Half Past Dead

by Meryl Sawyer

Tori never mentioned it, but she thought it was a hoot that Tyson Peebles had bought the house next door to the Kincaids. Every day, the judge and May Ellen had to drive past Peebles’ in-your-face mansion. Served both of them right. They thought they were so perfect.

  “What are you going to do about your sister?” Clay asked.

  Tori knew that tone of voice. She’d been in love with Clay since she was sixteen. She was pushing thirty-four now. Clay was upset—with her, with Justin Radner, with Kat. The only thing to do was placate him and wait it out.

  “What can I do? If Kat’s out on some type of work program, how can I get rid of her?”

  He hitched his shoulders and kept driving. Tori glanced out the window at the mini-Taras in the middle-class section of Twin Oaks. They were squeezed onto lots the size of Tyler Peebles’ fountain. “Aping their betters,” Tori’s mother often said.

  Tori’s condominium was in a discreet building hidden behind a row of stately cypress trees. It was the nicest complex in town, and Tori prided herself on the way she’d decorated it with beautiful antiques and fine fabrics. She’d invited the Kincaids for dinner once, and May Ellen actually complimented her decorating, but they’d never accepted another invitation.

  Clay pulled his sleek silver Porsche to a stop in front of her condo. She gazed at him, willing the Clay she knew and loved so much to resurface. A hard silence engulfed them. Tori waited, not quite holding her breath.

  “There’s no ‘us’ if you can’t get rid of your sister. My father’s seriously gearing up to run for the senate. We can’t afford to have criminals in the family.”

  “What can I possibly do?”

  He turned to her, and in the dim light, she saw eyes as hard and cold as a knife blade. Clay’s were usually bluer and sparkled with humor. “You’d better think of something.”

  She reached for the door handle.

  Clay put his hand on her arm, stopping her. “You know I love you.”

  Tori’s heart seized up, and she gazed at him. She’d loved him for so long. She couldn’t remember caring one whit about another man. She would do anything for him. She’d already proven that.

  “My father wants me married by the time the campaign starts. I’ll stump the state with him. He thinks it would be helpful if my wife were pregnant.”

  The shock of the revelation almost brought her to her knees in utter defeat. She knew what he was really saying. If she didn’t get rid of her sister, Clay would have to marry someone else.

  Tori couldn’t muster the breath to say good-night. She climbed out of the car and he roared away before she reached her porch. Somehow she managed to unlock her door. She stumbled to the sofa and sat there in the dark. What was she going to do?

  She couldn’t imagine who the judge would want Clay to marry. The girls from the “good” families were already married. Once the judge and Buck Mason had wanted Verity and Clay to wed. Then Verity had taken up with Justin Radner.

  When Justin dumped Verity and left for Duke, everyone assumed Clay and Verity would get together at Ole Miss. They’d dated, but Tori had been there and Clay loved her. Soon Verity was out of the picture forever.

  Tori had been through so much with Clay for so long. She couldn’t give up now. Even though it was almost midnight, she decided to go see her mother. She was in so much pain these days that her mother rarely slept except right after the nurse had given her an injection. Even then it was only for an hour or so.

  She drove up to the condo Loretta Wells had bought after her second husband—Kat’s father—had died. It was in a better neighborhood than the small house Parker Wells had purchased after they’d married. The home where Tori had grown up had been near winding Tuttle Creek. It was known in the area as “the crick,” and on the other side of it white trash lived in homes that squatted on concrete blocks. Pickups were parked on lawns that were nothing more than weed patches. Tori’s mother had wanted to distance herself from “those people” as much as possible.

  When her mother had fallen ill with ovarian cancer, Tori had been going through her things to help and discovered her mother had taken the money Parker Wells had set aside to send Tori and Kat to college. She’d bought the condo with it.

  Tori had been angry with her mother for about two seconds. Then she decided her mother had done the right thing. Tori hadn’t wanted to go to Ole Miss full time. She’d taken extension classes there to be close to Clay so Verity wouldn’t steal him away.

  Her mother had moved to a much more respectable area—a fact not lost on the Kincaids. What did make her angry was May Ellen Kincaid’s attitude. Even though her only child had dated Tori for years, May Ellen had never once invited her mother to her home.

  Loretta Wells never mentioned this slight. Getting Tori married to Clay had been a religious crusade for her mother. Tori would love to make her mother’s dream come true before cancer claimed her life.

  The light in the living room of her mother’s small condo was on, and Tori could see the blue-white flicker of the television. Tori parked her car in the space in front of her mother’s condo and got out. She wearily walked up to the door. She hated dumping this news on her mother.

  Tori let herself in with her key. Her mother’s eyes were wide open, and she was staring at the television, but Tori doubted she was actually paying attention.

  “Mom, how are you doing?”

  “My stars, don’t you look beautiful!”

  Tori tried for a smile. Since she could remember, people had told her how beautiful she was. What good was beauty if you couldn’t marry the man you loved?

  She sat beside her mother on the yellow chintz sofa Tori had bought when she’d redecorated her mother’s condo. The green eyes Tori had inherited gazed lovingly at Tori. Since the chemo, their vibrant color had dulled, and her gaunt face had cavernous hollows beneath the cheekbones. She was so thin that her housecoat hung on her like clothes on a scarecrow. Short, ropy strings of gray hair stuck out from her head.

  Tori asked, “How are you feeling?”

  “’Bout the same. Pain’s everywhere now.”

  “I wish there were something I could do.” Tori had taken her to specialists, brought in the best food, arranged for a nurse to come in three times a day, but nothing in Tori’s power was going to stop the cancer. With it came pain that pills and injections muted but couldn’t make go away.

  “I would feel better if you married Clay before I’m gone to glory.”

  Tori nodded, afraid to trust her voice.

  “What’s wrong?” Her mother fired the question at her the way she would have when she’d been well.

  Tori had never been able to lie to her mother. She read every gesture, every expression with startling accuracy. She had an uncanny perceptiveness where Tori was concerned.

  “Kat’s back in town. She’s out early for good behavior.”

  Her mother slumped back against the cushions, her eyeballs rolling heavenward. “Lord Almighty, this could finish me.”

  Tori waited, afraid to say more, until her mother’s breathing became more normal, and she looked at Tori. It took a few minutes to explain about the Kincaids’ reaction to the news, and Clay’s need to be married before his father started campaigning.

  Her mother stared at the TV for a moment, thinking. Then she asked, “If she’s out on parole, couldn’t she be sent back for a violation or something?”

  “Maybe. I should ask Justin Radner. He’ll know.”

  “Radner? That no-good from the trailer park? Is he back, too?”

  Sometimes it amazed Tori how like May Ellen her mother could be. She told her all about Justin and how she’d pawned off the Atherton place on him. Her mother rewarded Tori with a smile.

  “I’m sure Justin will help me.”

  Desperation glinted in her mother’s eyes. “If not, there are other ways.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DAVID NOYES LET HIMSELF into the Tribune’s offices just after dawn. The red brick building with white Corinthi
an pillars was classically southern. It was a throwback to an era David recalled fondly from his youth. All of Twin Oaks was in a time warp. He’d come here because he’d had no alternative. It had taken him over a year to recuperate from an automobile accident that had almost killed him. While he was recovering, the Boston Globe had replaced him with a young hotshot investigative reporter.

  Even with David’s credentials—two Pulitzers and sterling recommendations—no one wanted to employ a sixty-seven-year-old man with a bad back. His roommate from Harvard, Silas Beaucannon, had founded AmeriNews, which owned small-town newspapers across the country. Silas had given him a job. The Trib wasn’t a run-and-gun outfit like the Globe, but David discovered he really liked it here. The small-town atmosphere reminded him of rural Virginia where he’d grown up. Best of all, as executive editor and publisher, David was his own boss for a change.

  What he didn’t like was Beaucannon forcing a convict on him. He had no idea what he was going to do with the woman. He had a reporter who covered local sporting events, and a lady who wrote the society page. Folks around here bought the paper to see their names in it.

  What generated revenue was advertising. He was lucky to have Ace Holmes to do that job. Ace was a good old boy through and through. He knew everyone in town, especially the business people. Ace had no problem calling up businesses to remind them that special sales and coupons meant increased profits. Maybe Ace could put the woman to work.

  He turned on the lights in his office and inhaled deeply. There was always a trace of printer’s ink in the air. Old-fashioned presses in the back of the building produced the newspaper. Big-city papers had turned to computers, but the Trib still used a typesetter and a printing press. The smell never failed to bring back the old days when he’d been a cub reporter in Chicago.

  Where had the time gone?

  Reporting had been his life. Although he’d come close twice, he’d never married. Now he wondered if he’d made a mistake. A pang of loneliness hit. When had his life become so stagnant? He purged his regrets from his thoughts and concentrated on his notes about the murdered woman. He had one worthless field reporter who phoned in most of his news. David did the investigative reporting—not that there had been much to investigate until this murder. He’d covered every angle of the crime he could think of and come up with nothing.

  Someone had to have known her, but in the hours he’d spent interviewing people, no one had a clue who she was. The sheriff hadn’t had any better luck—or so he claimed. David had interviewed Justin Radner and was impressed with him, but David couldn’t help suspecting Radner was holding something back. His sixth sense had paid off in the past.

  He needed to develop a source inside the sheriff’s station. It hadn’t seemed necessary before because serious crime was rare in Twin Oaks, only one murder years ago and the robbery at the bank. He glanced at his watch. Kaitlin Wells should arrive in another two hours.

  David concentrated on the front page articles. Most would be pickups from the wire services. He decided to move the murdered woman’s story from the prime spot above the fold to below the fold. As long as the woman remained unidentified and the cause of death unknown, he doubted the readers would be interested in another rehash of what little facts were known.

  He scanned the wire services for possible stories. People drifted into the city room’s cube farm, and he waved from behind the glass that formed the top half of the wall enclosing his corner office but kept working. As soon as he had the Wells woman settled with Ace, he wanted to go over to the sheriff’s station and see if he could pry some new information out of one of the deputies about the murdered woman.

  David heard a knock on the open door to his office and looked up. Connie Proctor was leaning against the doorjamb. An imposing widow with blond hair bleached almost white, Connie was a workhorse who served as the copy editor and wrote the obituaries. She was also in charge of death notices, which usually ran with a picture of the deceased and were paid for by the family. It had proven to be a lucrative source of revenue for the paper.

  In his experience, every office had someone like Connie—a stellar employee but a person who enjoyed bad news and put a negative spin on anything she could. With David, she was friendly—almost too friendly. He couldn’t decide if this was her way of getting on the good side of her boss or if she was flirting with him. He handled her behavior by keeping strictly to business.

  “Kaitlin Wells is here,” Connie informed him, rolling her eyes as if the devil himself had arrived.

  “Have her come in.” David selected the final article for the front page from UPI and pressed his computer’s save button. When he spun around in his chair, an attractive brunette in a blue suit with a short skirt that showed off her slim legs was standing in front of him.

  “Mr. Noyes,” she said in a soft voice. “I’m Kaitlin Wells. I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to work here.”

  “You’re welcome.” He gestured for her to sit in the chair in front of his desk, thinking she didn’t look anything like the picture he’d seen in the Trib’s archives. “Kaitlin, I want to discuss some of the terms I have for employing you.”

  “All right.” She gazed at him with arresting green eyes. If she had long blond hair, she would be a dead ringer for her sister, Tori. “Everyone calls me Kat.”

  “Okay, Kat it is.” He decided she seemed to be more assertive than he’d been led to expect when he’d told the staff she would be at the Trib on a work furlough. He’d envisioned a plump woman in plain clothes, hunched shoulders, and world-weary eyes from being incarcerated. If he’d seen Kat on the street, he would never have imagined she was a felon.

  “I want you to be on time. Come in at eight and you may leave at five. You’ll have one hour for lunch. We have a break room with a refrigerator and microwave, in case you want to bring your lunch. No eating or smoking at your desk.”

  “Where is my desk?”

  “Out there in the city room. That’s what we call the room where our reporters work. I’m going to give you a few different assignments until I decide what suits you best.”

  “I notice the paper seems to have more ads than when I lived here.”

  David smiled inwardly. She’d taken the trouble to look over the paper. A good sign. “AmeriNews bought the paper five years ago. They own over two thousand papers in small towns. Advertising is what makes any paper profitable. I think I’ll start you off working with Ace Holmes. He’s in charge of advertising.”

  A beat of silence. “Will I have a chance to do any reporting?”

  He was momentarily speechless with surprise. “I’d have you help me with a murder case that—”

  “The woman found in the brush out in the unincorporated area. I read the article in Saturday’s paper.”

  He really didn’t have time to teach her reporting. It would be better to assign her to Ace, but he found himself saying, “I think the sheriff knows more than he’s telling us. Any ideas on how to find out?”

  She looked at him with wide green eyes. He doubted she had what it took to become a reporter, and he mentally kicked himself for asking.

  “I have an idea. If you take me to my desk, I’ll make a call.”

  He hesitated, measuring her for a second before asking, “Why don’t you tell me what you’re going to do?”

  She leaned forward slightly, excitement lighting her face. “Women talk. I have a friend who’s a hairdresser. There are only two beauty shops in town. I’ll bet Lola Rae styles a deputy’s wife or someone at the station.”

  He hated to admit it, but this wasn’t a half-bad idea. Women gossiped, and they had been reliable sources in the past. “Call her from the second desk, the one with the National Geographic calendar on the wall.”

  David watched Kat walk out to her desk in the cube farm. When he’d heard she was coming, David had gone to the newspaper’s morgue where all the previous issues of the paper were stored. He’d read about her being caught by the presid
ent of the bank with money missing from the vault. The evidence seemed irrefutable.

  Because it was a federal crime, the trial had been held in Jackson, the capital. The Trib had sent a reporter, and the paper had printed detailed articles. The reporter had left the Trib shortly after the trial, but reading between the lines, David decided Kat’s public defender had done little to help her case.

  A few minutes later, David looked up and Kat was standing at the entrance to his office, grinning. “I was right. Lola Rae does a deputy’s wife’s hair. The woman told her that the sheriff didn’t have much faith in the local coroner.”

  “He’s just a mortician. There isn’t enough call for autopsies to justify a full-time coroner.”

  “Sheriff Radner sent tissue samples and the body of the victim to New Orleans.”

  David frowned. “New Orleans? Why not the state crime lab?”

  “The woman said the sheriff thinks they’re slow and sloppy.”

  He considered this information. “I haven’t had any experience with the state lab, but Radner would be in a position to know.”

  “The results are supposed to be back today.”

  Interesting, he thought. New Orleans was practically murder capital U.S.A. It wasn’t as big as L.A. or New York, but for its size, the city had an alarming number of homicides. No doubt, the coroner’s office there could analyze the information even better than the state crime lab.

  “Okay,” he told her. “Here’s what a reporter does.”

  “Verifies the information with a reliable person. We don’t want to print rumors,” she said quickly. “I read a book on newspapers from the library over the weekend.”

  David couldn’t help smiling. Despite his earlier reservations, he liked Kat Wells. He just hoped she didn’t make him regret helping her. “We need to talk to the sheriff and ask him if it’s true.”

  “But protect our source, right?”

  “Let’s go over to the station now.” He stood up.

  “What if the sheriff isn’t in?”

  “Ask a deputy to confirm or deny.”