Hush My Mouth (22 page)

Or was it something else? The challenge Edna exuded couldn’t be all residual or imagined. Did Edna have her own reasons for having to prove herself? What was the chip on her shoulder?

Whatever the explanation, it was time for me to back away and let her do her job.

“Thanks, Edna. I’m so sorry about the—interference. I’d hoped we could get here before . . .”

She spun on her heel and melted into the gloom at the far end of the driveway.

Friday Morning

The next morning, Shamanique was her usual punctual self. When I heard her come in, I rushed to dress in my usual office uniform—khakis and a white button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up. Doesn’t set a good example for the boss to wander downstairs late to work in the ratty Clemson T-shirt she’d slept in.

I stuck my head around the door. “Want some toast?”

She shook her head, the new braids and beads in her hair dancing happily. “Maybe some tea.” She pushed her chair back and joined me on the short trek to the kitchen.

From the cupboard, Shamanique got the green tea bags she’d brought, disdaining my English Breakfast tea and other well-caffeinated varieties.

“So,” she said, getting her kitten-and-flowers mug from the dish drainer. “Hear you had a hot date last night.”

Her voice had a singsong tell-me-more note.

“Huh?” She’d obviously talked to her aunt Edna.

She raised an eyebrow and cocked both her head and her hip. “With the cute old guy next door? Why didn’t you tell me you two were—”

“Uh-uh,” I said, my hands held up in what could be seen as either a stop sign or a defensive gesture. “Don’t even go there. We just took a walk, to check on some—proteges of his.”

“Oh, come on. You know he’s cute. In that preppy sort of way. You both live here. You telling me there’s—”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Strictly business.” When Shamanique had first arrived, I’d suspected that underneath the polite
yes, ma’ams
lurked someone less docile, someone who could be related to Edna Lynch and, at the same time, could get herself in trouble with the law. She was beginning to lose the facade.

She stared at me a moment and apparently saw I wasn’t making false protestations. She shrugged. “Whatever. So you got something lined up for tonight?”

“What’s tonight?”

“Friday?” She drawled it out, as if to a slow-wit. “Date night? The weekend?”

I snorted. “Hm. The weekend. Probably Sunday lunch with my great-aunts. And some work around here.” Or at the lake house. The usual excitement.

“Man, you need to get out. Good-looking woman like you don’t need to be sitting at home when you can get a man to buy you dinner. Maybe go dancing.”

I thought of the Pasture, full of stale odors, scarred furniture, and desperation. That was the dance spot that came uninvitingly to mind.

I waved her off. “I got plenty to worry about without adding a guy to the mix.” Fortunately I could go home or to my
great-aunts’ or Lydia’s to bum a meal—or I could pay for dinner myself.

The electric kettle whistled and she unplugged it. “You telling me you aren’t dating anybody?”

“Not right now,” I said, pouring water in her cup and then mine. “It’s complicated.”

She shrugged, apparently taking the hint. I hadn’t dated—anything more than a casual working dinner with an acquaintance—in too long to remember. My life had been busy: I’d made partner in a large firm, then resigned after I blew up at a lying witness during a trial; I’d come home for a temporary refuge that had become quickly permanent, then gone to Charleston to help Jake Baker with a big case. I’d been busy for the last few years, especially the last six or eight months here in Dacus. Besides, if I hadn’t found any serious dating or marriage material in Columbia or Charleston, what did Dacus, the little town I’d left after high school, have to offer, other than idle entertainment? And I did mean idle, as in local members of the hunting, fishing, and tobacco-spitting club.

“If the right guy comes along, I’ll know it,” I said. “Until then, no need to waste my time or some guy’s money.” Or risk another broken heart.

Shamanique gave me a pitying look. For one so young, she’d mastered Aunt Edna’s silent expressiveness. “Honey, there’s always a good reason to use a guy’s money. That’s about all some of them are good for. Trick is finding one with some money. Too many of them got their eye on your purse along with your other things.”

She stirred some honey in her mug and eyed with suspicion my artificial sweetener.

I followed her down the hall, dunking my tea bag. The dating scene undoubtedly presented different challenges for the two of
us—very different. In my case, if there’d been any good prospects, they’d moved away or were already married. The ones who’d stayed seemed to gather in a small-town hill-country fraternity specializing in hunting and fishing, with football, stock-car racing, and golf thrown in for variety. A woman in the beauty parlor last week, when I went to get my hair trimmed, was talking about how glad she was her husband had something to do every season of the year now—the best was when he was gone off hunting, but locked in his den with the TV remote was almost as good, she said.

From watching my great-aunts—two who had never married—I judged single a better option than that, even if a guy who could hunt and fish had skills and could feed the family. He might even be able to rewire electrical outlets. But getting his attention could take longer than learning to do it myself—which reminded me I needed to stop by the hardware store for a sink washer.

The phone rang as soon as we entered the reception room. Given how much I hate phone calls, just having somebody answer the few phones calls I got was proving worth her salary. I liked her directness and her spunk, though I hoped she’d satisfied herself on the topic of my love life. Her chattiness made me appreciate all the more Rudy’s reticence on personal matters.

“One moment please,” she said in her cheerful phone voice. Covering the receiver with her hand, she mouthed, “Rowly Edwards?”

I nodded and carried my tea into my office.

“How’do, Miss A-ver-ee?”

“Grand. Take it you have some news?”

“Another long chat with Miz Sidalee Evans yesterday.” He said her name as if it ran together, Sidely. “A fount of information, she was. And more than willing to talk. I also got a little more on Dirick Timms, the boyfriend. Not a gang member. I wondered if
maybe he could’a had somebody helping him, lending him cover. He’s a punk, true enough, but a loner, by all accounts.”

“Not even the other punks like him, huh?”

He snorted. “Like as not. Oh, and from the little I’ve dug up, Neanna had for certain broke it off with him.”

“Really.” That gave me pause. “That’s too bad, in a way. I’d had him picked out to play the bad guy.”

“Don’t mean he isn’t,” said Rowly. “He moved on to another girlfriend, but that don’t mean he was ready to let go of the old one. Word is, he’s not averse to slapping girls around.”

“That’s what made me vote him most likely culprit.” That and the fact that lightning had struck twice. Neanna and Aunt Wenda both attracted dangerous men into their lives—and ultimately into their deaths.

“He still could’a gone after her. Got drunk or tweaked out, decided he’d been wronged and decided to fix it. Wouldn’t be the first ex-boyfriend or ex-husband to want to right a wrong done him.”

“Yeah, but he’d be the first to slip out of the Atlanta jail and slip back in to do it.”

“True enough.” He paused. “But who’s to say he was her only bad boyfriend?”

That was a thought. “Any mention of another one?”

“Nope, but she headed outta here on a crazy whim. Maybe some guy was part of that.”

I thought about Skipper, her boyish hitchhiker. Did he know something he wasn’t telling? Was he hiding something I couldn’t see?

“What did Cousin Sidalee have to say?”

“Over mint tea and these little powder-sugar balls that make one heck of a mess unless you poke the whole thing in your mouth, she had plenty to say.”

“Oo, the buttery kind with chopped pecans?”

“Uh-huh. They were good, but hard to be dainty with. She didn’t seem to note the mess. She was just glad to have company. You know how it is with folks of a certain age. They get lonely, don’t get too many new stories or new listeners.”

I could see Rowly puffing little clouds of powdered sugar as he chewed the nut teacake balls, his Adam’s apple and his brown-thatch hair both bobbing as he nodded in time to her story.

“So what’d she ’llow?” I asked. Talking to Rowly, with his deep drawl, deepened my own drawl.

“She talked a lot about how devastated Gran—everybody called her that—was over her children. The first daughter running off, lost somewhere in drugs or craziness. The other one, Wenda, murdered. Sad enough to lose your child, but to such as that, and to have both of them gone in bad ways.”

Rowly’s tone summed it up with words I could imagine in one of the country songs I knew he wrote.

“She loved that granddaughter of hers. Seemed determined to fix whatever had broke with her own two, even to the point of asking the French family to take Neanna in when she herself got sick. Seemed to be working, too, right up until Gran died. Thank goodness she never knew it didn’t keep working.”

“So why’d she have such a large insurance policy on Neanna? That really freaked her out when she learned about it. Frankly, it would freak me out, too.”

“Ready for this?” Rowly said. “Miz Sidalee had fussed at Gran about spending money on the premiums. Miz Sidalee didn’t think it right to spend that money when Gran needed it for herself. But, in Gran’s words: ‘This is the only way I got to hold her here. God knows I could use the money, but He ain’t gonna give me two hunnert thousand dollars, else I might stop relying on Him. So if He won’t give me the money, He’ll have to keep her alive.’ ”

“That’s—” I didn’t have a word to describe my reaction to it. The theology was more than a little cockeyed, but who was I to question the methods of a desperate woman?

“Crazy?” Rowly supplied a word.

“Not to her, apparently.”

“I reckon.” Rowly’s tone oozed judgment.

“The policy was in effect when Neanna died and the premiums were paid up.”

“Yep.”

I searched my memory banks, reordering information Fran had given me, what I believed about her. Why hadn’t she mentioned that she was Neanna’s beneficiary?

“Is the insurance why Fran French can afford to be little Miss Money’s No Object?” I asked. “Is she using blood money?”

Rowly knew we’d be remiss not to cast a skeptical eye on everyone involved.

“No, not hardly. Truth is, Miss French’s family’s got plenty of money. That insurance payoff—when it comes—wouldn’t pay to air-condition one of their houses.”

“Those are her dad’s houses, though, aren’t they? Not hers.”

“True enough. Still, she hasn’t put in a claim for the money, and the girl’s not hurting. Got her own trust fund, from her own grandmother. Following the money this time doesn’t lead far.”

“Her grandmother, huh?” The dichotomy between Fran and Neanna, the two “sisters,” and the two grandmothers who’d played—or tried to play—fairy godmother struck me.

“Yeah. One other thing. Miz Sidalee talked—at grave length—about how hard Gran worked to find out what happened to both her girls. Finally she found Marie, the oldest, but not the way she’d hoped. Gran went to the library and studied up in the computer classes after states started posting Jane and John Doe descriptions of unidentified bodies. Miz Sidalee said Gran could ‘googly’ anybody.
Made me laugh. Googly. I like that word. Like that song about goo-goo-googly eyes.”

“Dear Lord. Imagine searching for your daughter on Jane Doe sites.”

“That’s how she found her. On a Web site out in San Francisco. That’s how she learned she was dead.”

No wonder Fran disdained private investigators. Gran had been left to do on her own what they didn’t do.

“The strange part,” said Rowly, “was Gran quit pushing to find out what happened to Wenda. She just stopped. No more calls to the police or the newspapers to stir up stories. No more scrapbook—mostly because there were no more articles. She just stopped.”

“Did Miss Sidalee know why?”

“At the time, Miz Sidalee thought it was a good thing she stopped, that Gran needed to put it behind her so’s she could heal. When she thought on it later, she saw it wasn’t so good. Gran got that picture in the mail, the one you sent me. That scared Gran, made her worry about the same thing happening to Neanna. So she stopped. Miz Sidalee saw it once. Said Gran thought it meant Neanna, even though she was only seven at the time, would be leaving her too and it scared her.”

“Did she have any idea who sent it?”

“No, but before that picture came, Gran was always pestering the newspapers to run articles, especially on the anniversary. She even tried to get it on one of those TV shows about solving mysteries. She loved that one show, but not so much after they wouldn’t do the story. Said they were nice enough, but still.”

The murderer had sent the photo a year after the murder. If he’d wanted to scare Gran off, it had worked. The photo was eerie, but not gruesome, and Gran didn’t sound like the kind of
woman who would back down easily, especially when she was fighting to protect her brood.