“Did they show ID?”
“One did. It looked genuine enough. The other one was obnoxious and accused me of knowing Palm’s whereabouts. What the devil is this all about?”
The chief’s lips curved in a quick smile that went away just as fast. “I hope you didn’t sic Devon on ’em.”
“No, but I was sorely tempted.”
“What did your FBI guys have on their mind?”
“Not ‘my’ FBI guys, thank you. One of them came from the Woodstone house, tramped right through my violet bed.”
“Getting back to Palm. You didn’t answer my question. When did you last see him?”
“I have not seen Palm since yesterday morning. He was turning on the sprinklers for the bedding plants, and I waved to him as I put Devon on his chain. Satisfied?”
“You didn’t know he was missing until you heard the news?”
“And I don’t know it now. He could have a good reason for being wherever he is.”
“Has he called you?”
“No.”
“If he does, I’ll ask you to let me know, Royce. That’s an official request.”
That depends on what he tells me. But she didn’t say the words aloud.
As she rose to leave, the chief said, “Oh, by the way, Royce, about Eddy’s survivor benefits.”
Survivor. Was that what she was—a survivor?
“I’m sorry it took so long to get it started. The financial group merged with someone else. I guess they’ve written to you and explained about the delay in getting the records straightened out?” Granite rummaged in another drawer, pulled out an envelope, and tapped it on the desktop.
“I’ve managed, Jared. With the six months’ salary benefit from the department.”
“Right, well, okay. Just thought I’d check. I know it’s been a rough few months for you.”
“Thank you.” She stared at the chief long enough to see he had said all he intended to say. She turned and opened the door.
Granite had not responded to one of her questions, so she faced him again. “You didn’t say why the FBI is in Fall Creek. I didn’t think they got involved in local crimes?”
Another frown passed over his features. “We got the report maybe three hours ago. Mrs. Morrell seems to think we small town police are incompetent since ‘you people aren’t making any progress in finding out who killed my husband and robbed me.’ She claims to have connections. Maybe she called them.”
“One of them did ask about her and Bert.”
“In one of her tirades, she said something about hiring a private detective. I told her if she did, he’d better check in with me before he went off on a wild goose chase.”
“Did she hire Mitch Ringer?”
The chief spread his hands and shrugged broad shoulders in his custom-fitted uniform shirt.
Royce stepped into the hall, almost colliding with Sergeant Glenn King.
“Sorry, Royce. Had no more break-ins, have you?” The rangy King grabbed her elbow.
“My fault, Glenn. No, no more break-ins, thank God.”
King seemed to hesitate a moment, then spoke. “I heard your last question. I was there when Mrs. Morrell mentioned hiring a PI.”
“And?”
“I thought I’d help Mitch by nudging a little business his way, so I gave her his card. She said a PI whose office was over his greasy spoon restaurant was not what she had in mind. Guess our Ringer is not up to her standards.” King had been his partner when Mitch Ringer left the police force after being shot in the line of duty. Now he was Fall Creek’s only private investigator. “Oh, well. I tried. Probably would have stiffed him anyway. You know how rich people are about paying their bills.”
“King,” Chief Granite shouted. “Get in here.”
“Yes, sir.” King sketched a salute and went into the office.
Royce took a step and stopped short again. On the lobby side of the desk sergeant’s counter stood Clupper, the goon who had crushed her violets. Hostility darkened his face as he saw who had just left the chief’s office.
“Vicious dogs are dangerous. Can threaten the wrong person sometimes, don’t you think, Sergeant?”
Suppressing her sudden apprehension, she glared back. “Threatening my dog in a police station, Agent Clupper? Has the FBI sunk so low?”
“Low is the widow who keeps mon—” Clupper clamped his thin lips closed, and his face turned impassive.
Sergeant Brand glanced up at Clupper, a measuring look in his eyes. “You can see the chief as soon as he and Sergeant King are finished.”
The man stomped toward the reception area and threw himself into one of the hard plastic chairs. The chair gave a protesting creak, and Royce hoped it would dump the man on the floor.
Sergeant Brand picked up a piece of paper. “Royce, Lucianne asked me to tell you she’ll catch up with you later. Something came up. This dropped out of her bag. Copy of a review of your book in the Capitol News.” He held the sheet of paper out to Royce. “Have you seen it?”
“Thanks. Looks like my editor’s been on the job, sending out advance copies.” She stuck the photocopy in her purse.
He came around the counter and took her hand in both his. “It’s good to see you again. Doing okay?”
She could read his genuine concern as he looked at her. She still missed Chuck’s twin sister, Charlotte, who had mirrored his gentle spirit, as well as his large body and six-foot height, until the last year or so before her death from bone cancer.
Royce stood with Brand chatting for a few minutes though later she could not have told anyone what was said. Her mind kept going back to Clupper’s last words.
What did he start to say? If it was what she thought, about the money, how could he know? Could the FBI have access to Eddy’s letter and will, even though the will hadn’t been through probate? What possible interest could they have? And no information about the money Eddy had saved was mentioned in it anyway.
“What? Sorry, Chuck, my mind was wandering.” She came back to the present, realizing the last thing Brand had said ended on a questioning note.
“I said, when are you coming back to help us get caught up on these back files?”
“Not for a while, Chuck. I’ve decided to take a trip to France. As soon as I get the book advance and a passport.”
“France! Now that’s great. But why France?”
“Eddy’s grandfather is buried in the American Cemetery over there. We always planned to go and never made it. Well, now I’m going for him.”
“That’s nice, Royce. Put a rose on the grave for us. You know how we felt about Eddy. He was the best.”
“I know, Chuck. We thought of the department as our family.”
“And you come back in before you leave, you hear?”
“I will. Take care, Chuck.”
As she left the police station, she glanced back at the man waiting to see Jared Granite. He was staring at her again, though something else had replaced his hostile expression. On anyone else, she would have called it a worried look. She dismissed the idea.
Maybe he’s really the private detective Thelma hired instead of FBI. Jared said he told her the man should check in with him. Where’s the other agent? Have they found Palm? Their suspicion that I know Palm’s whereabouts doesn’t explain the depth of this man’s anger toward me. Or is it a reflection of my own attitude toward authority figures, in spite of all my years as a cop’s wife?
Chapter Seven
Those early years with Eddy were not always placid. She was stricken when the roast burnt or the sink leaked. She had been so determined their life would be perfect. It had to be, to make up for the hell they both lived through as children.
The sprawling crowded city-housing projects in Atlanta were a far cry from Fall Creek. Books had been her only escape. Even now, she remembered the constant noise. Drunks shouting, screaming children, loud mufflers on the barely running wrecks which were all the residents could afford.
W
hen Royce was ten, the police came to tell her mother that her inconstant race-car-driving husband had been killed on one of the dirt tracks around the city. The loss of even an unfaithful husband devastated her unstable mother. She was drunk at his funeral, and daily Royce watched her crawl into bottles of cheap liquor. Barely a month later, Royce arrived home from school the day of her mother’s third-floor fall to find police cars and the ambulance that took her mother’s body away.
She pushed down the memory of that day. And of the gray afternoon of her mother’s burial two days later when she was taken by a Child Protective Services employee to the city’s pauper’s cemetery. As soon as the cheap pine coffin sank into the ground, the woman grabbed Royce’s hand and marched her through the cemetery to the car which took her to her first foster home.
Royce crossed the street to the parking lot where she spotted the old black Ford with the rental sticker that Clupper had driven away from her house. She would have expected that the FBI provided decent cars for their agents, like the one Agent Howard drove.
Another reason to doubt Clupper was also an agent. What had he found out? What could she make of the enigmatic statement he’d started to make and broken off? Maybe if she followed him, saw who he talked to, she might find the answer to some of her questions. Her own car was parked in the next to last row. She got in, put her key in the ignition, and waited.
Engines running, two police cruisers were parked side by side in the last row, headed in opposite directions. Their drivers’ conversation was punctuated with hand gestures, probably about the Sunday football games they were missing. The sight of the two clean-cut young patrolmen dragged her thoughts back again to the day of her mother’s death.
An older policeman with kind eyes told Royce she had to go with him. She was allowed to take her few clothes in a plastic garbage bag. She swallowed her tears and touched the cheap necklace of red plastic beads her father had won at a street fair booth and given to her shortly before he died.
Royce went into a group home in the state’s foster care program. After three months, she was sent to live with a foster family. Her necklace went missing, and when she accused the daughter of the family, she was sent back to the group home. Then for eight years, she shuttled from one indifferent foster family to another. She grew tired of reaching out in vain for someone to care. She’d never known loneliness could be so deep and endless.
She attended a different school nearly every year, and her name always brought ridicule and laughter from fellow students, even some teachers. Just before her birth her father had the chance to drive an old Rolls Royce car in a stock car race. He loved the vintage Rolls so much, he insisted on naming his daughter Rolls Royce Henderson.
When she turned eighteen and finished high school, she gladly left the state system and found a minimum wage job at a bookstore. The tiny efficiency apartment she rented was drab and cheerless, but it was her own and after a while she managed to buy an old car with a cracked windshield.
One day on her way home, Officer Eddy Thorne pulled her over. “Miss, you need to get that windshield fixed.” He smiled as he said it though.
In spite of her well-honed aversion to men in police uniforms, something clicked between them. Eddy called her the next day with the excuse of needing her previous address for his report. She reluctantly revealed she had lived in the projects. Eventually, he persuaded her to go out with him. He casually mentioned that he’d lived in “the Dump,” too, and that they’d known each other as children. She’d recognized the good-looking boy-next-door but hoped he hadn’t known her. The circumstances of their acquaintance shamed her, but Eddy brushed it off.
When Eddy asked her to become his wife, she dared to hope she might find happiness. Both agreed they wanted a family, and both knew they didn’t want to raise children in the environment they had barely survived. After a year of marriage, they moved from Atlanta to Fall Creek, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Eddy had been interviewed and hired by then Chief Jared Granite Sr.
Soon after moving to Fall Creek, they found their house on the rundown side of town, scraped together a down payment, and took out a mortgage. Hal Woodstone, the slightly older man who lived next door had a small greenhouse in back. They liked him. Royce, a product of urban slums and totally ignorant about plants and gardening, especially admired the hard work he put into the greenhouse, determined to make it pay.
She shifted in the seat and looked at her watch. Jared Granite wanted her to be available in case he needed to talk to her again. But she couldn’t just sit home and wait for news. Since her release from foster care, she’d found that if she wanted something from life, she had to go after it. As she had been determined to learn all about plants and flowers from Hal Woodstone.
How different would her life have been if she’d been content to remain ignorant about gardening?
“Will you enlarge the greenhouse and nursery? You have plenty of room here,” she’d asked as she helped Hal water the flats of flowering annuals and herbs and arrange the nursery stock that first spring they’d lived next door. In return, Woodstone gave her plants for her yard that he said were too small or not quite right to sell.
He reached for the hose she was using and coiled it expertly over his arm. “Our truck garden and orchard went all the way over to the next street when I was a kid. We better get those six maples in the ground. The root balls are drying out.”
“Your family raised fruits and vegetables to sell?” she asked as they walked around the tables of bedding plants.
She picked up one of the small trees and followed him, setting it down beside the two he’d carried, before he answered. “I decided a nursery/greenhouse would be easier to handle than a big truck garden.” He hoisted a bag of potting soil and dumped it around a maple sapling.
Still imagining a family working together, she concentrated on straightening the silver maple in the hole they’d dug for it. “I guess with a garden that large, the whole family had to work at it.”
“Ma and me. She died when I was seventeen.”
“What about your dad?”
“Got what he deserved the same year. Killed in a car accident while he was drunk.”
“Oh.” Now she wanted to drop the conversation. It was getting too close to home.
But Hal continued to talk while pounding a stake deep into the ground for the tree’s support wire. “She left while he was in jail for beating her up so bad the paramedics took her to the hospital. He found her when he got out. Docs couldn’t save her that time. Out on bail for manslaughter when he was killed.”
“I’m so sorry, Hal.”
Belatedly, she abandoned what was obviously a painful topic for him.
Not long after that conversation, she was helping Hal with a display of ferns, spider plants, and geraniums in baskets hung from a wire which ran the length of the greenhouse. The new misting system, which Woodstone had connected earlier in the day, was acting up. Suddenly, a spray of water hit Royce in the face. Startled, she leaned back, lost her balance, and fell from the old stepladder. She grabbed for the wire, missed, and landed heavily against one of the tables below and dropped to the floor.
“Goddamn.” Hal leapt from the ladder on which he stood, raced to her side, and took her hand. “Are you all right?”
She tried to stand. “I’m all right, Hal, what…” Her knees buckled, and she went down again. She struggled to hang onto consciousness as the sun-brightened plastic of the greenhouse roof and the floor seemed to switch places in a slow spin. Then she felt sick to her stomach.
Woodstone raced for the phone beside the entrance and dialed 9-1-1. In moments, an ambulance arrived followed closely by Eddy’s squad car. He hovered over her, impeding the paramedics. He implored her to be all right, fear and anxiety creasing his forehead. The ambulance took her to the hospital, but she had no broken bones.
That accidental fall had been the first of her three emergency trips to the hospital by ambulance. Was Palm in
need of an ambulance with no one to make the call? Had he been attacked by the thief who’d murdered Bert and was now lying somewhere, wounded or dead himself?
Or had he worked late, so he wouldn’t have to be home for dinner with his father and herself? Did he know of his father’s intentions? Surely Hal mentioned his plans to Palm. If so, was he upset? Got into an accident when he left the office? Was he wandering around God knows where, not even aware that his boss, Bert Morrell, had been robbed and murdered?
No. She rejected the possibility, shaking her head. She would cling to the belief that Palm was alive and find him. Following Clupper was the only idea she could come up with that might help lead her to Palm. Apparently, his business with Jared had not taken long. A few minutes later, the man emerged from the police station and started across the street.
He left the parking lot, and she let him get halfway down the block before pulling out after him. Following him was a little tricky, due to the traffic. She managed to keep the beat-up black car in sight until they reached the center of town, which was blocked off for the festival. He turned into a large vacant lot being used for parking this week. While she debated doing the same and risking being seen, a festival-goer vacated a spot at the curb right in front of her. She pulled in and sat in her car, waiting for Clupper to come out of the temporary parking lot.
Was this a stupid thing to do? Was her need to know something going to backfire again? Eddy had teased her about it, always wanting to know details of the cases he told her about, trying to figure out what had happened. But she had to find out about Palm. If Clupper was meeting the FBI agent, maybe she could eavesdrop and learn if they’d found Palm.
A boisterous group approached the lot entrance in no hurry to leave the festival. A couple of the children in the group carried drinks in plastic cups. The boy pushed the girl as they passed the first row of cars, spilling her drink, a chocolate milkshake, on the license plate of a silver Hummer. Though somewhat obscured by the thick brown liquid, the plate number was actually three letters, TBM.
Disguise for Death Page 6