by Joan Hess
"In a hurry to get home?"
Pale turned to outright pasty. "I had an appointment somewhere else. In Farberville."
"At eleven o'clock at night?"
"Yeah," he muttered. "Business."
"With Lamont Petrel, perhaps?" I said, wondering why he looked as if he was about to pass out. "As you know, he disappeared three days ago and the state police are conducting an investigation. In your statement to Sergeant Plover, you said you had no idea where Petrel is. If you had some sort of secret meeting with him last night, you'd better say so now."
"It wasn't with Petrel. I was…interviewing a checker." Several inches of whiskey gurgled down his throat.
"Oh, were you? She must be some potential checker to warrant the drive to Farberville that late at night. I'll have to have her name and address so I can verify this."
"This doesn't have anything to do with sticking pins in cupcakes-and you damn well know it!" he roared, a little of his customary charm returning along with his circulation. "If you know what's good for you, Chief Hanks, you'll just worry about whoever it is trying to ruin my store and stop pestering me. I got every right to do interviews when and where I choose."
"And I have every right to question everybody involved and verify stories," I said, taking an inordinate pleasure in the sweat popping out on his forehead like crystal zits. "Her name and address?"
"I don't reckon I recall offhand."
"I reckon you'd better try harder."
A loud rapping on the glass door interrupted any reckoning about to take place. I stuck my head out the office door, saw Mrs. Jim Bob arguing with Plover, and turned back with a bright look. "It's your wife. I suppose we could wait until she comes into the office, but it's your choice."
The whiskey bottle went back into the drawer. "Cherri Lucinda Crate, and she lives in that apartment house across from the airport. Top floor at the far end." Jim Bob tried to give me a nice smile, but his heart wasn't in it and the curl of his lips reminded me of an animal that'd been dead in the woods for several weeks. "Ain't no cause to go bothering her, though," he continued in a low voice. "She doesn't know anything about this."
"I should say not!" Mizzoner snapped as she came into the office. "I explained at great length to Eula Lemoy and to Dahlia O'Neill's granny that I for one cannot be held responsible for whatever funny business is going on in this store. Although I must say I fail to see anything funny about it." She turned on me with the fury of a goose defending its nest. "I want you to arrest Lamont Petrel, and I want you to do it before he poisons the remaining members of the missionary society. This has got to stop." I agreed, pointed out the slight difficulty in arresting Petrel at the moment, and left the two alone for a cozy chat. Plover was unlocking the door for Harve, Les Vernon, and two other deputies. We went down to the far end of the checkout counters, where Mrs. Jim Bob's shrill voice was less deafening.
Harve gave me a disgruntled look. "We talked to this last bunch of victims. All the tampered products were purchased this morning from the display by the register next to the office."
He scratched his head as he consulted a tattered stenographer's notebook. "We've had six reports thus far, and I'll call the dispatcher shortly. There haven't been any complaints on cupcakes and sponge cakes or anything else purchased yesterday evening, but that may not prove anything. The puke-provoking packages could have been put on the shelf last night or this morning."
"Kevin left the store at seven-fifteen," I said. "That narrows the time frame just a bit."
"There were a lot of folks in the store last night. As soon as we've interrogated the checkers, I'll get the list to you and you can start working on it. Les, you check the cake packages on the shelf for prints."
I felt slightly better that the perp list was now expanded to include more names, especially since I'd eliminated Kevin from contention and couldn't come up with a motive for Hizzoner, despite my best efforts. I suggested we examine the remaining stock for suspicious seals, and we fanned out for what became a tedious two-hour marathon of studying the underside of candy bars and corn-chip bags for telltale smears of glue-all without putting our own prints on top of someone else's, and as it turned out, all for naught, since none of us found anything.
We regrouped at the last register to listen to Deputy Vernon. Three packages of cupcakes had been pierced through the cellophane with straight pins. Two packages of cream-filled sponge cakes had been resealed, and sloppily at that. To our collective disappointment but not our great surprise, there was nary a print on any of the items.
Harve pointed at the beads of glue on one of the packages.
"I'd bet my new weedless bucktail jig it didn't come this way from the factory."
No one took him up on it.
Plover offered to send the evidence to the lab, since he seemed to get better service than Harve and I did. Harve thanked him effusively (the primaries were coming up fast), and went to call the dispatcher for an update on the upchuckers.
I walked out to the parking lot with the amiable state trooper. "I won't fall over backward if the lab finds ipecac in the sponge cakes," I said, squinting as the sunlight pounded down on us. "I wish I knew what the hell was going on. First some unknown party dumps an unknown quantity of the damn stuff in the tamale sauce and takes down twenty-three innocent grazers. Petrel disappears, but it takes a stretch to see him as the perp. He and Jim Bob both have an interest in the store's success, not its failure-and a lot of folks won't be shopping within five miles of it. The picnic pavilion might as well stay closed; no one's going to patronize it anytime soon."
"Heard anything about Petrel?" Plover asked quickly, then winced as if he'd stepped on a live coal and said, "Just asking, Chief."
I told him about Jim Bob's trip into Farberville, but added that I had a feeling Cherri Lucinda Crate would eventually, if somewhat unwillingly, back his story. "Nobody even saw Petrel leave the office? What about the checkers and customers in the front of the store?"
"They all went to the back of the store to watch the show," he said morosely. "There was a ten-minute interval during which Petrel could have ridden out the door on a pink-polka-dotted mule."
He told me he'd be back shortly and drove away. As I started for the door, Deputy Vernon came out and said, "Harve says there's still no answer at Buzz Milvin's house. He wants you to run up there and see if the guy's scrunched in a closet counting up his victims on his fingers and toes."
"The stuff may have been tampered with before he came to work at nine," I said.
"Harve had a chat with the employees, and they finally produced a half-assed list of customers what came in last evening after six. Lots of folks, including"-he gave me an odd look-"Ruby Bee Hanks, Estelle Oppers, Buzz Milvin and his mother-in-law, and a dozen or so more."
"Mandozes, the Mexican guy?"
"I think so. Anyways, Harve says for you to go see if you can hunt up Milvin and bring him back for questioning."
I tried to assign Buzz a motive as I drove down the road to his house, but I was as bereft of inspiration as I was of cool air from the pisspoor air conditioner. I parked beside Buzz's truck and went to the front door. I rang the bell, and when there was no response, I went around the side of the house to see if they might be having a barbecue or something.
As I swung around the corner, I almost crashed into a small figure under an open umbrella. "Lissie," I said urgently, "where's your pa?"
"Napping."
"What about your grandmother and Martin?"
"They're napping, too. I wasn't sleepy, so I got Roxanne"-she held up a rag doll-"and we decided to go for a walk all the way up the road to the mailbox. I made her a raincoat and a rainbonnet. See?"
There was an icy rock growing in my stomach, and growing damn fast. I briefly glanced at the doll wrapped in clear plastic and said, "Good for you. I need to talk to your pa now."
"Please don't tell Pa where I went, Miss Arly. He likes me to stay close to the house, but sometimes Roxanne and
I get bored with the same old yard. Pa says not to talk to outsiders, too. I suppose it's okay to talk to you."
Humming tunelessly, she went past me and vanished around the front of the house. I continued to the back door, knocked on the glass, and then ordered myself to try the knob. I had a real bad feeling about it.
"Anybody home?" I yelled as I stepped inside. The kitchen was clean, with dishes drying on the rack and the dish towels neatly hanging from plastic hoops. I repeated my question, listened for a reply, then went along a dark hallway to the living room.
Buzz Milvin was lying in a recliner. His eyes were closed, and had it not been for his wheezy breathing and gray skin, I might have thought he was, as Lissie had told me, sleeping. I hurried over to him and shook his shoulder. "Buzz? Buzz? Are you all right?"
He mumbled something and his head flopped to one side. A trickle of saliva ran down his chin, and his breathing seemed to worsen. I went back to the kitchen and called the sheriff's office. The dispatcher promised to send an ambulance immediately. I glanced in at Buzz, who hadn't moved, and went on down the hall to several closed doors.
I recoiled from the odor as I opened the first one. It had the sour pharmaceutical smell I'd noticed when I first met Lillith Smew, but something had been added that made it even less tolerable. The woman on the bed was motionless. Unlike Buzz, her chest did not jerk up and down as if responding to jolts of electricity. Her skin was grayer than his, and her tongue protruded between slack lips. Death had voided her bowels.
I gulped back an acid taste, shut the door, and went on to the next one. It was the children's bedroom. The bottom bunk bed was vacant, but a hand dangled over the rail from the top bunk. I approached the hand, and again heard labored breathing.
"Martin?" I croaked.
"Yeah?" he said so softly that I could barely hear it. "That you, Gran?"
"It's Arly. I've sent for the ambulance. Someone will be here to help you in a minute." I squeezed his hand, more to comfort myself than him, and said, "What happened, Martin?"
"Where's Gran? I wanna talk to Gran."
"I'll listen," I said, straining to hear him with one ear and the ambulance's siren with the other. "I'll listen to you, Martin. What do you want to tell Gran?"
"That I wasn't lying."
"Of course you weren't lying." I jiggled his hand. "Lying about what? You can tell me; I know you won't lie to Gran or to me, Martin."
"What's the matter with my brother?" Lissie asked from the doorway.
"He's sick," I managed to say calmly. "So are Gran and your pa. I sent for an ambulance."
"Why's everbody sick?"
Martin groaned from the top bunk. I wiped the sweat from his forehead, murmured to him that I was there, and looked back at Lissie. "I don't know why everybody's sick. Do you?"
She began to shake her head, and continued to do so as the ambulance arrived out front. For all I knew, she was still at it as I ran to the front door and barked at the medics to bring two gurneys. There was no need for hurry with a third.
*****
Ruby Bee closed the front door and went back across the dance floor to the bar, where Estelle and Hammet were sitting in gloomy silence. "I jest can't figure out what all's going on over there," Ruby Bee muttered, mostly to herself, since the other two had given up trying to provide answers. "First Arly and that nice state trooper come screeching up like there's an armed robbery in progress. The next thing, Hiram, Perkins's eldest, and a few other people come barreling out the door and looking mighty frightened. Then we get the sheriff and some of his boys. Before you can say boo, everybody's coming and going every which direction like they was driving those awful bumper cars at the county fair carnival."
Hammet sighed. "I wish Arly'd get back. It's nigh on time fer baseball practice. I got a hit yesterday-a real hard one that liked to have made that Martin kid squeal like a pig getting his dick chopped off."
Estelle rolled her eyes and sighed herself. "You already described it, Hammet. I'm sure it was a real hard hit. I do believe we've already heard enough about where it bounced and any sound effects that may have occurred thereafter."
"I can't for the life of me figure out what's going on over at the SuperSaver," Ruby Bee said. She shoved a basket of popcorn under Hammet's nose. "Here, eat some more of this. It'll keep your strength up for practice-if and when Arly shows her face. She left you here a good three hours ago. If that ain't irresponsible, then I don't know how to make biscuits from scratch. I'm her own mother, and-"
The whining of an ambulance siren cut her short. The three looked at each other as the sound increased, peaked in an earsplitting shriek as it passed the bar, and abated as it continued down the highway.
"Lord a mercy," Estelle gasped. "Do you think something's happened to Arly?"
"There ain't no reason to think that," Ruby Bee said with a look of warning in Hammet's direction. "Maybe Arly was sent out to investigate an accident on that bad curve just past the Voice of the Almighty Lord Assembly Hall."
Estelle leaned forward, beckoned for Ruby Bee to do the same, and whispered, "If there's been a wreck or something, then somebody probably called over to the sheriff's office. Why don't you see if you can find out anything. Go on, I'll handle Hammet. " She sat back and smiled at him. "Tell you what, I've got a nice shiny quarter that'll pay for three songs on the jukebox. You can go right over there and pick out what you want to hear."
"I don't wanna hear some dumbshit song," Hammet said, his face wrinkled up like a Pekingese. "If'n Arly's hurt, I gotta go help her."
He jumped down from the stool and ran out the door before Ruby Bee or Estelle could open their mouths. He was a good ways down the road and still going full steam before either of them made it to the door to yell at him. And by the time a truck piled high with chicken crates moved out of the way, he was long gone.
Ruby Bee started for the telephone. "He'll be all right. He knows his way around town by now. I'm going to call LaBelle over at the sheriff's and ask her real politely if she knows where I can find Arly. If that doesn't work, I think I'll mosey on over to Jim Bob's SuperSaver and pick up a package of paper towels and a few other things."
"You got three cases of paper towels in the-" Estelle squared her shoulders and nodded. "I think I might go with you to keep you company."
*****
Brother Verber folded his hands in his lap and gazed sternly at the sinners sitting right there beside each other on chairs he'd brought over from the dinette. He gave them a minute in case they wanted to take off repenting without any prodding on his part, then said, "I am deeply troubled, deeply troubled indeed. Y'all have been coming thrice weekly to the house of the Lord under false pretenses. People what come to the house of the Lord thrice weekly ought to do so without carrying a heavy, burdensome load of sin in their hearts."
Dahlia stared at the wall above his head. "I ain't done nothing," she said flatly.
Kevin twitched as Brother Verber's eyes bored into him. He wished he was almost anyplace else except in the hot, stuffy mobile home parked next to the particular house of the Lord under discussion. Mopping floors was better'n this, he thought glumly. Mopping floors weren't half so bad as being told he was some kind of pervert and sex maniac. However, he couldn't think of anything to say, so he settled for a gulp and a shrug.
"The only way," Brother Verber intoned, "the only way to cleanse yourselves of this sinful, disgusting lust that's sucking on your souls like a tapeworm is to repent. If you don't repent from the beginning and in detail, well…Satan's just waiting around the corner, hoping for two new workers in the eternal furnace. I ain't here to pressure you all, though; you can make up your own minds. Maybe you want to shovel coal into Satan's furnace for all eternity while little red devils poke you with pitchforks till you scream."
"I ain't done nothing," Dahlia repeated. She elbowed Kevin so forcefully, he nearly tumbled off the chair.
"Me, neither," he added hastily. "We was sitting on the swing talking about
our new jobs at the supermarket, that's all. Anybody what says different is lying-and that's a sin, too."
He was pretty impressed with his speech, but he could tell just from looking that Brother Verber wasn't. In fact, the more he looked, the more he could see the fat ol' pious pig cranking up to spew out all kinds of stuff. And although Kevin knew there hadn't been any fornicating on the porch swing, he didn't much want to discuss various incidents over the last two years. The outhouse, for instance. The back room of the Kwik-Stoppe-Shoppe, on numerous occasions. Once, while Dahlia sat on the stool behind the counter and he'd…
Kevin all of a sudden realized that he was about to get hisself in deeper shit, because the same devil that had tormented him on the swing was back for another visit. "I have to go to the men's room," he said in a strangled voice (although it wasn't his voice that felt like it was being strangled-not by a long shot).
Having been prepared for a detailed description of lustful abandon, Brother Verber was unprepared for this and he began to blink like an addled calf. He may have been staring at Kevin, but his mind was in the bathroom. To be precise, it was in the wicker basket beside the commode-along with two insightful issues of his study material. After a minute, he said, "Right now, we'd better get down on our knees and pray for the salvation of your souls. This ain't the time for wordly concerns, not with damnation seeping into the room like swamp gas."
"I got to go."
Dahlia snorted under her breath, but she didn't say anything and Kevin repeated his plaintive request once again. Brother Verber stood up and went down the hall to the bathroom, hoping for a chance to relocate the well-worn June issue of Kittens and Tomcats and the July issue of Rubber Maid, but Kevin was so close behind him, he could feel hot breath on his neck.
"Let me see if the hand towels are clean," Brother Verber said. He stepped inside and closed the door. The room was small and short on hiding places. If he put the magazines in the one cabinet, Kevin might poke around out of idle curiosity, especially if he had business that might take a while.