The Angel Whispered Danger (27 page)

The two young officers who stood in the doorway looked as tired and perplexed as I felt. “Somebody at your place called and said they thought you might be having some kind of trouble,” the taller of the two said to Uncle Ernest.

“That could very well have been the case if I hadn’t had a jolt of the truth,” my uncle said. “I have good reason to believe my caretaker—who seems to be on the run, by the way—might be responsible for the death of Ella Stegall, and God only knows who else before her!”

My grandmother marched immediately to the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. “What makes you think that Casey . . . Rose . . . would want to kill poor Ella?” she asked Uncle Ernest.

Violet answered for him. “Ella recognized her voice—I’m sure of it. You know how blind she’d become, and they say people tend to make up for that with other senses. And remember what she said to me about a voice or voices? We thought she must’ve been talking about hearing somebody in the woods back there, but I think she was beginning to remember where she’d heard Casey’s voice before.”

“I don’t know how,” Uncle Lum said. “I never heard Casey say much of anything.”

“And since I don’t hear too well, she must’ve known she was safe with me,” Uncle Ernest said. “But people tend—tended to ignore Ella. Poor thing, she was always just there in the background. I expect Rose forgot about her and let her guard down. We’ve had repairmen from time to time, and that crew came to spray the orchard not too long ago. Casey usually dealt with them and Ella might have overheard.”

“Or she might have heard her speaking to the cat,” Violet said. “Casey didn’t like Dagwood. He dug in her flowerbed, got in her way, all those things cats do. Once I heard her tell him to stay away from the mower or he’d be mincemeat, and Casey sounded like he . . . she wouldn’t be all that upset about it, either.”

Ma Maggie frowned. “What did you do? Did you say anything?”

“I told Ella I thought she’d better keep a closer watch on Dagwood,” Violet said.

“Knowing how outspoken Ella was, I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t confront Casey about her identity,” Uncle Ernest said. “And that signed her death warrant.”

“But we can’t arrest someone on supposition,” the younger policeman said, reaching for his radio. “I’m afraid we’ll need more than that.”

“I’ll show you more than that—a lot more than that. Meanwhile I suggest you run a background check on Casey Grindle and see if it matches up with Rose Dutton—who, by the way, is probably over the county line by now.” Uncle Ernest spoke with authority, and when he stood and looked at the two, I understood why his students had called him “Emperor Ernie.”

“I believe if I were you, I would get in touch with the powers that be right now, and put out an APB before she gets any farther,” he told them.

I wasn’t surprised when they did.

I was surprised a little later, however, when the sheriff himself showed up at Bramblewood, leaving the two deputies in charge of seeing that my uncle’s can of Chocolate Comfort got to the lab. It was barely daylight and Violet had gone to bed as soon as we got to the house, but I had downed two mugs of my grandmother’s “stand-alone” coffee and was good for another hour or so at least. Besides, I wanted to know just what Uncle Ernest had in mind when he told the police he had something more to show them.

“If this is as important as you seem to think it is, I want to have a look at it myself,” Sheriff Yeager told my uncle. He was a stocky, balding man who looked to be in his fifties. I had seen him the day after Ella’s fall and again with the searchers when Burdette and the others led us out of the woods. This morning his khaki uniform was neatly pressed, his black shoes gleamed and he smelled of woodsy aftershave. I marveled at how quickly he had managed to look regulation spiffy at such short notice.

Aunt Leona was still asleep, and I doubted if we’d see Violet all day, but Grady, Ma Maggie, Uncle Lum and I followed the two men outside where Uncle Ernest unlocked the trunk of his ten-year-old Chevrolet that looked every bit as new as the day he bought it. Expecting to be shooed away at any minute, I stayed in the background as he carried a large cardboard box to the porch and set it down.

“What in the world is that?” my grandmother asked as her brother opened the box.

The sheriff carefully lifted out something wrapped in shredded black plastic that fell apart in minute tatters to reveal what looked to have once been a canvas backpack, black with dirt and decay. “Where’d you find this?” he said.

“Under a rose bush in the garden,” my uncle said.

“You mean somebody buried it there?” Sheriff Yeager peered closer. “Do you know who it belonged to?” he said, speaking in my uncle’s ear.

Uncle Ernest looked at the rest of us like he wished we’d go away, but it was too late. Unless threatened with dire punishment—like having to iron while watching table tennis—I was there for the duration. “Do you remember reading about the hippie couple who disappeared on the river back in the sixties?” he asked the sheriff. “I believe this belonged to the man—Shamrock, I think he called himself—and I’d be very much surprised if that skeleton they found in Remeth-churchyard wasn’t his, too.”

“Have you looked inside the pack?” the sheriff wanted to know, but my uncle shook his head. “Thought it best to wait, I was afraid I might destroy something.”

The rest of us stood restlessly while the sheriff went to his car for gloves. “You couldn’t pay me to touch that nasty thing,” Ma Maggie said. I felt the same.

From the expression on his face, I don’t think Sheriff Yeager relished the idea, either, but he lifted the flap after the buckle fell away in his hands, and reached inside.

I don’t know what I expected him to find, but I found myself backing away as if something grisly might jump out at me. Instead he drew out what was left of a pair of moccasins, rotted remnants of what could have been clothing, a rusty key chain with a shamrock enclosed in plastic and a tarnished, waterstained wristwatch with the crystal miraculously unbroken.

The sheriff held the watch to the light and squinted at something on the back. “Still a little too dark to see out here,” he said. “Let’s take it inside. Looks like some kind of engraving.”

Uncle Ernest switched on a lamp in the living room and the sheriff held the watch under the light.
“Q.E.P., 1962,”
Grady read aloud, since he obviously had the best vision in the bunch.

Uncle Ernest ran his fingers over the engraving. “Quincy Puckett—don’t know what his middle name was, but I’ll bet this watch was a high school graduation gift.”

Sheriff Yeager looked up. “If all this is true, who do you suppose put him over there in Remeth Cemetery?”

My uncle’s face was solemn—more than solemn—his expression made me want to throw my arms around him and protect him from all this. Uncle Ernest was such a good man, and innocent in so many ways. How could this be happening to him?

“I don’t
suppose
,” he said. “Quincy Puckett was buried over there by Rose Dutton, otherwise known as Casey Grindle.” He paused and looked at Ma Maggie. “And earlier, Waning Crescent.”

Valerie Rose Dutton had been eighteen and beautiful when Uncle Ernest discovered her bathing in the river behind Bramblewood early one September morning in the mid-1960s.

“She told me she had been abducted and abused by a man who called himself Shamrock, and that he had held her prisoner and forced her into going along while he robbed merchants and committed numerous other crimes,” my uncle related. “They had spent the night ashore, and when she awoke that morning, Rose said Shamrock had taken their raft and left her there. She’d been begging him to change, she told me, to give up the way they were living. She was afraid to leave him, she said. Afraid of what he might do.”

We had moved to the kitchen where Uncle Lum fried bacon while I whipped up a dozen eggs for scrambling—holding out one, of course, to soft boil for my uncle. Uncle Ernest nursed a cup of coffee and looked out the window at what had been his young wife’s garden. “She was so young, so very lovely, and I was in my midthirties and had never had a lasting relationship with a woman before—never felt that strongly about anyone.”

“That’s because he’d never seen one bathing naked in the river,” Grady whispered behind me. I gave him my “shut up” look.

“I believed her, of course,” our uncle continued. “I was a fool, but I didn’t care. Even when the news came out about the raft being found and the girl, Waning Crescent, was named in the newspapers as an accomplice, I never doubted her story. Shamrock had purposely sunk the raft and continued on foot to throw off the police, she said, and I wanted it to make sense so badly, it did.

“She cried; Rose was good at crying, and begged me not to give her away. She had no family, she said. I was all she had in the world, and so we were married.”

For somebody who had been awake since before dawn, my grandmother’s eyes were wide. “You told us you met Rose during summer session at the college, said she’d just completed her sophmore year and was taking some time off to decide on her major.”

Uncle Ernest almost smiled. “I was her major,” he said. “For a little while, at least. I was happy, she was happy—or I thought she was, and nobody was the wiser. She left me only a few months before our second anniversary, said she’d made a big mistake.” He rubbed gnarled hands over his face. “My God, how could I have been so stupid?”

“You said you weren’t surprised that Rose had turned up,” Grady said as he dealt plates around the kitchen table. “What made you think she was close by?”

Uncle Ernest put a pitcher of orange juice on the counter and searched the cabinet for enough glasses. “When they found that skeleton over in Remeth and the police told me it was that of a man who died about the same time Rose came,” he said. “And we knew somebody had used Ella’s cat to lure her to the edge of that drop-off. For the life of me, though, I couldn’t figure out why Rose would do that until Violet said something about Ella’s recognizing the voice.

“But it was that thing with the yellow jackets that convinced me. Somebody didn’t want Belinda to find that epinephrine in time.”

“Where is Belinda?” Ma Maggie wanted to know.

“In Atlanta with her daughter for a week or so,” Uncle Ernest said. “After what happened at the reunion, I felt uneasy about her being here.”

Grady just couldn’t resist. “Are you two gonna get—”

“Married?” Our uncle poured juice all around. “Well, Grady, I haven’t asked her yet, but when and if I do, you’ll be the first to know—if she accepts, that is.”

Sheriff Yeager, after an obligatory, “Oh, no—I couldn’t!” not only joined us for breakfast, but insisted on making the toast. “I can’t understand, though, why Rose has waited this long to turn up. Why now? And where’s she been all this time?”

My uncle reached for the strawberry jam. “For one thing, she wanted me out of the way, and probably Belinda, as well. Guess we’ll have to wait to find out why when they catch up with her—
if
they catch up with her.”

My grandmother excused herself from the table and folded her paper napkin as if it had been fine linen. “Well, I’m going to have to wait a while to find that out, because I’m going home and take a nap—and you should, too, Ernest. Ella’s service is at three and we’ll have all those people dropping by afterward.”