Die a Yellow Ribbon

by Teresa Trent

  “You found it. I knew you’d figure it out. Was this that deductive reasoning you use when you’re solving a crime?” Ruby sounded very impressed with me.

  “Not quite.”

  Leo smiled. “She was sitting on it.”

  Ruby gave me a wink. “Whatever works, Betsy.”

  Many of the treasure hunters began to read the clue themselves, their lips moving to the words. “We’re off to the bank,” Ruby said. A stream of exhausted clue hunters headed in the direction of the Pecan Bayou State Bank.

  “Here we are again with a clue we can’t decipher.” Leo rubbed the back of his neck. “If it’s the final clue, do you think Bosco and Earl must have figured it out by now?”

  That was a good question, and something I feared myself. They had been ahead of us all along. Now that we were near the end, we would have to outthink them and outrun them. “If they’ve figured it out, we would have heard the church bells ringing to announce the winner. No, I think they’re just as stuck as we are, which brings us back to what in town is cold and dank.”

  We started listing off several possibilities such as walk-in freezers, basements—of which there weren’t that many in town—and the archival room at the library.

  “What about that one mausoleum in the cemetery? That’s cold and dank,” I suggested, although hoping that wasn’t the answer.

  “Maybe. I say we don’t follow the crowd to the bank,” Leo said.

  “I agree. I know Rocky well enough to know he would never do something as easy as feature the actual place in the clue. That just makes it too easy. You wouldn’t suppose Rocky would put a clue box in a mausoleum in the cemetery?”

  Leo chewed on his bottom lip. “Maybe? It would be a great place to hide a clue. The clue box would be hidden by the mausoleum itself. Also, who visits a mausoleum unless they know the person inside?”

  “True, but how would the caretaker feel about all of Pecan Bayou trudging through his cemetery?” If Rocky had done something like put a clue in the cemetery it would not go over well if anyone’s flowers were knocked over.

  Leo shrugged. “That is what it’s there for, right?”

  “So, we’re off to the cemetery?” I dreaded the thought, but at least the trees would offer some shade.

  “No, let’s do that only if we absolutely have to. I think we should go to the library.”

  “The library?” Was the heat getting to him? We had already been at the library once today. If there had been a clue box, we would have seen it. “Why the library?”

  “I know, I know. We were there before, but how about the archival room? That place is cold because it’s temperature-controlled and the only people who ever go there are the genealogists.”

  “Sounds like a good idea.”

  So many of the regular library patrons were participating in the treasure hunt that I had to guess the library was as quiet as the mausoleum we were putting off visiting.

  Chapter 14

  “Here to check out a book?” Cora Jean, the librarian, sat behind the counter holding a dog-eared romance.

  I grabbed the clue from Leo and held it up. “The last clue for the treasure lists something cold and dank. We thought about the archival room.”

  Cora Jean got a twinkle in her eye. “Does that mean the whole town’s going to come in here in the next couple of hours looking for a clue box?” she asked, putting a bookmark in the paperback.

  “Don’t get too excited. Most people are going to the bank.”

  “And here I thought I would get even more unexpected visitors today. I usually hate working on Saturdays, but today it’s downright fun. Do you know, did Mr. Butler ever find Sarah?”

  “Not that we’ve heard.”

  The little librarian with the large round glasses leaned forward slightly, and using her best librarian voice whispered, “So sad about her. I had no idea she was a sleepwalker, and now I’m hearing she was cheating on her husband with Poppy Donaldson?”

  Wanting to keep her talking, I commiserated. “He sure has his hands full. Had you ever heard about anything going on with Poppy before?”

  “No, but it sure does explain a few things. You know I go play bingo every Thursday night at St. Mary’s and I’ve seen her walking down the street a couple of times. I thought maybe she was lost or meeting someone. I could never figure out what was going on with that woman, but I guess now we know.”

  So, other people had seen Sarah wandering around in a sleepwalking state. We walked down the musty stairs to the archival room together.

  There was no clue box.

  “I guess I should have told you we weren’t a part of the treasure hunt, but it’s just so nice to have someone to talk to today. My Saturday regulars aren’t here, and it’s kind of lonely. I never thought I’d miss Lester Jibbets and his Saturday newspaper binge.”

  With no yellow clue box awaiting us in the archival room, I suggested we go to the bank.

  “So now you think the clue is at the bank after all?” Leo asked.

  “We’re not going there for the clue. I want to see what has happened to Sarah.”

  The bank was one of the taller buildings in the downtown grid with towering glass windows and stately red brick. Stan and Howard came out, and I noticed a yellow clue paper folded in the pocket of Howard’s Hawaiian shirt. Howard, who didn’t always remember to put on deodorant, left a heavy odor of sweat behind him.

  “It’s not in there,” Stan informed us. “A bunch of people have been through already. I don’t think the bank’s too pleased. All their free pens are gone.”

  “Thanks.” I put my hand on the door. “We need to see a banker.”

  “Okay…” Stan said, looking confused at my statement. I was almost sure he would next ask me if we needed to borrow money from him.

  Howard grabbed the sides of his shirt and started flapping as if trying to circulate the cool air around him. “I hate to go back out in that heat.” We weren’t too crazy about the flapping shirt, either.

  We strode across the tiled floor to Vic Butler’s office. Howard’s body odor dissipated from my nostrils as we encountered a fruitier scent inside the bank. Even though he had the Venetian blinds closed, through the doorway, we could see he was on the phone, hunched over the desk. One of his filing cabinet drawers was pulled out, probably left open when the phone rang. We saw him pull a notepad out of the desk drawer and begin scribbling information on it.

  As we got closer we overheard his side of the conversation. “Yes. I see. Thank you so much for calling. I really appreciate you checking the woods.” He hung up the phone and straightened upon seeing us. “It’s like she’s disappeared. No one can find her. I can’t sit here another minute. I’m going to walk around the town one more time.”

  “Before you go, we just wanted to let you know that we searched Maximum Muscle but didn’t find anything.”

  Vic gave out an exhausted sigh. “Really? Nothing? Well, thank God, and thank you for doing that. It would have been so embarrassing if something Sarah left behind in a sleep state or even a waking state ended up on a police report. This town has enough to talk about. Sorry, I have to go.”

  “No problem. Just glad we could help,” I said as he quickly exited the glassed-in office.

  “Man, I can’t imagine how worried he must be,” Leo said. “If that was you wandering around half out of your head, I don’t know how I would handle it.”

  We were still standing in Vic’s office. I glanced at the notepad. “Hmm, it looks like he’s checked off everywhere they’ve searched so far.” I took the notebook and returned it to the desk drawer.

  “Betsy. Don’t do that. It’s bad enough you’re tidying up behind us every second of the day, but it’s not your place to tidy up Vic’s office.”

  “Sorry. I just couldn’t help myself,” I said as I quickly shut the open file drawer.

  “Betsy!”

  “Sorry. I’ll stop.” But I knew I couldn’t stop. Once you start seeing the world in organiz
ed patterns, you want to make sure everything goes where it belongs. There’s a reason why people say, “Put all your ducks in a row.” It felt so good. It really was like a drug.

  “So where to next?” I asked.

  “I guess it’s time to get our chill on in some mausoleums.” Leo drew out the word mausoleum with a slightly vampirey voice.

  My phone buzzed, and I looked at the screen as we got into the car. “It’s Zach.”

  “Are you guys almost done?” he asked, sounding a little impatient.

  “At this point, it’s hard to tell. What’s up?” Two words every parent says with the greatest of trepidation.

  “Nothing really. I was just wondering if I could go out like Tyler did. Danny could watch Coco.”

  “By himself? What do you mean Tyler went out? Again? Where?”

  “I don’t know. One of his friends called, and he said that you said it was okay. It was okay, wasn’t it?”

  Even though his job was to stay home and help Zach take care of Coco and now Danny, Tyler had just pulled another fast one. Yes, it was Saturday, and yes, he was about to be a senior in high school, but I thought becoming a senior also brought a modicum of maturity. Leo had assured me Tyler was more mature than I gave him credit, but still. All I could think was I had been reading the wrong parenting books.

  “Hold on,” I put my hand over the phone. “Tyler took off,” I said to Leo, who was staring absently at the clue.

  “He did? Wasn’t he supposed to be helping Zach?” Leo answered, distracted. I felt my blood pressure rising, but Leo’s focus was on the clue so I couldn’t be too critical.

  “Yes. He told Zach we gave him permission to go and left him alone. We need to find that boy and straighten him out.”

  Leo curled in his bottom lip and flinched as he began to back out of the park. “I might have told him that if everything was in control, he could go pick up a friend and bring him back to the house.”

  “You what? I never said they could have friends over. You know how distracted they can get. Coco could wander off, and neither boy would know it for hours.”

  “Not unless she took a video game controller with her,” Leo said, a little laugh in his voice. He stopped when I glared at him.

  I returned to the phone. “What friend would he have gone to pick up?” I asked Zach, thinking maybe we could find Tyler and get him back to where he should be.

  “Uh, Aaron? Demarcus? I don’t know who he’s been hanging out with this week. You know, it’s summer, and he’s been hanging out with a lot of people.”

  Our house had turned into a revolving door of young men and women in the last year. Tyler was a star athlete, so one week it was the football team, and the next week it was basketball, not to mention the cheerleaders bouncing all over the place. Parenting a teenager was a little like directing traffic with a blindfold on.

  “Fine. We’ll be there in five minutes,” I said as I clicked off the phone in anger. “He’s out of control, and he clearly played us. Of course, he didn’t tell me about you giving him permission because he knew I wouldn’t stand for it.”

  Leo, who didn’t seem to be bothered by the incident, kept his eyes forward and said, “Betsy, he’s seventeen. He’s going to test the limits. Don’t you think that after the exhaustive parenting we’ve put into him all these years that we should begin to trust him a little bit?”

  Trust him? Responsible people didn’t dump on their little brother and leave him with babysitting duty twice in one day. Responsible people called their parents and told them they were abandoning their duties.

  “I know what you’re saying makes sense, but it’s the principle of the thing.”

  “Well, I don’t think we have to worry about him,” Leo started slowing down the car as we neared the Pecan Bayou bridge.

  “Leo? We need to get home,” I said, but he appeared to be ignoring me.

  “I realize that, but I think I found him.”

  I followed his gaze to see Tyler with his hands on Sarah Butler’s shoulders.

  Chapter 15

  “What on earth?”

  We bounded out of the car. Sarah Butler was the friend Tyler had left the house to meet? Even though this looked suspicious at first glance, it certainly didn’t look like a romantic tryst. Instead, Tyler spoke evenly, as if with a small child.

  He raised a hand gently and pointed to the bayou. “It’s okay, Mrs. Butler. There’s no one in the water.”

  Sarah’s eyes were wide with fear. She brought her hands up to her mouth in horror, seeing something none of the rest of us could. Tyler reached for her arm.

  “But I have to save her,” Sarah cried. “She’s hurt. It’s all my fault. I made a mistake.” She started pulling away from Tyler.

  Leo stepped forward. “Mrs. Butler? Are you okay?” He positioned himself on her other side.

  Sarah looked up at him, her eyes childlike, and she screamed. “No! Get away!” She tried to free herself.

  “Sarah,” I pleaded. “It’s just Leo. He won’t hurt you.”

  “He’s a monster. He is going to hurt the lady. I have to fight him.”

  “Mrs. Butler. That’s my dad. He’s not a monster,” Tyler said.

  Sarah suddenly stopped fighting and pointed to the water below. “She’s hurt. Can’t you see that? She could die down there.” Her attention fell completely away from Leo. Whatever threat she had perceived from Leo had vanished. I found it interesting that she was frightened of him and not me. Did she associate the “monster” with a man? If she encountered Mark Valencia, had she seen him as a monster or a man?

  My eyes went in the direction she was pointing. No one was in the water, but Bunny Donaldson was down by the bank holding a small trowel and a terracotta flowerpot.

  Tyler shook his head, looking down. “I found her like this. She was standing on the railing when I walked up. I still can’t believe she came down after I asked her. I thought she was going to jump for sure. I’ve never been so glad to see my parents catching me doing something wrong. I was going to Demarcus’s house when I found her.”

  Bunny Donaldson trudged up from the bayou’s edge. “What’s wrong with her?” Bunny pulled off her gardening gloves and stowed them in the clay pot with her trowel. Bunny had placed a deep red poppy in her long blonde braid, making her look like a very old Disney princess. “Did some of that silicone finally go up a few inches to her brain?”

  Tyler flinched. “Don’t say that. Can’t you see she’s out of it?”

  “I think she’s sleepwalking. See if we can guide her to the car,” I said softly.

  Tyler, using even tones barely above a whisper, said, “Mrs. Butler. Let’s get in the car, and we can go and get help for that lady down there, okay?”

  Sarah stared at the ground beneath the bridge. “Okay.”

  As Leo and Tyler gently placed her in the back seat of the car, I reached into my bag and retrieved Vic’s card to call him. He answered on the first ring.

  “We found her.”

  He let out an audible sigh of relief. “Where?”

  “On the Pecan Bayou bridge. She thinks someone is in the water. She’s not awake, but she’s talking. I think I understand what somnambulism looks like now. Anyone seeing her would think she’s fully awake.”

  “Thank God you found her,” he said, his words breaking. “Can you bring her home to our house? I can meet you there.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I know where it is,” Tyler offered.

  “He does?” Vic asked overhearing him.

  “He’s the one who found her,” I said. “This is going to be upsetting to hear, but she was about to jump off the bridge. I think she was trying to save Bunny Donaldson, who was planting a flower on the banks of the Bayou. Our son talked her out of it.”

  “Remind me to thank that young man. We need more like him around here.” Vic hung up.

  What was that? He wanted to thank our son for leaving his little brother to babysit so he could s
earch for someone else’s wife? Even though that was what I felt when we drove up to the bridge, Vic’s words made me see the situation a little differently. I had been negative toward Tyler, but like Leo said, we needed to trust him more. He had saved a woman’s life and was aware enough to see she wasn’t in her right mind.

  Before we could get the car started, Bunny Donaldson blurted out through the open window, “I think she’s returning to the scene of the crime. Guilt will eat you up just like the rotten core of an apple. And what’s that on her dress? By jingo, Sarah Butler may be a serial killer.”

  I craned my neck around to look at Sarah. We had been so focused on getting her off the bridge that I hadn’t noticed her clothing. She had what appeared to be blood spots on the front of her red dress.

  It was bad enough Vic was dealing with Sarah walking around town half awake. He didn’t need the gossip mill adding “serial killer” to the conversational stream.

  “We don’t know that,” I scolded. “We don’t even know how whatever it is all over her dress got there. Be reasonable, Bunny.” Bunny gave me a sideways scowl showing me she had no plans to curb her tongue.

  “You want me to be reasonable when my best friend, my sister, and one of the few people in this town who will talk to me has been brutally murdered while I’m standing here right in front of the murderess? You have no idea what it’s like to be me.”

  “You’re right, I don’t. But we need to get Sarah out of here right now.” I rolled up the window.

  Through the glass, Bunny shouted, “Sure, sure. We all have to protect the beautiful wife of the president of the bank. But of course, that’s how things work in this town. The bigger your coconuts are, the more respect you get.”

  I looked over at Tyler, who was beginning to blush.

  “Mark my words. I will see justice done. Until then, I will continue to come to the banks of Pecan Bayou and plant flowers in my sister’s memory. This town will be drowning in poppies before I’m done.”