt?”

She gave another half shrug. “Or a probation officer. Or a counselor. Like that.”

I nodded. “Good.” The most animation I’d seen out of her.

“What kinds of things can you do on a computer?”

The shrug. “I’m not very technical.”

“But you know how to use one?”

“Sure.”

“What kinds of software? What have you used the computer for?”

“You know. Word processing, spreadsheets. Some database. I’ve helped Auntie Edna do online searches and skip traces.” She pronounced aunt like a long “ah” with a “t” tacked on as an afterthought, not like the word “ant.”

“I’m good at finding stuff,” she said.

I suspected she was more computer-savvy than I was. Why was she so danged hard to have a conversation with? I needed to unleash my mother on her. Never failed, she could get anybody chattering away—their hopes, dreams, fears, history, the works.

“Well, I guess we’d better get busy. One thing, Shamanique.” I leaned toward her to emphasize what I had to say. “The things that go on in this office, the things you read or overhear, must stay in this office. Everything is confidential. You can’t talk about any cases, to anybody. We clear?” My standard speech for years to all
my law clerks and secretaries. The same speech I’d been given on my first clerking job.

“Yes, ma’am.” She looked me straight in the eye. “Auntie Edna says the same thing.” She shrugged. She was probably thinking, as I had:
Who would I tell? Nobody I know is interested in any of this stuff
.

“Great. Let me know if you have any questions.”

She went to the desk in the front room, picked up the letter opener, and started methodically slicing open what would be mostly junk mail.

I climbed the ladder to study the chandelier. Some of the dangling crystals could be unhooked. Others couldn’t. I climbed as high as the ladder safely allowed and pulled up on the chandelier’s upper chain, trying to get a sense how much the thing weighed.

The answer: a lot more than I could lift. Two plans ruined. One plan had been to unhook the crystals, soak them, dry them, and return them. The other was to lower the whole assembly and soak the dangly parts in the bathtub. Two problems with that: It was much too heavy and, on close inspection, I was certain no bathtub—not even the deep claw-footed tub in my bathroom upstairs—could hold it. I braced my thigh against the top rung and fiddled and studied.

“I wouldn’t use the bleach, if I were you. It might etch the crystal.” Shamanique’s quiet voice startled me. “That dust wand is a good start,” she said.

“Think that’ll work?”

“It’ll catch most of the dirt. Then you can use a vinegar-and-water solution. Got any cotton gloves? You can wet one glove in the vinegar water and keep the other dry. That’ll polish it up nice. Except your arms’ll get awful tired. I’ve finished with the mail. I could help you with that.”

I stared down at her.

“I’ve helped my mama do it. That’s what she does. Clean houses.”

“Okay, then. Why don’t you lock the door there?” I pointed to the French doors. I wasn’t expecting anybody this afternoon, but then again, I hadn’t expected Edna to show up bringing Shamanique, shaman of arcane cleaning knowledge.

By five o’clock, we had a gleaming chandelier.

“The whole room looks brighter,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am. What time you want me tomorrow?”

“Um.” I couldn’t very well say,
I wander downstairs whenever I wake up, some time between 4:00
A.M.
and 10:00
. “Let’s say 8:30?”

She gave a little wave, her earrings swaying with her graceful spin.

Wednesday Morning

The next morning, Shamanique bounced up the front steps promptly at eight-thirty, her hoop earrings and short skirt swaying. I took only a few minutes to show her the phone and my oak filing cabinets—from my grandfather’s office, refurbished by my dad. I left her making labels to file a stack of papers. I’d stayed up late last night sorting and identifying stacks with sticky notes. How was I going to keep a secretary busy? At least I could go to Emma’s soccer game this evening without feeling guilty about untended mounds of paper.

Rudy and I rendezvoused at Maylene’s at nine o’clock. No need to head out on our somber mission unfortified.

The crowd was predictable. At a large table in the center of the room sat a couple of lawyers, a pharmacist, a couple of retired farmers, and other assorted pundits, dissecting yesterday’s news and
offering their own none-too-optimistic predictions for the future. Other tables held a group of highway workers wearing Day-Glo orange vests, a wildlife officer studying the newspaper, and three guys dressed in camo, in from a morning spent fishing. A normal day.

What Rudy ordered for breakfast was equally predictable. I opted for oatmeal and walnuts.

“Any blueberries?” I asked the waitress—another new one.

“I’ll check.” Her tone didn’t offer much hope.

As she turned to the kitchen, still scribbling on her pad, I asked Rudy, “You have a chance to look for Wenda Sims’s file yesterday?”

He poured half the sugar jar into his coffee cup and stirred, the spoon gritty on the bottom of the cup.

“I called Evidence. Carl said he’d look. Doesn’t sound promising, though. We used to put some of our long-term storage in the basement of the old courthouse. It flooded, you know.”

Rudy offered my disappointment a twig of hope. “Carl’s been around here forever. He said Vince Ingum handled that case. Said Vince had retired to Myrtle Beach, but he had a number for him.”

“Great.” Provided he didn’t mind revisiting a case he’d never solved, talking to a live person could be better than reading an old file, waterlogged and mildewed or not.

“Carl said what stuck in his mind was they chalked it up to a domestic case. She had a boyfriend back home who liked to use her as a punching bag.”

“Oh.” Fran hadn’t mentioned any of that. Most crime boiled down to the tawdry, but it still surprised me. I somehow expected something so life-altering—or life-ending—to be worthy, or at least complicated. “They couldn’t make a case?”

Before he could answer, movement behind me drew his attention. The commotion also attracted the attention of the rest of the restaurant. Even with my back to the door, I heard the chatter stop.

The cause for the disruption suddenly presented itself at our booth: Colin “Mumler” Gaines and the ghosters, in person. Colin huffed to catch his breath.

“Deputy Mellin? We were told you could help us.”

Rudy, his hand around his thick, white coffee cup, didn’t say yay or nay. He just waited.

“I’m Mumler Gaines. This is Quint and Trini.” He acknowledged me with a nod, probably remembering my face but not that he’d seen me hovering overhead when he’d visited my angel.

“We went out to the Heath house. We’re doing some paranormal research in the area and were told that house would be an excellent subject. While there, we were attacked.”

He waved his arms to emphasize the enormity of the offense.

I coughed. My ice tea had gone down the wrong way. The Heath house. I could see the train wreck coming.

So did Rudy. “Someone told you to go out there?”

“Yessir. Somebody called, in response to our newspaper story.”

I glanced at Rudy, but he didn’t take his eyes off Colin or his photographer’s vest and its bulging pockets.

“Exactly what happened?”

“We tried calling, but they don’t have a listed number. So we went out there this morning, to see if we could set up a visit for this evening. They stole our camera!”

“Stole it?” Rudy’s professionalism kept the sarcasm out of his voice. I didn’t dare drink any more tea for fear I’d spew it out my nose.

“Well, they took it from us and wouldn’t give it back. This big guy with a rag tied on his head. Big guy.”

Ah, my old buddy Clyde. Or Do Rag, as I preferred to think of him, though I certainly never called him that to his face.

“Another guy rode his motorcycle down the porch steps and started buzzing around us, trying to run us down.”

The members of the Southern Posse motorcycle gang had recently settled in the pre-Revolutionary War Heath farmhouse. If one of the motorcyclists had wanted to run Mumler down, he’d be in the hospital, not in Maylene’s flapping his arms like a blue jay defending its trinkets.

“Did you ask them to give your camera back?” Rudy’s voice was mellow-sweet as he smiled at Colin. With Rudy, that mellowsweet voice is usually a sign to step out of the way.

“Not—exactly. We . . .” Colin didn’t seem to have an answer for that. “We went to the police station.” He waved over his shoulder toward the front door. “They said it was outside their jurisdiction. They said we could find you here.”

“The city police?”

“Yessir.”

Chief Deputy Sheriff Rudy nodded. Rudy’s revenge on the city cop would be sweet.

“You can go to the county Law Enforcement Center—the sheriff’s office—and file a report. Somebody will be back in touch with you. It might be best if you all stayed away from out there at the Heath house.”

“Yeah.” Colin nodded but looked forlorn. “That was one of our best leads, though.”

Rudy pursed his lips and gave a good imitation of a commiserating nod. “You boys know about the crybaby bridge? Just north of town?”

Quint, the other ghoster guy, drew closer to the table. He and Colin exchanged glances.

“No.”

“Some real activity there. Ask over to the county library. I’m sure it’s been written up and all.”

The group came to an almost immediate, albeit silent, agreement.

“Thanks.”

“Best time’s around midnight. Be careful. Don’t get run over out there.”

“Yessir.”

They turned without seeing the smile at the corner of Rudy’s mouth. I covered mine with my hand. The laugh I tried to choke back came out as a snort. Good thing I’d stayed away from the ice tea.

“Who the heck sent those innocents out to visit Mad Max and his motorcycle gang?” I asked.