Shades of Twilight (14 page)

“Did she threaten to have him cut out of Lucinda's will?”

Roanna nodded. “But Grandmother just looked surprised. I was so relieved, because I couldn't have stood it if I caused Webb to lose Davencourt.”

“Did you hear anything violent happening in their room?”

“Some glass breaking, then Webb yelled at her to go ahead and get a divorce, and he left.”

“Did he tell her he'd do anything to get rid of her?”

“I think so,” Roanna answered readily, knowing that the others had likely confirmed this. “I don't blame him. I'd have added my allowance to her alimony, if that would have helped.”

The sheriff's lips twitched again. “You didn't like Jessie?”

She shook her head. “She was always hateful to me.”

“Were you jealous of her?”

Roanna's lips trembled. “She had Webb. But even if she hadn't, I know that he wouldn't be interested in m-me. He never has been. He was nice to me because he felt sorry for me. After she caused such a ruckus last night—I mean after
I
caused it—I decided I might as well go away to college the way they'd been wanting me to do. Maybe then I could make some friends.”

“Did you hear anything from their room last night after Webb left?”

Roanna shuddered, an image of Jessie as she'd last seen her flashing through her brain. She gulped. “I don't know. Everybody was mad at me, even Webb. I was upset and went to my room. It's at the back of the house.”

“All right now, Roanna, I want you to think carefully. When you go up the stairs, their rooms are across the front hall to the left. If there's a light on in the room, you can see it under the door. I checked that myself. When you went to your room, did you look in that direction?”

She remembered that very well. She had cast a fearful
glance at Jessie's door, afraid she would come storming out of it like the Wicked Witch in
The Wizard of Oz,
and she had tried to be very quiet so Jessie wouldn't hear her. She nodded.

“Was there a light on?”

“Yes.” She was certain of it, because otherwise she would have thought Jessie had gone on into the connecting bedroom and thus wouldn't hear her.

“Okay, now tell me about later, when you found her. What time was it?”

“After two. I hadn't been asleep. I kept thinking how I'd messed everything up and caused Webb so much trouble.”

“You were awake the entire time?” the sheriff asked sharply. “Did you hear anything?”

She shook her head. “I told you, my bedroom's on the back, away from everyone else. It's real quiet back there. That's why I like it.”

“Could you tell when the others came up to bed?”

“I heard Aunt Gloria in the hall about nine-thirty, but my door was closed and I couldn't tell what she was saying.”

“Harlan said that he started watching a movie about eight. It shouldn't have been off at nine-thirty.”

“Maybe he finished watching it in their room. I know they have a television in there, because Grandmother had a connection run for them before they moved in.”

He pulled out his notebook and scribbled a few words, then said, “Okay, let's go back to when you went to Jessie's room this morning. Was the light on then?”

“No. I turned it on when I went in. I thought Jessie was in bed, and I was going in there to wake her up so I could talk to her. The light was bright, and I couldn't see good for a few minutes, and I—I stumbled over h-her.”

She shuddered again and started shaking. The bright color of a moment before leached out of her face, leaving it chalky again.

“Why were you going to talk to her?”

“I was going to tell her that it wasn't Webb's fault, that he didn't do anything wrong. It was just me—being stupid, as
usual,” she said dully. “I never meant to cause him any trouble.”

“Why not wait until morning?”

“Because I wanted to fix it before then.”

“Then why didn't you talk to her before you went to bed?”

“I was a coward.” She gave him an ashamed look. “You don't know how nasty Jessie could be.”

“I don't think you're a coward at all, honey. It takes guts to say something's your fault. A lot of grown-ups never do learn how to do it.”

She began rocking again, and the haunted look came back. “I didn't want anything bad to happen to Jessie, not bad like that. I'd have laughed if her hair fell out or something. But when I saw her head … and the blood … I didn't even recognize her at first. She was always so beautiful.”

Her voice trailed off, and Booley sat in silence beside her, thinking hard. Roanna said she'd turned on the light. All doorknobs and light switches had already been dusted for fingerprints, so it should be her print on that particular switch, something easy enough to check. If the light had been on when she'd gone to her room, and off when she went to talk to Jessie, then that meant either Jessie had turned off the light herself after Webb had gone, or someone else had. Either way, Jessie had been alive when Webb had left the house.

That didn't mean he couldn't have returned later and gone up the outside stairs. If his alibi at the Waffle Hut checked out, though, that meant they likely didn't have enough circumstantial evidence to charge him. Hell, there was no motive anyway. He wasn't having an affair with Roanna, not that Booley had pinned much credence to that theory to begin with. It had been a shot in the dark, nothing more. The hard facts were, Webb and Jessie had argued over something Roanna said was her fault while totally absolving Webb. Jessie had threatened him with the loss of Davencourt, but no one had believed her, so that didn't
count. In a temper, Webb had yelled at her to go ahead and get a divorce, and slammed out of the house. Jessie had been alive then, according to both Roanna's testimony and the coroner's estimate of time of death, based on the degree of rigor mortis and the temperature of Jessie's body. No one had seen or heard anything. Webb had been at the Waffle Hut close to the time of Jessie's death. Now, they weren't talking about any great distance here, nothing that couldn't be driven in about fifteen or twenty minutes, so it was still within the realm of possibility that he could have returned, bashed her in the head, and then calmly driven to the Waffle Hut to establish his alibi, but the odds of convincing any jury of that were pretty slim. Hell, the odds of convincing the county prosecutor to press charges on that basis were even slimmer.

Someone had killed Jessie Tallant. Not Roanna. The girl was so painfully open and vulnerable, he doubted she knew how to lie. Besides, he'd have bet money she didn't have the strength to pick up that andiron, which was one of the heaviest he'd ever seen, specially made for the oversize fireplaces here in Davencourt. Someone strong had killed Jessie, pointing to a man. The two other men at Davencourt, Harlan Ames and the stableman, Loyal Wise, had no motive.

So, the killer was either Webb—and unless Webb confessed, Booley knew there was no way of proving it—or a stranger. There was no sign of forced entry, but to his amazement he'd discovered that none of the people here locked their balcony doors, so force wouldn't have been necessary. Nor was there anything stolen, which would have given them robbery as a motive. The plain fact was, Jessie was dead for no good reason that he could tell, and it was damn hard to make a murder charge stick without giving a jury a motive it could believe.

This was one murder that wasn't going to be solved. He could feel it in his bones, and it made him sick. He didn't like for law-breaking slime to get away with so much as stealing a pack of chewing gum, much less murder. It didn't
make any difference that Jessie had evidently been a bitch of the first water; she still hadn't deserved to have her head bashed in.

Well, he'd try. He'd check out all the angles, verify Webb's alibi, and present what he had to Simmons, but he knew the prosecutor was going to say they didn't have a case.

He sighed, got to his feet, and looked down at the forlorn little figure still on the sofa, and he was moved to offer her some comfort. “I don't think you give yourself enough credit, honey. You aren't stupid, and you aren't a coward. You're a sweet, smart girl, and I like you fine.”

She didn't reply, and he wondered if she'd even heard him. She'd been through so much in the last twelve hours, it was a wonder she hadn't cracked under the strain. He patted her on the shoulder and quietly left the room, leaving her alone with her regrets, and her nightmare images.

T
he next few days were hell.

The entire Shoals area, which consisted of Tuscumbia, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Florence, the four towns that butted together where Colbert and Lauderdale Counties met at the Tennessee River, were riveted by the spectacle of the bloody murder of a member of Colbert County's premier family and the ensuing investigation of her husband as the killer. Webb was as well known, if not quite as respected yet, as Marshall Davenport had been, and of course everyone who was anyone had known Jessie, the star of the local top society. Gossip ran rampant. Webb hadn't been arrested, and Sheriff Watts would say only that he had been questioned and released, but as far as everyone was concerned that was as good as saying he'd done it.

Why, look at how his only family treated him, the whispers ran. Lucinda cried every time she saw him, and she couldn't bring herself to talk to him yet. Gloria and Harlan Ames were convinced Webb had killed Jessie, and though publicly they didn't say anything, they had made a few comments to their closest friends, the “just between you and me” kind. The more moral souls were disapproving
when the confidential gossip was spread, but that didn't stop it from growing like kudzu.

Gloria and Harlan's two children, Baron and Lanette, kept their respective families as far away from Webb as they could.

Only Webb's mother, Yvonne, and his aunt Sandra seemed convinced of his innocence, but of course they would be. He'd always been Sandra's favorite, while she practically ignored Gloria's grandchildren. A definite rift was growing in the family. And as for Roanna, who had discovered the body, she was said to be suffering from shock and had all but sequestered herself. She had always been like a puppy dog at Webb's heels, but not even she had anything to do with him. Word was that they hadn't spoken since Jessie's death.

The insidious vines of gossip spread the rumor that Jessie had been savagely beaten before she'd been killed; someone else said she'd been mutilated. They said that Webb had been caught
in flagrante delicto
with Roanna, the little cousin, but credulity stopped short of actually believing that. Maybe he'd been caught, but with
Roanna?
Why, she was skinny as a rail, unattractive, and had no idea how to make herself appealing to a man.

Anyway, obviously Webb had been caught with
someone
, and gossip ran hot with speculation on the unknown woman's identity.

The autopsy on Jessie's body was completed, but the results weren't released pending the results of the investigation. Funeral arrangements were made, and so many people attended the service that the church couldn't hold everyone. Even people who hadn't known her personally attended out of curiosity. Webb stood alone, an island around which everyone else moved but never quite touched. The minister extended his sympathies. No one else did.

At the cemetery, it was much the same thing. Lucinda was heartbroken, weeping uncontrollably as she stared at Jessie's flower-laden casket, supported on brass rails over the raw, open mouth of the grave. It was a hot summer day,
without a cloud to mar the sky, and the white-molten sun soon had everyone dripping with sweat. Handkerchiefs and miscellaneous bits of paper were used to languidly fan perspiring faces.

Webb sat on one end of the first row of folding chairs that had been placed under the canopy for the immediate family. Yvonne sat beside him, firmly holding his hand, and Sandra sat beside her. The rest of the family had taken the other chairs, though no one seemed eager to be the one sitting directly behind Webb. Finally Roanna slipped into that chair, a frail wraith who had grown even thinner in the days since Jessie's murder. For once, she didn't stumble or drop anything. Her face was white and remote. Her dark chestnut hair, usually so untidy, was pulled sternly back from her face and tied with a black bow. She had always jittered around, as if she had too much energy to control, but now she was oddly still. Several people gave her curious glances, as if not quite certain of her identity. Her too-big features, so unsuited for the thinness of her face, somehow looked better suited to the remote severity that now swathed her. She still wasn't pretty, but there was something …

The prayers were said, and the mourners tactfully steered away from the gravesite so the casket could be lowered and the grave filled. No one actually left the cemetery, except for a few who had other things to do and couldn't wait around any longer for something to happen. The rest milled around, pressing Lucinda's hand, kissing her cheek. No one approached Webb. He stood alone, just as he had at the funeral home and then the church, his expression hard and closed.

Roanna stood it as long as she could. She had avoided him, knowing how he must hate her, but the way people were treating him made her bleed inside. She moved to his side and slipped her hand into his, her cold, frail fingers clinging to the hard, warm strength of his. He glanced down at her, his green eyes as welcoming as ice.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, her words audible only to
him. She was acutely aware of all the avid eyes trained on them, speculating on her gesture. “It's all my fault people are treating you like this.” Tears swam in her eyes, blurring his outline as she looked up at him. “I just wanted you to know that I didn't … I didn't do it on purpose. I didn't know Jessie was coming downstairs. I hadn't talked to her since lunch that day.”