The place was a mess. There were papers and clothes thrown everywhere. No one came to greet me. "Hello." My voice seemed to echo off the walls. "Aunt Penny? It's me, Helen."
Nothing.
I'm a true-crime author. The perfect career for me, the person who had obtained and lost literally hundreds of jobs, because I had little call to deliver to anyone's expectations. I was great at interviews when the subject wasn't personal, and I was good at research. I covered historical crimes, and those skills were enough. People who were dead didn't mind if I had absolutely no life skills. My agent and editor weren't in love with me, but they were in love with the steady income my books provided, so I was tolerated, even with my sporadic behavior and constant missing of deadlines. I refused to believe that my father, author of numerous self-help tomes, had been any kind of influence on my publishing contract. However, my believing it didn't make it true. But I could still hope it was.
My agent, Eleanor Goldman, was always trying to get me to write about a crime less than fifty years old. She swore I could be the next Ann Rule. She also steadfastly ignored my claims I didn't want to be. Overall, I enjoyed the job, especially the research. But reading about so many crimes had, over time, made me a little jumpy.
Penny's house was seriously giving me the creeps. I made a cursory inspection of the two bedrooms and the bathroom. Each room had that same look of wild disarray. No one left a house like this on purpose. Where was Penny?
Maybe out in the backyard or down the street at a neighbor's?
I pushed open the kitchen door. If Penny were at a neighbor's, she surely would have heard me scream when a fat yellow cat jumped off the table and launched aggressively at my face. We had a short but violent argument, which I nearly lost, about who would retain possession of my head, before the cat dropped to the ground and ran from the kitchen. I was left stunned on the threshold of a circa 1960s kitchen, done up in rusted chrome and sea-green Formica.
A few days' worth of dishes were scattered in the sink, but nothing else seemed amiss. The cat's empty bowl sat in the corner of the room. An empty cereal bowl, lightly crusted with old corn flakes, rested on the table next to Penny's newly opened pack of Lucky cigarettes and her red imitation-leather handbag.
Now I was really starting to worry.
I peeked into the backyard, but no one would go out there of her own volition, as the weeds had grown up to the window. On the way back into the bedroom for another look around, I noticed Penny's desk. There in the corner sat an ancient black wall phone and an equally aged answering machine. It was blinking a red number two. I was stunned anyone still had an answering machine like that. But then dread set in, and I hit the button.
The first message, left yesterday afternoon, was nothing but dead air, followed by a long beep. Then it was my message from the night before, sounding tired and stupid. Penny had not checked her messages in two days, and it was time to get some answers.
I checked my phone, discovered I had no signal, and then crossed back to the desk. Gingerly, I picked up the phone and dialed 9-1-1, not at all sure if that was the right emergency number for backwoods Texas. My hands were shaking, and I needed to calm down or the person on the other end would never understand me. I snatched up a cigarette pack on the desk and held it up to my nose, taking in a deep breath, letting just the smell of nicotine roll over me. I'd stopped smoking last year, but that was before people started disappearing. I wasn't ready to start again, but the smell of a cigarette, even a bad one, calmed me.
"Thelma Sue's." A heavily accented voice picked up on the other end. I was momentarily struck dumb, opening my mouth and then closing it again. "Hello?" She drawled.
Okay, I would just simply call on the locals for advice. I slid the pack into the pocket of my jeans and took another steadying breath. "I'm sorry. I was looking for the police. Can you tell me how to reach them?"
"Sure, honey, you got the right place. This is Thelma Sue's Hair Extravaganza, and I also run the emergency switchboard when the Tallatahola girls get them some lunch."
The what at the what? I lost my train of thought for a moment, but it came barreling back when the cat hunkered into the living room and hissed at me. "I need a policeman here at my aunt's house. I think something's happened. Something bad."
Thelma Sue sounded incredulous. "Lordy, honey, are you sure?" She didn't wait for my confirmation. "Who is your aunt?"
"Penny Cadgell. Do you call out the officers, or do I have to ring some kind of special bell in the town square, because I really need some police out here."
Now Thelma Sue sounded annoyed. "Well, honey, we don't have any police here in Birdwell."
Panic reared its ugly head. "What do you mean you don't have any police? What do you do when people commit crimes?"
Thelma Sue was now amused. I was certain that I had almost covered the whole spectrum of her emotional range. "Honey, we don't have crimes here." She paused. "Excepting that you count all the drunks that come outta Dwight's. Well…and there was that one time that Horace Ledbetter's wife, Mary, hit him over the head with a half-thawed turkey after he was three hours late at some football party last Thanksgiving, but we all thought he sort of deserved it, know what I mean?"
"Look, you must have somebody who serves in some sort of legal capacity to round up the drunks and confiscate the turkeys."
"Oh. Well, you got to call Aodhagan." Obviously, I should have just started the conversation with this question, instead of irrelevant ones like, Can I talk to an actual law enforcement official?
"What's Aid Again?" I requested, fishing in Penny's drawer for a pen, picturing some organization that would only help those they'd already helped before.
"Well, he's the volunteer sheriff."
CHAPTER TWO
I couldn't have been more dumbstruck if she'd announced I needed to call the local preschool, as they were currently serving as junior crime fighters.
"What?"
"Aodhagan MacFarley. He's the volunteer sheriff. He's got a couple of volunteer deputies too, but if I was you I'd ask for Aodhagan because Earl, his right hand man, he ain't never been the same since he stood too close to the fireworks display Fourth of July, 1989."
"How do you spell Aid-again?" I asked, defeated.
This seemed to amuse her almost as much as when I had requested to speak to the police. "Lordy, honey, I don't know. Who does? Lots of A's and O's and H's. I don't know what his mama and daddy were thinking about. I swear to you that his mama, Lola, she must have still been high from those birthing drugs. She had her daughter at home, all natural, and they done named her Jane. Now what does that tell you, I ask you?"
I could not have answered, even if I'd wanted to, because Thelma Sue didn't wait for a response.
"I don't know so much about Lola anyway, you know. When she had Jane at home, she did it on purpose with some woman with a funny name, in Junior Hudley's horse trough. I mean I had Bubba Dick at home, but that was an accident seein' as he came so quick-like."
She continued, without even seeming to pause for a breath. "I had Willis and Loula at the county general, like most folks do. Or in Doc Holiday's clinic, but he don't care much for delivering the babies. He says it's too messy. Sometimes of course he has to, like with Bubba Dick, what I had in the basement right next to Al's new tool set, as I couldn't get back up the stairs after he started coming. Plus, the county general's all the way in Tallatahola."
She spoke with confidence that I had any idea where Tallatahola was and felt her extreme pain at having any child named Bubba Dick. Let alone having one in the basement, next to her husband's new tool set. Actually, I might have been assuming too much in thinking that Al was her husband. There were so many people involved in her little narrative, Al could have been Junior Hudley's trough-less, tool-loving horse for all that I knew.
"Look, how do I reach this guy?"
There was a pause on the other end. Thelma Sue was no doubt picking her teeth. "He's down at the elementary today."
I thanked her and ended the conversation before I was treated to the whole convoluted history of the Birdwell early education system and its effects on Willis, Loula, and little Bubba Dick. After I had already hung up, I realized that I had forgotten to request the phone number of the school before desperately escaping from the ruthless jaws of Thelma Sue.
I dug through Penny's desk again until I found the phone book. Actually, it was more like the phone pamphlet, and to my relief, there was only one school in town. I also looked up Aodhagan MacFarley while I was letting it ring and wrote down the proper spelling under the school's number.
"Birdwell Schools. Arletta speaking." Another heavy Texas accent answered, excited enough that she could have been answering the phone, I just won ten million dollars! Arletta speaking.
I didn't know if this Aodhagan guy worked there, was visiting his kid, or just liked to hang around elementary schools staring at other people's children. "I'm looking for Aodhagan MacFarley."
"Mr. MacFarley is reading to the kids right now and isn't to be disturbed."
"Yeah, well this is an emergency. So if you have any other literate staff members, you might have them replace Mr. MacFarley, and ask him to come to the phone."
My insult escaped her notice but not my mistake. "Mr. MacFarley isn't a staff member." She was obviously sorely scandalized. "He's the mayor."
"Great, now he's the mayor too?"
Her cheery façade was definitely fading. "Are you saying that he's a bad mayor?"
"What? No! I just need a police officer."
"Well, why didn't you just say so at the beginning? I'll call up to the office. You just hold on right there."
After all my trouble, I wasn't likely to just hang up, so I waited, being generously provided with the Muzak version of "Careless Whisper," by Wham, which was fine because, hey, "guilty feet have got no rhythm." Finally, the other end picked up.
"Aodhagan MacFarley." His voice was younger than I expected, calm, deep, and reassuringly official.
Now that he was on the line, I wasn't sure where to start. "My name is Helen Harding, and I was coming here to visit my aunt, Penny Cadgell, but when I got here, she was gone."
There was a long pause. "Well, maybe she's just gone to the store or something. Our older generation really does like to make a good impression when they have visitors."
I could feel myself starting to fray around the edges. I didn't have the capacity for dealing with…pretty much anything. I turned into a bundle of useless nerve endings the second someone turned on the heat. Hysteria bubbled up, and I worked hard to tamp it down. Some of it still escaped.
"She's not at the store," I pretty much screamed into the ear of poor unsuspecting Aodhagan MacFarley. "There are signs of a struggle, and she's left everything. Her purse and her cigarettes."
Apparently he knew Penny, since these appeared to be the magic words. "She left her cigarettes? How long do you think that she's been gone?"
"I don't know. I came in about thirty minutes ago, and right away I could tell that something was wrong, but I think maybe since last night because the message that I left on her answering machine was still an unheard message."
There was another long pause where I could hear the mayor/volunteer sheriff/elementary book reader talking in a muffled voice to someone else. He came back on. "I'll be there in about five minutes. Don't let anyone in until we get there, and don't touch anything else."
I stood in the middle of Penny's living room for maybe two minutes. Should I go outside and wait? No, he said not to let anyone in. That meant stay inside. Also, how would I know Aodhagan MacFarley from anyone else?
Maybe he got to drive a police car in his role as the only law enforcer in town.
I carefully took in Penny's lopsided green plaid couch and her easy chair, left in the reclined position, across from her television that had seen its better days sometime before I'd been born. The floor was thin-planked hardwood and worn to the point that it had to have weak spots. She had a singular lamp next to the easy chair, but it didn't have a bulb in it.
Shuddering about the germs that had to be hanging out in this place, I elected to ignore directions and go outside to wait instead. A pearly gray Range Rover with a portable light fastened above the driver's door pulled into Penny's drive. I couldn't see who was inside. I stepped out onto the porch figuring it was now safe to move.
All four doors opened simultaneously, and I was presented with what was probably the whole Birdwell volunteer sheriff's office. I assumed the driver was Aodhagan MacFarley, who was not at all what I had expected. Dressed in fitted jeans and a blue mid-century bowling shirt with Mac embroidered above the pocket, he also sported a pair of black-and-white loafers reminiscent of the 1950s.
He was probably somewhere in his early thirties, with hair that was at least three weeks past really needing a cut, curling at the ends. He had the very dark hair and very pale skin of the Irish and uncomfortably inquisitive dark blue eyes behind black-framed Buddy Holly spectacles.
The front passenger had to be Earl. It was clear his eyebrows had been singed off and never had grown back correctly. From the backseat a fortyish farmer with salt-and-pepper hair, vacant brown eyes, and a vague smile hopped out. The threads that were left of his clothing appeared to be a blue T-shirt and a pair of overalls, but I couldn't be entirely sure. In a way, he reminded me of the pug from the restaurant. It was the eyes.
The fourth white knight, of the volunteer variety, was still trying to get out of the car. He was struggling, no doubt on account of the fact that his Levi's were tailored to fit a five-year-old.
He probably couldn't bend at the waist either, since he was wearing a silver belt buckle roughly the size of a bicycle tire. His face was so chiseled it could have been carved out of stone, and he'd capped it with a tremendous white cowboy hat. He was attractive in a yippee-ki-yay sort of way. The Irish guy stepped up to Penny's porch and offered his hand.
"Aodhagan MacFarley. I guess I'm sort of the law around here." His fingers were very long and thin. They were also without rings, I noted without thinking, and clean, so whatever he did in his off-sheriffing time, it was not manual labor.
"This is Earl, that's Stan and," he pointed to the cowboy, "that's Junior Hudley."
Ah, the famous Junior Hudley, owner of the local birthing trough. Junior ambled over to the door with the bow-legged gait of a cartoon cowboy, and close up I could tell he was closer to forty than I had originally thought. Well, even if these guys didn't have intelligence or experience going for them, at least they had maturity. Or age, anyway. Aodhagan MacFarley was clearly the youngest one, and if he was a day younger than thirty-four, I would have been very much surprised.
I followed them inside, and the man who was sort-of the law pulled out a notebook and flipped it open. My confidence wavered slightly when he had to borrow a pen from Junior Hudley to write in it.
"All right." He looked at me in a way that could only be described as kindly, and I felt the tension drain from my body with a sudden slump of my shoulders. "Tell me about what happened when you got here."
I went through the whole ordeal again, careful not to leave anything out. Even the part where the cat, apparently named Lucky, jumped on my face, since it illustrated how long he'd gone without eating.
"And then when I saw that she had two days worth of messages and a whole package of Luckies on the kitchen counter, I knew something had to be wrong."
The sheriff nodded to Earl, Stan, and Junior. "Check the whole house again for any other signs of a struggle. And don't touch anything."
He turned his gaze my way. "You look like you could use a little fresh air. Let's go back outside, and we can continue to talk out there. Okay?"
Without response, I allowed him to lead me by the arm out the back door. I don't know why I was being so docile, except that I now knew I didn't have to worry about it alone. Aodhagan MacFarley and crew were here to save the day.
Up close, the backyar
d looked even worse than it had through the window. In the farthest corner of the yard was a shed that had blackened burn marks all the way up the left side and appeared to still be standing by the grace of God alone.
I said the only thing there was to say as we stood there in the three-foot weeds. "Wow."
Mayor MacFarley looked at me like he'd only just remembered I was there. "When was the last time that you talked to Penny?"
The question surprised me because it seemed to come out of nowhere. "Uh, sixteen or seventeen years ago?"
He raised his dark eyebrows at me. "That long?"
"Well, I don't know exactly, but I was thirteen at the time."
His deductive reasoning probably worked better than I'd given anyone credit for here in Birdwell. "What are you doing here?"
"Penny wrote me a letter and asked me to come. I called her, but she wasn't home, and then she called me, and I wasn't home, so finally I just left a message on her machine that I would be here today."
I got the distinct impression that he now considered me a suspect. Like I'd done something with Penny. He didn't ask the reasonable question, why I'd come. Which was fine, because I'd have had to answer with, I have no idea.
Instead, he seemed to drop out of the conversation again. He moved away from me, looking up at the sky.
I looked up too and saw nothing but sky. Eventually, I realized he wasn't looking. He was sniffing. Letting go of my arm, he walked in a half-circle, still smelling at the air. I was actually stuck in an episode of The Outer Limits. This wasn't happening at all. Pretty soon, like every episode of The Outer Limits, I was going to understand the message of why we were all going to die for abusing the environment, and then I could turn off the TV.
"Why don't you just sit down right there for a minute and just relax. I'll be right back." He motioned toward Penny's back porch, which was collapsing into itself in the middle.
I was not hallucinating that there were a pair of shiny red mammalian eyes staring at me from underneath. I didn't take his casual advice. I thought about suggesting that he sit on it first and see what happened, but he was already moving into the yard. Aodhagan had made it to the shed. He opened the door and went cautiously inside.
Dead Men's Tales (Olivia Grant Mysteries Book 2) Page 22