“You think there’s anything in these worth killin’ over?” Adam held up the file in his hand.
Hick shrugged. “They’re just student records. Grades, absentees, any kind of health or disciplinary problems.”
“But there’d be a folder in here for everyone in town.”
“Reckon most everyone in Cherokee Crossing at least went through eighth grade even if they didn’t finish.”
Replacing the file, Adam crossed the room and opened the door to the principal’s office. Hick felt his heart constrict. He could never go into the office without remembering his father’s patient face as they discussed his latest report card. Hick didn’t know who had it worse; his father, being a principal with a poor student for a son, or himself, a poor student with the principal for his father.
A board had been removed from one of the windows making the room lighter than Gladys’s office. In front of it sat a small table with three potted plants. In addition to the table, the room still boasted a desk, chair, and credenza, although the walls were empty and the credenza bare.
“I wonder what used to be here.” Adam said, indicating a dark circle of wood that stood out from the light coating of dust on top of the credenza.
“It could have been anything.” Hick looked around the room. “Maybe she moved one of these plants closer to the window.”
Adam opened and closed all the drawers. “Looks like George cleaned everything out before he moved on to Tennessee.”
The atmosphere of the office was neat and tidy and had the feeling of a place held in awe. Despite the light sheen of dust, it was a stark contrast to the dilapidated state of the rest of the schoolhouse. The floor looked like it had been swept recently, and the remaining houseplants were watered and well cared for. On the principal’s desk an old lamp, two nameplates, and a marble pen stand were carefully placed like holy vessels on an altar. It felt more like a chapel than an office, but if it had any secrets, it wasn’t telling.
The two men left the room and Adam closed the door behind him. Hick moved back to the files Gladys had been working on. Absentmindedly he thumbed through them. “I was hoping something would jump out at me, that something would feel wrong.”
“Yeah,” Adam agreed, flipping through the files in a different box.
“There’s not so much as a file out of place.”
Adam stopped and looked up at Hick. “That being said, where is 1936?”
“What?”
“Gladys was meticulous about keeping things in order. The box for nineteen thirty-six is missing.”
Hick scanned the room. “No. It’s over here, on this stack.”
“Okay, but why would that box be out of place?” Adam asked. “Everything else is lined up neat as a pin.” He opened the lid and shone the light on the files. “It’s chock full, though. Everything in alphabetical order.” He put the lid back on and turned to Hick. “Doesn’t look any different from the other boxes.”
“Adam, what are we missing?” Hick sat back down in Gladys’s chair and surveyed the room.
“Hell if I know,” Adam admitted. “Let’s think. What have we got so far?”
“Well, we know Gladys didn’t walk to that levee on her own and she didn’t drive. She was taken to the levee, dead or alive, but we’ve been to her room and there are no signs of a struggle there or in here. Doc says she didn’t put up a fight.”
Adam nodded. “None of the usual motives for a random killing seem to fit. She wasn’t robbed, she wasn’t violated, and she didn’t fight back.” He paused and raised his eyebrows. “If it wasn’t random, what’s the motive?” He nudged a box with the toe of his boot. “Revenge?”
“For what?”
“Look at these files. Gladys had a lot of information at her fingertips. You think she found something and was blackmailing someone?”
Hick shook his head. “You figure Gladys for a blackmailer?”
“No, but I wouldn’t have figured Gladys for a murder victim, either. Miss Audie said she took a walk that morning and then didn’t come home. That she sometimes went straight to school from her walk. Something happened, and
I’m inclined to believe it happened—or at least started—here. Miss Audie says she never went anywhere else.”
Hick was quiet for a long moment. “I don’t know. Blackmail is so out of character for Gladys.”
“If she was blackmailing someone it would make sense to meet in secret,” Adam continued. “The only reason to meet so far out of town is to not be seen.”
“What on earth could Gladys have known that would make someone kill her?”
Adam swept his arm around the room to take in all the stacked boxes. “She knew something about almost every single person in this town. There has to be something here in these files.”
“School records?” Hick said. “You think someone would kill over school records?”
“It’s all we have to go on, Hick. If she didn’t fight, and she was alive, then she willingly climbed into a car, never dreaming she wouldn’t return. There has to be a reason. It had to be someone she knew.”
They were silent a moment, both of them looking at the office that would remain empty forever. Finally Hick decided. “We’ll bring this box along. Maybe it’s out of place for a reason.”
“Where to now?” Adam asked as they squinted against the sun and climbed down the stairs to the squad car.
Hick put the box in the trunk and slammed the lid. “She wrote everything down. Maybe there’s a note, something about an appointment she had with someone the day she died. We need to take a closer look at her room.”
Barefooted and wearing a faded house dress, Miss Audie was in the yard pulling Maple saplings from her defeated flower bed when Adam and Hick arrived. Wiping her dirty hands on the front of her dress she met them in the driveway.
“Oh, I hope you come to tell me good news,” she said with a plaintive warble in her voice.
“We’ve got no news yet,” Hick said, “but we need to go through Gladys’s room again … if you don’t mind.”
She turned toward the house. “You go right ahead. I don’t know rightly know what to do with poor Gladys’s things. She got nobody to send them to, not that there’d be much to send.”
With Adam behind him, Hick climbed the stairs and paused in front of Gladys’s door. “I don’t know why this is bothering me so much. We’ve searched places before.”
“This is work. Forget this stuff belongs to Gladys and just get to it.” Adam opened the door and moved toward the desk. He pulled out a drawer, spilled the contents onto the bed, and began sorting through them.
Hick sat in front of the desk and peered into the cubby holes. He spied a couple of letters to an attorney in Memphis and opened the top one. Scanning it, he turned to Adam, “This is a letter to a lawyer in Memphis. It looks like she’s been trying to find her son.”
Adam glanced up. “Does it say why?”
Hick shook his head. “No. He just says the agency is uncooperative and he needs a little more information.” He pulled a bank book from the next cubby hole and opened it to the last page of entries. He stared at it for a moment, flipped the pages backward and forward. “Adam, take a look at this. Last page.” He tossed the book on the bed.
Adam opened it and blinked. “Who the hell is Millicent Harris?”
“I don’t know, but Millicent apparently has a little money.”
Adam whistled. “Fifteen thousand dollars. Why would Gladys have this?”
Hick opened a drawer and pulled out a few file folders until he found what he was looking for. He lay it open on the desk and started riffling through the thick stack of bank statements. “Adam, what if Gladys was Millicent Harris?”
“What?”
“These bank statements are all addressed to Millicent Harris at a post office box in Memphis, and they go all the way back to 1920—right when Gladys showed up in town. But why would she feel she had to assume a new name?”
“And where
did she get fifteen thousand dollars?”
“And why did she leave the money just sitting there?” Hick studied the statements. “As far as I can tell, there’s never been a withdrawal and looks like there’s only been two deposits. The first was for $10,000 in 1919 and another $5,000 deposited six months ago.”
Adam whistled softly. “Hate to say it, but blackmail is looking more probable.”
Hick frowned. “She couldn’t have blackmailed someone from the school in Cherokee Crossing. She would have to blackmail the whole town to get that much money.”
“We’ll need to subpoena the bank records from the Central Bank in Memphis,” Adam said. “Maybe they can tell us where the money came from.”
Hick nodded and continued searching the desk while Adam pulled a small trunk from beneath the bed and opened it. Inside was a scrapbook containing letters, newspaper clippings, and photographs. There were the school pictures taken each year of Hick and Pam, and one of Hick in his army uniform sent home just before leaving for Europe. Behind those were the school pictures of George Shelley’s girls, Lucille and Edna May.
Gladys saved every Christmas card ever received from the Blackburn and Shelley families, and the old-fashioned faded corsages given to her on her birthday were pressed neatly between the scrapbook’s yellowed pages. Hick remembered the first year his father handed Hick the clear box with the corsage and gently nudge him toward Gladys. Hick was seven years old and Gladys’s eyes had filled with tears. “Why thank you, Andrew,” she said with a look of grateful delight. It occurred to Hick that his father was thinking of the son Gladys never knew when he persuaded Hick to begin the birthday ritual. It remained intact until he left Cherokee Crossing for basic training.
Newspaper articles announcing Pam and Hick’s marriages and the birth of their children were glued in place along with others that dated back decades. Stories of the First World War, the Great Depression, and World War Two were saved along with more local items like Hick’s election as sheriff and numerous gatherings, town events, and obituaries.
“She really thought a lot of your family,” Adam said softly, holding a picture of him and Pam smiling happily on their wedding day.
“Mom and Dad always treated her like she was one of us.” Hick sighed and turned his attention back to the desk. He pulled open a small center drawer in the old drop down and extracted a group of newspaper articles held together with a large paper clip. “This seems odd,” he said, drawing Adam’s attention from the scrapbook. “This is the article announcing Susie Wheeler’s murder, and there are stories of Abner’s arrest, trial, and execution here, too.” Hick turned the articles over and ran his fingers over the back side of the newsprint. “Feel this. The paper is stiff. Maybe they were glued in the scrap book and she took them out.”
Adam crossed the room and took the papers, rubbing them between his fingers. “That is strange. Let’s see if there’re blank spaces in the scrap book.” He sat down with the scrapbook and flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for. “Here. They were pasted in here,” he said holding up the empty pages where there had been something glued and then removed.
“Why the interest in Susie Wheeler and Abner Delaney?”
“Hell if I know,” Adam said.
Hick scratched his head. “How long ago did Susie die?” Adam held up one of the newspaper clippings. “Says here 1936.”
“The same year as the box of school files we’ve got in the trunk.” Hick shook his head. “I don’t get it. What’s the connection?”
“Maybe something in all this will give us an idea.” He pointed to the contents of the trunk where stacks of school newspapers and letters and other memorabilia sat beneath the scrapbook.
Adam handed the clippings back to Hick who stared at the story of Abner Delaney’s execution. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“No,” Adam said. “But it is a strange coincidence that Gladys’s body was found by Abner’s boys.”
“Shit,” Hick muttered. “If Wheeler finds out he’ll have this whole town screaming for their blood.”
“Maybe he’s right after all. Maybe she found something and threatened to blackmail the Delaneys.”
“Threatened them with what? Abner’s dead and the Delaney’s are poor as dirt. No, I don’t buy it. Besides, why would they call us if they’d killed her?”
“I don’t know, but we need to figure this out quick. Between Wheeler and Murphy, things could get ugly real quick.”
Hick looked again at the newspaper. No details about the crime, no motive, no evidence. Just an arrest and an execution. “Were you around when Abner Delaney was arrested?”
“Pam and I were engaged and Michaels told me to sit it out.” Adam shrugged. “I honestly never knew much about the case. I was … distracted.”
Hick couldn’t help but smile. “I remember.”
At thirty-six, Adam Kinion had been a confirmed bachelor in Cherokee Crossing. It wasn’t that women weren’t attracted to him, he just always said he’d never met the right one. And then, within a matter of months, eighteen-year-old Pamela Jo Blackburn had converted him from an independent bachelor to a love struck, domesticated husband. Hick was only ten years old at the time, but he had liked Adam from the start and had come to respect and rely on his brother-in-law in the years that followed.
Hick pushed back from the desk and stood. “Here’s what we need to find out: first, why was Gladys studyin’ on a fourteen year old murder? And second, how in the hell did she get fifteen thousand dollars in the bank?” He put the papers back in the desk drawer and turned to Adam. “Get a hold of the judge to file the subpoena for the bank records. In the meantime, I’m heading out to the Delaney place. I want to ask the boys a few more questions.”
5
The Delaney house resembled a wood pile with a rusty red roof. The whole place was set up on cinder blocks from the days when the Little River flooded. The steps to the front porch were treacherous and busted and the porch itself was teetering precariously on one end. There was an old tub with a washboard sitting inside of it and nearby an icebox that couldn’t afford ice and was used, instead, to store potatoes. The pickup truck the Delaney brothers drove stood in the yard, looking more like a pile of rust than a working vehicle. The front door was without a screen and stood open to let in daylight, air, and mosquitoes. Hornets buzzed from a nest underneath a dilapidated porch roof from which several cats peered down. The whole place smelled of decay.
“Miss Delaney?” Hick called into the dark house.
A young girl appeared in the doorway, barefoot with a faded print dress. Thirteen-year-old Mourning Delaney and her twin brother Job had been born the year their father was executed in the penitentiary. She had little hope for an easy life. She was poor, she was ignorant, and she worked hard all summer chopping cotton to help put food on the table. In spite of these hardships, there was a simple charm about her that was hard to resist.
“Howdy Sheriff,” she said with a smile showing a wide gap between her front teeth. She tugged at a blonde braid while balancing on one foot and scratching a mosquito bite with the other.
“Hey Mourning,” Hick answered. “Eben and Jed at home?”
“No, sir,” she answered.
Mourning’s twin, Job, seemed to materialize from somewhere within the dark shack. “Hey, Sheriff,” he said. He lacked his sister’s charm and there was surliness to his face that was not so much meanness as just habitual.
“You seen Eben or Jed?” Hick asked the boy.
“Yeah,” he answered. “They come home a couple of hours ago and Ma got on ’em right smart. Said to get their things together ’cause Smitty was gettin’ a truck up to go on to Illinois for the strawberry pickin’. It’s been warm up that way and Smitty said the berries was ready.”
Hick frowned. This was not an expected development.
“Sheriff?” a weak voice called from inside the darkened shack.
Mourning turned and seeing something
said, “Come in. Ma wants to see you.”
Hick entered the house. The furnishings were sparse but the cabin itself was clean and tidy. Mrs. Pearl Delaney sat in a rocker near the stove in which a fire was burning despite of the mild June weather. She had a blanket over her knees and two thin gnarled hands rested on it. She was not as old as she appeared but hard work and sorrow had taken their toll. “What’s this about, Sheriff?” she asked. “Why you need my boys?”
“They found a body yesterday morning while they were fishing, and I need to ask them a few more questions,” Hick replied.
Pearl stopped rocking and sat forward. “Sheriff, you know I got little trust in the law after the way they did my Abner. Them boys didn’t do no wrong and they’s gone now for a week or two.”
Hick shuffled uncomfortably. “Ma’am, I might need to bring them back. This is important. The woman they found had been murdered.”
Pearl’s eyes widened. “Just like Abner,” she said breathlessly. “My boys is gonna get blamed just like Abner.” Her eyes stared in front of her as if they were seeing a catastrophe unfold. “God’s judgment,” she muttered to herself.
“Ma’am,” Hick tried to reassure her, “we ain’t planning on charging your boys with any wrongdoing. We just gotta ask them some questions since they found the body.”
Pearl fixed her faded blue eyes on Hick. “My Abner was walkin’ in the woods and come upon a body and the next thing I knowed he was electrocuted. Iffen you take my boys in, they don’t stand a chance. They’s poor and uneducated and their daddy was a con. Don’t you see? It don’t matter iffen they did it or not. The decks already stacked against ’em.”
Hick understood Pearl Delaney’s fear. Abner’s guilt would bleed onto his sons. Justice often eluded the poor. In spite of this, Jed and Eben had to be brought in. Hick believed the boys were at the wrong place at the wrong time, but with Reverend Wheeler’s vitriol filling the minds of the townsfolk, they needed to be questioned to put the gossips to rest.
Hick knelt before the old woman in the rocker. He placed his hand upon hers and looked deeply into her eyes. “Miss Delaney, I need to talk to your boys. I need them to tell me some things to help me catch someone who killed an innocent woman. You understand that, don’t you?”
Behind Every Door Page 4