“Of course, you may have a glass of water. I’ll bring it to you in the parlor.”
I could almost hear her teeth grinding as she led me to the parlor door. I walked inside and took a seat until her footsteps faded down the hall.
I had a minute, maybe two. Even though I’d listened closely, I was distressed that I hadn’t heard a whine from my hound. Sweetie had gone into the house and seemingly disappeared. What had Virgie done with her?
I tiptoed across the hallway and through the formal dining room into a back stair well. The temptation to run up the stairs was great, but I was afraid if Virgie knew I was loose in her home, she’d hurt Tinkie.
“Sweetie,” I called softly. “Sweetie.” Dogs have hearing six times more sensitive than humans. Of course, that doesn’t mean they come when they’re called.
I didn’t even hear a toenail click on the wooden floor. Damn. I unlocked a window in the dining room, tiptoed back across the hall, and was seated in my chair when Virgie returned with a glass of water on a silver tray. There was a napkin and nothing else. She was going to perform the ritual, but with a minimalist approach.
I took the glass and thanked her, sipping daintily. “Are you on a well?”
“Yes, we’re on a deep well.” If she hadn’t been such a lady, her leg would have swung in annoyance.
“The well at Dahlia House is over two hundred feet deep, and the water is pure, like this.”
Virgie perched on the edge of the sofa and watched the level of the liquid in my glass. She wanted me gone, but she couldn’t tell me to hurry. She was biding her time.
I put the glass on the napkin on the side table. “I can see you have a lot to do, so let me get right to the point.”
“What point?”
At last I had her attention. “I wanted to talk to you about the murders.”
“Murders? Plural? Who else has been killed?”
“You haven’t heard!” I leaned forward in perfect gossip mode. “It’s been discovered that several women received threatening notes and then later met with foul play. Well, it wasn’t actually ruled as foul play until I put it all together.” My intention was to take the focus off Tinkie and put it on me. Virgie would have a hard time overpowering me.
“Why, Sarah Booth, I didn’t realize you were such a good detective. Tell me everything you discovered. Would you care for some coffee and some homemade fruitcake?”
I’d turned the tide. She was eager to hear what I’d found out. I smiled. “Fruitcake would be lovely. You know, as soon as I find Tinkie, I’m going home to Dahlia House to make my traditional fruitcakes. All of this detective business has gone too far.”
“You’re quitting?”
“Indeed. Cece is running a story on my ‘retirement’ tomorrow. To be honest, I may have jeopardized Tinkie’s life with my desire to solve cases. At least, that’s what the note I received implied.”
“And you’re just going to give it up?”
“When it comes to a choice between Tinkie and a career, it’s easy to pick Tink. It’s not even a choice.”
“Let me get that coffee.” She was up and across the room before I could blink. I figured I had five minutes and took off for the staircase. I hurried through the upper floor but didn’t see or hear a trace of Sweetie. She had to be on the first level, maybe with my partner.
I hurried silently back down the stairs, pausing to look at the family portraits that lined the wall of the dining room. The Carringtons were a very proper family, but a smile wouldn’t have broken any rules of etiquette that I knew.
I was back in my chair when she brought in a bigger silver tray, this one laden with goodies. I had to hand it to Virgie: she had all the accoutrements for a proper Southern lady—silver, china, linen napkins, the whole deal. “Please, help yourself,” she said as she poured coffee for each of us from a silver pot.
The fruitcake was laden with bright green and red cherries. Fruitcake is one of my favorites, but I hadn’t just fallen off a turnip truck. I suspected Virgie of being a serial killer. I wasn’t about to eat her fruitcake. I took a slice and pretended to nibble as I tucked it in the folds of my napkin. “Delicious.”
“I’ll share my recipe with you. You know, Sarah Booth, if you worked on your homemaker skills just a little, you could probably find a man who could keep you in style.”
I forced a smile before I sipped the hot coffee. “I guess that’s something I’ll have to consider now that I’ve retired as a private investigator.”
“So tell me what you learned.”
This was where I’d have to tread carefully. I didn’t want to reveal too much, but I wanted to string her along. And where the hell were Coleman and Oscar? I’d been in the house at least twenty minutes. They should have arrived by now. I was counting on Coleman’s big fist hammering on the front door.
“Marilyn Jenkins’s mother, Karla, received a note warning her of her bad conduct before she was killed.” I pretended to nibble a bit more fruitcake. She’d laced it with bourbon, and it did make my mouth water. Instead, I finished my coffee.
“Karla Jenkins died in a freak landslide. I read it in the newspaper.” Virgie was watching me closely.
“The death was ruled accidental.” I didn’t want to put her on the defensive by telling her the case was going to be reopened.
“What else?” She poured me another cup and topped hers off.
“Genevieve Reynolds’s mother died in another freak accident. There was a note involved there, too.”
“Have you linked the notes with the deaths, or is it just a coincidence?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s none of my business anymore.” The room spun, and I shook my head. I was exhausted. I downed the last of my coffee. “Of course, I don’t have a clue what the sheriff will do.”
She smiled like the Cheshire cat. “Oh, I don’t suspect he’ll do much of anything.”
I tried to focus on Virgie, but she kept moving around the room. My stomach was suddenly queasy. Something was wrong, very wrong. I tried to stand and heard the sound of breaking glass. I took one step toward Virgie and was surrounded by darkness.
The sound of footsteps awakened me. Someone was walking back and forth, back and forth. I came around slowly, wondering where I was and who was with me. I was lying on a cold, uncomfortable wooden surface. When I tried to move, I moaned.
“Sarah Booth!” Tinkie touched my forehead. “You’re okay! I was afraid the old bat had poisoned you.”
“Tinkie?” Something about Tinkie was coming back to me. She was in danger. I was supposed to save her. I took a breath and forced myself into a sitting position. I had messed up bad.
“Did she hurt you?”
“You ate the fruitcake, didn’t you?” Tinkie asked. “We are the only two people in the world who could be poisoned by fruitcake. No one else would eat it.”
“I didn’t eat it. I knew better. But I did drink the coffee. Who puts drugs in coffee?” I did my best to gather my wits. “Are you hurt?”
“She wouldn’t dare hurt me. As soon as she comes back in here, we’ll jump her.” She bit her lip. “There’s a small problem, though. She has a stun gun.”
“Did she use it on Sweetie?” A blast from a Taser could kill a hound.
She shook her head. “I saw Sweetie outside. That’s how I knew you’d come to rescue me. I waited and waited, but I never saw or heard anything until Virgie dragged you in the door and dumped you. What happened to Sweetie?”
“The wicked witch lured her into the gingerbread house and has probably put her in the oven.” How could I have been so stupid as to drink something from a known murderer? I needed to hang up my license.
“She probably fed her some of that Seconal-laced fruitcake, and Sweetie is snoozing away in one of the back rooms.”
One thing about Tinkie, even in the direst situations, she always thought of the best possible outcome. “I can only hope she’s okay. I shouldn’t have brought her, but she did track you do
wn. She went straight to the back steps.”
“She’s a great dog.” Tinkie sank onto the floor beside me. “We’ll get out of this.”
“Coleman and Oscar should arrive any minute.” I’d been thinking that for the last forty minutes. Where were they?
“They know I’m here?”
I nodded. “We were a little behind you, Tink, but we finally figured it out. Virgie was the common factor in all of the deaths. The women were her pupils. I guess she decided if she couldn’t teach them how to behave properly, she’d just bump them off.”
“Except for us. We were never her students.”
“Which may be the only reason we’re both still alive. She’s not responsible for our behavior. We aren’t her failures. She simply wanted us to leave her alone.”
“She’s still going to kill us. She can’t afford to let us go.”
Although Tinkie looked on the bright side of things, she was a realist. We were dead meat.
I heard a slow step, slide. Step, slide. I thought of every horror movie in which the malformed monster steps out of the darkness. That was my talent—to remember every terrifying event of a spooky show. Tinkie’s fingers dug into my arm, and we quaked together. The steps passed our door and continued on.
“Who was that?”
I rose to my feet. “I think that was Virgie dragging my dog.” Fury replaced the fear that had gripped me. “We need to get out of here.”
“We need a gun or a knife or a tool of violence.” She stood up, too. “I never thought I could hit an old lady on the head, but I’m telling you, I could give her a headache that would last until next June.”
I understood completely. Searching the solarium for a weapon, I suddenly remembered Tammy’s dream about Tinkie. I thought it was worth at least a mention, so I told her about it.
“That’s so strange. For the first few hours I was here, I could see girls leaving the school. Only a few of them, in their black skirts and white blouses. I beat on the windows and tried to get their attention, but they couldn’t hear me. I had the distinct impression that I was in a glass of some type.”
“That’s how Tammy described it.”
“Sometimes she’s just plain creepy with her gift,” Tinkie said as she gave a small cry of joy. “Here’s a pen.”
“Now there’s a deadly weapon if ever I saw one.”
“Be sarcastic, but if wielded with enough force, I could puncture her lung.”
“Or give her a small ink tattoo.” I put my arm around Tinkie. “I’m only kidding. The pen is the best weapon we have so far. Let’s keep looking.”
We searched in the darkness, rejecting the pillows from the wicker furniture, but I did manage to wrest a leg off the coffee table. It wasn’t exactly heavy, but if I swung with enough force, I could stun her.
“When she opens the door, I’m going to step out from behind it and whack her in the head.” It wasn’t a very original plan, but we were limited by our resources.
“When she falls to the floor, I’ll straddle her and hold the pen at her throat.” Tinkie was determined to put that pen to use.
“Fine.” I hoped once I hit Virgie, she’d go down all the way. But there weren’t any guarantees when dealing with a homicidal septuagenarian. I just had one more thing to add. “Where in the hell are Coleman and Oscar?”
“Maybe they won’t come. Oscar was pretty angry with me.”
Now was my chance to return so many of the good deeds Tinkie had done me. “We should have called him when you were going to spend the night. He worried all night long.”
Even across a dark room I could see her stiffen. “Tinkie, if you had a child, think how worried you’d be if he or she stayed out all night.”
“The difference, Sarah Booth, is that I’m not a child.”
“But you also aren’t in the habit of staying out all night. Oscar thought something tragic had happened to you. We should have called.”
“I’m not going to apologize.”
I chuckled. “At this point, I don’t think it matters. He’ll be so glad to see you alive that he’d agree if you wanted to do burlesque.”
She sank into one of the wicker chairs. “That’s the problem. I don’t want Oscar’s permission, tacit or explicit. I’m going to make my own choices in life from now on.”
“Even if it means worrying the people who love you?”
She thought about it. “Maybe.”
“Tinkie, the whole time you’ve been gone, Oscar has been afraid you were in trouble, and look, you are. There are factors that make it reasonable for him to worry. The work we do for one. And he’s worried about your breast lump.” I figured I might as well dig up the whole potato patch.
“He has no right to say a word. It’s my breast. My lump. My choice.”
“And his heart.” Tinkie was kind and considerate. Why was she being such a hardhead? “If something happened to you, it would kill Oscar.”
“We risk that every day. Everyone who loves risks losing their heart every minute of every day.”
She was right, but there were degrees. “What would it hurt to go to a doctor? What would it hurt?”
“If he tells me the lump has grown, I might lose my faith that it will go away. I just need some time.”
That was it in a nutshell. She needed time to feel her way through the situation, and Oscar and I wanted immediate action. We were all wrong. “Will you consider something for me?”
“Maybe.”
“If we get out of this, take it as a sign that we’re both intended to live long, full lives. Make an appointment for February with a surgeon to have the lump biopsied. If it’s gone by February, you won’t have a worry in the world.”
A long silence stretched across the dark room. All around us the world was quiet.
“Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll make the appointment for February fourteenth, Valentine’s Day.”
“I think Oscar will take that as a true gift of love.”
There was the sound of footsteps approaching our door, the steady clatter of Virgie’s sensible but feminine shoes. I took my position behind the door, and Tinkie turned in her chair so that she was silhouetted by the light in the yard.
We held our breath as we waited for the door to open.
23
The door opened slowly, and no one stepped through. “Sarah Booth, get out from behind that door, or I’ll have to hurt you.”
Virgie was one sharp cookie. There was no point pretending. I edged out, away from her reach, and went to stand beside Tinkie. If I couldn’t catch her by surprise, Tinkie and I would try to overpower her.
“What are you going to do with us?” Tinkie asked.
“Even more important, what did you do with my dog?”
“You shouldn’t try sneak attacks when you have a dog with your name and phone number on the tag,” Virgie said. “It gives away the endgame.”
She had played me like a fiddle. I’d underestimated her, and now I was as much a hostage as Sweetie and Tinkie.
“What are you going to do with us?” Tinkie repeated.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It depends. I can’t let you go. I have no faith that you’d keep your mouths shut. And don’t pretend you don’t know all about it. You both ended up talking to me, which tells me you figured it out. Now whom did you tell?”
“No one.” We said it too quickly.
“The truth,” she said, stepping into the room a foot or two. She had the Taser in her hand. “You might as well tell me, or I’ll get it out of you the hard way.”
I squeezed Tinkie’s shoulder to give her strength.
“You want to know who we told? We told all the authorities between Memphis and Jackson,” Tinkie said matter-of-factly. “Your goose is cooked. You might as well let us go.”
It was a bold stance, but one without proper backing.
“If that’s the truth, I might as well kill you both. I can only be executed once, you know.”
Spoken in true seri
al-killer style. She was right, though; she had nothing to lose by killing us. We would be victims five and six, or maybe fifteen and sixteen. There was no telling how long Virgie had been conducting her own Darwinian efforts to stamp out the socially inept gene pool.
“We might be of use to you.” I stepped in front of Tinkie. If she was going to attack us, Tinkie might have a chance to get away.
“But not as much use as I would be.” Tinkie stepped in front of me.
I rolled my eyes and leaned down to whisper, “I get one chance to save you.”
“You had your chance.” She held her ground. “And you blew it.”
Tinkie’s one flaw as a partner was that she liked to rub things in.
“Stop it. And stay back, or I will Taser you into a jerking puddle.”
“That’s not a very ladylike threat.” I stepped in front of Tinkie. “Where’s my dog?”
“She won’t be chasing any more coons,” Virgie said.
I made a grab for her, but she was quicker. She slammed the door on me, and I heard the dead bolt turn. But I’d also heard the doorbell chime. Coleman had arrived at last.
Tinkie and I took turns listening at the door, in the hopes of hearing some sign that help was on the way. There was only silence, though.
We sat in the wicker chairs and waited, helpless to act to save ourselves or the Pie. I was seriously worried about my hound.
After a half hour had passed, I stood up to pace. “What’s taking them so long?”
“Are you sure they understood?”
I thought back through my conversations with Oscar. “I’m positive. He didn’t want me to come by myself, because of the danger. I ignored him because I wanted to get to you. Then I told Gordon, and I’m sure he had a clear picture of what was going on.”
Tinkie slapped her forehead. “Sarah Booth, we are dense! Coleman doesn’t have any jurisdiction in Coahoma County. He’s the sheriff of Sunflower County!”
The truth of her words was like a bone in my throat. “Surely that won’t slow him down. Doesn’t he have probable cause or something to that effect? Can’t he just break in and worry about the consequences later?”
Bones To Pick Page 22