Hush My Mouth (4 page)

“How old was Wenda when she died?”

“Twenty-nine.”

I held the two photographs and compared them.

“They look like sisters, don’t they?” Fran said.

I nodded.

“From what her grandmother said, Wenda and Marie—Neanna’s mom—looked nothing alike. Neanna’s mom was, shall we say, robust, with thick, curly dark hair. She wore it long. Neanna envied her mom’s curviness. She thought she looked too boyish and flat-chested.”

“We always want what we don’t have, don’t we?” I said, knowing what it was to covet your sister’s bra size even as she envied my red-gold hair and petite height.

Fran gave a faint smile. “I always envied Neanna’s ease at attracting boyfriends.”

Looking at Fran, with her shoulder-length auburn hair and her crystal-green eyes, I couldn’t imagine she’d sat home on prom night. But walking down her memory lane was stirring up some of those long-abandoned teenage self-doubts we all harbor.

“Who’s this?” I pointed to the young man standing next to Neanna.

“Just some guy. She dated him a year or so ago.” She reached for the picture and flipped it over. A date was penned in a tiny, shaky scrawl.

“Not someone she’s seeing now.”

“No. It wasn’t anything serious.”

“Are these the most recent pictures of Neanna?”

“No, but they’re the best likenesses of her I could find.”

“How old is Neanna?”

“Twenty-nine.” An odd expression crossed her face. “The same age Wenda was.” She indicated the photos in my hand.

The same age. I looked at the back of Aunt Wenda’s photo.
The same tiny, careful hand had noted the date. “This was taken not long before Wenda died.”

Fran glanced at the date. “That’s right.”

Wenda wouldn’t have known she would see less than a month more of her life. But, looking at the picture, I knew, and knowing made her eyes seem sad.

I still hadn’t gotten an answer to my earlier question, so I tried it another way. “You don’t think Neanna really came just for the concert. Why did she need to use that for an excuse?”

Fran looked me directly in the eye. I forced myself to hold her gaze. I’d had to learn to do that. Not until I started practicing law, meeting people from all over the country, did I realize how my hill country upbringing had ingrained in me that it was rude to stare directly at someone. In my head, I knew a direct, unwavering gaze implied sincerity, but where I grew up, some age-old cultural instinct said it was just plain rude at best, an invitation to a fistfight at worst. Your past stays with you. By the same token, I’ve had liars look me right in the eye and spin me a web. Even though they know how to mimic sincerity, the blinking usually gives them away. Fighting against who you are is hard.

Fran took my measure—or searched her own fears—before she spoke. “She came looking for Aunt Wenda. I think she couldn’t quite admit to herself what brought her because she was afraid of what she’d find. In the simplest terms, she came because of the scrapbook. And the insurance policy.”

“What policy?”

“Going through her grandmother’s things, she found out Gran had bought insurance on her—on Neanna. Life insurance, not a little burial policy. It really upset her. Like—” Her voice cracked. “Like she was betting on Neanna dying so she could get some money. With her own two children—Neanna’s mom and
Aunt Wenda—both dying, Neanna figured Gran saw betting on her death as a better gamble than the slots at Harrah’s Cherokee.”

“How did she take out the policy without Neanna knowing?”

Fran shrugged. “Neanna never paid attention to details, to paperwork.”

“Maybe Gran had some other reason,” I said, wincing at the thought of a grandmother hedging her bets, gambling on her granddaughter’s life.

“That’s what I tried to tell her, though I really stretched to come up with a more charitable explanation than hers. She just wouldn’t move past it. And she pored over the scrapbook.”

“She brought the scrapbook with her?”

“I think so. I looked for it, when I was getting these photographs. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I had teased her about having memorized it.”

She frowned, maybe regretting she hadn’t been more understanding, simply because it had been such a big deal to her sister.

“I want you to help me find Neanna,” Fran said, making clear both her involvement and her expectation of success. “As quickly as possible. I suppose you have a fee agreement for me to sign?”

I got up from my chair, surprised at how stiff I was, probably more from the tension of absorbing Fran’s story than from just sitting.

Over the few months since I’d set up practice in Dacus, I’d gotten better at being businesslike without office staff to handle the details for me. I had fee-agreement forms neatly filed in the bottom drawer of my grandfather’s massive oak desk, but I still hated talking about money with clients.

On the form, I circled the hourly fee—one that usually made people in Dacus blink. Fran didn’t.

“Do you want a check now? You’ll have expenses, if you hire an investigator.”

“That can wait.” I immediately regretted waving off her checkbook. Cash flow might be a problem this month, and I loathed dipping into savings to float my rejuvenated law practice. At the same time, I wanted to make sure Edna and I could deliver.

“As a next step, I need the name of the fellow who hitched a ride with Neanna.”

“Skipper Hinson. That’s all I know. Here’s my cell phone number.” She’d written it on the bottom of the signed agreement. “Or you can reach me at the bed-and-breakfast. I’ve forgotten the name. Off Coffee Road north of town.”

Liberty Lodge. I knew the place. Good Sunday brunch there. “I’ll keep you posted.”

“I’ll do the same for you,” she said as she stood and smoothed out her slacks.

I had a warning twinge. She didn’t need to be wandering around town asking her own questions. I wasn’t used to clients hiring me, then working their own cases, but her level gaze said trying to talk her out of it would have the opposite effect. She’d driven from her Jekyll Island vacation cottage to find her sister. In her place, I wouldn’t sit idly twiddling my thumbs, either.

“Why don’t you call the hospitals again?” I suggested. Best to focus her efforts. “Try Greenville and Anderson, as well. And the Highway Patrol. Then give me a call.”

She nodded.

“We’ll find your sister,” I said.

Everything she’d told me said we needed to hurry.

Midday Monday

My sense of urgency over finding Neanna didn’t have anything with which to vie for attention. My calendar was clear except for a final divorce-decree hearing scheduled for first thing in the afternoon. Simple enough, and I’d already overprepared for that, so I could turn my attention to Neanna.

I hunched at my desk absentmindedly tracing my pen over the words where I’d taken notes. Which path to follow first? How about the easiest?

I spun my chair around, got the phone off the credenza behind me, and dialed Rudy Mellin. Chief Deputy Rudy Mellin. Fran said she’d checked the likely places, but maybe she hadn’t checked with the right person.

He answered his office phone on the second ring.

“Rudy, have you by any chance arrested anybody named
Neanna Lyles? Or found any amnesiacs wandering around? Anybody unidentified end up in the Camden County Hospital this weekend? About thirty. A very pale, very thin blonde.”

Rudy gulped something. Probably coffee. He didn’t switch to Diet Pepsi until the afternoon.

“Heaven help us all. You’ve turned psychic on us.”

“You have her?” I couldn’t believe it.

“We-ell,” he drawled. Not in his teasing way though. “I don’t exactly have her. You want to tell me why you’re asking after her?”

“Her family’s looking for her.”

“You know the family?”

“Just her sister. She’s here from Atlanta trying to find her.”

“Atlanta, huh? So how do you two know each other?”

“We don’t, Rudy. She hired me.”

“Oh.” He got that reserved tone he gets when he’s playing cop. “Why’d she think she needed a lawyer?”

“Not the kind of thing you call an accountant about, is it?” I didn’t want to mention the drawing power of my giant stone angel.

“So why didn’t she call us, if she was worried about her sister? She involved in something she didn’t want to draw attention to?”

“She did call the sheriff’s office, Rudy, along with the hospital and everybody she could think of. Nobody gave her any information.” I let that sink in. “Besides, she doesn’t know the area. For Pete’s sake, just because you hang around with crooks all day doesn’t make everybody one.”

He was quiet so long I wondered if we’d lost our connection—or if he’d hung up on me. Finally, he asked, “You got a picture of this lady? Any identifying marks?”

Uh-oh. “I have a photo. And she has a small freckle or mole just over her lip, like a beauty mark.” I took a breath before I asked, “Why?”

“Meet me at the Burger Hut. I was headed out for a quick bite.”

“Sure.”

Burger Hut had neither good burgers nor did its blocky brick-and-glass boredom look anything like a hut. But it sat across Main Street from my office, in a parking lot next to a long-empty grocery store, so it had the advantage of convenience.

I labeled a file
Neanna Lyles
, stuck the loose sheets with my notes inside, and wrote Fran’s cell number and home mailing address inside the cover. Even though my caseload was light, I found the detritus generated by even the simplest cases could quickly build into toppling stacks if I didn’t label it and beat it into submission. My little niece Emma had dropped the hint to her mother—my sister Lydia—that I needed a label maker of my own after she’d spent a Saturday afternoon helping me with my filing. Where does a seven-year-old—especially one related to me—learn to file?

I sharpened some pencils before I strolled across the street and still beat Rudy there. But he’d had farther to come: a stroll out to the Law Enforcement Center parking lot and the four-block drive to the Burger Hut.

The three picnic tables outside were already occupied, so I loitered until Rudy whipped into the lot in a marked sheriff’s patrol car. He glared at the table occupants, all enjoying what might be the last bearable day before summer blasted in to stay.

We ordered, got our cardboard trays, and I followed Rudy’s lumbering bulk back to the cruiser. I sometimes forget just how tall he is. He’d played on our high school football team, but he seemed bigger now—not just heavier.

“Don’t spill anything in here. We’re having to clean these things out ourselves now.”

I didn’t ask who used to clean up their fast food and doughnut
messes. I didn’t want to hear about County Council budget cuts or intradepartmental mutiny.

“You got that photo?” he asked just before he bit off half of his first hamburger. A creamy mustard-mayonnaise blob landed in the cardboard tray in his lap.

I settled my half-unwrapped burger back in my tray, slipped Neanna’s party picture out of my purse, and held it up for Rudy to see.

He chewed and kept looking long after his expression said he’d seen what he needed to see.

“So?” I asked as he swallowed and reached for his foam cup.

“You don’t have a weak stomach, do you?” he said after a loud slurp.

I crooked an eyebrow to emphasize the irony before I took a bite of my greasy hamburger.

He pulled a plastic folio from under his seat. The cruiser’s front seat held a dash-mounted computer, a shotgun sitting upright between us, and various other high- and low-tech gadgets, so storage space was scarce. Thanks to the prisoner cage, he couldn’t throw stuff in the backseat, where I carried most of my worldly possessions.

He pulled out a picture. “Cleaned up but only a little. You sure you don’t mind identifying it?”

I was afraid I knew what he meant by
cleaned up
, but I’d handled medical malpractice defense in my earlier life. I’d seen plenty of gruesome photos.

She lay on her back, her damp-looking hair swept away from her forehead. The dull steel table made it clear she wasn’t in a hospital room. The delicate birthmark, right below where her cheek would crease if she could smile, was dark on her bloodlessly pale skin. Neanna Lyles.

“She’s the one you’re looking for?”

I nodded, my mouth too dry to speak.

He slipped the photo back into his folder.

“What happened?”

“How do you know her?”

“I told you. I don’t. Her sister—I have clients, you know. Just clients.”

“We don’t know for sure what happened.” He took another bite and looked out the windshield, watching the people in line at the Burger Hut window.

“You don’t have to spare my feelings, you know.” What was with him? He wasn’t usually so protective or so reticent.

“It was a tough scene,” he said. “One of the rookies on routine patrol spotted a car parked at the overlook early Saturday morning.”

I didn’t ask which overlook.

“He figured he’d interrupt a couple in flagrante delicto and send them home.” He rolled out the Latin in his thick drawl.

“The driver’s window was down—actually shot out, as he discovered. He could see the driver slumped over the wheel. The view he had was much worse than the photo you saw. Exit wound did a number on the left side of her skull. From the initial description of the body, sounded like she’d managed to give herself a perfect kill shot.”