by Ann B. Ross
“Good, good,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Adam is an excellent carpenter. I’ve worked with him before, so I’ll get him lined up. But let me caution you, he tends to run ahead and add his own ideas.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said, somewhat dryly. “That’s a fairly common tendency.”
“He’ll be working under my supervision, though,” Tucker Caldwell said, as if he hadn’t heard my comment, “so I’ll have my eye on him. Thank you, Mrs. Murdoch, I’ll call you as soon as I have the plan ready. Won’t be long.”
He’d already taken off down the hall, heading for the front door with me trailing along behind him. I was glad for the enthusiasm he was displaying, but would’ve liked to have had more of a conversation with him. It wasn’t to be, however, for he was off like a shot, seemingly eager to get to his drafting table.
I stood by the door after closing it behind him as a wave of fatigue hit me—the consequence of our busy weekend. Then something else hit me—I suddenly realized what was different about Tucker Caldwell. Earrings! That fussy little man had a gold stud stuck in his left earlobe, which I knew had not been there when I’d met him in his office. It seemed as if Mr. Tucker Caldwell had had as interesting a weekend as Etta Mae and I, although I assure you we had not come home with any decorative souvenirs from our trip.
Chapter 26
For the rest of the day I had a sense of impending doom hanging over my head—all because there’d been no word from Sheriff McAfee. What was the man thinking? What would he do? Surely he’d do something. I didn’t think he was the type to take an escape from isolation or protective custody or witness protection—whatever he called it—lying down.
But I decided not to dwell on it if I could manage to put it out of my mind. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, I always say, although I couldn’t always put it into practice. I understood the admonition against worrying about the future because there’s always enough to keep us busy in the present, but what about the past? I couldn’t get the previous day out of my head. Why, only twenty-four hours before, Etta Mae and I had been in one of Pearl’s bleak cabins recovering from that church service and making plans to liberate Mr. Pickens. It all seemed so long ago, for here I was back at home going about my daily routine, broken only by the presence of a hymn-singing carpenter and a prissy, ear-studded architect.
All I’m saying is that it makes you think—how quickly circumstances can change and how disconnected it can make you feel. But a phone call late that afternoon began to put me back in focus.
“Sam? Is that you, Sam?” I wasn’t sure at first who was calling, expecting a West Virginia twang, if anything. But the voice was Sam’s even though it wavered through the line, fluctuating over a roaring sound in the background. “How are you? Where are you? Are you having a good time?”
“We’re all fine,” he said, his voice suddenly loud and clear. Then as he began telling what they’d been doing, I could catch only a few words—Tel Aviv was one, the Wailing Wall another, then something about Emma Sue and the Dillards. “How’re things there? Everybody okay?”
“Why, we’re just fine,” I said, images of Mr. Pickens’s peppered posterior, a long night drive, an angry backwoods sheriff and snakes wrapped around an arm flitting through my mind. “Nothing unusual going on, just the same-old same-old. I can’t wait for you to get back. Oh, Sam, I really miss you.”
“… miss you too,” he said, then spoke a jumble of words, of which only a few came through clearly. But I heard enough to assure me that Sam’s being half a world away had not dampened his ardor.
I hung up the phone, my heart lightened just from hearing his voice. I’d longed to tell him all that had happened, but it would’ve worried him and spoiled his trip, which I didn’t want to do. There was nothing he could do from such a distance, and he’d be home soon enough. I’d wait and unload it all then. Besides, the connection hadn’t been good.
Just as I turned away, the phone rang again. Still half expecting to hear Sheriff McAfee’s voice, I gingerly answered it.
“Julia?” Mildred Allen said. “I’ve had a most interesting phone call and I want to know what you think.”
“Who from?”
“Agnes Whitman. You know, the woman I told you about? She said that now that she’s moved back to the area she wants to renew old acquaintances. Of course I hardly know her—just know of her and even at that, mostly about her escapades. She was just a child when daddy was doing business with her father. But they were all financial deals, so she was too young to be involved. I saw just enough of her to know she was spoiled rotten, but that’s another story. Anyway, she tracked me down some way and invited me to a garden party she’s giving.”
“That sounds nice.”
“I’m glad you think so because she wants me to give her a list of my friends so she can invite them, too.”
“Well, how strange. Doesn’t she have friends of her own?”
“She’s been too busy to meet anybody,” Mildred said. “At least that’s what she told me. She said she’s been heavily involved in getting her house built and the gardens designed and installed. Now, apparently, she’s ready to show them off. I’m putting you on the list, Julia.”
“Oh, well, I don’t know…”
“If I have to go, you do, too,” Mildred said. “Besides, I’ve heard that her house is palatial and the grounds out of this world. It’ll be something to do, and a garden party will be different from the usual.”
“You know what that’ll mean, don’t you? Even if we don’t care for her, we’ll have to invite her to something we’re having.”
“Oh, tell me about it,” Mildred said in her world-weary way. “But that’s the chance you take. Come on, help me with a list. Who else can we rope in?”
So I did, but carefully did not commit myself to attending a garden party given by a complete unknown. We decided on about a dozen women who were always invited to our social events, LuAnne Conover being one and Marlene Hargrove and Pastor Poppy Peterson being two others.
“What about Helen?” I asked.
“Helen Stroud? I think, yes, let’s do. She’s been out of circulation long enough. But, Julia, if she really does marry Thurlow Jones, what’s that going to do to her standing?”
“Improve it, I’d think. Financially speaking, at least. And from what I’ve heard, she’s well on her way to improving him.”
“Okay, I’ll put her down,” Mildred said. “I’ve missed seeing her anyway. But too bad Emma Sue won’t be here. She’d love it.”
“She’ll be back in a little over a week. When is the Whitman woman having this thing anyway?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“My word, Mildred. What’s she doing waiting until the last minute to invite people? I don’t want to go to something that’s just been thrown together.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s that,” Mildred said. “She apologized, but said she’s having some more landscaping and building done soon and wanted us to come before the grounds are torn up. She’s decided to build a guesthouse that will be a replica of the main house—smaller, of course, which may or may not turn out to be tacky. I told you about it when I told you that Adam Waites will build it. Anyway, it doesn’t surprise me that she’s suddenly decided to give a party and invite people she doesn’t know. She’s a little different—the normal rules don’t apply. So it should be interesting if nothing else. You’ll go, won’t you?”
“I don’t know, Mildred. I’m not fond of garden parties. When you walk on grass, your heels sink down in the dirt. The last garden party I went to was after several days of rain. My heel got stuck and I walked right out of my shoe. Yet you can’t get all dressed up and then wear flats, either.”
“I know what you mean, but I want you to go. Besides, you need something to keep you occupied while Sam’s gone.”
I’d been fairly well occupied already, but Mildred knew nothing of that and I didn’t tell her. I distracted her by letting her
know that Adam Waites and Tucker Caldwell were working on my house and thanked her again for her recommendations.
“Even more reason for you to go to the party,” Mildred said. “I understand that Adam did most of the finishing work out there, so you’ll see what he’s capable of. And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Tucker is her architect. He’s well-known throughout the state and beyond. You can’t miss this chance, Julia.”
Then something Mildred had said earlier came back to me. “Wait a minute, Mildred. You said the Whitman woman is having this party in such a hurry because her yard will soon be torn up and Adam will be doing the work. Something’s out of kilter here because he’s working for me and will be for several more weeks. I have him committed to finishing the upstairs, and Tucker Caldwell has him lined up for the new downstairs library.”
Mildred laughed. “Looks like he’ll be whipsawed between the two of you then. But possession is nine-tenths of the law, and you’ve got him. Just keep him busy and don’t give him any free days—she’ll snatch him up and no telling when you’ll get him back.”
“Oh, my,” I murmured. I’d already realized that all the remodeling I was planning would not be completed by the time Sam returned home. But the thought of everything coming to a complete standstill while Adam worked for Agnes Whitman was most disconcerting. Why, the house could be in a state of disarray the whole summer long. Maybe I should go to the garden party and at least meet the competitor for Adam’s services. And maybe drop a hint or two that she should rearrange her work schedule to coincide with the completion of my projects.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll go. What time should we be there and how do I get to her house?”
“Four o’clock and I can pick you up.”
“No. Thanks anyway. I may need to leave before you. So much is going on here, you know.” I didn’t go into exactly what was going on at my house, but for all I knew a certain sheriff would be in town by then. And if that were the case, I might not be available for any kind of party—garden or otherwise.
Mildred gave me directions to the gated community out in Fairfields, which was some ten miles or so from Abbotsville. “Just go past the gatehouse and stay on the main road until you see another set of gates on the right.” Mildred tittered. “You might say the house is gated within the gates. But you can’t miss it, Julia. They say it’s enormous—the largest and most outstanding house in the county, bar none.”
After hanging up, I stood there wishing I hadn’t agreed to go. In the past few days, I’d about met my quota of people who were a little different and had little stomach for meeting any more of the same. And I couldn’t help but wonder: if Agnes Whitman’s house was so magnificent, why was she having an outdoor party?
Chapter 27
The day of the Whitman woman’s party arrived with a cloudless sky, high temperatures and heavy humidity. By early afternoon the thermometer registered well into the nineties, and all I wanted to do was stay in my air-conditioned home and drink iced tea with lemon.
And that sense of impending doom I’ve spoken of? It was heavier than ever. There’d been no word from Sheriff McAfee, and even Coleman was at a loss as to what the sheriff’s intentions were.
“I’m thinking,” Coleman had said to Mr. Pickens, “that maybe I’ll call him. At least let him know you’re here and available if needed.”
The three of us—Coleman, Hazel Marie and I—had gathered around Mr. Pickens’s bed the day before to discuss the problem. Even though Mr. Pickens had a pale and peaked cast to his face, his looks were considerably improved by a shave that had been administered by James—a procedure undergone only by a man of courage. Mr. Pickens was propped up in bed with several pillows behind his back while he sat gingerly on one of Hazel Marie’s best eiderdown pillows—a position that indicated to me that he was well along in the healing process. At least he could look us directly in the face now instead of out from under his arm while he lay on his stomach. And I’m happy to report that his mind had cleared considerably. After being told a half-dozen times how he’d gotten home, he’d begun to exhibit some well-deserved appreciation toward his liberators. He’d sent both Etta Mae and me huge bouquets of roses with thank-you notes scribbled in his own handwriting. Mine read: Can’t begin to thank you for the risks you took on my behalf. You can work in my kitchen anytime you want. Which just goes to show that he was pretty much back to normal.
“Hold off awhile, if you can,” Mr. Pickens said, responding to Coleman. “You’ve not had an official request for information, have you? No BOLOs or APBs?”
“Nope,” Coleman said, shaking his head as I worked out Be On the Lookout and All Points Bulletin. “Nothing about you at all. In fact, the only contact I’ve had with the Mill Run sheriff was when I was trying to get information out of him about you.”
Mr. Pickens squirmed a little to ease one of his four sore places. “I’d like to wait before stirring the pot until I get copies of my licenses, credit cards, and so forth. I sent some faxes to Raleigh this morning—with the help of my wife.” He smiled at Hazel Marie as she leaned across the bed to take his hand. “Right now I’m still as stripped of identification as I was when they found me.”
“We know who you are,” I said, “but our word, apparently, means nothing to Sheriff McAfee. Etta Mae and I both told him your identity, but he kept saying he had to wait for official confirmation. But how would he get that when he wouldn’t let anybody see you?”
“Fingerprints,” Mr. Pickens said. “He probably ran them through the federal identification system, then contacted Raleigh. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that he’s sitting up there now with copies of everything I had in my pockets, including the two-for-one coupon from McDonald’s.”
Mr. Pickens turned to Coleman. “If he calls, go ahead and tell him whatever he wants to know. I’ve got nothing to hide. But I’d rather have my identification in hand before reaching out to him.”
Coleman nodded. “Suits me.”
“Well, none of it suits me,” I chimed in. “I’d like to know just exactly what you were doing to get yourself in such trouble. And just who took your original identification and who shot you and, well, how you got in that situation in the first place. A situation, I remind you, that exposed several of us to a great deal of peril in order to get you extricated.”
Those black eyes of his gave me a long look, then he said, “It’s not a story I’m proud of, but it started out as a simple missing person’s case.” He grimaced, then shifted his position again.
“Oh, J.D.,” Hazel Marie said, “if you need to rest, you can tell us about it another time.”
Before I could enter a protest, Mr. Pickens said, “I’m all right, honey. It started with my client, a Mrs. Hanson, in Winston-Salem, who hired me to find her son who’d been missing a little over six months. The local cops had investigated and sent out bulletins, but she felt they’d given up on it. And they had because, come to find out, this wasn’t the first time the boy had gone missing and not the first time he’d been in trouble with the law. He’d been arrested at least once on a marijuana charge and several times for vandalism and joyriding. Mrs. Hanson blamed it all on his getting mixed up with the wrong crowd.” Mr. Pickens stopped and seemed to gather his thoughts. “I keep saying ‘boy,’ but he’s twenty-two or -three, so with no evidence of foul play, the cops treated him like an adult who was free to come and go as he pleased. And also, come to find out, I was the third PI she’d hired. The others, she claimed, had just taken her money and done nothing. But I had something they hadn’t had: a ransom note that the mother had just received. It demanded twenty-five thousand dollars for his safe return, and a picture of the kid dated a couple of days before it came was sent along with it.
“Well, the mother was beside herself, but she wouldn’t call the cops in again. ‘They won’t do anything,’ she said, and told me she’d pay me the twenty-five thousand if I’d bring him back to her. Well,” Mr. Pickens said somewhat wryly, “that was a
pretty good incentive, although I would’ve done it for my usual fee. See, the picture gave me an idea of how I could find him. Part of a sign on an old store was in the background, and the note itself gave me a starting point. That and the picture told me I wasn’t dealing with the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
“Why, J.D.?” Hazel Marie asked. “What was in the note?”
“Well, first off, it was written on the back of a gas receipt from a station in Beckley, West Virginia.”
“Why, we went right through there!” I said.
“You sure did, and that’s where I headed. I put out some feelers and began looking around from there.”
Coleman grinned and shook his head. “Sounds like he’d been picked up by some real dummies.”
“That’s not the half of it. I figured from the first that this Harold Hanson hadn’t been abducted. He was part of it. Who else would send a picture of a kidnap victim standing out in front of a store sign and eating a popsicle?”
“My word,” I murmured.
“Well,” Mr. Pickens went on, “it took me awhile, but I finally found where the picture had been taken. I’d spread out my search from Beckley, going through some of the surrounding towns. Anyway, I was tooling along a state highway outside of Mill Run and saw it. Drove right past it, then it hit me. I turned around and there it was.”
Hazel Marie was holding one of his hands in both of hers, sitting on the side of the bed, entranced with the story of her husband’s expertise. “Oh, J.D., you are so smart. How in the world did you recognize it?”
He smiled at her. “Well, in the picture, it looked to be a sign across the top of an open structure of some kind, but all the picture caught was cept sunday in big letters.”
“Oh, my goodness,” I said. “It was except sunday, wasn’t it? luther’s flea market open daily except sunday. Etta Mae and I saw the same thing. Mr. Pickens, it’s just remarkable that you would recognize the place from that little bit in the picture.”