“So we still have a faceless killer.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it has to be somebody DeLage or Miss Ouida knows, or—”
My phone buzzed and I picked it up.
“I don’t know who it is,” Marilyn said, “but she’s upset. Insists on talking to you personally.”
I punched the button.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Graham?”
My breath caught: The voice belonged to Ouida Fabré.
“Miss Ouida?” I asked and pressed the button to put her on the speaker phone so Pepper could hear.
“Mr. Graham, I’m so scared. I can’t talk for long. If they see me on the phone they’ll get aggravated and they can be mean.”
“What’s wrong, Miss Ouida?”
“It’s Nicholas,” the old woman said, her voice quavering. “He took my books.”
I muttered an epithet.
“They’re the only thing I have.” She sounded on the verge of tears.
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“Just a little while ago. That nurse, Ida Krogh, came here and took them away. They can’t do that, can they? Those are mine. I just want to die.”
Her voice died away in a moan.
“Don’t give up, Miss Ouida,” Pepper said. “We’ll do everything we can.”
“My nephew thinks I’ve lost my mind,” Ouida moaned. “But that doctor you brought the other day doesn’t think so, does he?”
“Of course not,” Pepper said. “And we’ll get you out, Miss Ouida. That’s a promise.”
“God bless you. I have to go now. They’re coming.”
The line went dead.
“We have to get her out of there,” Pepper said.
I looked down at her hands, where she was supporting herself on the desk, and saw that her knuckles were white.
“How?” I asked quietly.
“I don’t know. A court order. Whatever it takes.”
I lifted the phone, punched in Dogbite’s number, and turned on the speaker.
“So who’s the lawyer for Ouida Fabré?” I asked. He gave me the name and I wrote it down: Stafford Oates.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We call him and make a case that Nick DeLage is trying to screw the old lady. If Oates agrees, he goes to the court to have the incompetency judgment reversed.”
“Is that all?”
“Sure. The judge will ask for expert testimony or he may just interview her, and then he’ll make a ruling.”
“But in the meantime, what about any of her property DeLage has?”
“As curator he can dispose of it if it’s a prudent thing to do.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“If she’s got some bonds lying around and he thinks he can make more money for her by selling them and investing in something else, he can do it. Or he could conceivably sell land of hers if he thought the opportunity was too good to pass up. But he has to keep records and he can’t profit by it, like selling it all to himself for a dollar.”
“And if we have an expert tell her lawyer she’s mentally competent?” Pepper asked.
Dogbite grunted. “He’ll probably have to make a formal examination.”
Pepper shrugged.
“And, of course,” Dogbite went on, “you’ll piss off Nick. So if you’ve got any notion of getting onto the property again before the end of the millennium, you better think about it first. Her lawyer will have to take into account the possibility that you and Alan may have an ulterior motive.”
“Ulterior motive?” Pepper cried.
“He’s right,” I said. “He’d have to consider it.”
“I don’t care what Nick DeLage thinks,” Pepper declared. “We can’t let him keep that old lady in that place.”
“Alan?” Dogbite asked.
I looked over at Pepper.
“Call her lawyer,” I said. “We’ll deal with Nick.”
Pepper’s look was almost reward enough. Almost … I got up and walked to my window as she punched in the number for Fitzhugh Griffin. We’d played it by the numbers and as a result Nick DeLage had the journals. Without the journals nobody would believe our story, regardless of the will. There had been clever forgeries before and without the journals to examine, historians would write it off as a curious maybe.
As for the metal box, we had even less chance of finding that now.
I turned back to my desk.
“Fitz says he’ll talk to her lawyer,” Pepper said. “He’ll give her a full battery of tests if the lawyer will let him.”
I nodded.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “We may not ever get to work at Désirée now. But we can’t let Nick do this.”
“You’re right,” I said.
But being right was scant comfort.
The patrolman came half an hour later, picked up my printout of the threat, and told Pepper she could probably go back and straighten up her place now. I offered to go with her, but she insisted on going alone. I supposed that putting one’s place back together after it’s been ransacked demands privacy, like examining an intimate part of your body immediately after the surgeon’s sewed it up. I waded through paperwork, took a call from La Bombast, who was amazingly congenial, and was just stuffing papers into my attaché case to take home when Freddie St. Ambrose called.
“Al, baby, how’s it going?”
A call from Freddie was never good news.
“Busy, Freddie. What’s up?”
“Even without the Désirée job.”
I felt my blood pressure ratchet up. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s why I’m calling. Professional courtesy. Nick DeLage said he’d call with the bad news, but I told him it was a matter between professionals and, I hope, old friends.”
“DeLage?”
“Yes. Al, I don’t know how to say this, but Mr. DeLage is some pissed. Feels like you went behind his back on some shit. Something about conniving against the best interests of his aunt. He’s very protective of the old lady, I understand.”
“Freddie, spit it out: Are you saying DeLage hired you?”
“Calm down, Al. Just business, what else can I say? I didn’t initiate the contact, he called me. Said he had an interesting project. Well, once he started to explain I knew exactly what it was, because I saw that little business on TV the other night. And I gotta say, I wondered then what my friends had gotten their asses into. That bitch on TV all but accused you of murder, for Christ’s sakes. I’d of sued.”
“You stole our job.”
“That’s a hell of a thing to say. I just told you, he called us. Said he was canning your asses. What am I gonna do, turn down work? And this is truly historically significant. Somebody’s gotta do it.”
“Don’t make too much of a sacrifice, Freddie.”
“Well, ta-ta, Al. Just letting you know my crew will be out at the plantation starting tomorrow and we don’t really need to see any of your people, if you get my meaning.”
“Screw you.”
“Where’s the professionalism, Al? Well, never mind. But answer one question before you go hit the wall with your fist.”
I waited, tempted to disconnect before he asked.
“What?” I said finally.
“That man that was killed: You didn’t really do it, did you?”
That was when I disconnected and slammed the wall.
I drove home in a foul mood. I cleaned the living room with a vengeance, throwing all the empty cans and bottles into a garbage bag, vacuuming the rug, and emptying the ashtray. I carried the empty dishes to the sink, put away the card table, and drowned the room with lemon scent.
Freddie St. Ambrose. That son-of-a-bitch was going to take his wrecking crew to Désirée and put holes every ten feet. He’d call it archaeology and, since it was private land and not under the jurisdiction of any regulatory agency, he could do as he pleased.
They’d probably e
ven disinter the remains on top of the Indian mound. In the end, there was a good chance they’d destroy any hope we ever had of knowing who the man on the mound was.
Not that it would bother Nick DeLage: He’d promote Désirée as a private historical attraction. And he’d sell the diaries for what he could get. Later archaeologists would be left with Freddie’s fallout, which meant not knowing the provenience of anything Freddie had found.
It made a train wreck look like a business plan.
I was standing in the garden, explaining it all to Digger, who seemed more interested in whether he would get his meal before or after his walk, when I heard the phone in the kitchen.
Pepper, probably. She’d be as angry as I was. But I had to tell her.
I went in and grabbed the receiver.
“Yes?”
“Alan?” It wasn’t Pepper at all, but Esme, and there was something I didn’t like in her tone.
“What’s wrong?”
“Alan, it’s Shelby. He never called like he promised, so I called his house, but there wasn’t any answer.”
“Well, there’s probably an explanation.”
“I hope so. I’m going to call the State Police.”
“All right. Keep me abreast.”
She was worried enough without my telling her about DeLage’s little caper. And Shelby was probably all right.
At least, that’s what I told myself as I opened a can of dog food for Digger and then called Pepper’s number.
Much later, the phone beside my bed rang, and when I got it to my ear I heard Esme telling me they’d located Shelby Deeds.
“He’s in the hospital in Hammond,” Esme said. “The police found him late last night on the interstate. They said he’d been drinking and drove off the road. Alan, it sounds like he may die.”
At almost midnight the hospital was quiet except for the soft slaps of our shoes in the hallway. Incandescent light painted the corridor and showed no mercy to the face of the weary nurse at the second-floor desk.
“He’s been moved from intensive care to a regular room,” she told us. “Are you family?”
“Yes,” Esme said without hesitation. “We’ve just come in from Baton Rouge.”
“He’s in Room 253,” the nurse said, “but I don’t know if he’s awake.”
We followed her finger down the hallway, stopping in front of a door that was partly open.
Esme pushed it the rest of the way and stepped inside the darkened room.
“Shelby?” she whispered.
Someone inside answered with a moan.
Esme went in the rest of the way and we followed.
The sheet-covered form was a bare outline against the soft light spilling in through the doorway and it took a moment to make out the old man’s face.
“Shelby, it’s me. I came as soon as I heard. I brought Alan and Pepper.”
“Esme?” His voice was little more than a whisper.
“What in the world happened to you?” Esme asked. “You don’t know how worried we’ve been.”
There was a silence, punctuated only by the beep of the monitor at the side of the bed. I looked up at the jagged lines tumbling in disorganized fashion across the screen.
“I don’t know,” Shelby said finally. “I was on the way back home. I stopped for some coffee at a McDonald’s before I got on the interstate.”
We waited.
“I remember—I must’ve been somewhere near Ponchatoula. Lights in the mirror, coming up behind me, blinding.”
“You ran off the road,” Esme said.
“Yes.”
“Do you remember anything after that?” Esme asked.
The head on the pillow moved slowly from side to side.
“Lights. I think there were police. But that was after. I must’ve been there a long time.”
Esme looked over at me and I knew she was trying to make up her mind whether to say anything about the liquor.
“Coffee,” she said finally. “That’s what you were drinking?”
“Yes, of course. Why?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Were they saying something different?” he asked, trying to raise his head from the pillow. “Were they saying …?” His head fell back and he groaned.
“Don’t worry about anything,” Esme reassured him. “The important thing is for you to get better.”
“No.” His head moved slowly from side to side. “Important thing is … find out who.”
“What are you talking about?” Esme asked. “Right now you’re all that matters, you silly man.”
“Not so,” he protested and a hand came out from under the covers to catch her own.
“I’m old. I could just as easily die of a stroke as a little bump on the head. But I don’t want to go not knowing.”
Esme shook her own head and sighed. “We’ll finish this when you’re better.”
“No. Finish it … now.”
“Shelby, I really don’t think there’s any reason to continue this conversation. I don’t see taking you out of here and packing you into a car, and I certainly don’t see loading your bed into a trailer and hauling it up to Tennessee, so—”
“Don’t understand,” he whispered, as if all the strength had been drained out of him by the argument. “The longer … wait … the more chances for whoever—”
“But we’ll make them put a guard outside your door,” Esme protested.
“Nobody … safe,” he breathed and I leaned forward to hear his words. “Have to go.”
“Go?” she asked, frowning.
His head shifted and I felt his eyes on Pepper and me.
“To Tennessee,” he wheezed. “To see Dorcas Drew.”
NINETEEN
We stayed over at a motel in Hammond and took off just before eight in the morning, after a quick check of the hospital room. We’d found Esme asleep on the couch and Shelby Deeds staring morosely at a hospital breakfast of poached eggs and dry toast. He gave us Dorcas Drew’s telephone number and then, ominously, told us not to be put off by her manner.
“It’s the librarian in her,” he said cryptically.
Once on 1-55, headed north, I called the office on the cell phone and informed Marilyn I would be in Tennessee for a day or two and told her the transmission was breaking up when she started to protest. Then I handed the phone to Pepper.
“Maybe you ought to talk to this Dorcas woman,” I suggested.
“Me? Why not you?”
“She may respond better to another woman,” I said quickly.
“Or she may hate other women and only respond to men,” Pepper countered.
“I’m driving?” I asked.
She smiled. “You poor man, can’t do but one thing at a time.” She punched in the number and waited, her eyes laughing at me. I reached over and took the phone.
“Yes?” The voice on the other end was sharp, even through the static, and I had the feeling I’d interrupted something.
“Miss Dorcas Drew?” I asked. “My name is Alan Graham. I’m a friend of Shelby Deeds.”
“Then why isn’t he calling?”
“Shelby’s in the hospital,” I said. “He was hurt in an accident.”
“You’re telling me he won’t be coming,” she said.
“No, ma’am. But he asked me to come in his place.”
Silence, punctuated by the crackling of static. Then: “Are you his student?”
“Not exactly. We’re working together on a project. I’m an archaeologist and—”
“It doesn’t matter. Well, I’ll have to rearrange my schedule. I’d planned for him to be here by noon.”
It felt like an accusation.
“I’m sorry. Right now we’re on 1-55 just north of Hammond, Louisiana, so—”
“We?”
“I have my, er, colleague with me. A woman.” I looked over at Pepper, silently willing her help.
“Humph,” Dorcas Drew said.
“Pardon?”
>
“You don’t really want to take that route,” she said finally.
“We don’t?”
“It takes you to Memphis. You don’t want to go to Memphis. I’m closer to Nashville.”
“Well, I thought we’d just take the interstate from Memphis east and—”
“You’ll miss everything.”
“Oh.”
“You are trying to understand the last journey of Governor Lewis along the Natchez Trace, am I correct?” Her tone was impatient, as if she were instructing a child.
“Yes,” I admitted, feeling like I’d been caught bringing the wrong homework to history class.
“Well, the governor did not go from Memphis to Nashville. Not the way you’re going. He started in Memphis, but there was no direct road between the two cities. The only route was down a trail from Fort Pickering—today’s Memphis—to Houston, Mississippi, just south of Tupelo. That’s where the Fort Pickering trail met the Natchez Trace.”
I took the outer lane, passing a Winnebago with a NO JOB, NO WORRIES sticker on the back.
“If you’re going to drive all the way up here to talk to me about the governor, then you should, at the very least, take advantage of the situation. Unless, of course, you’ve already made this trip in the past.”
I’d been to Nashville a couple of times, but I knew that would hardly satisfy.
“What would you recommend, Miss Drew?” I asked meekly.
When she spoke again her voice was notably softer. “When you leave Jackson, take the interstate up to Canton, Mississippi. After Canton there’ll be signs directing you to the Natchez Trace Parkway. Stay on the parkway all the way to Dogwood Mudhole, in Tennessee.”
Two hours later we reached Jackson, an urban sprawl in the gently rolling pine forests. I’d put on a Pete Fountain tape five miles back and the tones of “A Closer Walk” were floating out from the speakers. I stole a glance at Pepper, still unable to believe all that had happened between us.
Maybe, I told myself, I’d dreamed it.
Nah. Because she was smiling back at me and even reached over to squeeze my hand.
Caught out.
“I’ve been thinking,” I began.
“You want me to come into Moundmasters,” she said.
My mouth dropped open. “How did you know what I was going to say?”
She shrugged. “Just figured it.”
The Meriwether Murder Page 13