That was the first time anybody had talked about Sperra as a person who deserved something. I liked him for it. He went to the chair beside Edward and sprawled casually, wearing his khaki pants and white polo shirt like a man who had stopped by on his way to a round of golf. He left his chair far back from the table so he could stretch his legs and rested his right arm on the back of Edward’s chair. “You doin’ all right, Georgia?” he asked her.
She sighed. “As well as can be expected. You okay, Renée?”
Renée took the chair to my right and turned her back slightly to me, stretching her long legs under Lance’s before she shrugged and said, “I’m doing all right.” She was wearing green again, that sage that exactly matched her eyes. Today it was a cotton shell with white jeans. Her large feet were encased in pale tan sandals, and she wore a large topaz on her right hand. I tried again to picture Renée as a squalling baby, and couldn’t. She must have sprung like Athena, elegant and perfect, from a wave somewhere near Galveston.
Burlin and Annie Dale came last. He was carrying a tray of cups, sugar bowl and creamer, spoons, and tall glasses of ice. She bustled after him with a pot of hot coffee in one hand and a pitcher of iced tea with floating lemon wedges in the other. If she were to bring them together, like cymbals, would heat and cold shatter both and shower glass all over us?
It would be a fitting start to this peculiar meeting.
Annie Dale and I greeted each other like old friends who keep meaning to spend more time together. She looked well, her gray hair cut short and brushed back off her face. But I eyed her full lower lip and silently wondered, Did you teach my husband how to kiss?
She gave me the same smile she always did, but now I asked myself, Was it a little sly? Knowing?
She beamed around the table. “If you all want anything else, just come ask for it.” She walked back to the house with a sway to her hips. Burlin and Edward both watched her to the front steps. Laws, that woman was sexy. Why had I never seen it before? And I knew as well as I knew my name that no matter what she and Joe Riddley had once done, if anything, it would forever remain one of life’s little mysteries I would never be allowed to solve.
The only chair left was all the way around the table, between Edward and Georgia. Burlin rested his hand on my shoulder briefly as he passed behind me to reach it. We devoted the next few minutes to pouring what we wanted to drink and taking a few sips to clear our palates. Finally Lance asked, “So, what’s this about, again?”
Georgia, Edward, and Burlin spoke at once. Burlin waved the other two to silence and said, “Mackie, here, says Sperra didn’t bring you that letter. She sent it by a man who is likely to go straight to the police when he hears about the reward. That means they will know she wrote it and sent it here. He’ll say he left it on the porch rocker. Annie Dale will say she found a letter there addressed to you and took it to you Monday afternoon.”
Lance absorbed this, then nodded. “So I’m going to be suspect number one pretty soon.”
Edward grunted. “Suspect number only, unless we come up with another one or you come up with a good story. Now, here’s what I think we ought to say.” His eyes shifted to me.
“It better be the truth,” I warned. “Making up stories gets folks in all kinds of trouble. Ask recent presidents.”
He flushed an angry red. “I still don’t know what she’s doing here,” he muttered to Burlin.
Burlin looked around the table. “Abigail looked up Mackie on the Internet, and it turns out she’s had some experience in solving murders. I haven’t read the stuff, so I don’t know what she’s done or how, but I thought maybe she could help us out.”
“Where is Abigail?” I hadn’t noticed until then that she hadn’t come with the others.
“She’s not feeling well,” Burlin said at the same instant Georgia said, “Sulking.”
“She hasn’t been well since Monday,” Renée objected, frowning at Georgia.
Georgia gave me a rueful smile. “Okay, she’s not sulking. She doesn’t feel well.” She managed to convey that in her experience of her baby sister, they were the same thing.
“What do you want to know?” Edward asked. “Where we were Monday night after the meeting?”
I nodded. “And if you can prove it.”
“Well, I can.” Everybody looked at him in surprise. “I left the meeting at ten ’til nine, because I was dry as a rotten log in drought and I wanted to buy a cold orange juice before I headed to Augusta.”
Georgia gave a dainty snort. “You and your orange juice.”
“Don’t knock it. This one may save my skin. The Bi-Lo here closes at nine, which anybody can verify. I went straight there and arrived as the manager was about to lock the door. He let me in, I made my purchase, and as I was paying, I got a call on my cell phone from one of the Augusta people wanting to know when I thought I could get there. The woman at the register had to wait for me to put him on hold while I paid her, so she ought to remember. He and I talked the whole time I drove up, planning strategy for Tuesday’s rally. He can verify that. Except for the time it took to drive from the meeting to the Bi-Lo, I’m covered until nearly midnight.” He sat back and seemed to challenge the others to come up with equally good stories.
“Why didn’t you say all that last night?” Georgia demanded.
“I needed time to remember it all. How about you, Burlin? You were leaving the meeting as I was.”
“Yeah, with Hubert. He dropped me off here and I went upstairs to change my clothes. I turned on the TV—”
“He’s a television news junkie,” Lance informed me.
“—and I think I might be able to remember the stories if I try. I know there was one about a convenience store holdup in Augusta, because Edward was heading in that direction.” He rubbed his hand across his mouth, thinking. “I brushed my teeth, put on some casual clothes, and came down to the porch to wait for Hubert. He came by in about ten minutes.”
“It would have been close, but you could have run over to the water tank and killed your wife,” I pointed out.
“I could have, but I didn’t. I got on my cell phone and placed a call, which my cell phone bill will show. I guess I could have talked while running to the tank, hitting my wife, and running back—you may want to check with the other party whether I was huffing and puffing and whether he heard any dull thuds. We were still talking when Hubert pulled up and he had to wait while I said good-bye. He may remember that.”
“That sounds pretty good,” I congratulated him. “The way Georgia was talking this morning, I thought nobody could prove where they were.”
“Except me and Renée,” she reminded me. “We were driving around Hopemore all night, trying to find Gusta’s.”
“But you came by here to change shoes first, right?” She nodded. “So what were you doing at that time, Renée?”
She gave me a smile that didn’t even pretend to be embarrassed. “Sleeping in the car. I’ve been dozing off and on all week, every chance I get. I didn’t see any need to go in, since Georgia said she’d just be a minute. She even pointed to the clock and said I could time her.” She gave Georgia a lopsided smile. “The dashboard clock said 8:30 when she left. She woke me when she came back to point out it was only 8:40—she’d hurried. I dozed some more while she drove around, until she woke me to say she was lost. I helped her find the right place, and we got there as the clock chimed nine. How she spent twenty minutes lost around here, I will never know.”
“More like thirty,” I told her. “Gusta’s clock runs slow.” I hated to ask the next question, but somebody inevitably would. “Would you have noticed if the car had stopped and Georgia had gotten out while you all were driving around?”
Georgia didn’t look the least bit worried while Renée took time to consider the question. “I’m sure I would have, because I remember that she had to stop twice at the stop-light.”
“One light in town, and it caught me coming and going,” Georgia said wryly.
“Did you check any of those times with your own watch?”
She held up her arm and pushed back her sleeve. “I don’t wear a watch.” I remembered at least two people informing me that Renée had no sense of time. How she managed to be a successful professional without watching clocks, I didn’t know. Maybe she could teach me when all this was over.
“The same is true for you as for me,” Burlin pointed out. “You have ten minutes when nobody was with you. Instead of sleeping, you could have dashed over to the water tank and clobbered Sperra.”
“I never dash,” Renée said calmly.
“There is that,” he agreed.
“Besides”—she reached to pour herself another glass of tea—“I quite liked the woman.”
24
If Renée wanted to cause a sensation, she did.
“What do you mean you liked her?” Georgia demanded.
At the exact same time, Burlin said, “You never met her.”
Lance reached over and put a hand on her arm, as if to protect her from them both. “Tell them,” he urged.
“Well”—her husky voice drew out the word, like a sto ryteller beginning a tale—“Monday morning I went for a walk. I needed to get away from people for a while. So I trudged out of town along the highway and turned past the Bi-Lo on the first dirt road I came to.”
“It’s gravel,” I corrected her, having spent a fortune on that gravel over the years.
“Whatever.” The distinction obviously escaped her. “There was a funny old house near the corner, with things sticking up all over the roof. Then there were some lovely piney woods on one side with a pasture on the other. I could smell hay and cotton dust, and—it just smelled like September, somehow. I walked what would have been two or three blocks, if there had been blocks, and passed a second house with a barn. Then I saw another pasture with a barbed-wire fence and a hill beyond the fence. I wondered what was over that hill, so I climbed through and went to see. At the bottom on the other side was a cattle pond with a short dock.”
“And you met Sperra at the pond,” I contributed.
She turned to me in surprise. “You’re really good! Did you see us, or are you psychic?”
“Neither. Sperra had been camping in that barn, and my grandson was staying with her a few days. He said Hubert drove Sperra away that morning, and she went to the pond.”
“Small-town grapevine detecting,” Georgia murmured. “The best kind.” A breath of wind lifted her bangs from her forehead, and I saw a faint line near her hairline where a plastic surgeon had taken a tuck and wiped away several years.
Renée was talking again. “. . . man, sitting on the dock throwing bits of bread into the pond. He looked harmless, so I sat down at the other end. After a while I said how nice it was to get away from people a bit, and he told me not to swim in the pond because it wasn’t clean. I said, ‘I grew up on a ranch in Texas. I know better.’ We sat a while longer without talking. Then I asked, ‘Aren’t you hot in that coat?’ He said, ‘Yeah,’ and took it off. That’s when I saw she was a woman. We didn’t say anything else for a while. Then she said, ‘You’re his wife, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘I’m Lance Bullock’s wife. Is that who you mean?’ She jumped up so fast, I nearly fell in the pond in surprise. Then she started waving her arms and yelling at me. ‘Don’t let him do it! Don’t let them make him do it.’ ” Renée was so involved in the story, she waved her own arms.
“Did you know what she meant?” I asked.
“No, and I told her so.” She reached out and touched Lance, but he was looking down at the table. His hands were clenched so tight before him, the knuckles were white. “Shall I go on?” she asked him privately.
“You might as well. You’ve gotten this far.” He still did-n’t look up.
“The woman stopped yelling and said, ‘I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to scare you. I get upset sometimes. But I’m his mother, before God and these witnesses.’ ” Renée gave us all a crooked smile. “The only witnesses being me, a couple of fish swimming near the top of the water, and a few butterflies. Anyway, she came and took me by both hands, and she had tears in her eyes. ‘He doesn’t have to run for governor,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t want to do it. I can tell. A mother knows these things. Don’t let them make him do it. His heart’s not in it.’ ”
Renée paused to take a big swallow of tea. It slid down a throat as graceful as a swan’s. Then she addressed Burlin. “I told her my heart isn’t particularly in it, either, and she said, ‘Don’t let them eat you. They’ll eat you alive if you let them.’ I said, ‘I have no intention of being eaten,’ and she said, ‘You know, honey, I don’t think you will.’ Then she spread out her arms and gave me a big, smelly hug. She even laughed and said, ‘I know I stink, but my heart’s pure.’ After that, I came back and found you all had already left for Dublin, so I took another nap.” She turned to me. “I knew that Lance’s mother was dead, of course, and anybody could tell this woman was a bit peculiar—”
In the South, that’s how we describe anybody who’s not like the rest of us, from a serial killer to a woman who still irons her underwear.
“—but I liked her, whoever she was. Oh—before I left, she ran after me and grabbed my wrist”—Renée rubbed it at the memory—“and asked where we were staying, so she could write—” She stopped. I saw her pressing her lips together and thought she was done, but she whispered, “I wish I hadn’t told her. Oh, I wish I hadn’t.”
“It’s never wise—” Edward began in a lecturing voice, but Lance flapped a hand for him to hush. Then he put an arm around his wife and pulled her to him. Renée laid her head on his shoulder and wept.
“It wasn’t your fault, honey,” he whispered. “It’s not your fault. Hush, now. Hush. It’s not your fault.” His eyes met mine over her rough-cut brown hair. “She told me what had happened as soon as I got back from Dublin. We drove back to the pond to see if we could find the woman, because I figured that whoever she was, if she was that determined to talk to me, I ought to give her a chance.” His voice grew bleak. “I never for a second imagined it was really Mother.”
“She was probably wandering around town with her letter by then,” I said, “looking for Hector. You never did find her?”
He shook his head. “No, but I got her note a little after three. She signed it with a little bird that she taught me to draw as soon as I could hold a pencil and enclosed this picture.” He fished it from his wallet and held it up. “I didn’t even tell Daddy, though, because I thought I ought to go see her before I mentioned her to anybody.”
“What did you do with the note?” I asked. “Do you still have it?”
“Yeah, I’ve got it. We were all in the sitting room when it came, in the middle of a meeting, and I needed time to think about it, so I shoved it between the pages of the speech I was working on for Augusta. Tuesday, after I heard what had happened”—he paused for a deep breath—“I got it and put it in our room.”
“You’d better go flush it,” Edward commanded.
Lance shook his head. “Not for a million dollars.”
“It won’t matter whether he has it or not,” I told Edward. “Enough people have seen it to verify its existence. Why don’t you tell us about your Monday-evening schedule, Lance?”
“I would have skipped the meeting entirely—Hubert wanted Daddy to speak, after all—but Edward, here”—he jerked a finger in that direction—“got the bright idea that Daddy ought to say a few words, then turn it over to me. I was in no shape to write a speech that afternoon. I still don’t remember what I said, and it didn’t matter anyway—nobody wanted to hear me when they’d been promised Daddy. And then Hubert announced that Q & A session, so I didn’t get away until a minute or two past nine. I even had to stay after Daddy, because some people had heard I was planning to change parties—”
“Which wasn’t your idea,” Renée added. “It was theirs.” She glared at Edward and Burlin.
“We have disc
ussed the possibility of Lance running on the other ticket,” Edward quickly explained to me, as if it were no more important than his deciding to wear a different tie.
“Mentioned it,” Georgia added, to soften the effect.
“You were going to make him betray everything he stands for,” Renée snapped.
Burlin gave me a rueful grin. “Bullocks never have easy marriages.”
I wasn’t going to touch that with a ten-foot pole. “So, Lance, where were you after the meeting? And can you prove it?”
“No, ma’am, I can’t.” His dark eyes were sober. “I came back here—” He dropped his gaze to the table and started scratching at a speck of something on the cloth.
I didn’t raise two boys without recognizing when a man-child isn’t being truthful. “But not straight here, right?” He looked up, startled. My eyes held his until he shook his head.
He took a deep breath as if he hoped air would give him strength. “Okay, everybody might as well know the worst. I did go to the tank.”
“You never!” Was that Georgia, Burlin, or Edward? They spoke at the same time.
“I did,” he admitted.
He’d shocked even Renée. Edward made a motion for Lance to hush. Burlin sat there like he’d seen a Gorgon and turned to stone. Renée reached out and took one of Lance’s hands in her own. “But you didn’t kill her.”
“No.” He spoke around what sounded like a sob in his throat. “She was already dead when I got there.”
“Tell it in order,” I commanded.
He took a long minute to compose himself. “I left the meeting place a little after nine. There were only a couple of folks still there by then. Hubert had run Daddy by here to change and promised he’d come back to lock up. I was later than the note had said, but I hoped if it was Mother, she’d realize I could have been detained. She’d been married to Daddy, after all, and that happens all the time in politics. So in case it was her and she was still waiting, I drove to the water tank.” He took a gulp of tea like we were sitting in a desert and he was parched. “The streetlights aren’t bright over there, but what I could see of the lot around the tank didn’t look safe for my tires, so I parked at the curb and walked. About halfway to the tank I started calling, ‘Mother? Mother?’ The word felt good in my mouth. I hadn’t used it for so long.”
When Will the Dead Lady Sing? Page 22