by J. F. Margos
Dody didn’t appear terribly grief stricken, but considering that his wife had allegedly left him for someone else over sixteen years ago, grief isn’t what I would have expected. He had completely let himself go and he had abdicated the care of his children to his mother-in-law, but there was a kind of pathetic aspect to him, and I felt sorry for him in a way. I was surprised he showed up. He had the shakes and he was sweating. He didn’t look well, but then, a lot of alcoholics don’t look well, especially when they’re sober. It looked as though Dody Waldrep had sobered up for this. He started to sit with his daughters, but one look from his mother-in-law said it all, and he sat down in the row behind them.
I watched him throughout the service. He didn’t weep, but he looked upset. Mostly he just looked terribly depressed and beaten. I think for Dody it had been another reliving of an old shame. I wondered if a man who looked that lost could have committed such a crime. It was hard to tell just by watching him there. One thing I had learned for sure in all my years was not to jump to any conclusions until all the facts were in, or at least more facts than we currently had in this case.
Dody didn’t attend the graveside services. In fact, he disappeared in the crowd right after the funeral. At the cemetery, I noticed a woman weeping softly, and then talking for some time with Addie’s mother. I leaned over toward my son.
“Who’s the woman in navy talking to Addie’s mother?”
“That is Gloria Hughes, Doug Hughes’s mother.” He raised his eyebrows.
I returned the raised eyebrows with, “Really.”
Mike nodded. “She says she’s heard nothing from Doug in all these years. The brother, Vernon, confirms that.”
“That’s what Jimmy says also. What do you think?”
Mike shrugged. “I don’t know, Mom. I guess I believe Vernon and Mrs. Hughes, but Jimmy is odd. I’m not sure what’s up with him.’’
I nodded in agreement. I couldn’t decide if he had problems from the war or if it was something else.
“Mrs. Hughes got real upset and asked us what we thought the chances were that Doug might still be alive.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“The truth. That I don’t have any idea. That I have no evidence that Addie’s murder is connected to Doug and that I don’t know any more about it than that.”
The truth was, the thought that Doug might also be dead had occurred to us all. The alternative to that was that Doug had killed Addie. There was some outside chance that he and Addie had split up and that Addie’s fate had been completely unknown to him. If that were true, though, we all felt that Doug would have contacted his mother years ago. The fact that no one had ever heard from him again led us all to believe that he had either been killed with Addie, or had done the killing. I personally considered the former to be a better bet.
“Did you question Dody Waldrep yet?”
“Oh yeah,” Mike responded.
“So, what was your impression?”
“I don’t like him,” Tommy replied.
“That’s succinct,” I said.
“Aside from smelling really bad and being a total drunk, he’s also not particularly forthcoming with information,” Mike commented.
“Details, please,” I said.
“Every time we asked him about his wife and her alleged affair with Doug, he became hostile and then clammed up,” Tommy said.
“Yeah,” Mike added. “He started on this diatribe about how all that was in the past. She had left him for another man. She was gone and he didn’t care—like that. Then nothing more. We could try to sweat him out, but this guy is such a drunk, I don’t know whether he’s even coherent enough for this crime—and he’s not real bright either.”
“Unfortunately, this crime didn’t require a lot of brain cells,” Tommy said, “so that in and of itself won’t eliminate him from the suspect list.” Tommy continued, “He’s had a bunch of jobs in the last fourteen years since he moved to Manor from Viola. He’s borderline in the job he has now, which he’s only had for a month. He criticizes everybody and everything. He’s basically not a very pleasant or happy fellow.”
“His mother-in-law doesn’t like him, that’s for sure,” Mike commented.
“That’s not a reason to suspect a man,” I said.
“We know that, Mom, but the guy is a lush, he’s evasive and I get bad vibes from him.”
“And everybody is on our list of suspects right now,” Tommy added.
“Did he ever beat his wife?” I asked.
“We thought of that, Mom, and we asked around. The answer, even from his mother-in-law, was no.”
“That’s right. He was a real jerk to her, but no physical abuse.”
“Sounds like you two have your work cut out for you,” I said.
“Story of our lives,” Tommy said, smiling.
“So, what’s next, guys?”
“The standard stuff. I’d like to locate Doug Hughes, one way or the other,” Tommy said. “Do a little more legwork on Dody Waldrep and Jimmy Hughes. Collect some more facts about the very unusual Lori Webster, and then see what shakes out of all that.”
“Which reminds me, tell me about Lori Webster.”
Gloria Hughes insisted that the rumors about Doug and Addie were just that. Yet the rumors persisted because of the attention Doug had paid to Addie and the fact he had been seen at the Waldrep home many times when Dody was not there. Vernon said that Doug had felt sorry for Addie because her husband was “a real heel.” Still, it did seem odd that Doug would spend so much time maintaining a friendship with a married woman.
Mike and Tommy had followed up and gone to Georgetown, to talk with Lori. Lori had left town and moved about thirty miles away to Georgetown after Doug disappeared. In Mike and Tommy’s book, Lori’s move right after Doug’s disappearance was unusual. That seemed to them like the actions of a guilty person. Mrs. Hughes told them that Lori had been “distraught” over Doug’s disappearance and all the rumors about he and Addie, and that was why she left, but the boys didn’t like it.
Lori had never married, and she had a job in a local department store in Georgetown, working as a customer service and credit clerk. Tommy and Mike had located her place of work in Georgetown from Gloria Hughes. Lori’s family members still lived in Rock Hill and Viola, but had not seen Lori since she left sixteen years ago. She had not been back to visit any of them—another strange fact.
When they arrived at the store, Mike and Tommy had been shown back to the customer service office where Lori worked.
“They set us up in this little back room there,” Tommy said, “and she came in and sat down with us.”
“She was nervous and kneaded her hands and looked down at her feet a lot,” Mike said.
“I broke the news to her, about finding Addie’s remains in Austin. She was stunned, man, almost catatonic, never looked directly at either me or Mike.”
“Yeah, then she burst into tears, which escalated into sobs. It was a strange reaction.”
“When she collected herself a little, she says to me, ‘Doug was found with her?’”
My eyes widened at Tommy, and he nodded his head.
“I know, I thought it was a strange way to word it, too. So I say, ‘No, ma’am, we have not found Doug Hughes.’”
“Yeah, so she’s sniffling and wiping her nose and her eyes, but she’s focused on the wall to the right of her. Real weird.”
Mike said that they proceeded to ask the woman all about her relationship with Doug. The rumors about he and Addie disturbed her, but she was sure that they were just rumors, and that his only interest in Addie was as a friend, just as his mother had said. Lori said when he disappeared, she was humiliated, hurt and unable to bear the gossip another moment, so she packed up and moved to Georgetown.
“That was the extent of what she told you?”
“Yeah,” Tommy said. “And I know she’s holding something back, because she doesn’t look you in the eye when she talks, you know
?”
“She’s an odd one,” Mike said. “She’s off-kilter somehow—looking up at the wall when she talked, giving abbreviated answers to all of our questions, so that we had to pry every detail out of her.”
“She has some really strange mannerisms,” Tommy said. “Her eyes darted all over that wall, but she never looked at us. Other than her initial hysterical sobbing, her responses were all cool—disconnected. She had nervous movements, closed her eyes when she was talking to us…”
“Yeah, and the only other time she showed any emotion,” Mike said, “was when she was talking about Addie. Then she became agitated and angry.”
“She said Addie’s name with jealousy attached to it,” Tommy told me.
“A woman can shoot another woman in the head, dig a hole and bury her,” Mike said.
“And a woman can dig up bones and rebury them,” Tommy added.
“Do you think she could have killed them both?” I asked.
“Toni, I’ve seen everything in homicides, and I’ve seen women commit some pretty gruesome murders.”
“Yeah, Mom, what about that wacko nurse who killed all those kids that time?”
“Okay. Point taken. If the woman is weird enough, anything is possible.”
Then I told them both about the conversation I’d had with Leo about the crime. I told them everything she had told me.
“I even asked Leo if the killer could be a woman,” I said.
“What’d she say?” Tommy asked.
“She said the killer could definitely be a woman, but that the stats say it’s more likely to be a man.”
“The things that Leo said could fit any of our suspects,” Mike said.
“Yeah, I agree,” Tommy said.
“The truth is here somewhere,” I said.
After the graveside service in Viola, Mike and Tommy headed back to Austin. I stopped in at the local café for some lunch. Notice I said the local café, because one was all they had. Viola was so small, there wasn’t even a Dairy Queen. The café was called the Main Street Café. Its proprietor was a sturdy-looking woman by the name of Doris. I knew her name was Doris because it was sewn onto the left breast pocket of the apron she wore.
I had seated myself at the counter and Doris approached me with a green plastic tumbler in one hand and a water pitcher in the other. Under the apron, Doris wore a cotton print dress. Her hair was bleached blond—probably to cover the gray—and teased up into the big-hair style. She had pudgy little hands and long fingernails polished expertly with red lacquer. Her lipstick matched her nail polish and, upon close inspection, I could see that Doris had run the lipstick just slightly outside of the natural edge of her lips. She couldn’t have been more than five or six years older than me, but she seemed old enough to be my grandmother. In fact, she kind of reminded me of my grandmother.
“Hey there, hon. You’re not from around here. Must be in town for Addie’s funeral, right?”
“Well, yes,” I said, just a little nonplussed. Then it occurred to me that this would be one of the few funerals they’d have in a town like this for a while, and as it involved murder and discovery of a missing woman sixteen years after her disappearance, this would be big doings indeed. Why else would an outsider stop in a small town like Viola, six miles off of the state highway, just to eat lunch?
“I don’t recall ever seeing you before, hon. How did you know Addie?”
“Well, actually I never knew her in life. I’m the sculptor who reconstructed her face from her remains.”
“Well, I say! You are, are you? Well, I say…”
She poured the water into the glass, shaking her head the whole time.
“Well, now, what can I get you for your lunch, hon?”
I gave Doris my order and she scratched it down on a little order pad she pulled out of her pocket, tore off the page and handed it through a small window behind the counter.
“There you go, Pop,” she said to the man who was slaving over the stove.
Doris tended to several customers at the other end of the counter. Soon, two of them at the other end craned their necks around to look at me, and then whispered to Doris again. A few seconds later, Doris came back my way with the water pitcher. She was smiling and popping chewing gum between her teeth.
“You know, hon, I saw that sculpture you did on the news the other night. I knew as soon as I seen it that it was her. You just did a wonderful job—a wonderful job. How’d you do such a great job of making that look like little Addie?”
I explained to her about the anthropological charts and about what I do to try to make the reconstruction as personal and human as I can. She listened intently, nodding the whole time and alternately smacking and then popping her gum.
“Well,” she said when I was done with my explanation, “you just did a wonderful job.” Then she sighed appreciatively.
I thanked her and she turned around to get my sandwich out of the pass-through window where Pop had put it. She laid it on the counter in front of me and winked as she walked away.
The sandwich was delicious. It consisted of cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, onions and Doris’s special dressing on whole wheat bread. On the menu it came with ham, but as I’m a vegetarian, I had asked Doris to omit that. As I licked my lips over the last couple of bites, Doris revisited my section of the counter.
“How was it, hon?”
“Mmm, fantastic,” I said while still chewing the last bite.
“How about some of my homemade pie?”
“Oh, I don’t know…”
“Oh, hon, you have to have some of my homemade pie. We have chocolate cream today and apple. Everyone just raves about them both, but my favorite is the apple.”
“Well, okay, I’ll have the apple.”
“You want ice cream on it, hon?”
“No, thank you.”
When Doris cut you a piece of pie, Doris cut you a slab of pie. I have lived in Texas my whole life and I don’t recall ever seeing a piece of pie that large, not even at my grandma’s house.
Doris hung over the edge of the counter waiting for me to take the first bite. That pie was heaven in a crust.
“Oh my!” I exclaimed.
Of course, Doris was delighted at my reaction.
“Well, I’m sure glad you like it all that well. That just makes me feel so good.” She bumped the heel of her hand on the edge of the counter for punctuation.
As was typical in a small town in Texas, the owner of the local café knew just about everybody and everything going on in town and the surrounding area. I decided to find out just how much information I could get from Doris.
“So, Doris, how well did you know Addie?”
“Oh, hon, I knew her and Dody their whole lives. Why, Dody’s about eight years younger than me and I can remember when he was born. My little brother used to play with him.”
“I see.”
“Addie was a lot younger. Her birthday was just a week before mine. I always remembered that because she was born right before my sweet-sixteen party.” Doris beamed at the memory.
“Well, how about that?” I said.
“Yes. Mama and Daddy had a party out at the house and Daddy churned homemade ice cream and Mama made pie—that very recipe that I used to make the pie you’re eating right now!”
“Oh, well, what a treat.”
“Yes, it was. Mama and Daddy invited everyone in town to my party—everyone! It was wonderful. Pop was there, too.” She pointed back at Pop in the kitchen.
“Oh, really?”
“Why, yes. Pop was my sweetheart from high school.”
Then she began to tell me how Addie and Dody had begun dating when Addie was sixteen. Dody was already twenty-four by then and some people in the town were wondering if he would ever settle down. They thought Addie was too young for him, or at least too young to know what she was doing. He and Addie did marry, though, and had two children, Melissa and Emma.
“They sound like such a happy family,�
�� I remarked. “I wouldn’t have thought that Addie would run off with someone, the way you describe her.”
“Well, she and Dody only got along because Addie wouldn’t talk back to him. I think that’s one reason why Dody wanted to marry someone so young—so he wouldn’t be challenged. I tell you, I’d have never put up with his nonsense.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was unreasonable as he could be. Grumpy, just grumpy. Didn’t like anything anybody did or the way they did it. I think Addie met Doug and just saw her savior.”
“A way to get out of the relationship with Dody.”
“Right. And you know, Addie and Doug could never have had a relationship and stayed here.”
“So, she left her kids and everything?”
“Well, that kind of surprised me, but I reckon if she’d taken them with her and all, there would have been big problems. Living through a divorce like that in a small town like this…” Doris shuddered.
“Why are you so sure that they were actually having an affair? I mean, did people actually see them together?”
“I didn’t, but I heard that other people saw them talking and looking very secretive in their talk. Also, Doug came by the house when Dody wasn’t there. In fact, he never did come by at all if Dody was home.”
“Couldn’t just have been because Dody was so unpleasant?”
She turned up one corner of her mouth. “Well…I guess it could, but why would he be dropping by the house of a married woman like that? I don’t know…I suppose it could be like you say, but that just doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Yeah, I see what you mean. So, tell me more about Doug—what kind of guy was he?”
“He was a nice fella. I know his mama. You know Rock Hill is only about ten miles from here and it’s smaller than Viola. They don’t have no café over there.”