Who Let That Killer in the House?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “I will,” she assured me. “Don’t worry.”

  When the paper came out Wednesday afternoon, I grabbed it and hurried to my office, actually afraid to see what Slade had written about DeWayne’s death. He’d remained true to his editorial roots in the news article—included every one of the gory facts: graffiti on the school and DeWayne’s house, all that was in the clippings sent to the newspaper “and possibly to Evans himself,” and the gruesome discovery of DeWayne’s body in the locker room. He didn’t mention that it was murder, so I figured the police were holding that information back for some reason. Slade did leave my name out of the article, as I had requested, and told the whole truth about DeWayne’s college episode.

  Bethany filled me in on the Stantons that week. I was glad to hear that Hollis was taking serious safety precautions. She stayed at the pool all day instead of popping out to meet friends for lunch. She drove straight to ball practice after work, and called to be sure Garnet or Sara Meg was at home before she left the other girls. Bethany followed her home.

  I was surprised to learn Friday that Garnet had started driving again, too. Bethany said that when Laura MacDonald got wind that Hollis was in danger, she concluded Garnet might be, as well. So Laura offered Garnet a loaner company car and persuaded her to resume driving while she still lived in a small, familiar town. Garnet phoned the insurance company to see how much it would cost her to get insured again and discovered that although Buddy had said he’d canceled her policy after her little accident, he’d never actually gotten around to doing it. She was now driving Laura’s car to school and work.

  “We’re being really careful,” Hollis promised with her saucy grin at church on Sunday.

  Buddy frowned. “I keep telling Sara Meg we ought to take the girls to the beach until Smitty’s trial. I offered to rent a place, but she won’t go.”

  “I can’t leave the store right now,” Sara Meg snapped. “I don’t know if it can survive, but it certainly can’t if I go gallivanting all over the world.”

  Buddy turned away. “Maybe I’ll just take them myself.” That was the first time I ever remembered hearing them quarrel.

  Bethany reported there was a huge fight later that afternoon when Buddy suggested again that he and the girls go to the beach alone. Garnet refused to miss work. Hollis refused to give up ball practice. Buddy stormed out, furious. Bethany said he looked so funny that she and Hollis collapsed in giggles. I hoped Buddy hadn’t heard them, after all the trouble he’d been willing to take to keep his nieces safe.

  Monday afternoon I went down to Myrtle’s for a little peace and quiet. Joe Riddley was ordering fall stock on his desk phone, and he tended to get noisy when folks said they couldn’t deliver when he wanted things delivered. Myrtle’s was cool and empty in the middle of the afternoon, and Art was sitting over in a corner scribbling in a notebook. “Writing poems?” I asked.

  He flushed to the roots of his hair and shut his notebook abruptly. “Yeah,” he muttered. “You want coffee?”

  “Make it iced tea today, with lots of lemon. It’s too hot for coffee.” I stretched out in a booth and slipped my feet out of my shoes to rest them.

  When he clumped back over a few minutes later, I asked, “Have you sent any more poems to the paper lately? Slade said he got an anonymous one about Othello last week—pretty good rhymes, I understand. Made me think of the poetry you write.”

  Art looked over his shoulder to be sure Myrtle was safely in the kitchen, then leaned down and said earnestly, “I was real sorry I sent it when I did. I hadn’t heard Coach Evans was dead when I mailed it, so I was sorta glad Mr. Rutherford decided not to print it.” He stopped to lick his lips. “But I felt like I had to write it. I know Coach Evans was a friend of yours and everything, and I’m real sorry he died, but I just couldn’t stand to see him hugging and kissing those girls. And Garnet—well, she didn’t hug or kiss him or anything, but she liked him more than she ought to. You want chocolate pie with that?”

  “Yeah.” While he was gone, I pictured a little meter we could all carry around to let us know exactly how much we ought to like each person we meet. Handy little things they could be, except when they told you what you didn’t want to hear. I was wondering who would program them, and determine the “liking voltage,” when Art came back with my pie. I sipped my tea, which was strong, sweet and cold, and asked casually, “You like Garnet a lot, don’t you?”

  He bobbed his head so hard his Adam’s apple jiggled. “Yes, ma’am. She’s real special, don’t you think? I mean, she’s so dedicated to her music and her studies, and so—pure, somehow. So untouched by the rest of the world. I don’t know how to explain it, but—” He came to a dead stop.

  “But she makes you want to write poems.” I smiled to let him know I was on his side.

  “She sure does.” He practically lit up the room with his wide, wet smile. Then he returned to his poems and I tackled my pie, wondering if Smitty was the only reason Hollis was sticking so close to home and whether Garnet had ulterior motives for refusing to leave town.

  If she and Art were the two people Hollis had wanted to discuss with DeWayne, Sara Meg might have to face some unfortunate facts, whether she liked it or not.

  25

  Before I’d settled in my mind whether to ask Hollis straight out whether she was worried about Garnet and Art, or whether to suggest to Sara Meg that she ask Garnet about him, Police Chief Charlie Muggins dropped by my office Tuesday morning with a bombshell.

  “Well, Judge, I have some good news and some bad news for you. Which you want first?” He took off his hat and lowered himself warily into my visitors’ chair. I listened to it creak beneath him and swivelled my own chair around so I could watch if it broke under his weight. I also checked to be sure my skirt was modest in that position. Chief Muggins tends to have wandering eyes.

  “Oh, give me the bad news first and sweeten it with the good.” I was racking my brain trying to figure out what bad news he could possibly be in a position to bring me. Had he persuaded the chief magistrate to fire me? Chief Muggins had never made any bones about the fact that he’d opposed my appointment.

  He slowly laid his cap on one thigh, giving himself more time to build up the suspense. “That Evans fellow you found? He didn’t kill himself like you thought he did. He was murdered. We found all sorts of evidence to back that up.”

  He sounded as if I’d personally insisted on suicide and was going to be real disappointed to learn a fine man hadn’t decided to end his own existence. I considered pointing out that I was the one who had called Ike to first suggest it could be murder, but I bit my tongue and kept my face in the “Be Sweet” position Mama had drilled into me for years. “That’s not bad news, Chief. It’s real good news. I had a hard time believing DeWayne would kill himself. So what’s your good news?”

  “We know who did it.”

  “Smitty Smith?”

  He threw back his head and laughed, showing more fillings than teeth. “I knew you were going to say that. But Smitty’s got a real alibi this time.”

  “He always does,” I pointed out, “but if you lean on his friends, maybe you can break it.”

  “No, this one’s airtight.” He sprawled in his chair with his legs stuck out, proud of himself. “He’s been pretty evasive about where he was that night, which made me suspicious, so I started doing some checking. Turns out his mama got herself beat up earlier that night on a date and didn’t want anybody to know. So Smitty drove her—without a license, mind you—to the emergency room in Augusta so none of her friends would see her looking like that.” He beamed at me, expecting me to share the joke. I thought instead of his own wife and how often Martha had seen her in our emergency room before she got smart and left town. I almost missed hearing him add, “They clocked into the hospital at eleven Friday night and she was sent up to a room around four in the morning. The nurses say Smitty was with her until after lunch.”

  “Then who else could it be?” I scarc
ely breathed, waiting for his answer. I already knew what he was going to say: Tyrone Noland. Tyrone was certainly strong enough, and if he were fixated on Hollis and thought she had a crush on DeWayne . . .

  The chief surprised me. “That Franklin boy. Art, he calls himself. Real airy-fairy kind of fellow.”

  “He calls himself Art because his name is Arthur.”

  Maybe I sounded a bit testy, but I don’t like that kind of language in my office, especially when I’m sharing it with Chief Muggins. There never seems to be enough air in the room for the two of us.

  Charlie picked his hat up by the brim and started patting it on his thigh.“He’s a weirdo, whatever his name is. Writes poems, acts in plays, and wears black all the time, just like those kids who shoot up their schools.”

  “They don’t all shoot up schools,” I objected. “Besides, Art’s scrawny. How on earth could he kill DeWayne, even if he wanted to? And what makes you think he did?”

  “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but since you asked, we found a piece of a note in Evans’s wastebasket written in block letters. Slade Rutherford down at the paper got another note the next day—well, on Monday—written in the same block letters. I mentioned that to Myrtle, over at the restaurant, and last night she called and said she’d found a book of poems written in those same block letters. Franklin had written them to somebody with ‘hair like russet leaves’ and ‘eyes of delicious brown.’ From what we can ascertain, there isn’t but one person in town who that’s likely to be—little Garnet Stanton. Myrtle says they’re real sweet on each other.”

  “He’s made no secret of the fact that he likes Garnet,” I admitted, the stuffing knocked out of me so bad, it was all I could do to sit erect. I asked the first thing that came to mind. “Why on earth would Art kill DeWayne?”

  “We don’t have to prove motive—you know that, Judge. It’s enough for me that I got a witness who puts him on that side street by the school at the right time, around eight Saturday morning, and I got notes and poems all written in block letters. That’s a pretty good start, wouldn’t you say? Oh, and there’s one more thing: Lab reports show that the two notes were written on paper from the notebook you found—and lost—at Myrtle’s, the one Tyrone Noland admits was his. Now, Tyrone says he hasn’t had the notebook since he left it in the booth at Myrtle’s, and he also says there were blank pages in the back when he lost it. When my men fished it out of a wastebasket near the school a few hours later, there were no blank pages. Who was in a better position than Art to take that notebook and tear out the pages?”

  I thought back to that day and shook my head. “I was watching the booth the whole time until Art and Smitty started a fight. Art was never near it. During the fight, while I wasn’t watching it, he and Smitty were punching each other. He couldn’t have taken it. I would swear to that in court.”

  Chief Muggins glared at me, breathing hard. “Don’t make life more difficult than you have to, Judge. You asked about motive a while back. Maybe he thought the Evans fellow was making time with Garnet. I hear she liked him—Myrtle said she was actually smiling at Evans the afternoon after the championship game, and you know as well as I do, that girl doesn’t smile.”

  “Have you asked Garnet about any of this?”

  He stuck his thumbs in the pockets of his jacket. “I’m heading over to interview her now.”

  “You know she’ll be at MacDonald Motors, not at home? She just got a job there.”

  He looked disconcerted, and I knew he’d looked forward to talking to Garnet alone at home, the old lech. Even the idea of him alone with her in one of Laura’s offices was enough to make me reach for my pocketbook. “Maybe I ought to come with you. I know her pretty well, and—you know, a woman’s touch.” Although, at that moment, the only woman’s touch I felt like giving was a smack to the side of his head.

  To my surprise, he took me up on my offer. As we crossed the parking lot, he said—so casually I might have missed its importance—“I hope she’ll have something for us, because we can’t actually match the handwriting.”

  I stopped, astounded. “Why not?”

  “The notes and poems are both written in the kind of block letters they teach in drafting class, engineering school, art school, architectural drawing—lots of places. Hard to match. And there weren’t any prints on the notes, either. Looks like whoever wrote them wore gloves. Let’s hope little Garnet is willing to help us out.”

  She might be, if he called her Little Garnet to her face. Help him right out the door.

  To my surprise, when we got to MacDonald’s, Laura nodded toward her father’s old office at the back. “Garnet and her mother are in there.”

  Sara Meg opened the door, her face flushed. I wondered if she’d come so she could be there for the interview to protect her daughter or to make sure Garnet didn’t embarrass the family. I was even more surprised when Chief Muggins announced we were there to interview Garnet. If he hadn’t called ahead of time, why was Sara Meg away from her store in the middle of the day?

  Garnet sat in a chair across the room, white and shaking. Charlie took the big desk chair that used to hold Skye MacDonald’s bulk, and my eyes misted with tears at that memory. Sara Meg took another chair, and I took the one that was left, over in a corner.

  Garnet sat there pale and remote, her eyes straying to the door like she wanted to get back to work.

  “Who’s minding the store?” I asked Sara Meg.

  Garnet glared. “She could be, if she wanted to. I certainly don’t need her here.”

  Sara Meg gave a nervous little laugh. “So what can we do for you?” She turned to face Chief Muggins and crossed her hands in her lap.

  Chief Muggins set his hat on the desk and leaned on his elbows. “I have a few questions for Garnet, here. You’re good friends with Art Franklin, right?”

  Garnet shrugged. “We have some classes together.”

  “But he writes poems about you, correct?”

  She looked at her hands. “He writes poems. They aren’t necessarily about me.”

  “This is really distressing for her,” Sara Meg interjected. “People keep thinking there is something between them when there isn’t. Isn’t that right, honey?”

  “We just have some classes together.” She paused. “I rode home from school with him once.”

  Chief Muggins clasped his hands before him on the desk like a friendly uncle. “What if I told you Franklin may have murdered DeWayne Evans? Would you have something to say to that?” He watched her carefully.

  Garnet’s gaze flew to his face. “He was m-m-murdered?”

  “Maybe so. Do you know anything about how Evans and Franklin felt about each other? Were they both sweet on you, maybe?” He leaned even nearer and gave her a wink.

  Sara Meg answered for Garnet. “Of course not! Garnet wouldn’t—she hasn’t—she—”

  Garnet shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself like a blast of Arctic air had swept through Georgia. Finding out somebody you knew and maybe liked has been murdered can do that to you. I still felt chilled by DeWayne’s murder myself.

  Chief Muggins’s voice grew low and smarmy. “We already have evidence that Art may have killed Mr. Evans, so tell me, little lady, what was going on between you and the chemistry teacher?”

  Garnet jumped to her feet and pressed her hands over her ears. “Mr. Evans was the kindest, smartest, dearest—” She dashed through the door and slammed it behind her.

  Sara Meg stood, her face like ice. “Get out of here! You, too, Mac. I know the law has a job to do, but you all have gone too far.” She strode to the door and held it open for us.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered as we left. “If I’d known you were going to be here, I wouldn’t have come.”

  Her eyes were dark and stormy. “As if I didn’t have trouble enough without all this.”

  Chief Muggins talked on the way home about how Garnet would come around when she’d had time to think things over. You’d have thou
ght he expected her to beat him to the police station with a statement to convict Art. I sat in miserable silence wishing Joe Riddley and I had gone with Walker and Cindy to Hawaii, the way they’d wanted us to. I could be lying on a sunny beach right then, not knowing a thing about what was going on in Hopemore.

  I didn’t realize we’d parked in our parking lot until a voice outside my window startled me. “If you are going to have a fling with the police chief, Little Bit, couldn’t you find a more private place?” Joe Riddley opened the door and leaned across me. “If you want her, Charlie, you can have her, but I warn you, she can’t cook.”

  I supposed Chief Muggins meant to leer, but he looked

  just like a polecat. “Then the deal’s off, Judge. Sorry. You’re gonna have to stay with this old coot, like it or not. But you think about what we been talking about, okay?”

  I sighed. “As if I could help it.”

  26

  Bethany told me the next afternoon why Sara Meg had gone to MacDonald Motors. Hollis had seen Garnet sneak a suitcase into the trunk of her car that morning and called her mother from the pool. Sara Meg had gone over to confront Garnet.

  “Garnet wouldn’t tell her where she was going, though, or who with,” Bethany reported, sitting in my chair and twisting a long strand of hair around her finger. “She wouldn’t even tell Hollis, and she was furious with her for telling their mama. Sara Meg told Buddy, of course, and he got mad at Garnet and Hollis both. Hollis says things are real tense over there now. Nobody’s talking to anybody. She asked if she could spend the night with me, and Mama said she could. I’m so lucky, Me-mama. My folks never fuss like that.”

  Apparently she had not only forgiven Ridd for Saturday night, but forgotten, as well.

  She stood to leave, then turned with a sigh. “But I wish Mama would let Hollis and me drive to California before school starts. Would you ask her? Please?”

  “Not likely, honey. I have a feeling you’re going to have to be a little older and wiser before your folks let you go that far alone.”