“Then what about motive, or means?” she asked. “Surely Vern was eliminated in those categories.”
He pinched his lips. “This is all off the record, Mom, so no sharing your theories with your friends over coffee.”
“I promise. It stays here.”
“No clear motive was ever determined. Sue was killed from a snapped spinal cord, possibly coming from a traumatic fall. Coroner determined the fall happened several hours before her body was dumped into Jordan Lake.”
“Oh, my stars. That piece of information was never made public.”
“And for good reason.”
“At one time, I thought the police were trying to track down a woman whom Sue had seen with. What was her name? Lorna Bates…Blakesley…”
“Lorna Bateman. A real grifter. Not much known about her other than she and Sue had become friends after meeting at the Carrboro Farmer’s Market several months before. Never could pin down Lorna’s whereabouts after Sue’s death. Thought maybe she was the last one to see Sue alive. Thought maybe she freaked out, left Sue’s car in a part of town near the Interstate, thumbed a ride, and disappeared forever into the great unknown.” He stirred in another packet of sweetener, tasted his tea. “But we could never prove any of it.”
Fancy drew a sharp breath. “And now something’s changed to alter your perception of the case, hasn’t it?”
“Let’s just say we’ve recently acquired a couple of interesting pieces of information that should help us finish out the case, information that we’ve quietly been working on. Oh, here comes our food.”
Balancing two white platters on his forearm, Vern walked up. Large fragrant filets, with golden battered crusts and just the right amount of crunch. A side of confetti slaw, also the best in three counties, was a beautiful creamy creation to behold. An avalanche of fresh home fries rounded out the entrees.
“Here you go, Fancy, Mike. Enjoy.”
“Thanks, Vern. And shootennany—” she counted, “four filets instead of the usual three. What’s the special occasion?”
“No reason. I just like my customers happy.” He smiled, then left. At the register, Vern nodded to Piper who disappeared after him into the kitchen.
Mike returned to his meal. He and Fancy ate in happy silence a few moments.
Fancy dipped fish in tartar sauce. “I’m still waiting, you know. You said earlier you had new information on the case.”
Piper magically appeared at her elbow, tea pitcher in hand. “Refills?”
“Yes, please,” Mike said, holding up his glass. “Hey, Piper, has business been good?”
She poured. “Yeah, Daddy says he still hopes to open another place someday.” She grinned widely, and the piercings drew taut. “He promised me I could try my hand running the new place when we do. Told me I could come up with the menu, the décor, the whole nine yards. It’ll be my baby.”
That reminded Fancy of something. “You should be just about done with that business degree from State, shouldn’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am. Almost there. One more semester.”
Vern joined them, evident pride in his voice. “Y’all talking about my brilliant girl here, the-graduate-to-be? Did you know she’s carried a 3.9, even while working here forty hours a week?” He put his arm around her, pulled her close. “Don’t know what I’d do without her. She’s been my right arm.”
Mike pulled off a piece of fish. “State’s pretty expensive school, I hear. But I guess it’ll be worth it when you two become a restaurant dynasty, right? McCall’s and Daughter?”
“You betcha. That’s the plan,” said Vern. He noticed their emptying plates. “Hey, how’s the fish? It meet your standards, Fancy?”
“Great as always, Vern.”
“Glad to hear it. If I don’t get to see you before you leave, hope y’all come back real soon.” A phone jangled in the back. “Excuse me, I have to get that.” He trotted back to the kitchen.
Piper turned to leave.
Mike spoke, halting the young woman. “You know, I saw some equipment you got out back near the dumpster. That stuff can’t come cheap—there’s a commercial-grade freezer sitting out there.”
“Yeah, the old one broke, and we got a really good deal on a used one at Herndon’s to replace it,” she said, naming a restaurant supply store in Durham. “You know how it is. Stuff gets old, breaks down, you have to buy another one.” She hesitated. “Can I get you guys anything else?”
Mike said, “No,” and she was off, back to the kitchen.
Fancy watched this last exchange with interest. She bit into a fry. “What was that all about?”
Mike held up a finger. He punched a number on his cell, covered his mouth to speak a few short sentences, then hung up. He picked up his fork. “In the wee morning hours a couple of nights ago, a Durham county sheriff’s deputy stopped the McCalls because of a missing taillight on their trailer. Vern told the officer they were hauling the big freezer in the back to their restaurant. The rest of the story was that the freezer’d come out of a deceased relative’s barn in Granville County. When the officer asked why-the-Sam-Hill they were moving the thing in the middle of the night, they replied they had to get it back to the restaurant before their food supplies got spoiled.”
“So. . . Piper lied to us just now.”
“Yep.”
“And I bet Chief Archer sent you here—”
“Yep,” he said, tucking into his slaw.
“—to get some answers,” she finished. Fancy swallowed hard, trying to connect the dots. “Mike, what does all this mean?”
Mike’s eyes flitted toward the kitchen. “I’ll explain it to you in a little while, but I need your assurance that you’ll sit quietly and not try to interfere, okay, Mom? I know you have a good relationship with Piper, and she might need you a in a little bit.”
She nodded, gripping her napkin tightly.
Mike finished his food, pushed his plate back, and parted the lacey curtain to watch the parking lot.
A black-and-white soon arrived, and Mike met the uniformed officers inside. The three men disappeared into the kitchen.
Fancy heard several raised voices, and the uniforms returned a minute later with Vern.
Vern exited the kitchen with his hands pulled behind, his jaw set, steely and determined. Piper cozied up behind her father, eyes red-rimmed, as if she’d been crying. Fancy could see her visibly shaking in her daddy’s shadow.
“Vern,” Mike said, pulling out a folded piece of paper. “We got a warrant here to seize your freezers, the one in the kitchen and the one parked out by the dumpster. We think you know something about your wife’s disappearance, and we want to ask you some questions.”
Piper pushed in front, eyes streaming. “It wasn’t Daddy! Don’t punish him.”
Vern bore down on Piper, desperately locking eyes with his daughter. “That’s enough, Piper. You go sit over there and stay quiet. Let these gentlemen do what they’ve got to do. I promise you, it’s gonna be okay. Trust me.”
Somehow he got through to her, and Piper plodded to a nearby table to wait, face-down, her arms wreathing her head.
Things happened in rapid succession. The two officers whisked Vern out to their patrol car to talk, while Mike exited through the kitchen to await forensics to arrive.
Fancy heard continued sobbing. She strained to hear Mike but everything out back was deathly quiet. She knew she promised to not get involved, but hadn’t Mike also stated he specifically wanted her there, because she cared for Piper?
Fancy grabbed her pocketbook and scooted in next to the shaken young woman. “Honey, it’s Fancy. Can I get you anything?”
Piper looked up, and the years melted away. Pigtails replaced the tufted purple hair. The make-up, the piercings—gone. Piper McCall was again a sad, small girl.
“I know what happened, you know,” she said.
Alarm bells sounded in Fancy’s head. “Piper, don’t say anything. You have to be quiet like Vern said, you
hear?”
“Fancy, I’ve gotta tell someone. I’m about to bust!” She sat up, her eyes wild.
Fancy pulled her close. “Shhh. Honey, we all got secrets. I think you better be thinking of your daddy right now.”
Piper pushed away, a coldness settling in. “I am thinking of him. That’s why I’m doing this.” She turned soulful eyes upon Fancy. “I’m sick of carrying it around.”
“Piper, you know they can ask me about what you say, don’t you? I’ll be a witness to whatever you tell me.”
“I don’t care, Miz Fancy. It’s been so hard, trying to hide it for so long. I don’t want to anymore—I’m done.”
And so she began. “I knew Mama’d been seeing someone. All the whispered conversations, the outings excluding Daddy and me, the little things that didn’t add up. Course, Daddy was never there to see it. He was so busy at the restaurant, he never had time for anything else. I confronted him with it once, and he was so upset with what I said, all he could do is slap me once really good, tell me I was wrong. ‘Your mama would never do that to us,’ he said. ‘She’d never run off with another man.’”
Piper’s eyes darted up. “I guess she did it because she must’ve been in a terribly lonely place. Now that I’m older, I can see it. At the time, I didn’t—all I saw was her disloyalty, her betrayal. And you know, it hurt like the dickens.”
Fancy gave her a tissue. “Oh Piper, what happened?”
“You know we live a ways off the road, with no neighbors close by. It was summer, and I was out of school. And instead of going to a friend’s house like I said I was going to do, I stayed home that morning—don’t remember why. I was laying on my bed upstairs when she pulled up in her new car, the one she’d bought the week before. Left the radio a-blaring. I watched her get out and noticed something had changed. I could tell by the way she was walking up the walkway. Something was definitely different.”
“She came upstairs to her bedroom, pulled a suitcase from her closet. It was already packed and heavy, because she had to drag it out by the wheels. You know, Daddy never noticed that she’d already done prepared to leave us,” she said dismally.
“Mama came out, and I surprised her, shocked her. I told her I knew what she was doing, and I let her have it. How could she do this to us? She had no right to go off, running around with some man, when Daddy and me needed her here.
“But she’d already made up her mind—said she was leaving that day with her new ‘friend.’ Told me to get out of her way, said she was getting out a loveless marriage, and that I was a silly thirteen-year-old who didn’t know doodley-squat about nothing.”
Fancy shuddered, reliving Sue’s long-ago rosebush conversation. If Sue could abandon her own daughter without a thought or care about her well-being, she did harbor a streak of cruelty, one a mile wide.
Piper’s voice snapped her back to the present. “Well, what she said stung me worse than Daddy’s slap across the face, more than all the worrying I did when she was off doing God-knows-what, with-God-knows-who! For her to say that to me? I did know. And I did hurt. I was so mad with this anger that’d been seething inside of me, I was like a bottle of Coke that’s been dropped and shook up real good.”
Piper’s eyes locked on the shredded tissue. “When Mama tried to push past me, I grabbed the suitcase. We jerked it back and forth. She yanked hard one last time, lost her balance. She tumbled to the bottom of the stairs and lay there in this gosh-awful position, her eyes staring up at the ceiling. I ran to her, but she wasn’t breathing. I tried to get her to talk to me, to do anything at all, but of course, she couldn’t.”
Fancy took the young woman’s hands in hers. “I’m so sorry, Piper.”
Piper continued. “About that time, someone at the front door started banging for all they’re worth. It was a woman’s voice and she was saying, “Sue, Sue? Have you forgotten me, hon? Let’s go! Daylight’s burning! You know we got reservations in Myrtle for tonight.’
“I was still wrapping my brain around who this intruder was, when I saw a shadow move along the front of the house. I panicked and ran to the front door, locked it up tight. The shadow tried peeping in the windows, but she couldn’t see anything. So she charged back to the front door, jiggling the knob, banging on it and yelling like a banshee.
“At that moment, my stupid, stubborn teenage brain came up with the only solution it could. This woman could not have my mother. She was going to have to go away, that’s all, and never come back.
“That was the summer Daddy had the pool put in. It was halfway finished, and the pool company wasn’t there that day. They were waiting on the fiberglass lining to lay inside that humongous hole they’d dug out back.” Piper’s voice became eerily calm. “I went to the backyard, hollered for the woman to come on around, that my mom had fallen into the pool and gotten hurt. So she came around, eyeing me, not knowing what to say. All I had to do was point to the hole.
“She went to the edge and looked in. I came up behind her, and with all the hatred I had inside of me, I swung the sharp edge of a worker’s shovel against her neck, slicing her open like a bag of peas. She fell in, and I left her down there, in the dirt, to die.”
Piper stopped, brushed the last of the tears. “And that’s all I’m gonna say.”
* * * *
“So let me get this straight. Piper McCall was responsible for the deaths of two women, her mother and her mother’s lover?” Lesa Hodge asked the next night at her brother Mike’s house, pausing over the salad bowl.
“Can you believe it?” Fancy heaped her own plate with greens. “She was a mere child at the time.” She turned to Mike. “I certainly hope the D.A takes that information into consideration before they bring final charges against her.”
Hillari Hodge shuddered and slipped her arms around her husband Mike’s neck. “I’m glad my mother’s got Cate tonight,” she said. Fancy nodded agreement. This was not something any three-year-old should overhear.
Fancy scooped up a healthy portion of lasagna. “What I want to know is how Piper managed to cover it up so well. She was only thirteen, after all.”
Mike put up his hands. “Okay, okay, I know this’ll be the main topic of conversation tonight, so let me explain the facts as I know them, and then there will be far less misinformation flying about. Of course, what is said here,” he said, looking at the three women, “stays here.”
“Of course.” Fancy made a motion of locking her lips, throwing away the key.
* * * *
After disposing of Lorna, Piper’d gone back in the house, dragged her mother’s body into the laundry room lest anyone else showed up, and waited.
Vern copped to his side of the deed. He’d arrived home that night to find Piper curled up in a fetal position on the couch. When he finally got her to tell him what was wrong, she described, in broken bits, what had transpired.
Vern knew he had to make it right, for Piper’s sake. If only he’d heeded his daughter’s warning in the first place—
At that very late hour, Vern drove Sue’s car to a deserted part of town, wiped it down, left the keys in the ignition. Even though Piper was thirteen, she already knew how to handle a vehicle, and she slowly followed behind her father in the pick-up, with a trailer hitched to it. Both of the bodies, double-wrapped in tarps, lay in the truck bed.
Vern got behind the wheel. They drove to a bridge over Jordan Lake, unwrapped Sue’s body, dropped her in with a splash.
Vern knew the other body was going to be more of a problem. If Lorna was found dead in conjunction with Sue, the police would narrow the suspect field down mighty quick. No, he’d have to keep her body hidden, keep the cops guessing where the woman was, until he could come up with a more permanent solution.
Vern was always on the look-out for good used equipment, and he’d bought a freezer a couple years back that he’d stored it in his garage. The homewrecker’s body could go in there, until other arrangements could be made. The freezer would be left at the ol
d abandoned barn on third-cousin Morris’s family property several miles away, padlocked and plugged in.
“But Mike,” Lesa interrupted, “why would Vern chance moving the freezer back to the restaurant after all this time? Seems like he would’ve bought another freezer to replace the broken one, left that one right where it was.”
“Oh, I think I know the answer to that,” said Fancy. “Piper’s just about done with four years of college. What a college education costs nowadays, they probably couldn’t afford the money for another freezer right now.”
“Mom, you’re pretty good at this,” Mike said, giving his mother a sly glance.
“Why, thank you, dear. Your daddy told me that plenty of times.”
The four sat in companionable silence. “Okay,” said Hillari. “I’ll bite. Vern couldn’t leave a body lying around for someone to find. He had to get rid of it. Whatever happened to Lorna’s body?”
“Vern had moved her—little pieces at a time—to a burial site and scattered them around. Eventually she was completely gone.”
“A burial site?” asked Lesa. “And where would that be?”
Mike shrugged. “Let’s just say, ‘A rose by any other name would not smell so sweet.’”
THE STONECUTTER, by Edith Maxwell
I first saw the stonecutter working in a pool of illumination as I strolled near the cemetery on a summer evening. Sweat shone on his face as he chiseled a gravestone. Darkness surrounded him. Anyone walking nearby was lit up like on a movie set, but as soon as they passed, the black night swallowed them whole and they ceased to exist. I gazed at him for a few moments from the darkness and wondered who he was.
When I saw him enter the library a few days later, I noticed he did not look American. Portuguese maybe, or Italian. It was the style of his slacks, and leather shoes of a cut not made in this country. It was the set of his jaw, unused to English vowels. It was the open collar of his shirt, the texture of the cloth.
I was in my usual post behind the library’s reference desk when he came in. He leaned forward and spoke to Jill at the main desk, and then headed into the stacks, toward where we keep books on town history. Watching him walk away, I saw an efficiency of movement, tough muscles under that European shirt, a firmness in the slacks.
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