One Fete in the Grave

by Vickie Fee

  Di looked at me like I had lost my mind.

  “Do you need them for a party you’re planning?”

  “No, they’re going to be a birthday gift for my mother-in-law. You know she collects salt and pepper shakers. You’ve been in her kitchen, haven’t you? Daddy Wayne custom built those shelves behind the kitchen table to hold her collection.”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember. She doesn’t actually use them, but she likes to look at them.”

  “Right. Anyway, Holly mentioned seeing these and I don’t have any other ideas for a birthday present for her, so I thought I’d run up and buy them. I asked you to join me because I thought we could eat supper at the Old Country Store while we’re there. Or I guess we could go somewhere else in Jackson, if you have a taste for something in particular.”

  “The Old Country Store sounds good. I love their cracklin’ cornbread.”

  “Me too.”

  Di was driving more than ten miles over the speed limit down a two-lane back road when a flashy sports car came careening past us. I looked over to see what fool was driving. And it was Aaron Rankin.

  I recognized him from the town hall meeting and his picture in the development brochure, but he had no reason to know me since we’d never actually met.

  As he passed I turned to Di and said, “That’s Aaron Rankin. Don’t lose him. I’ll call Dave and tell him where Rankin is and which direction he’s heading. We’ll just try to stay on his tail until the police arrive.”

  Di slammed her foot down on the accelerator and we lurched forward, giving me momentary whiplash.

  Di knew, because her ex had told her, and I knew, because she had told me, that the seventies’ muscle car had eight cylinders and could go zero to sixty miles per hour in just over eight seconds.

  I hit Dave’s number on my speed dial—I’m not sure what it says about me that I call the sheriff often enough that he’s on speed dial.

  “Dave, Di and I are heading east on the old highway and Aaron Rankin just passed us. We’re trying to keep him in sight. If he turns off this road, I’ll text you.”

  Dave started to speak, but I hung up before he launched into a sermon about keeping our distance from a fugitive and obeying posted speed limits.

  At the county line, the road suddenly veered in a hard left. In his compact sports car, Rankin left his lane, crossing the double yellow line, but managed to hug the road. Di stayed in our lane but the left rear tire left the pavement as she made the turn.

  If Rankin had any doubts we were following him before then, he didn’t now.

  There were a couple of close calls with oncoming traffic, which fortunately was sparse. Rankin put the pedal to the metal as we reached a straightaway and he nearly sideswiped a Cadillac driven by an elderly man whose driver’s side tires rolled along the center line. I momentarily closed my eyes and dug my fingernails into my pants so hard I thought I was going to slash slits in them. Di edged to the right, driving with two tires on the shoulder until we were past the Caddy.

  Without slowing down at all, Rankin suddenly made a hard right turn onto a narrow road with potholes as deep as gopher holes.

  I texted Dave that we had turned off the old highway onto Galbreath Road. I had no idea where Galbreath Road would lead us, and unlike my SUV, Di’s car didn’t have GPS. My seat belt was all that was keeping my head from hitting the roof as we bounced along. The poor condition of the road did slow Rankin down just a bit.

  The phone buzzed. It was Dave.

  “Have you reached the bridge over the creek on Galbreath Road yet?”

  “No. I don’t remember seeing a bridge.”

  I looked over to Di, who was shaking her head “no.”

  “No bridge.” Just as I spoke those words we hit the bridge. I tried to tell Dave, but he cut me off.

  “Good. Listen up. Just past the bridge, there will be an S curve in the road.”

  We were swinging into the top of the S as he spoke.

  “Coming out of the second curve there will be a hill with a sudden drop. . . .”

  At that moment we saw Rankin just ahead of us go flying over the hill, all four tires off the road, and land on the other side of a dip before the car spun around sideways and slid several feet.

  I dropped the phone as Dave was trying to warn us to slow down. Di tried too late to hit the brakes and we went airborne before bottoming out, the undercarriage of the Buick slamming hard onto the uneven pavement. The car died.

  After sitting stunned for a moment, I looked up to see blue lights approaching from the other side of Rankin’s car. He got out and started running through a field, but there was no place to hide and the cruiser turned onto the field road and cut him off. Two state troopers jumped out of their car, wrestled Rankin to the ground, and handcuffed him.

  I retrieved the cell phone from the floorboard and heard Dave still talking.

  “Liv, are you there?!” he was shouting.

  “Yeah, I’m here. We bottomed out over that hill. But the good news is the state police just took Rankin into custody.”

  Dave said he’d call a tow truck, and one of the state troopers walked over to Di’s car, which was making a hissing noise that sounded like an expensive repair. I assumed Dave had told him about us since he didn’t ask us any questions other than to inquire whether we were okay.

  Di and I rode back to Dixie in the tow truck. The driver dropped us off at the sheriff’s office. Terry told us that we could go on back to Dave’s office, that he was waiting for us. That sounded both comforting and ominous.

  Fortunately, he kept the inquisition brief. I think the fact that we were on our way somewhere else and had merely happened upon Rankin instead of having tracked him down worked in our favor. He asked us to run through everything—twice, which seems to be his standard procedure.

  “I understand you were just trying to keep Rankin in sight until law enforcement arrived. But what would you have done if he had suddenly stopped his car, jumped out, and came at you with a gun?”

  “Run him over,” Di said without missing a beat.

  Dave let it pass.

  “The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation will likely want to question you. They’ll need to make a full report about how they captured Rankin. My guess is they’ll want to downplay your role in it.”

  “Fine by me,” Di said. “What is Rankin going down for exactly, besides speeding?”

  “Kelvin Duffy with TBI only gave me a rough outline of things. This is totally the TBI’s case. But it sounds to me like Rankin has been playing a shell game with investors’ funds, transferring money out of bank accounts belonging to the rental property investors into operating expense accounts.

  “Some of his ‘operating expenses,’” Dave said, wrapping air quotes around the words operating expenses, “included tens of thousands of dollars in personal expenses like luxury vacations with his wife and private school tuition for his daughter. He was also making monthly rent payments on an apartment occupied by a woman who isn’t his wife.

  “To conceal his misappropriation of funds he provided false and misleading financial reports to investors and he perpetuated his fraud scheme by propping up the failing rental property investments using funds from other investments. Likely that included the Dixie investors, although I’m not sure exactly how they figure into this just yet.”

  Dave asked Ted to drive me home. I assumed the sheriff was going to personally handle transporting Di.

  * * *

  When Ted pulled up in our driveway, the garage door was open and Larry Joe was getting something out of his truck. Our life is such that Larry Joe didn’t seem surprised when I arrived home in a patrol car. He just waved at the deputy.

  “You and Di have some excitement this evening?”

  “You could say that.”

  We went into the kitchen. He grabbed a beer and I poured myself a glass of Merlot. He was remarkably calm about the whole car-chase episode. Of course, I chose my words very carefully.

&n
bsp; Chapter 22

  At the office on Thursday, I decided to make a few calls to get some preliminary cost estimates for the thirtieth reunion group, even though I had told them I wouldn’t. If they got back to me with an estimate of how much per couple their classmates were willing to fork over, I wanted to have at least some idea how much of their wish list that amount would buy.

  One good thing about multiday, varied activities gatherings is that those on a tighter budget can gracefully opt out of some of the events by arriving a day or two late, or leaving a day or two early. I was certain some of the grads would come only for the dinner/dance on Saturday, while others would want to arrive before any of the scheduled events to hang out in smaller groups with some of their old pals and check out some of their old haunts.

  If Kurt and Judy’s estimate of 75 classmates, each with a plus-one, was accurate, that would mean 150 for the dinner/dance. But I suspected a number closer to 100 to 110 for the family day on Friday and an even smaller number on Thursday, something like 70 to 80 for the night out on the town. This was just my best guess based on experience with similar events, but it gave me a place to start.

  I called a couple of charter bus businesses and got estimates on per-hour and per-day rates. The largest buses would accommodate up to sixty people and mini buses could carry from twenty-four to thirty.

  I also checked with my contact at the Memphis Zoo. I had arranged a number of birthday parties there and even a wine tasting, but those had been limited to about twenty people. I chatted with her, taking notes about larger groups and private after-hours events.

  Since the reunion was for the class of 1989, I called a couple of sources and asked about bands that performed eighties music. I already knew the phone number and the rates for a disc jockey that could put together an eighties mix that would be a crowd-pleaser, and would definitely be easier on the wallet than a quality live band.

  * * *

  Di’s car was in the shop, where it had been towed the previous evening. She was still waiting to hear what the damage was pricewise.

  I picked her up from the post office a little after four o’clock and drove her home.

  “I hope repairs to the Buick don’t end up costing too much,” I said.

  “Me too, but I don’t want to think about that just now. It’s been a long day. Why don’t you entertain me by telling me the newest ideas your mom has for the wedding.”

  “You enjoy seeing me suffer, don’t you?”

  “Only a little.”

  “Okay, so she’s added more people to the guest list. If she doesn’t stop soon, Earl’s acreage isn’t going to be large enough to accommodate them all. And it’s not enough to just set up tables on the grounds near the house; she suggested I check on renting a tent or several tents to put everyone under cover, in case it’s hot or it rains.”

  “So have you checked with Barnum & Bailey yet to see if they’ll loan you the big top?”

  “No, but it may come to that if she keeps adding to her guest list. I may have to hide all her pens.”

  “It could be worse,” Di said.

  “How’s that?”

  “She could decide she wants the tents erected on floating docks in the pond surrounding her little fantasy island. That way everyone would have a ringside seat for the ceremony.”

  I squinted my eyes and gave her a mean look.

  “If you mention that to Mama, they’ll be burying you next to Bubba.”

  We both laughed. I figured I might as well laugh as cry.

  “So, down to business,” I said. “Getting the DNA sample from Jennifer was relatively simple. Now we have to deal with the more complicated matter of retrieving a DNA sample from Bubba.”

  I pulled up in front of Di’s trailer and parked.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked as we walked to the door.

  Once inside she said she was going into the bedroom to change her clothes.

  “Keep talking,” she said. “I can hear you.”

  “The medical examiner has released the body to the funeral home. My idea is that we go to the funeral home and you somehow draw the mortician away from the preparation area, while I slip in and yank some hairs off Bubba’s head.”

  “Will hairs from a dead man still work for a DNA sample?”

  “According to the information on the DNA lab’s Web site they will.”

  “Why do I get the job of enticing the mortician? Am I supposed to flirt with him? And let me just add, eeww.”

  “How you get him out of the way is entirely up to you. You can tell him you’re interested in a career in embalming, if you like.”

  “Double eeww.”

  “Look, if you’d prefer I’ll distract the mortician and you can pluck the hairs off Bubba as he lies naked and bloodless on a metal table.”

  “No thanks, I’m good,” she said. “But if we’re going to the funeral home I guess I should put on a skirt.”

  * * *

  My skirt-clad friend and I drove to the funeral home. There was a funeral in session when we arrived at Frank’s Funeral Home. Frank Jr. is the funeral director now, carrying on after the death of his dad, Frank Sr. The family wisely chose the name Frank’s for the funeral home, rather than Slaughter, which is their last name.

  I hoped the funeral in progress would mean most, if not all, of the staff was occupied with the family of the deceased and their friends. We started to slip downstairs, which is accessed through a staff only door in the back, away from the public areas, when we ran into Steven Slaughter, Frank Jr.’s brother, who spends more time with the deceased than with their grieving families. Probably a wise choice, businesswise.

  Di immediately started chatting him up. He looked dubious, but seemed to be enjoying the attention of a warm-bodied female. I excused myself under the pretext of going to the ladies’ room.

  I wasn’t sure how long Di would be able to feign interest in Steven, so I hurried. There was no one on the stairs or in the hall. I spotted a heavy metal door on the right with signs that said, STAFF ONLY, NO SMOKING, KEEP DOOR CLOSED AT ALL TIMES, and GLOVES MUST BE WORN AS YOU ENTER. There was a glove dispenser on the wall beside the door. This must be it, I thought.

  I turned the knob; it was locked. Dang. Why didn’t this obvious possibility occur to me earlier? I dug in my purse and pulled out a nail file. After fiddling with the lock for a moment, I realized it was hopeless. I hustled back up the stairs and found Di sitting on the arm of a Victorian settee gazing down at a rather nervous-looking Steven.

  “Sorry, we need to go now,” I said to Steven as I tugged on Di’s sleeve.

  She gave him a little tootles wave.

  As we neared the car, she said, “Did you get it?”

  “No. The door was locked.”

  She threw her arms in the air.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “I had hoped to avoid it, but I’m going to have to enlist Mama’s help. The viewing’s tomorrow, with the funeral on Saturday. I think I’d better go ahead and drop by her house and tell her what we need her to do.”

  “Are you sure you want your mama to know what’s going on?”

  “I’m not going to tell her we want Bubba’s hairs for DNA testing. I think I’ll give her the impression that we’re looking for poison or something.”

  “Wouldn’t the medical examiner already have tested for poisoning?”

  “Yeah. But with any luck, Mama won’t think about that. Honestly, I think she’ll be excited to feel like she’s doing something to help Earl. Hopefully, she won’t ask too many questions. Do you want to come with me to Mama’s or do you want me to drop you off at home first?”

  “Do you think your mother will have any cake or pie on offer?”

  “Chances are good.”

  “I’ll stick with you then.”

  * * *

  Pulling up to Mama’s house, I was relieved to see that Earl’s truck wasn’t in her driveway. I had a feeling he might not be thrilled with the little assignm
ent I had planned for her.

  I tapped on the back door and hollered, “It’s me, Mama. And I have Di with me.”

  She called out for us to come on in. As we passed through the kitchen I spied more than half a chocolate cake sitting on the counter next to the coffeemaker. Di elbowed me and nodded toward the cake.

  We walked through to the den. It was only polite to speak to Mama before we started slicing into her cake. True to her Southern upbringing, as soon as we’d exchanged hugs and hellos, Mama asked if we’d like something sweet.

  “I’d love some of your chocolate cake, if it’s no trouble, Mrs. Walford,” Di said.

  “You know you don’t have to ask me twice,” I said. “Mama, don’t get up; I’ll get the cake. Do you want some?”

  “No, I’d better not. I’ve already had two slices today and I wouldn’t want to gain weight before the wedding. But put some coffee on, Liv, if you don’t mind. I could use a cup.”

  I went back into the kitchen and started the coffee, before cutting two generous slices of cake for Di and myself.

  “Di, you want coffee or iced tea?”

  “I think I’ll go with coffee. Thanks.”

  I made use of the pause-and-pour feature on the half-full pot of coffee and poured a small mugful for Mama, doctoring it with two sugars and some cream, the way she likes it. I put a splash of milk in mine. Di takes hers black.

  I carried in their coffees and went back to the kitchen to retrieve the cake plates, balancing my coffee cup on my plate.

  Mama was sorting through photos of her and Earl, placing them in different stacks on the coffee table.

  “Whatcha doing, Mama?”

  “I got a bunch of photos of me and Earl printed at the drugstore. Some of these had been on my camera for over a year. I was thinking we’d do a display at the reception, and we might even want to use one on the front of the wedding invitations. What do you two think?”

  “I think you got robbed in the cake contest, Mrs. Walford,” Di said, mmming with her mouth full.

  “Well, thank you, hon. But we’ve got so many good bakers in Dixie, it wouldn’t be fair for the same person to win every year.”