by Amy Vansant
“Aw Char, I’m scared,” said Al, rattling his ice. “I’m scared to tell the sheriff. I thought I’d bounce it off you, see what you thought.”
“But why me?”
“Because you found her. Maybe you know stuff I don’t. And ’cuz you’re smart. Everybody knows it. You make a killing on trivia night. You and your nose always in those books,” he thrust a thumb towards the living room where Charlotte’s book Stonehenge stood. “And you’re close to Frank. I thought maybe you could help me out there, make sure he doesn’t arrest me? I know I didn’t do anything to her, but I’d feel better if I told him about it. Maybe it could help in some little way.”
Charlotte bit her lip, considering the possibilities and the best way to handle this new information.
“Do you mind if I make a phone call?”
“You callin’ the cops?” asked Al, beginning to stand.
“No! No, I’m going to call Declan. I want to see if he knows what his mother was wearing when she went missing.”
“Oh, like if it wasn’t white then it wasn’t her? That’s smart. See? I never thought about that. That’s good. That’s good. Careful how you tell him, though. He might not be so happy with me, y’know…that maybe I almost hit his mom with my car and all.”
“I’m just going to ask him about the clothes right now.”
Al settled back into his chair.
“Okay. You call him.”
Charlotte found her phone and dialed the number on the card Declan had given her the day they met.
“Hello?”
“Declan? It’s Charlotte. Quick question. What was your mother wearing when she disappeared?”
“What was she wearing? Why?”
“I just need to know. It’s probably nothing.”
“I don’t know,” he said after a pause. “I was asleep when she left. She was wearing her pajamas the last time I saw her. If she went out, she probably got redressed.”
“Were they white?”
“What?”
“Her pajamas.”
“Oh, no, they were navy, I do remember that. Like a cotton shorts outfit with little dots all over them. The dots were green, I think.”
“Was her car missing? Did she take it?”
“No. Wherever she went, she walked, or was picked up.”
“Where did you live then? Was it within walking distance of my house?”
“Of your house? I…I guess it was. Your part of the community wasn’t there then, but yes, we were just outside of Pineapple Port on your side of the development.”
“Hm…” said Charlotte, looking at Al. Declan’s information didn’t rule out the possibility that he had seen Erin on the road that night.
“What’s this about? Did you hear something?” asked Declan.
“No, I’ll tell you later. It’s probably nothing. I have to go, okay?”
He sighed. “Not really. I don’t see why—”
“I just can’t this second. I’ll talk to you soon, bye.”
She hung up and rubbed her lips with the knuckle of her left index finger, staring at Al, who had moved into the kitchen to hover near the scotch.
“What he say?” he asked.
“The last time Declan saw his mother she was wearing navy pajamas.”
“So it wasn’t her!” said Al, his face awash with relief.
“Not necessarily. He said she disappeared after he went to bed. If she decided to leave the house she would have changed.”
“Aah,” he grunted, face collapsing into a frown. “You got me all excited there for a second. I better have a drink.”
He poured himself another, an act that barely registered for Charlotte as she imagined a girl in white, captured in headlights, running down the street. It was a haunting image.
“Even if it wasn’t Erin, I wonder what happened to the girl you did see,” she mumbled.
“Maybe it was a ghost. Maybe I was seein’ things. It all happened so fast. Nobody ever said anythin’ about finding nobody on the side of the road. Honestly, I might have imagined the whole thing.”
“So you didn’t see reports about Erin missing? On the news?”
“Nah. It wasn’t like today with the news everywhere, twenty-four hours a day. I never heard about her missing. I don’t even know if it was around the same time to be honest. It’s just eatin’ at me.”
“Al,” said Charlotte, adopting her most serious face. “Please promise me you’ll tell Frank this story.”
He scowled. “I dunno… I want to…”
“It’s the right thing to do. I’m sure it’s nothing. It’s just the right thing to do.”
Al nodded and thrust his hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts. He started pulling out keys, a Leatherman knife, loose aspirin, gum and bits of paper, piling it all on her counter. His pockets were like a magical clown car, contents never-ending.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought I’d leave my stuff here, in case he takes me to jail. I don’t trust those guys, I’ll never get it back.”
“You don’t have to do that. You’re not going to jail.”
Al stopped and stared at her.
“I promise. And if you do, I’ll take all your stuff to your wife for safekeeping, okay?”
He started stuffing things back into his pockets.
“Okay, Char,” he said, clapping her shoulder when he’d finished. “I’ll go over there right now. I’ll do it.”
She clapped him back. “Good man.”
“Thanks,” he said, pausing at the door. “It felt good to get that off my chest.”
“Well, it will feel even better to tell the sheriff.”
“I dunno. He’s a hardass.”
Charlotte snickered. She loved how honest everyone became after the age of seventy.
“You can trust him. What if I went with you?”
“Would you?” Al beamed. “I was just about to ask. That would be real nice of you. I’d feel better.”
“No problem. Let me grab my flip flops.”
Charlotte and Al walked down the street and knocked on Frank’s door. Darla answered, wearing a flowing caftan in turquoise and brown.
“Charlotte! What brings you here?” her face clouded with confusion. “With Al?”
“She’s here in case I need someone to hold my stuff,” said Al.
Darla’s face twisted with confusion. “What?”
“Al has something to tell Frank,” said Charlotte. “I’m here for moral support.”
“Tell him to come back tomorrow,” said a gruff voice from inside the house.
“Oh nonsense, come on in,” said Darla.
Charlotte stepped inside in time to catch Frank rolling his eyes and pantomiming shooting himself in the head with his finger.
“Dammit, Frank, don’t do that! It’s gruesome!” snapped Darla.
“Do what?” he asked, winking at Charlotte.
Frank stood and shook Al’s hand.
“Whatcha got for me?”
Al told half his story before Frank asked him to stop.
“Two things. One, do you want a lawyer?”
“Nah, I’m sure it was just a dream. I just thought I should tell someone.”
“Okay, second thing…”
Frank looked at Darla. “Darling, love of my life, you have to leave. I can’t have you gasping and saying oh my word after ever sentence.”
Darla scowled.
“Fine. Can I get anyone a cup of coffee?”
“No, thank you,” said Charlotte. “But I’ll take a glass of wine.”
“That’s my girl,” said Darla, heading into the kitchen.
Frank took notes as Al finished his story.
“Okay, you’re free to go, Al. Got it all on paper. If we need to contact you again I’m assuming you’ll be around?”
Al nodded. “Where would I go?”
Frank and Al said their goodbyes as Charlotte sipped her wine. When Al left, Darla turned to her husband.
“You’re not going to arrest him?”
“For what?”
“He admitted to driving drunk!”
“I can’t arrest a man for driving drunk fifteen years ago. If I could, I’d have to arrest everyone in the damn neighborhood. This isn’t exactly a taxi crowd around here.”
“But he killed that girl!”
“He’s not sure he hit anyone, or even if what he saw was true. And if he’d killed her, they would have found her on the side of the road, not in a grave.”
Darla grunted and pushed her nose to the side to make it appear broken. “Unless he buried her. I heard he’s got connections, you know.”
Frank waved her away. “The only thing that man’s got connections to is his television’s remote control. Oh, and hey, Charlotte, you might like to know I got the autopsy report back right before you stopped by.”
“Really? Already? Is it her? Did they find anything?”
“It is Erin Bingham,” said Frank, flopping back into his comfy chair.
“Oh no.” Charlotte suffered a wave of sadness. She knew the victim had to be Declan’s mother, but she’d hoped it wasn’t.
“Did you tell Declan?”
“I’m going to give him a call in the morning. They also found a chip in one of her ribs that looked like it could have been caused by a bullet.”
“Then the bullet Harry found killed her?”
“Probably. There was also scratching around that chip. They don’t know what caused it. Did the dog get ahold of any rib bones?”
“No. Just the skull and jaw. I never saw Katie grab anything else.”
“What about Abby?”
“She wasn’t out there. She prefers the air conditioning.”
“Oh, you spoil that dog,” said Darla.
“And you didn’t touch anything?” asked Frank.
Charlotte shook her head.
“Hm.”
“Is that your official sheriff evaluation of the situation?” asked Darla. “Hm?”
Frank nodded. “Mm hm.”
Chapter Eleven
Charlotte left Darla’s house and returned to her own. She hopped in the shower and stood under the water, staring at her loofah mitt, replaying Al’s story over again in her head.
Could Al have killed Erin Bingham?
She couldn’t picture Al getting out of his car, dragging Erin’s body away from the road, digging a hole and burying her. He was a hundred and thirty pounds and five feet tall on his best day, holding a sack of flour and wearing his highest heeled loafers. If Declan’s height came from his mother, Al would have struggled to drag her deadweight, even as a younger man. The chance that he also had a shovel in his car and dug a grave, all while so drunk that he had to drive with one eye closed, didn’t seem likely.
In addition, her home was under construction when Erin went missing. It seemed odd that Al would have hidden a body in a work zone, where the daily activity of building made her discovery more probable. A person didn’t have to be in the mafia to see the stupidity of such a move.
No version of Al burying Erin made sense, but the coincidence of Erin’s disappearance matching Al’s memories of a young woman alone on the stretch of road between Pineapple Port and Declan’s old home was interesting.
She wanted to call Declan, but she also dreaded the idea.
Charlotte reached for the soap and grimaced at her loofah mitt. She hated loofah mitts. Every year, Mariska found a reason to give her a gift basket with a scrubby item in it and she felt guilty throwing them out. She forced herself to use the evil loofahs for a month or two until it felt less ungrateful to toss them.
She liked the idea of exfoliation. Nobody wanted to walk around covered in dead skin. And to their credit, loofah mitts were better than those scrubby balls of crinoline that looked like headband decorations for seven-year-old pageant girls. Their sole purpose was to decorate bath-themed gift baskets that people bought for quasi-friends. Bath baskets required little thought, but had an air of thoughtfulness, like roses from a gas station.
But loofah mitts were too wide and slipped off her hand. A person with a paw large enough to fit into one could play tennis without a racket.
She preferred scrubby gloves. Tight-fitting gloves allowed her to employ all the nimbleness her fingers could afford. The loofah mitt was like beating herself clean with a club. Loofah was also too scratchy; she wanted to slough dead skin cells, not scale a fish. The mitt looked soft and inviting in the gift basket, but once wet, it curled up like a dead insect and dried with an impenetrable exoskeleton. She could wear it like a cuff and block bullets like Wonder Woman. What good was a mitt that turned into an unchewable hamster tunnel after one use?
She considered soaking the loofah to keep it from hardening overnight, but she worried that, fully hydrated, it might to spring to life. She didn’t want to wake up one morning to find it clamped on her face. A day later her chest would explode like Alien, unleashing an army of loofah mitt larva upon the world.
She needed to throw out the mitt and end her misery, but she hated wasting something Mariska bought.
Maybe she could toss the loofah as part of her new self-improvement policy…
Charlotte glanced towards the kitchen, where her chalkboard awaited. As she did, she realized the hot water had dropped a few degrees.
How long have I been standing here pondering loofahs?
Charlotte bathed using the bath gloves she’d purchased for herself, stepped out of the shower, and wrapped a towel around her body. She leaned back into the shower, pinched the loofah with two fingers and dropped it into the trash.
As she combed her hair, her eyes darted back and forth from her foggy mirror to the loofah in the trash. She didn’t trust it there. She felt like it was angry with her. She plucked the loofah out of the trash and walked it to the kitchen trash, where it would remain hidden under her sink, secured behind cabinet doors.
She returned to her room and slipped into sweat shorts and a cotton tank top, trying to remember what she’d been thinking about before the loofah stole her attention.
Oh, right. Al’s involvement in Erin’s death.
She might have solved the whole mystery by now if she spent as much time thinking about Al and Erin as she did about killer loofahs.
Charlotte stared at the clock on her kitchen wall and wondered if it was too late to call Declan. It was only seven, but seven was like midnight in Pineapple Port.
I shouldn’t get involved…still…Declan deserves to know…
She knew she should let Frank call Declan in the morning, but it was killing her.
She wandered to her chalk wall and wrote stop LM situation. It was code for addressing Mariska’s loofah mitt tendencies. She had to nip future loofah purchases in the bud. It was the adult thing to do. Mariska wouldn’t be insulted. She’d probably be happy to avoid the expenditure of keeping her swimming in loofahs.
She picked up a book and tried to read, but she couldn’t concentrate. She put down the aged paperback and found her cell phone.
She knew her mind wandered whenever faced with a dilemma. The official term was avoidance. For months after her mother’s death, she’d stopped speaking and begun reading two or three books a day. If she couldn’t physically remove herself from an unpleasant situation, her mind packed up and left of its own volition. Years later, she couldn’t shake the habit, but normally, it wasn’t a problem. Usually, she didn’t have a dead woman in her yard.
The loofahs had kept her from thinking about telling Declan that his mother was officially dead.
Before her mind could hide, she maneuvered to her recent calls and dialed.
Ha! I moved too fast for you, brain!
“Hello?”
The moment Charlotte heard Declan’s voice she realized she couldn’t tell him her news over the phone. It wouldn’t give him the opportunity to see her face; to see that she felt confident Al wasn’t his mother’s killer. On the phone, he might get angry and hang up on her. He
could call Frank and demand to know why no one had told him about Al’s reckless driving or the autopsy reports and then Frank would be furious with her.
“Hello?” repeated Declan.
Charlotte remained silent. She’d spent twenty minutes thinking about a loofah and two seconds planning a very serious call about a potential murder.
I didn’t think this out at all.
“Charlotte, I have caller ID. I know it’s you.”
She looked at the phone, horrified.
Damn modern-day technology!
Charlotte chewed at her lip, trying to invent a reason why she might have called. She didn’t want to tell him the real reason for her call, but they weren’t in a hey-I-just-called-to-say-hi sort of relationship.
Should I invite myself to his house? I wonder what his house looks like. I bet it’s modern and neat. For some reason I picture hardwood floors and a leather sofa, but not a cheesy faux leather one, a nice one. I wonder—
“Charlotte?”
Declan? Oh right…how the hell have I survived for twenty-six years? I have the attention span of a—
A squirrel hopped by her window and she followed its progress, wondering what skinny little Florida squirrels ate.
We don’t have acorns around here. Do we? Wait—
She realized she was holding a phone to her ear.
“Hello?” she said.
“There you are. I couldn’t hear you.”
“Uh…”
Charlotte imitated a poor connection.
“Wait…I…erp…I…eh…moving…bet… Here. Is this better?”
“There you go. Much better. We must have had a bad connection.”
“Yep. Sorry. Hey, are you at home?”
“I’m at home.”
“I have some information about the case. About your mom. Would you mind if I came over to tell you?”
Good. Breathe. Focus…
“Just a second.”
Charlotte heard a muffled yell, as if Declan had covered the phone to scream at someone.
“Sorry. My uncle is here and he was being…uh…loud. What is it? What did you find out?”
“I’d really rather tell you in person. It’s sensitive.”
Charlotte cringed. She didn’t even know what it’s sensitive meant, but she’d heard people say it in movies. It sounded ridiculous. She might as well have told him it was ‘top secret’ or ‘black ops.’