"Planning on making a phone call?" He gestured to the phone.
Guilt for prying made me jumpy. "What? Oh, uh…no. I was looking for any of those people Penny mentioned in her will."
I was sorry to bring up the will when a dark cloud descended over his face. "Well, I can save you the time. They don't live here. Although, some of those names do sound familiar."
"Actually, they sound a little familiar to me too, although I don't know why."
"Let's get the Lubbock phone book from the den. I'm not sure that I remember where it is, so it might take me a minute. A phone book is barbarically unsophisticated, but in this part of the world, it might be the most efficient way to find people."
He leaned to pick up the phone book as though he'd known right where to find it and dislodged the photo album as well. I expected him to put it back, but instead he just stared at it as it lay on the floor as though it was the weirdest thing he'd ever seen. He'd known just where the phone book was, but the album had been unexpected.
"I haven't seen this in years." He bent and picked it up, blowing off whatever dust I hadn't removed in my earlier perusal. "Alexa made this for me."
"Is Alexa your sister?" I admit it was a leading question, but I asked it anyway.
"Alexa? No. My sister's name is Jane. Alexa was… She was my girlfriend." He flipped it open and examined the pages. "She was… Actually we were engaged."
The fact he'd admitted as much to me was surprising. I wanted to ask why they'd broken up, but even I didn't have that much moxie.
"I've been engaged before too," I admitted. Give a little, take a little. No need to tell him it'd been four times before.
He looked at me. "Why'd you break up?"
Fascinating question. Vaguely, I said, "Oh, there are about four different answers to that question. What about you?" As long as we were crossing acceptable boundaries.
I didn't think he was listening to me. He had reached the page with the mistletoe picture and paused, his eyes dark and haunted. "She died in a plane crash."
"Oh, that's horrible." I was the worst person in the world for thinking we were on a little more even footing since the legend of Alexa had come into the picture. "You must have been devastated."
"What?" He finally looked up again, jerked back from where he'd been.
"I just mean it must have been hard to lose her like that. And right before your wedding."
It took a long second before my words sank in. "Oh, no. We broke up two months after this picture was taken. The crash was in September of the following year." He shook his head and closed the book. "I just saw the picture and remembered. She never forgave me, and her family shunned me at the funeral. I didn't feel it was right not to show though. Her brothers actually escorted me out the back door of the church like bouncers."
"What did you do to her?" In my experience, they always did something. My third fiancé, Douglas Miner-Wilks III, had continued to maintain that we'd pick a date, right up until the day I'd discovered that he was already married with two small children and a pregnant wife.
I'd made this discovery right in the middle of the lingerie department at Neiman Marcus when his smallest child, Douglas Miner-Wilks IV, decided to hide under my skirt. Then who should pop out from beneath a rack of Wonderbras but his father, my so-called fiancé.
He ground to a screeching halt, therefore facilitating a collision between himself, his tactfully pregnant wife, Camille, and his pug-faced, seven-year-old daughter. I behaved with extraordinary aplomb by giving and receiving introductions with his family as merely a writer from Douglas's agency. He later had the nerve to corner me and try to convince me to carry on as before, but I had refused by happily tossing his two-carat engagement ring, a twin to the one his wife wore, I had noticed, out the window of the thirty-ninth floor.
When my third book sold the advance to its paperback rights for just shy of a million dollars, my agent got him fired, lest I decide to find another agency. I felt a little bad about that, him being a family man, but I still managed to sleep at night.
Aodhagan shrugged uncomfortably. "I broke her heart. She was fixated on marriage. She was a wedding planner, and she wanted her own wedding to be perfect. I was only in my early thirties at the time, and I didn't think that I was ready to settle down. She wanted to move in together. I said no. She waited a few months, and then she gave me the age-old ultimatum. Either we get married or we break up. So I said okay.
"Around Christmastime, she started pressing me for a ring and a date. I felt suffocated, and I thought it was because I wasn't ready for that kind of commitment. I took a week off work, drove to the coast, and spent all day, every day, thinking about it, and I realized that wasn't true. There was something missing in our relationship. I didn't know what it was, and she didn't feel it.
"By the end of the week, I knew that it would be a terrible mistake for both her and me for us to stay together. We didn't belong. Even though I loved her, she wasn't 'The One.' You know what I mean. My soul mate—if you believe in that kind of thing.
"If she'd initially given me the time to think first, I never would have agreed to marry her. I went back home and told her she wasn't my soul mate and that I could never marry for less, and she told me what I could do with my antiquated ideals and refused to speak to me again."
He put the album away and presented me with the phone book, which he'd tucked under his arm. "I was lazy, and she got hurt. I could never make it up to her."
After hearing his story, I was glad I had not let my resolutions be swayed by the mistletoe kiss or Aodhagan's pants, although they were both extremely moving arguments. It only confirmed that no relationship was stable enough to depend on, even one with Aodhagan MacFarley, and the only thing safer than him was probably a small town in Utah.
The Lubbock phone book had numbers for both a Lloyd Granger and a Dennis Strinton. Whether they were the right ones or not remained to be seen. There was no sign of Kathleen Audbergen or Frank Lundgren, the man who had not received a letter. Under Lloyd Granger's name, there were listings for a whole collection of church-related organizations—Granger Ministries, House of Hope, Prayers Across America, Granger Bible College, and Voices of Worship 100.7.
"Sure, that's where I've heard the name before," Aodhagan proclaimed. "He's the televangelist."
In that context, I also recognized the name. My mother had read Barbara Cartland through his totally overdramatized sermons on Sunday morning cable as a nod to spirituality. "Okay, yeah. My mother watched his sermons on cable when I was a teenager."
Something niggled at my brain. "Now that I have the mindset of people in the public eye, I think I know where I've heard the name Kathleen Audbergen before. There's a painter with that name. An impressionist who paints the Four Corners states. I saw an exhibit of hers at a museum in Connecticut. It was called something like Impressions of the Southwest."
On the piece of paper where he'd written the numbers, he also jotted down Impressions of the Southwest under Kathleen Audbergen's name.
"I don't think we'd better just call these people and ask them if they have key information on a nearly half-century-old murder. They'd hang up on us for sure. Maybe we can drive to Lubbock tomorrow and see if they look the part."
"Are you suggesting that we spy on them?" Aodhagan's expression was unreadable. He could have been horrified, or he could have thought it was a keen idea. It was impossible to tell.
"Do you have any better ideas? We'll be able to tell pretty easily if they're even the right age."
"Actually, I do have a better idea, but even if I didn't, it wouldn't matter, because I can't do it tomorrow. I have to go to church. And then in the afternoon I have to give a mayoral speech at the church picnic for the Birdwell Church of Christ."
"So, what is it?"
He raised an eyebrow. "Well, you know. The regulation church picnic. Games, potato salad…"
I rolled my eyes. "No. Your better idea. What is it?"
"Oh,
that. Just ask Jamie. He's Penny's solicitor. He'd know where all those people live."
"I think that's illegal. I don't think he'd tell us."
Aodhagan shrugged, taking off his shoes. "He'd tell me."
This was probably true, and I was still trying to unravel the ins and outs of Birdwell, Texas, politics when Aodhagan asked me if I wanted to go to church with him. I respectfully declined. This was not on account of not caring to go to church but on account of not wanting to go to church with Aodhagan. I might have been ignorant of small-town Texas, but I was not totally ignorant of small towns. I'd experienced Port Victoria every summer for my entire life.
He'd never hear the end of it if I rode with him or sat next to him at the sacred courtship institution of church. All the girls in town, except apparently Marian the librarian, would woe at my presence, and the oldsters would never let him hear the end of the list of evils that come from selling out on hometown honeys. It would be impossible to explain that sometimes a single guy took a single girl to church just because she needed a ride or some religion. I was pretty sure I knew which Aodhagan thought I needed.
CHAPTER NINE
In the morning, bright and early, I was awakened by a nuclear explosion of sunshine coming in through my hideous lacy curtains. Today's expected high also matched the expected high in Hell, so I planned to stay safely ensconced in my little shell of air-conditioning. I could hear Aodhagan moving around downstairs, no doubt whipping up some gourmet omelets and French toast.
After breakfast, Aodhagan headed out to get his week's worth of repentance. I spent a while wandering through his meticulous, boring house. I went up to my room to write and ended up falling asleep. I guess I must have been tired, because I didn't wake up until almost seven at night. Aodhagan was still at the picnic, so I made myself a sandwich in his pristine kitchen, hoping he would not be offended by my presence in his sacred mecca.
Back in the living room, I turned on the television. In my quest to find something I wanted to watch I came upon the religious station and Lloyd Granger. He certainly looked of an age to be Penny's contemporary. He had a full head of shocking white hair but a relatively youthful face, and I wondered if he dyed it for effect.
Rushing frenetically from one end of the stage to the other, shouting in a powerful baritone, he kept his audience entranced, and to tell the truth, I was fairly hypnotized as well. Everything he was saying sounded like fairly run-of-the-mill televangelist drivel, but it was the way he said it that captured my attention. Except for the way he shouted every time he said the word Lord, which I found disconcerting, he was compelling.
As he began some oratory about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, it occurred to me that, although Penny's body had not yet been released, she would eventually need a funeral. No one had contacted me yet to see about arrangements, and I could only assume that some other friends of hers, perhaps Dooley and the rest of her bowling league, had taken it upon themselves to take care of the funeral.
That was unacceptable to me. Penny was my family, who had inexplicably chosen to leave me her unnaturally large estate. I would lay her to rest in Cadgell style, even if she had left that life behind while she was living. She wasn't religious and hadn't attended church, so any church, there was probably only one in Birdwell, would do. She had no relationship with any clergy, so the local guy could probably easily do the honors.
Then I hit upon a brilliant idea. Why not her old friend Lloyd Granger, preaching right before me? She had still thought of him enough to leave him something in her will, and it was more than I could say for any other religious figure.
Who better to walk her through the very valley of death of which he now spoke? What's more, the circumstance would afford Aodhagan and me the perfect opportunity to scope him out a little.
At that moment Aodhagan returned, slamming his car door loud enough that I could hear it from my seat. A few moments later, he appeared in the living room and glanced at the television. "A little Sunday night religion?"
"Lloyd Granger." I indicated to the screen. "He certainly looks the right age to be the guy we're looking for."
He sat down next to me, and I missed the next several things that fell fervently from the lips of Lloyd. "I'm going to ask him to do Penny's funeral, if he turns out to be the right guy. I don't think she cared too much for other preachers."
He shrugged. "For all we know she didn't care too much for this guy either, but someone has to do it. Everyone at the picnic was asking about the service. I told them they should ask you." He leaned forward to get a better look at Lloyd Granger's face. "I tried poking around with a few of the old-timers to see if any of them had an opinion on what might have happened to Norma Jean Fredrick, but they all made it clear that not only was the subject taboo, they also considered it to be in bad taste."
"That's too bad. It was a good idea. Who around here would remember that far back?"
He shrugged again. "Tallatahola County's heyday with Lubbock's upper echelons faded by the sixties. By 1975, everyone was gone. I guess most anyone over sixty would remember the murder but only from the outside looking in. The upper crust was very elitist. They wouldn't have shared their pain with the common folks who'd still live around here. If we can get any of them to talk, we probably won't learn much more than we did from those old issues of the County Star."
"Still, we should go and see them. Maybe they'll be more willing to talk that way. I've found that interviews are really successful. Especially with elderly people who really want someone to talk to," I said. "That is, unless you have to save the spotted owls or some crap like that tomorrow."
"No, I do not. Tomorrow, I am all yours."
That was a thought I had trouble dealing with, and I made some noncommittal motion with my hand. He turned to the television, and we watched the rest of the Granger program in silence.
When Lloyd Granger finally wrapped it up with a lot of impassioned shouting, we sat in silence for a long moment. Aodhagan stood and tossed me a pool cue, which I barely caught, scrambling to keep it from hitting the floor. "Come on. This is how I think. Or in the shower but this is probably a better group activity."
Good lord. This man was lethal. I nearly dropped the cue again. "Aren't you afraid I'll wipe the floor with you? I am from NYC."
He snorted, a smile turning up the corners of his mouth in a grin that needed to be added to the list of illegal things. "Bring it, honey."
In the morning, I woke up feeling strangely optimistic considering the circumstances. Last night's game, while fun, hadn't led to much thinking. We were no further in than we'd been before. I had a funeral to plan, a murder—no, make that two—to solve, and an alluring temporary roommate to ignore. But today was going to be a good day. I could feel it in my bones as soon as I opened my eyes.
It was Monday morning, so Dwight Dooley was obliged to dismiss me today from his list of potential suspects. I knew that Aodhagan was up because I heard the phone ring somewhere in the house at least a half a dozen times, and he always answered it on the first or second ring.
I knew old people. Covering historical murders meant I spent a great deal of my time talking to either historians or people who had been present during the original crime. That meant a lot of people at least fifty years my senior. I knew they expected the young to dress well.
I came downstairs to discover that Aodhagan had produced muffins and grapefruit for breakfast, but he was nowhere to be seen. Helping myself, I sat down to eat. The phone rang again, but nobody picked it up. By the time I finished eating and cleaned up, Aodhagan still hadn't returned. It was after eight, and I was starting to worry a little. Fortunately, he returned a scant three minutes later, whistling the tune to Frank Sinatra's "(Love Is) The Tender Trap."
"I thought you'd been kidnapped." I said.
"Meals on Wheels. We do it every Monday morning for some of the people who can't get out."
"How many people are we seeing?" I asked, following him out in
the morning air.
"Four. One is Abilene Walker. She's Thelma Sue's mama, so I suspect that we'll get to hear all sorts of things, pertinent or not, about Birdwell history from her. "
"Why not just ask Thelma Sue herself? She made it clear to me she was keen on poking her nose into Penny's death."
He laughed. "Don't let her hear you talk like that. She's too young to know firsthand. She tries to pass herself off as thirty, but since I turned thirty-eight last Thanksgiving and we were in school together, she must have lost a few years somewhere."
Without consciously trying to, I mentally compared Aodhagan's age to that of my fiancés. Eric, my first fiancé, was now twenty-eight. My second fiancé, David Ford, was twelve years older than I was, and would now be forty. My third fiancé, Douglas Miner-Wilks the philandering III, was about forty at the time of our engagement, so he would have been forty-five or so now. Lenny was thirty-five.
The closest to Aodhagan's age was David Ford, and since he was the fiancé I preferred to think about the least, and there was no good reason for it anyway, I switched mental tracks to a more pertinent question. "Who else are we going to see?"
"Billie Jo Spencer owns the drug store in Boothe. She's one of those it would just be best to pop in on. Billie Jo's as mean as a hornet. If she doesn't bite our heads off just for daring to address her face-to-face, we may be able to get something out of her. Addie Arnett is the owner of the Tallatahola County Star. Her husband, Herbert, ran it until he died in the seventies."
"What about your parents? Wouldn't they remember something?"
He shook his head. "No. They lived in England in 1969."
"Your parents are English?"
"No. My father is Scottish, and my mother is Irish. They just lived in England when they were first married."
Digging Up Bones (Birdwell, Texas Mysteries Book 1) Page 8