Behind the Bonehouse

by Sally Wright

  I can no longer tolerate his attacks. His killing of Cassandra, who’d never done him any harm, shows the vicious bent of his insanity. Munro was a trained assassin during World War II, and I know it’s only a matter of time until he makes a concerted attempt to murder me too.

  All I can do is leave tomorrow as quickly as I can pack. I could return to Bloomington, or maybe try Nashville. Destination doesn’t matter. I have to escape Munro’s persecution and preserve this journal too, in case the worst happens.

  Earl Peabody shook his head, and stared out the window that faced the foot of the bed, the journal held carefully by one leather corner in his huge tanned hand. “Carl musta gone off the deep end, ’cause Alan Munro wouldn’t a killed him.”

  I know Alan. The way he dealt with that killer two years ago, without takin’ revenge. No, he and Jo are real fine folks, and Seeger’s way off base.

  Gotta run it down anyway, and get to the bottom of it quick as I can.

  ’Course, the inscription on the pen, that’s something. “J to A.” From Jo to Alan? They got married about then, from what I remember. Not that Alan killin’ Carl makes any sense at all.

  Earl took the suicide note into the study and turned on the turquoise electric typewriter that sat in the center of the desk. It was one of the new IBM models, like the one they’d just gotten at the Sheriff’s Department after months of wrangling over funding, the model that had a revolving ball, with the type stuck on all around it, that could be replaced to change the font.

  He pulled a piece of typing paper out of a bottom drawer and held it up next to the note by Carl’s bed so that the light coming through the front window was right behind them both.

  There was a watermark on the one from the bedroom, and one on the paper from the desk too, but they weren’t the same marks the way he’d expected.

  He typed the same message that’d been left by Carl, and saw right away that the type was the same, but the “o” was chipped on the one from the bedroom, and wasn’t on Earl’s typewriter.

  So it ain’t just what you’d come to expect. Not right outta the chute. Not some everyday suicide. Not with different type.

  ’Course it’s not like suicide’s an everyday occurrence with folks here in the county. I don’t reckon there’ve been twenty all together, not in the past eighteen years.

  Earl sat and swiveled, and hummed to himself for a minute, then looked through the papers in the top center drawer, and pulled out a handwritten list in the same handwriting that was in the journal, and slipped it in a file inside his satchel.

  Then he walked into the kitchen and asked Esther Wilkes if he could have a word.

  “Thank you, ma’am, for waitin’ on me. And I’m real glad you went outta your way not to touch nothin’ you didn’t have to and all. Did my deputy get your fingerprints?”

  “Yes, sir, he did.”

  They were sitting in the study—Earl in Carl’s desk chair, Esther sitting with her pocketbook in her lap, her lace-up oxfords planted right together, her back straight in her overstuffed chair.

  “We did that to eliminate your prints, as we try to see what we got here.”

  Esther didn’t say anything. She looked at Sheriff Peabody as though she were waiting for him to do his job in whatever way he would.

  “So did you notice anything missing, or rearranged in the house when you got here?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t. I thought about that too. I kinda walked around and inspected, while I waited for y’all to get here.”

  “Can you identify this handwriting?” Earl handed her the list he’d taken out of the desk.”

  “That’s Mr. Seeger’s writin’. No doubt at all.”

  “You’ve known him a good long while?”

  “I worked for Miz Seeger a good many years.”

  “So how would you describe Mr. Seeger? Has he seemed depressed, or upset at all?”

  “I only come in one day a week. Thursday, like today. And a ’course till last fall he’d be goin’ to work, and I wouldn’t see him hardly at all before he left the house. He’d just walk through on his way out the door, and that’d be all I seen. Miz Seeger, she works in the libery over to the university, and her hours change some, but she’d be here when I come, and usually for some little while so I know her a whole lot better. I like to come early, in the cool of the day, and we’d talk some while I got to work, and I think she’s a real fine woman.” Esther, set her purse on the floor and clasped her hands in her lap.

  “Did Mr. Seeger seem different after she left in the fall?”

  Esther hesitated, and it looked to Earl like she was asking herself how blunt she could be with a white county sheriff she didn’t know from Adam. “I hope you’ll say just what ya think, Miz Wilkes. That’s the way you can help.”

  “Well. I’d say he got a whole lot more fractious and short tempered. Kinda rude, if ya want the whole truth. He’d be here every week to let me in, and he made it real plain that he didn’t want me to have a key, or be here on my own. Some folks I work for give me a key a my own. But he’d sit in the living room, in his chair with the footstool, and read till I’d finished my work, comin’ in though, wherever I was, more times than you’d expect. It was like he was watching my every move. Like he figured I’d try to steal from him if he weren’t makin’ sure.”

  “And that’s stayed pretty much the same since the fall?”

  “I wouldn’t say that altogether.”

  “No?”

  “I b’lieve I saw a change. Seemed like he got real quiet. More than normal. I’d look over and there’d be this stoney-like scowl on his face, and he’d be workin’ away at something in his mind. ’Course, what, or why, I have no idee.”

  “When was this?”

  “I cain’t say for sure. Mightta been January. Mightta been early February. Then sometime around then, I’m not sure just when, he got busier than he’d been since he’d stopped going to work. He spent more time in his study with the door closed. ’Course, I only seen him one day a week, so I cain’t say for sure. It’s just the impression I got.”

  “Did you usually come in the back door, or the front?”

  “Back door. Yes, sir.”

  “Was it unlocked today?” Earl was leaning back in his chair, a notebook in his left hand, his right holding his pen.

  “No, sir, it was never unlocked, not once. Not since Miz Seeger left. She used to leave it unlocked, but not him, no sir.”

  “So how’d you get in on your own?”

  Esther stared silently at her feet, then smoothed her dress toward her knees, before she looked Earl right in the eye. “Miz Seeger put an extry key in a coffee can in the garage for me, in case I ever needed it. Once in a while, she’d have me come an extry afternoon, when she was gone, to do somethin’ special. Ironin’ and what not. And she trusted me to come in on my own. He wouldda been real put out if he’d had any idee.”

  “Did ya ever show anybody else the key?”

  “No sir, I did not!”

  Earl nodded, and pushed his glasses up his nose, then asked if there was anything else she figured he ought to know.

  Esther thought for a minute, gazing past Earl toward the row of encyclopedias on the bookshelf behind him. “I was fixin’ to quit today, and ask for my back pay. I been workin’ for Miz Seeger at her new place, and I’m fixin’ to start for her sister. I was dreadin’ it. Tellin’ Mr. Seeger. I knew he’d throw a fit and make it real unpleasant. He owed me for three whole weeks.”

  “That don’t sound like he was treatin’ ya right.” Earl took a small plastic bag out of his canvas carryall with the fountain pen inside it and handed it across to Esther Wilkes. “Do you recognize this?”

  “No, sir. I never seen it before.”

  “Can you think of anyone Miz Jane could’ve given a pen to with that inscription?”

  “No, sir, I cain’t.” Esther looked slightly perturbed, as though the question had been in questionable taste, or an affront to Miz Seeger’s goo
d name.

  “Alright then. Thank you. I appreciate your help.”

  Esther said, “You’re welcome,” and pushed herself out of the chair.

  “One other thing. I’d like you to give my deputy a sample of your handwriting. I’ll get one from Miz Seeger, too. We’ll need them for comparison as time goes on.”

  “Can I ask you somethin’, Sheriff?”

  “Sure.”

  “You figuring this was murder? ’Stead of him committing suicide?”

  “Well, I’ll tell ya, Miz Wilkes, the whole truth is I don’t begin to know, but we gotta look at it all.”

  “Yes, sir. D’you see the sticky stuff on the floor by Cassandra?”

  “I did.”

  “Smells like nothin’ I ever smelled.”

  “Yep, I know what ya mean. If you think of anything else, I hope you’ll give me a call.”

  “Yes, sir, I surely will.”

  Earl went through the rest of the desk, and the tall file cabinet next to the door, and found nothing that seemed to help him put the death in better perspective.

  He walked down the hall to the bathroom, and looked through the medicine cabinet, then took the top off the toilet tank, and looked behind it too, more out of thoroughness than with any expectation of making a discovery.

  But when he picked up the toilet seat, there was a fragment of cream-colored vinyl that looked like a piece of the new type disposable gloves they’d started using in hospitals, stuck right there on the rim of the toilet bowl, like a glove had been cut up and flushed maybe, and one piece got stuck.

  He pulled it off with tweezers, and slipped it in a plastic bag, thinking that, with any luck at all, they’d get him a latent print up at the state police lab.

  He walked through the kitchen, opening and closing drawers and cupboards, before he looked in the ice box. He opened the back door and considered the dirt scattered across the flagstones. There was some plant, low and creeping, growing between most of the stones, that might’ve been planted, he couldn’t tell—but between the two closest to the door, it looked like it’d been dug up accidental, getting shoved by a shoe, or a hoe. He yelled for Pete, who was upstairs in the guest room, and asked him to take samples of the dirt and the plant material too, when he was done upstairs. “Anything interestin’ up there?”

  “Nope. Don’t look like it gets used. There’s a small bedroom, and a storage room like a little attic where there’re suitcases and old chairs, and a bathroom with rust in the sink, but that’s about all.”

  “I’ll be up in a minute.”

  Earl went into Carl’s bedroom again, and stared at the carpet on Carl’s side of the bed, then took a utility knife out of his satchel and cut a patch eight inches square and put it in a bag of its own.

  “Pete?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d like you to vacuum the carpet in here. Could be we’ll get some fibers to compare to somebody’s shoes.”

  “Got it.”

  “You always have to say ‘Got it,’ do ya?”

  “Guess not.”

  “You dusted the phones down here?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good. I gotta make me a call.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Excerpt from Jo Grant Munro’s Journal:

  …Buddy Jones drove his wife over to watch Ross this morning, and we talked for a minute. He’s done so well at Mercer Tate’s he feels like he’s ready to help Mercer train a new stallion manager and try to find himself a job with one of the local trainers, like he’s always wanted. He’s put out a couple of feelers, and then—out of the blue—he got a vicious letter from Frankie D’Amato threatening to tell lies about Buddy to whatever trainers he approaches.

  Frankie! The ne’er-do-well groom who offered to secretly breed one of Mercer’s studs to Buddy’s mare a couple of years ago so he could pocket the fee himself, which would’ve been grounds for lynching a hundred years ago. So when Buddy told Mercer (who only fired Frankie when he could’ve prosecuted him) Frankie took it out on Buddy’s mare.

  What is it in human nature that makes a person hate enough that years later he’d still be looking for ways to inflict pain?

  Short word. Three letters. Starts with the letter “s”.

  Earl Peabody stood on Carl Seeger’s front porch, his huge hands settling his dark brown wide-brimmed WWI style sheriff’s hat on his head, as he gazed across the street at the elderly woman in a big straw hat deadheading some sort of plant, while looking across at him.

  He was just about to cross the road, when the door opened on the house on his left, and a short pear-shaped man with small hands and feet hurried across his lawn toward Earl.

  “Excuse me. I’m a friend of Mr. Seeger’s. Has something happened to Carl?” He was tying his tie, a suit coat thrown across one shoulder, his shirt tail not quite tucked into the front of his pants.

  “May I ask your name, sir?” Earl was staring at the man’s thin brown hair, wondering uneasily if it’d been sprayed into place.

  “Terrence Cathcart.”

  “Well, Mr. Cathcart, I’m real sorry to have to tell you Mr. Seeger’s passed away.”

  “How? Of what?”

  “We’re not rightly sure yet, but we’re gonna be lookin’ into it real close.”

  “If he was murdered I know who did it!” Cathcart’s plump face was red now and prickly, and his eyes looked incensed.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Carl told me Alan Munro’s been persecuting him for months. He called me last night and told me he’d found his cat dead, and he was sure Alan had killed her.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I can’t say to the minute. Maybe six-fifteen, or so. Something like that.”

  “Do you know Mr. Munro?”

  “Not to say ‘know.’ I work for the IRS, and I’m in the process of auditing his and his wife’s finances.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes. I’m on my way there.”

  “What led you to undertake the investigation?” Earl was looking down at Terry, his broad shoulders stooped, his upper body bent slightly forward as though he might be having trouble hearing the high pitched voice.

  Cathcart hesitated, and pushed his arms into his jacket, while he glanced off to his left toward town. “We often receive reports of malfeasance. I’m responding to such a report.”

  “And who gave you that report? If you don’t mind my askin’.”

  Terry Cathcart adjusted his tie, and patted his stiff shiny hair. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “This is an unexplained death investigation, Mr. Cathcart. There’ll be a formal enquiry. You’ll have no choice but to answer that question, and pro’bly a whole lot more, all of ’em under oath.”

  Cathcart stared at his shoes, before he glanced at Earl. “Carl told me there was very good reason to investigate Munro. He had pertinent information, having worked with him at Equine Pharmaceuticals.”

  “Was there bad blood between them, would you say?”

  “On Alan’s part, yes. He caused Carl to lose his job. He threatened the cat. Cassandra. He came over a week or so ago and threatened Carl’s life. And that was just a couple of days after he’d accosted him at Keeneland in front of the whole crowd.”

  “You heard him yourself, did you?”

  “Well,” Terry brushed a speck of lint from his coat, then glanced across the street. “Not directly. Carl told me about it.”

  “Can you describe Mr. Munro’s car?”

  “It’s a dark-blue Dodge sedan, several years old.”

  “When was the last time you saw it?”

  “Last week. In Carl’s drive. I haven’t seen Munro when I’ve been working at his house. He leaves before I get there, and comes home after I’ve left.”

  “Well, sir, I thank you for your help. Someone from my office will ask you to make a statement. Today, or maybe tomorrow.”

  “Fine. I’ll be more than happy to tell what I know about Alan Munro.
”

  “I’m sure you will.” Earl nodded and started across the street, leaving Terry standing in Carl’s driveway tucking his shirttail in his pants.

  Elinor Nevilleson had pulled off her gardening gloves and laid them on top of the clippings in the wicker basket that hung from her left arm. She straightened herself to her full heighth and held out her right hand. “Sheriff Peabody. Elinor Nevilleson. I hoped you’d be interviewing Mr. Seeger’s neighbors. May I offer you a cup of tea?”

  “Thank you, ma’am. I’d like that.”

  The thick walls of her old stone house sheltered it from the heat, and her parlor was cool and dark. The cream-colored crewel-work drapes, half-pulled across the tall windows, softened the early sun. The mahogany framed Regency sofa and Georgian tables and chairs, fighting for space on the blue oriental that covered most of the heart pine floor, the gilded mirrors and Victorian portraits, filled the parlor with history and style, but made Earl feel cramped right off, like he was too big for the room.

  “Sugar, Sheriff?”

  He sat at one end of the brocade-covered sofa, wiping his hat on his sleeve before setting it down on the pale yellow silk, lying shiny and smooth on his left. “No, thank ya, ma’am, but I will take a piece a lemon since ya got it right there.”

  She passed him the plate, then slipped a slice in her own tea, before she looked at Earl. “Having seen the mortuary van depart, and having seen Miz Wilkes drive away with her husband, I can only presume Mr. Seeger has passed away.” She sipped her English Breakfast tea from a blue-and-white Chinese porcelain cup, then set it carefully in its saucer, as she studied Earl over gold-framed glasses with sharp brown eyes.

  “Yes, ma’am, he has. Did you know Mr. Seeger well?”

  “I did not, no. We had what I can only describe as an adversarial relationship. He was a rude and vindictive person whom I chose to have little to do with.”