Dust to Dust dffi-7

by Beverly Connor

  “I almost hate to say, because it’s going to turn someone’s world upside down,” said Kingsley. “But she knows it’s coming. You know the young woman who discovered the body of Stacy Dance?”

  “The gal from Ohio, cousin to the drummer?” said Fisher. “I suppose I need to get her back here.”

  “She’s not the drummer’s cousin,” said Kingsley. “Her name is Samantha Carruthers. She’s the sister of Ellie Carruthers-the teenager Stacy Dance’s brother was convicted of killing.”

  “What?” said Fisher. “The hell you say. You are not serious?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” said Kingsley.

  “What the hell was she doing hanging out with the Dance girl?” Fisher said.

  “Several reasons,” said Kingsley. “Among them, I suspect Samantha Carruthers had doubts about the identity of her sister’s murderer. I think it was something subconscious, but I believe it was there.”

  “How did they get together?” asked Fisher.

  “They were in the same college class,” said Kingsley. “Stacy had a band. Samantha played the guitar and wanted to join the band.”

  “How did you find out?” he said.

  “I was retracing Stacy Dance’s last days. I spoke with her band members. Samantha Carruthers was there, but she was introduced to me only as the drummer’s cousin, visiting from out of town. I went to meet with the Carruthers family, as Stacy had, and Samantha showed up at home-literally walked in through the front door-while I was interviewing Mrs. Carruthers. ‘Hi, Mom. Hi, dear.’ Imagine my surprise.”

  “Damn, imagine my surprise,” said Fisher. “Why didn’t she tell me when I interviewed her? Why the fake name?”

  “She said she didn’t want her parents to know. You can imagine what their reaction would be. I didn’t give her away. I knew something must be up. She met with Diane and me later and spilled the beans. Samantha’s moved out now. I’m not sure where, but the drummer probably knows. I told her you would be finding out. Your showing up won’t be a surprise to her, but it will be to her parents. Like I said, I hadn’t wanted to turn her world upside down. I still don’t.”

  Kingsley didn’t mention the diary. It had more to do with the Carruthers murder, and the Gainesville visitors wouldn’t have wanted to revisit that. If the diary came up later, he told Diane, he would give it to them. Diane thought they were about ready to go. Then Stark spoke up.

  “What about that newspaper article?” said Stark. “That has been very uncomfortable for us, and unfair.”

  Diane was hoping they wouldn’t mention it.

  “I sympathize,” Diane said. “As I am director of the museum, newspaper articles have been the bane of my existence lately. We didn’t have anything to do with the article.”

  By we, Diane meant Kingsley and herself. They would assume, however, she also meant Webber. If Lynn wanted to come clean, fine, but Diane doubted she would. Too much to lose.

  Stark nodded. “It had a lot of inaccuracies,” she said.

  “I agree,” said Diane.

  The meeting broke up and Diane called Frank and asked if he felt like having a guest. She knew he had been busy all day repairing the house. She wished she had been there with him.

  “Sure. I’ll order Mexican,” he said. “And I have an idea about the names I couldn’t decipher.”

  Chapter 48

  Diane cleared the table after the dinner of enchiladas, Spanish rice, and chiles rellenos Frank had ordered, and brought out fresh brewed raspberry-chocolate coffee. Frank was laying out the decoded diary pages on the table and explaining to Kingsley what they meant.

  “You’ve impressed me,” said Kingsley. “You talk like this was easy.”

  “It was fairly easy,” said Frank. “Just a little time-consuming. Fortunately, there’s not much to do in a motel room.”

  “That’s right, you just got back from, where was it, Nashville? I’d think there would be a lot to do in Nashville,” said Kingsley.

  “I’m not much into nightlife,” said Frank. “Ben, my partner, and I are pretty boring.”

  Frank gave Kingsley a code sheet with all of Ellie Rose’s little doodles and what they represented. He had another sheet with symbols for proper names that he couldn’t translate.

  “Most of the names were friends from school, judging from the context,” he said. “If I had a list of her friends, I could figure out who she was talking about in each instance. Most of what she wrote about was related to the normal concerns a girl her age would have. Lots of drama, but nothing serious. It’s these two names that are the ones of interest.” Frank pointed to two doodled symbols in the list. “They are the only ones she seemed to be truly wary of.”

  Frank showed Kingsley larger drawings of the two doodles. “Diane and I thought this one looked like a stylized snake with scales and horns. And the other one looked like some kind of a masonry ruin-bricks or something. I thought maybe it looked kind of like an igloo-at least, the blocks reminded me of ice blocks. At any rate, the jagged outline looks like something broken,” said Frank. “Note that the snake scales in the first symbol are small versions of the larger blocks in the other symbol.”

  “You said you had a flash of what they might mean?” said Diane.

  “If they are names, what if the outline represents the first name and the inside pattern represents a last name? That would make these two symbols represent two people who share the same last name. For example, Ellie Rose might have represented my name by using a hot dog with small doughnuts inside it, and my daughter’s name would be a star with doughnuts inside.”

  “Doughnuts?” said Diane and Kingsley together.

  “I don’t get it,” said Kingsley.

  “You know, Dunkin’ Donuts. That’s one type of coding Ellie used-a kind of rebus soundalike: Duncan-Dunkin’.”

  Diane laughed.

  “Like the Brick twins, Snake and Jagged,” said Kingsley, grinning.

  “Sort of,” said Frank.

  The phone rang. Diane rose from the table, carrying her coffee with her, and answered the phone.

  “Diane, uh, Thomas Barclay here. How are you? Read in the paper you had some kind of dustup at your home.”

  Dustup? Yes, that’s what it was, a dustup. Diane frowned and sat down in the living room and took a sip of hot coffee. Thomas Barclay was one of the museum board members, one whom she struggled to get along with. He was a bank president with a forceful personality.

  “Yes, there was an incident here. A man shot the lock off the door and forced his way in with a gun and tried to kill me. I’m fine. I was able to shoot him before he shot me,” she said. She realized she sounded sharp, but calling what happened to her a dustup pissed her off.

  There were several moments of silence.

  “My God, a home invasion-here in Rosewood. What were they after?”

  “Me, apparently,” said Diane.

  Barclay seemed to be at a loss for words. “Do the police have someone watching your house?” he said.

  “Yes, they’ve had someone with me all day.”

  “Good, good,” he said. “The reason I called is-well, I got a curious call from a friend. A man I serve with on a board of directors in Atlanta. Name’s Everett Walters.”

  “The name sounds familiar,” said Diane. She waited for him to get to the point.

  “He’s a good man. Usually very sensible. He said his son over in Gainesville has a very good friend and neighbor that you’ve been harassing. Of course, I told him that was unlikely. But the thing is, the thing that makes it difficult is, he insists that the board, the museum board, get rid of you. Says your behavior is casting a bad light on the museum. I told him we don’t have the power to fire you. He said we need to do something, that his son’s friends suffered a terrible tragedy and now you are causing them immeasurable suffering on top of it, and you have to be stopped. What’s this about?”

  “It’s not about museum business and I’m sorry that a member of the board was dragged int
o it. You need not worry about museum involvement. You can tell your friend, Mr. Walters, that the Gainesville police will be handling things from here on out,” she said. “We’ve turned everything over to them.”

  He was quiet again. Apparently Barclay had never been on an advisory board before. He much preferred making policy, rather than merely expressing his opinion. He would have liked very much to be able to fire Diane, or at least to curtail her powers. Not being able to do either, he made an effort to be polite.

  “All right. I’ll tell him the police will be handling it. I’m sure that will be a comfort,” he said.

  “I’m sure it will. You said he is usually very sensible,” said Diane. “How well do you know him?” Diane thought it very odd that he would call with such a vehement request. She could see him asking Barclay to look into it, or to find out what was going on. But to request that she be fired? That was a little over-the-top. Had Wendy leaned hard on him for Marsha Carruthers’ sake?

  “Oh, we go back,” said Barclay in his best bank president’s voice. “He owns several businesses in Gainesville and Atlanta.” He said it as if that were Everett Walters’ measure of worth. She supposed that for Barclay it was.

  “Everett Business Supplies, Walter Ace Parcel Delivery, Night Couriers. His son is chief of oncology at the big hospital in Gainesville and is being looked at to run for a congressional seat. Has a grandson in law school. Good solid family. His father was the one who started the family business. Good tradition. Everett’s not given to histrionics-I wouldn’t have thought.”

  Apparently Walters’ call sounded a little over-the-top to Barclay too. That was interesting.

  “It’s unfortunate he bothered you with this,” said Diane. “I assure you, he has exaggerated to the point of absurdity. There is no reason to worry. I hope the rest of your evening is uneventful.”

  “Yes, ah, yours too. Terrible about the home invasion. Just terrible. Here in Rosewood you don’t expect that kind of thing. Well, good-bye, Diane.”

  Diane bid him good-bye and hung up the phone. She took the phone to its station and went back to the table.

  “What was that?” asked Frank.

  “Thomas Barclay, from the bank-a member of the museum board. Wendy Walters’ father-in-law is calling museum board members. Or rather, he called Thomas Barclay, at any rate, and asked him to fire me for harassing Marsha Carruthers and her family.”

  Kingsley looked at her with an expression of puzzlement. “You’re serious? He did that?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “It sounds like the Carruthers are using their neighbors to put pressure on you to stop the investigation,” said Frank. “A little late for that.”

  Diane didn’t say anything. She was staring at the drawings.

  “Diane? Are you there?”

  It was Kingsley’s voice. But Diane didn’t say anything. She barely heard him, she was so interested in Ellie Rose’s doodles.

  Chapter 49

  “Diane,” said Frank, “you thought of something. I can tell by the trance you’re in.”

  Diane didn’t answer. She walked over to one of the bookcases in the living room and pulled out a desk encyclopedia and flipped through the pages. She was coming to understand how Ellie Rose’s mind worked too. Diane put the encyclopedia back and pulled down a travel book, thumbed through it, and replaced it. She pulled out a geography book and looked through it. It had the picture she wanted. She grabbed a bookmark from the basketful Frank kept on the shelf and marked the page. She took the book to the table, sat down, and pulled the drawings over to her and studied them.

  “Did Ellie Rose ever truncate a name in her representation of it?” Diane asked Frank.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “For example, if she were writing about me, might she use a drawing of dice, or rather one die, to represent the syllable Di, rather than symbolizing the whole word Diane?”

  “Sure. The symbol she used for Atlanta was a sun with squiggly rays,” Frank said.

  “I don’t get it,” said Kingsley.

  “Hotlanta,” both Diane and Frank said together.

  “Oh, of course.” Kingsley grinned.

  “Okay,” said Diane, pointing to the drawing of the snake. She paused, trying to organize her thoughts. “We called this a snake because this top triangle looks kind of like the head of a snake, and the elongated, curved diamond shape below it looks like the body of a snake-and maybe she did that on purpose-making a symbol with a double meaning. But this drawing could also represent a tie,” said Diane.

  “A tie?” said Kingsley. “Like neck ornamentation?” he said, pulling at his own brown and tan striped tie.

  “It could,” said Frank.

  His eyes twinkled. Diane could see he loved decoding things. Actually, it was kind of fun.

  “Okay, now look at this other one-the jagged outline that we interpreted to mean something broken or in ruins. But look at this.” Diane turned to the page she had marked in the book and pointed at the photograph. Look at just the outline of this face of Mount Everest. The shape is the same as her symbol. Notice that her drawing of the jagged shape is always the same. It wasn’t a generic jagged-shape thing she was representing. It was this particular thing: Mount Everest.”

  “You’re right,” said Frank. “It’s the same outline. Okay, we have Tie and Everest. You are suggesting that those are the first names, right?”

  “Sort of,” said Diane. “You said you think the pattern inside the symbol is the last name. The crosshatches look like scales on the first symbol because we identified it as a snake. On the second symbol, I called them bricks in a broken wall. I think I was right, at least about the wall part.

  “When we think about drawing something that represents a generic wall, we don’t draw something made out of stucco or drywall-we think of bricks in a wall. The bricks mean wall. So, what we have is Tie Wall and Everest Wall, or rather, Tyler Walters and Everett Walters. Those are the names of Ellie Rose’s neighbor and his grandfather-the man who is trying to keep me busy with something other than investigating this case.”

  Kingsley and Frank both sat back, silently looking at the drawings.

  Kingsley nodded and stroked his short beard. “I’ll buy it,” he said.

  Frank looked up from the drawings to Diane. “Is that what the call was about just now? This Everett Walters?”

  “Yes,” said Diane. “He called Thomas Barclay. They serve together on some board in Atlanta. He wanted Barclay to fire me. Maybe he thought I’d be too busy trying to save my job to pursue this case.”

  “Thomas Barclay. Isn’t that the banker who gave you a hard time about the Egyptian artifact scandal?” asked Kingsley.

  “The very one,” said Diane. “Even Barclay thought Everett Walters was a little too dramatic in his demand. Walters must have been very insistent.”

  “Well, that’s interesting,” said Kingsley. “Very suggestive. What was it again that Ellie Rose said about them in her diary?”

  He rustled through the papers on the table until he came up with the diary translation Frank wrote.

  “If we put the names in place of the symbols, it reads: Dread seeing Tyler Walters. Tyler Walters has gotten mean since Everett Walters came into his life. Tyler Walters is just too creepy. Everett Walters scares me.” Kingsley put the list down. “Tyler lived next door to Ellie Rose Carruthers. You don’t think…”

  “You know,” said Frank, “just because Ellie Rose was put off by them doesn’t mean they killed her. I know that’s what’s running through your minds right now. And not to put a damper on things, but we don’t know if Diane’s decipher of these symbols is correct. I think it is, but we don’t know for sure.”

  “I know,” said Diane, “but here’s the clincher. Barclay just told me that one of Everett Walters’ businesses is Walter Ace Parcel Delivery. If I’m not mistaken, that’s the company Ryan Dance worked for, and it was in their secured parking lot that he parked his
car-the car with all the evidence in the trunk that he claims someone must have planted. You have to admit, it’s worth looking into.”

  “You’re right,” said Kingsley. “My God, you’re right about that.”

  “So now you do intend to look into the Ellie Rose murder case? The one you assured those women in Gainesville that you weren’t investigating?” said Frank.

  “Yes,” said Diane. “This may turn out to mean nothing, but it’s really making the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”

  “Just checking,” said Frank. “I find it a little chilling myself.” He smiled. “I know I would follow up on it.”

  “It makes sense about Wendy Walters,” said Kingsley. “It was obvious she and Marsha Carruthers are codependent. I could see what Marsha was getting out of the dependent relationship, but I couldn’t understand what Wendy was getting. If she was trying to assuage her guilt, it would lead her to go way above and beyond the behavior of a good neighbor.”

  “Her guilt about what exactly?” said Frank.

  “That’s the question,” said Kingsley, absently pulling at his tie. “Did someone in her family kill Ellie Rose, and did she know about it?”

  “Jeez, it’s beginning to sound like a Shakespearean tragedy,” said Diane. She started to offer more coffee when the phone rang again. She left them at the table wondering if Wendy was some variation of Lady Macbeth and went to answer it.

  “Diane, it’s Vanessa. How are you?” she asked.

  “I’m doing well. No real lasting effects. Frank replaced the doors today. You’d never know they had been shot up,” said Diane.

  “That makes me shiver every time I think about it. I don’t know how you remained so calm during all that,” she said.

  “I wasn’t really all that calm,” said Diane.

  “You did well. I’m very impressed. God forbid, if I’m ever in that situation, you are the one I want by my side to protect me. But the reason I called, Mother said she remembered getting letters about the Gauthier family when we were in Europe. She said the letters were from Laura Hillard’s great-grandmother, Ernestina. She kept mother up-to-date on all the Rosewood gossip in those days,” said Vanessa.