“I’ll go with you, Miss Emma,” Joe offered.
“No, I’ll go. I want to go,” said Faye, though her stomach churned at the thought of spending more time in the company of a corpse. If Emma could do it, then she could.
“All right. I’ll take you two ladies over there. Now. Back to Wayland and Nita…let me see…” The sheriff plucked a paper out of the stack and studied it. “Here’s my notes on the tattooed pair. They alibied each other. Big surprise. And nobody noticed either of them leaving the room. Liz says she’d taken their order and served it, both within ten minutes of Wally’s death, and the two of them were sitting there both times she went to the table.”
“Speaking of Liz…” Emma started. After a moment’s hesitation, she went on. “I don’t know her, but I understand she’s friends with everybody here. So I hate to ask. But you say she used to work for Wally and that he wasn’t always a nice person. So…”
“Liz was definitely behind the counter the whole time Joe and I were eating,” Faye offered. “We were talking to her. After that, who knows?”
The sheriff held up another piece of paper. “She gave me records of her cash register receipts for the whole evening, so we’ve got the time of each transaction. And we’ve got the names of the customers, except for them that paid cash.”
Ross looked over his shoulder. “Looks like Liz was pretty busy.”
“Let me see that.” Faye reached for the paper and ran her finger down the column of numbers. “There. See those two cash transactions? That has to be me and Joe. She’d checked out a half-dozen others in the twenty minutes before we left. And four more customers paid her after that, just in the time it took us to go out to my boat and start cleaning it up. She didn’t have much time to go outside and stab Wally.”
“Liz isn’t the only one that ever works the register.” Everybody looked at Joe. This was the advantage of keeping quiet most of the time. On the rare occasion that Joe spoke up in front of a crowd, people listened. “Chip works the register sometimes.”
“You got a point,” the sheriff said. “Liz almost runs the whole show—cooking, waiting tables, taking the money—but Chip does the food prep…which takes him into the back room and out to the meat locker and the utility shed. That keeps him out of people’s sight on a regular basis. And he helps her out at the register when she’s busy.” He held up the list of receipts. “She sure was busy the night that Wally died. Which I guess means they were both pretty busy. Everybody in the place mentioned seeing Liz and Chip during the last few minutes before the killing. Their alibis aren’t air-tight, but they’re better than most.”
Emma was talking again. “Do you…do you think that Wally killed my husband? What did Faye say he said while he was dying? ‘I’m sorry about Douglass…’ And didn’t he say something like ‘Tried to stop…’ What was he trying to stop? Maybe he wished he’d stopped beating a defenseless old man.”
“We don’t know, Emma, but his last words make him a prime suspect. That’s one reason it’s so important for you to go look at his body. Today. This morning would be good. It will help if we know whether he was one of the men who broke into your house that night.”
Faye sensed that the sheriff was closing the conversation down and she had another question. “One more thing—I saw all the people we’re talking about, right at the time of Wally’s death. They came boiling out of the restaurant, just as soon as they heard me scream. Now I remember being very, very bloody. I didn’t see anybody wearing any blood but me and Joe. And Wally. Was there enough time for the killer to wash up? Or are we dealing with someone who was never in the bar at all?”
“I doubt there was much time to wash up,” the sheriff said. “Though there might not have been all that much blood, not at first. Wally was bleeding from a major artery. From the trail of blood we found, it looks like it might have burst after Wally got up and tried to get some help. The significant bleeding you saw may not have started until the killer was gone.”
“Can you tell us what you know about Wally’s stabbing?”
“Well, we know where it happened. We found some of Wally’s blood out in the parking lot, in the corner next to the utility shed, so you’re right. For all we know, the murderer could have been somebody who never set foot in the bar, somebody who drove up, did his killing—”
“You sure it wasn’t a her?” Faye asked.
“Can’t be sure. I just usually say ‘him,’ because not so many women go around killing people. Humor me on this one.”
There were exceptions to that rule, and Faye knew it well, but she let the subject drop.
“Where was I? The killer could have been someone in the bar, or it could’ve been someone we don’t know anything about, somebody who drove up, killed Wally, and left. It looks like the first blow dropped Wally to the ground, then the killer stabbed him again and left in a hurry. Probably because he was afraid of being seen. Or maybe he thought he was finished, because Wally was doing such a good job of looking dead.”
“Then Wally got up off the ground and came looking for me, because he wanted to give me that note I told you about. I sure wish he’d lived long enough to tell me why.”
“Assuming that’s true—that he was looking for you so that he could give you a message—then we have to also assume that he saw you when you walked from the restaurant to the boat dock. Being as how nobody’s seen him since the hurricane, we have to wonder if he came back just to get some kind of information to you. We just don’t know what that information was. Whether he’d already been stabbed by the time he saw you walk past, we can’t say. We do know that when that artery blew, Wally didn’t have much time, and he knew it. He went looking for help, and you were it.”
Ross leaned forward, trying to enter the conversation. “What about the knife? You still haven’t found it?”
“I’ve got divers in the water. We’ve looked in the woods, in sheds, in toolboxes—at least the coroner was able to tell me it was definitely a knife, not a screwdriver. That made the toolboxes a lot easier to search. The bar…well, that’s a hell of a thing. There’s knives everywhere in there. Steak knives on the tables. Butcher knives in the meat locker. Paring knives in the kitchen. Chip and Liz looked like they wanted to laugh when I asked ’em if any knives were missing, but it’s too damn awful a question to laugh at. They want to help, but they just can’t.”
“Could the killer have washed off the knife, then left it in on a dining table or in the kitchen?” Faye swallowed hard, thinking that she might never want to eat at Liz’s again.
The sheriff shrugged, and Faye felt her appetite leave, perhaps permanently. The silence around the table suggested that everyone was digesting the same information.
Magda spoke up, briskly changing the subject. “Any footprints? Or anything else that could identify the killer?”
“Nope. That gravel parking lot doesn’t do much to preserve prints.”
Emma’s mind hadn’t left her husband, nor the possibility that Wally might have been his killer. “After Wally mentioned Douglass,” Emma said, taking Faye’s hand and looking her in the eye, “did he say anything else?”
“He said he was sorry. And, like you said, he wanted badly to tell me about trying to stop…something…but he wasn’t able to get the words out. Then he told me to remember. He said that several times. It was clearly important to him that I remember the friendship we had before he sold me out and ran.”
“Do you remember anything else, dear? Anything that would help the sheriff?” Emma’s eyes were pleading.
“I remember that the whole time Wally was double-crossing me…the whole time he was choosing money over me…he was pretending to be my friend. It’s hard to put much stock in anything Wally says. I mean, anything he said. The man was a lie walking around on two legs.”
***
The morgue was cold, and it smelled exactly like Faye expected it to smell. Wally looked almost like he’d looked as he lay dea
d in her lap, only worse. He was nothing more than a waxy lump of flesh. The only warm things in the room were Emma’s hand and the tears on Faye’s face.
The sheriff said, “Take a good look at him, Emma. Look at his size—he was five-eleven and weighed about two-ten. Could he have been one of the men we’re looking for?”
Emma walked around the body, checking it from all angles. Then she closed her eyes and consulted her memory. “Could have been. Yes. He could have been. But it was dark and they were far away. You know I can’t be sure.”
“I know. But we had to try.”
***
Ross drove Emma’s big, expensive American car just as expertly as he drove his little, expensive, German sports car. Faye had her window down, trying to blow the morgue smell out of her hair.
“I wish I could have done that for you. Visit the morgue, I mean. You two have been through enough lately.”
“We appreciate the ride and the moral support.” Emma noticed Faye’s window and rolled down her own. “This is not the first time in my life that I’ve found myself utterly surprised at the things that have happened to me. And at the things I have to do to make them right.”
The April countryside flashed past Faye’s window, cheerful and green, as if death and betrayal and decay didn’t happen. As if they didn’t matter.
“This sure is a nice car, Miss Emma.” Ross was ordinarily smooth and debonair, but this obvious attempt to divert the subject to something innocuous jangled Faye’s nerves. “The turning radius is amazing for a car this size.”
Faye’s mind was too fried by now to follow the thread of any conversation, however banal. She found herself ignoring what Ross was saying and merely listening to the unfamiliar cadences of his over-educated speech. Had he once had a Brooklyn accent that he’d worked to overcome? Or had his parents spoken with these measured, cultured tones? Maybe he’d absorbed his perfect diction at his mother’s knee.
“I’ve never driven a Cadillac before. I had no idea they had this much power.”
An echo of his words banged around in her brain. I’ve never driven a Cadillac before. Did her thick southern accent set his teeth on edge? When she spoke, did he hear something like Ah’ve nevah drivuhn uh Caddylack buh-fore?
Faye wasn’t sure she knew anybody else besides Ross who actually pronounced the first “e” in “before.” Ross almost said “bee-fore,” in a caricature of correct speech.
That settled it. His diction was too self-conscious. He’d learned it from a speech coach. Who ever heard of saying “bee-fore?”
Suddenly, she was sorry she’d allowed her brain to chase this rabbit trail, because she heard an echo of Wally’s last words.
Remember before. You have to remember before.
What had Wally meant?
Remember. Before.
Before. Bee-fore.
Or did Wally really say, “before?” The question knocked her out of her shell-shocked haze.
Maybe she’d had it all wrong. Maybe Wally had said, “Remember B4”?
Somehow, he’d slipped a note that said only RARE F301 into her pocket.
And RARE F301.B4 was a complete call number.
Faye didn’t know the entire Library of Congress system of cataloging books by heart, but she knew parts of it well enough. She knew that the B signified that the author’s last name began with a B. The 4 was the identifier that distinguished the book Wally wanted her to see from all the other books on the same shelf. And the university letterhead told her which library’s rare book collection held Wally’s secret.
Ross drove along, unaware that she was sitting in the back seat, piecing together a message from a dead man. Emma dozed in the passenger seat beside him. Faye would just as soon Emma didn’t know what she was thinking. The woman had been through enough. Let her rest until Faye helped the sheriff bring the heads of her husband’s murderers to her on a silver platter.
Why had Wally given her the information in this way? Maybe he’d wanted to make sure nobody got the message but Faye. Even if someone else had found the note, few people thought automatically in terms of Library of Congress call numbers in the way Faye did, and Wally knew it. And of those few scholarly folks, Faye was the only one that heard Wally’s final clue: B4. This code was designed just for her. But why didn’t he just tell her what he wanted her to know?
Perhaps because the person who killed him was standing nearby.
Somewhere in the university library was a rare book written by someone whose last name started with a B. There was a message in it for Faye, left for her by a dead friend. Tomorrow, after she filled the sheriff in on her discovery, she would be driving to Tallahassee.
Chapter Eight
Faye was wearing white cotton gloves, and so was Joe. They were also trying to look trustworthy for the benefit of the rare books librarian, who looked like she wished her assistant hadn’t let them put their grubby hands on the merchandise. Nevertheless, Faye was a graduate student with full library privileges, and Joe was a harmless undergrad, obeying all the pertinent rules. The librarian had no choice but to let them read the book.
It was a collection of letters from an official in the Confederacy, Jedediah Bachelder, to his wife, Viola. The aged volume in her hand was interesting in itself. Sometime in the late 19th century, someone had bound Bachelder’s actual letters into a leather-bound book, making this volume one-of-a-kind. Because Bachelder hadn’t been particularly interesting to historians, the letters had never been published in a printed volume. This book was all there was. No wonder the librarian had been loathe to have them touch it.
Faye found Bachelder’s letters intriguing, simply because she’d held one of his personal items in her hands a century after his death. The silver hip flask that had so fascinated the newspaper reporter had been engraved with Bachelder’s name. When she found it, Faye had done some research showing that Jedediah Bachelder was a prominent slaveholder who had owned several plantations in Florida and Alabama, one of them on a river south of Tallahassee. Based on the man’s history as a slave owner, Douglass had agreed to put the flask into his museum of slavery.
Library research wasn’t often so immediately rewarding as it had been this morning. Before she even opened the book, Bachelder’s very name had told Faye that he was a link between Wally’s library reference number and Douglass’ museum pieces. But the simple existence of Bachelder’s flask and these letters didn’t explain why Douglass’ house was targeted for burglary, or by whom. And it certainly didn’t explain Wally’s death. The old hip flask was interesting, but it wasn’t worth doing murder.
It might, however, explain the timing of the burglary. The reporter had run a photo of the flask in the newspaper on the very morning of Douglass’ murder. Once that article appeared, anybody in Tallahassee and the surrounding area could have feasibly been aware that he owned a 19th-century hip flask engraved with the name J.L. Bachelder. Less than 24 hours after the paper hit Tallahassee’s doorsteps, Douglass lay dead. The sheriff would want to let officials in Tallahassee know about the flask’s possible connection to the murder, so that they could put a guard on the museum.
She handed the collection of letters to Joe, so he could leaf through it. His arsenal of educational aids was arrayed around him. A voice recorder freed him from having to take laborious notes. A straight-edge helped his eyes focus on the line of text that he was reading. A transparent sheet of blue plastic filtered out visual noise in a way Faye didn’t understand, dramatically improving his reading accuracy.
Joe’s tutors certainly knew what they were doing when they prescribed these strategies for circumventing his reading difficulties. For a man who preferred to use tools that he’d chipped himself out of stone, Joe was very high-tech when it came to learning.
While Joe used his modern tricks to decipher 19th-century letters, Faye searched the library’s collection for more information on Bachelder. A reference book of biographical sketches identified him
as a functionary of the Confederate States of America government. President Jefferson Davis himself was said to have frequently sought his counsel.
More surprising was the fact that Bachelder’s wife, Viola, merited her own biographical sketch. In her day and age, a lady’s name only appeared in print when she was born and when she died, if then. Viola Bachelder, though to all appearances a lady of unblemished character, had not lived a quiet, retiring life—at least, not in her last years.
She had spent the last part of the war in a townhouse located in a small Alabama town near one of Bachelder’s larger plantations. Turning the townhouse into a hospital, she had ministered to soldiers wearing either uniform. Civilians were also welcome in her hospital…all civilians. Much ink was spilled over the fact that Mrs. Bachelder turned away no one, not even slaves and freedmen. The redoubtable woman had succumbed to typhoid fever at age 44, only a month before Appomattox, and Faye was very sad to read of her early death.
Faye returned the biographical sketches to the librarian, whose desk plate gave her name as Elizabeth Slater, and settled herself beside Joe again. He removed the blue plastic sheet from the page he was reading and handed over the book of Bachelder’s letters, clicking off his voice recorder as he did so.
She silently blessed him for taking the initiative to record the text of the first few letters. Ms. Slater had informed them that special permission would be required to get copies of these fragile and irreplaceable documents, and that would take time. Meanwhile, Joe’s recordings would have to do. She’d gotten him some voice recognition software for Christmas, so they could have transcriptions of these letters with a touch of the button. Heaven only knew what the software would make of Bachelder’s Victorian turn-of-phrase or Joe’s Oklahoma accent, but maybe the result would be readable enough.
Faye scanned the letters, promising herself more time with them later. They seemed to be of little historical value on a national scale—Bachelder revealed little about the workings of the Confederate government—but they were a touching tribute to a marriage of long standing. Jedediah spent the war years away from home, and his concern for how his wife fared in his absence grew as the Confederacy’s fortunes waned. Faye sat bolt upright in her chair when she read about his solution to the problem of rampant inflation and its effect on their fortunes.
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