by Joan Hess
Hammet trailed after me, reiterating his offer to blow the intruder to smithereens iffen I wanted him to. After assuring him that such actions would be premature (and defining “premature” when I saw his lip creep forward), I opened the door to stare at a man with dark hair, brown eyes, and an apologetic smile. He took in my robe and bare feet while I took in his sports coat, starched shirt, discreet silk tie, and creased slacks. It probably took me longer to do the taking in, but I wasn’t standing at his door before the sun rose.
“I’m Mason Dickerson,” he said. “I know this is crazy, but I wonder if I might ask you something?”
“You jest did,” Hammet said. “Asked her somethin’, I mean.”
“Well, yes, you’re right. But it really is important, Miss Hanks. I realize it’s early and I’m a total stranger, and by all rights you ought to slam the door in my face or shoot me…”
I joined him on the landing before Hammet could offer to comply with the latter part of the suggestion. “Mason Dickerson,” I said slowly. “You’re Madam Celeste’s brother, right? You’re her business manager or something like that?”
“Something like that. If it’s not too much trouble, she would like you to come over to our house. I’ll be happy to drive you over.”
“At six o’clock in the morning?” I shook my head, wondering if Hammet might be on the right track. “I have a personal policy of declining social engagements before sunrise. Unless this is an emergency involving official police business, tell Madam Celeste to call me in a couple of hours.”
“Yeah,” Hammet contributed from the doorway. “It’s too fuckin’ premature to be visitin’ folks.”
Mason shrugged helplessly. “You know that and I know that, but my sister refused to listen to any argument. Look, I’m sorry to disturb you. Please just go back to bed and forget about this, Miss Hanks.”
“What’s all this about?”
“I don’t know. One of Celeste’s crazy visions.” He moved down a step. “Something about a dead woman. Celeste thinks she has information that’ll be useful to you, but the whole thing’s nonsense and I’m sorry I bothered you.” He retreated another few steps.
“Wait a minute.” I told Hammet to go to the kitchen and fix himself a bowl of cereal. Once he was gone, I studied Mason while I tried to jolt my brain into a functional state. “What are we talking about—a dead body or a vision of a dead body? And while we’re on the subject, whose?”
“I really don’t know any more than I’ve told you. Celeste wanted you to come by the house because she has something to tell you about some woman who may be dead. But Celeste has been kind of screwy since she was a child, and you don’t have to listen to her if you don’t want to. Please accept my apologies, and forget I was ever here.” His face was red and his voice cracking with embarrassment. He kept looking at the top of his car as if he wished nothing more than to be in it and speeding down the highway.
I felt sorry for him, and I was also feeling a little bit curious about this peculiar invitation, especially since he seemed so eager to cancel it. “Why don’t you come inside for a cup of coffee while I try to decide what to do? Now that I’m awake, I suppose it won’t hurt anything to hear what your sister wants to tell me, although I am fairly skeptical about this sort of thing.”
“So am I,” he murmured. “But thank you for agreeing to come. Celeste can be difficult when she doesn’t get her way.”
He had come back up to the landing when a motorcycle roared around the corner. A figure in a helmet braked in a shower of gravel and imperiously gestured for us to come downstairs. Telling myself this was a truly bizarre dream, I did as requested. As I reached the bottom step, I realized the figure was covered with mud and dripping like a faulty faucet. Ruby Bee’s idle gossip came back to me. “Merle?” I said tentatively.
He pulled off his helmet. “Morning, Arly. How are ya?”
“Fine, thank you. What brings you here at this hour?” I fully expected him to pull a dormouse and a March hare out of his pocket and suggest a tea party. I wouldn’t have raised so much as an eyebrow.
“I came by last night, but you was out,” Merle said, forgiving me with a toothless smile. “Good thing I caught you this morning, ’cause I’m going to be right busy later today over at the creek. I built a ramp outta some scrap lumber, but I jest ain’t having any luck so far. I believe I’m gonna have to recalculate my angles.”
“Why did you come by last night and again this morning?” I asked, optimistically ignoring the reference to his daredevil antics.
“To tell you what I found yesterday evening just afore dark.”
“And what did you find?”
“A dead body, Arly. I found me a dead body. I found some other bodies, too, but they was wanting privacy so’s they could commence to court, so I don’t reckon I ought to carry tales about ’em.” Merle loosed an earshattering cackle. “No, sir, them two kids was sweaty when I happened across them, and real red-faced when they realized they’d been caught.”
I looked back at Mason, who was white and clutching the railing for dear life. Taking a deep breath, I said, “The dead body, Merle. Tell me about the body.”
“Don’t you want to hear about the two that was having theirselves a fine old time in the front seat? They was doing it in a funny way, but these kids today have some newfangled notions on how to go about procreatin’. Mrs. Hardcock, bless her soul, would of been right scandalized. She always wore a flannel nightgown and covered the face of the alarm clock with a towel when I came a-sniffin’ at her.”
“Merle, I want to know about the body. Are you going to tell me, or do I have to drag it out of you word by word?”
I had to drag it out of him word by word. Once I learned that he had happened across a dead, bloodied body on the far side of Cotter’s Ridge, I ordered him to wait for me at the PD. I told Mason, who was quivering like a molded salad, that I would get back to him later and sent him home. Then, bewildered and thoroughly apprehensive, I went upstairs and told Hammet the news. He shrugged and asked if were Her. I said I didn’t know for sure, but that it was likely. He then wanted to know iffen she’d done been et by a bear, and if so, was the bear dead, too? And if that were the case, was they gonna skin the bear and who would get to keep the hide? All in all, he handled it with aplomb.
Aplombless, I dressed, gulped down coffee, called the sheriffs office to report a suspicious death and arrange for a backup, and somehow managed to function like the cop I was supposed to be, although my brain, like Merle’s motorcycle, had not yet cleared the creek. I left Hammet in front of the television, enthralled equally by cartoons and commercials, and trotted across the deserted highway to the police department just as the sheriff’s deputy drove up in a four-wheel wagon. I ordered Merle to get in the backseat, then climbed in next to the deputy and tried my darndest to explain something I didn’t know anything about.
An hour later, after jolting up a wretched logging trail on the north side of Cotter’s Ridge while Merle shouted directions in one of my ears and the deputy shouted questions in the other, we parked and got out of the vehicle. Merle led us to a clearing, then stopped and wordlessly pointed at a crumpled and very still figure on the far side. From where we stood, I could see it was what remained of Robin Buchanon. I wasn’t totally surprised, but I had to battle the sudden explosion of icicles in my stomach and the flood of sourness in my mouth.
“Goddamn it,” I muttered under my breath, thinking about her children. Hammet in particular, since I hadn’t been fooled by his casual remarks earlier. A mother is a mother is a mother, even if she’s a moonshining, whoring, abusive mountain woman. “What the hell happened to her?”
The deputy caught my arm as I started forward. “Booby traps,” he said, pointing down at a thin wire almost lost in the leaves. “The trip wire’s attached to some sort of detonation gizmo. The woman must hav
e been in too much of a hurry to watch the ground.”
I shook my head as I looked at the rows of four-foot plants. “I’ll bet she was. This must have been the family ginseng patch. She’d have been furious when she saw the marijuana plants, and rushed forward to rip them up.” I eased around the perimeter of the clearing, keeping an eye out for wires, buried cans and buckets, dangling fish hooks, and other charming devices, most of which were brought home from the Vietnamese jungle, along with a fondness for marijuana. I won’t say much about the odor, but it wasn’t anything you could miss, not even from a good fifty feet away. Covering my mouth and nose with a handkerchief, I knelt down at a prudent distance and forced myself to examine the pitiful body. “Yeah, her foot’s caught on a trip wire. There’s the booby trap in that branch. I saw a diagram of one in a manual at the academy, but I don’t guess I’ve ever seen a real one.”
The device was a Rube Goldberg contraption involving the trip wires, a spring-coiled door hinge, a nail, a square of wood with a hole bored in it, and a shotgun shell that had been detonated. That’s all I’m going to tell you, and there are no diagrams in the back of the book. Do not go down to the basement and fool around with the above mentioned items unless you have a perverted secret desire to go through life minus eyes and a smattering of fingers.
The deputy came over to peer at the booby trap. “It’s only number six bird shot, but she caught it square in the face. It was probably rigged just to scare the living daylights out of some innocent trespasser, which it sure as hell would of. Bird shot won’t kill you unless you get it in the eyes. If she’d been half a dozen inches taller or a few feet farther away, or even turned the other direction, she’d be squawking like a wet hen while she picked pellets out of her bottom.”
That wasn’t much comfort for Robin Buchanon.
“I’m going to nail the son of a bitch who boobytrapped this patch,” I said. My voice must have sounded cold, because the deputy and Merle exchanged cautious looks and stayed quiet. I sucked in a breath through the handkerchief and continued. “It’s one thing to grow a little dope out in the National Forest; God knows it’s the number-one cash crop in this part of the state. But this booby trap changes things. We’re not going to rip out the plants and haul them to the county incinerator, moaning all the way about lack of manpower. We’re going to catch the bastard and hang him on murder one and everything else in the book. He’s going to drown in the felony charges we’ll come up with.”
I stood there and glowered while the deputy radioed in his report. Merle squatted under a tree and did not cackle. After a great deal of staticky conversation, we were told to handle the preliminary investigation ourselves because they doubted they could find us. They had a point.
The deputy and I gingerly examined the scene for evidence, of which there was damn little. Robin’s tools and gunnysack were labeled and put into plastic evidence bags, then stashed in the back of the vehicle. The tiny fragments of cardboard from the shotgun shell were treated in a similar fashion. The device that had killed Robin Buchanon was bagged, with a few expressed hopes that fingerprints might be found. The plants were measured, counted, and assessed at more than ten thousand dollars, wholesale alone, although they were short enough to indicate they had been planted as late as midsummer. Retail (a.k.a. street value) could be as much as ten times higher. Six more booby traps were located around the perimeter and very carefully left intact. At that point the deputy and I grimaced at each other. He returned to the vehicle for a body bag, and we forced ourselves to slide the remains into it. Then each of us found a private spot in the forest in which to vomit. I knelt for a long while afterward, thinking all sorts of crazy things that I still can’t put into words. Which goes to show I was about as hard-boiled as the heroine of a Jane Austen novel.
Once the vehicle was loaded, I went back to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. The marijuana plants were swaying just a bit in the breeze, like proud, bushy, green plumes. Once the investigation was closed and the son of a bitch was doing a string of consecutive sentences for murder, manufacture of a controlled substance, trafficking, reckless endangerment, and an assortment of federal charges, the patch would be cleared and burned. Maybe the ginseng would come back, I thought with a wry smile. If it did, I’d bring Hammet et al to the spot and show them their family legacy. Their mother’s estate, so to speak.
I went back to the wagon. Merle was perched on the edge of the backseat, not real pleased by the bags (and odor) behind him. Sympathizing, I got in the front, rolled down the window, and told the deputy I was finished for the time being. As he drove our makeshift hearse down the road, I stared out the window. “This is my case, you know,” I said without turning my head.
“So the sheriff figured you’d say. It’s as much your jurisdiction as anybody’s, and you did know the deceased. He may be being so generous because we’re shorthanded, overworked, and underpaid. Ain’t none of us had a decent vacation in the last six months.”
I considered suggesting they take so-called vacations instead, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. I leaned back and closed my eyes.
“Looky there,” Merle said suddenly, bruising my ear as he stuck his hand out the window to point at a clump of firs. “Do you recollect how I said earlier that I’d seen some kids courting along the road? Looks like they couldn’t get their jeep to working again.”
I’d forgotten about the courters. And I didn’t like the word “jeep,” which brought to mind the one that was supposedly parked in front of the PD. Because it now occurred to me (a mere three hours after the fact) that it hadn’t been there earlier, when I’d raced over to meet the deputy. It hadn’t been there the night before, when David Allen had driven us past too quickly for me to decide what was wrong. That flash of insight was a mere fourteen hours after the fact. Perspicacity is not among my sins.
The deputy jammed on the brakes. “It’s under those firs. You got to look real hard to see it, but you can see a flash of red and the sunlight glinting on a taillight.”
“Red jeep,” I said, sighing. “Just for the record, Merle, who were these two lovebirds you met last night?”
He confirmed my worst fears. The three of us pushed through the brush to the jeep, which was empty of all signs of humanity except for a square of wax paper on the floorboard in front of the passenger’s seat. At that moment I caught myself wishing the twosome had been et by a bear, but I put the fantasy aside and yelled their names. Pretty soon the deputy and Merle started yelling, but nobody waddled or stumbled out of the woods.
“They’re damn lucky they’re not here,” I said through clenched teeth. “I’ve got a murder investigation on my hands; the last thing I need is a missing team of car thieves. If Kevin fell out of a tree in front of me right now, I swear I’d strangle him. If I could get my hands around Dahlia’s neck, I’d strangle her, too.”
“Shall I call in a grand theft auto?” the deputy suggested. “Destruction of government property? Malicious mischief? How about we put out an APB on ’em?”
“Do that, and stress that they’re liable to be armed and dangerous. Maybe some trigger-happy cop’ll save me the bother.” I leaned back against the hood of the jeep and rubbed my face until it hurt. “This whole mess is too damn much for me. I’ve got a murder, a bunch of orphans, a stolen vehicle, two missing morons, a town full of loonies who communicate with dead ancestors, and a psychic who seems to know more than I do. I don’t return my calls, my lipstick’s crooked, and my mother thinks I’m a stagnant pond. I don’t need this, guys.”
I didn’t burst into tears, but I toyed with the idea all the way back to town.
Mrs. Jim Bob nibbled a corner of the candy bar with her small, even teeth. Although her stomach was grumbling, she carefully refolded the wrapper and put the candy bar back in the bedside drawer. Rationing was essential, she told herself in a firm voice. She was in no danger of drying out too badly, what
with the bathroom tap. But thirty-six hours into the siege, she was getting hungrier by the minute and she was having a hard time not just jamming the candy bar into her mouth.
She dialed the sheriffs department and dully asked to speak to Chief of Police Arly Hanks.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Jim Bob,” the dispatcher said, “but she still hasn’t called in. I swear I’ve been beeping her since your first call. I don’t know what else I can do for you, dear. Are you sure there isn’t anyone else who can help you?”
Mrs. Jim Bob wasn’t about to admit she was at the mercy of four children, that she couldn’t exercise her authority or even sneak past the little heathens to the kitchen for a meat loaf sandwich and a glass of iced tea. Why, the dispatcher, one LaBelle Hutchinson, was by far the biggest gossip in the whole county, and more than likely to tell the whole world about Mrs. Jim Bob’s dilemma. LaBelle belonged to every auxiliary and missionary society in the county and it wasn’t because of her dedication to all those worthy causes. She just knew everything that happened, from marital squabbles to drunken teenagers stealing the family car to filthy child abusers, and she wasn’t above preening in the limelight while her tongue wagged harder than a duck’s tailfeathers.
Mrs. Jim Bob caught herself wondering how to find a filthy child abuser, since she knew some candidates worthy of abuse. She scolded herself for such un-Christianlike thoughts, then told LaBelle to keep trying to locate Arly. She dialed Brother Verber’s number, but it was still busy. The telephone company had run a check sometime in the now murky past, and assured her that the line was not out of order. They were real snippy about it, too.
She replaced the telephone receiver and went to the bedroom door to make sure it was still locked. As she returned to sit on the corner of the bed, she heard what sounded like an elephant thudding into the living-room wall. She didn’t even wince, being long past the wincing stage.