Do Unto Others

by Jeff Abbott

  To my surprise, a hint of a smile tugged at her mouth. “You’re very kind, Mr. Poteet. But I know you and Aunt Beta weren’t exactly friends. She gave me updates over the phone about her book-banning efforts.”

  I opened my hands, then closed them back together. No use in denying that little fact. “No, we weren’t friends. I—” She raised a well-manicured hand to interrupt me.

  “Look, Mr. Poteet, there’s no need to explain. I know what kind of person my aunt was.” Shannon Harcher shrugged. “You don’t have to pretend with me that you liked her. I won’t hold you to all those small-town niceties.”

  “Okay, Miss Harcher—”

  “Shannon.”

  “Then call me Jordy. Okay, Shannon, your aunt and I weren’t friends.” I paused. “You’ve probably already heard that from the D.A.’s office and the chief of police.”

  Her lovely eyes narrowed. “I haven’t talked with the D.A.’s office. The chief told me you’d found the body.”

  So Junebug hadn’t told this girl I was a suspect. Maybe he didn’t consider me one anymore. I felt relief that she hadn’t talked with Billy Ray Bummel. She wouldn’t have come around me if he’d been allowed to paint my picture.

  “I did find the body.” I told her the story, quickly. I left out the part about Billy Ray wanting to nail my butt to the wall. While I spoke, Sister got up and fixed us iced tea with sliced limes. Shannon nodded her appreciation and sipped. She didn’t interrupt my story and sat thoughtfully for a moment when I finished.

  “A baseball bat, of all things,” Shannon finally said. “I still can’t believe it. I always thought that she’d go down frothing at the mouth, waving her trusty Bible.”

  “Not to be indelicate,” I said, “but I take it you didn’t share your aunt’s religious views.”

  One of her fine, high, arched eyebrows (which probably already needed a building permit) went up a little farther. “No, I’m afraid I didn’t. I know you didn’t get along with her, Jordy. Sometimes, I didn’t either. My folks died when I was seventeen in a car wreck in Houston. They didn’t leave me enough for college, and I didn’t have the grades for a scholarship. Aunt Beta gave me the money for college.” She smiled. “With provisions. As long as I went to Baylor. As long as I went to church regularly. As long as I majored in religion.”

  “Sounds like Beta,” Sister put in.

  Shannon smiled her gorgeous smile. I might have majored in religion myself to see that more often. “It turned out to be negotiable. I ended up majoring in music instead. I just told Aunt Beta I specialized in church music, and that made her happy.”

  “I’m glad someone could negotiate with her; I never mastered that particular talent.” I shifted on the couch. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Shannon, but why are you here to see me? Surely not just to meet the man who found your aunt’s body?”

  Shannon lowered her eyes, staring down into her iced tea. She looked soulful and lost. It was a pose that she seemed comfortable in, carefully made to tug at a man’s heart. I could hear Mark’s sigh across the room.

  “In going through some of Aunt Beta’s things, I found these library books. I was going to drop them off at the library, but it was closed. And I was curious to meet you anyway, after Chief Moncrief told me you’d found my aunt.” She dug into a book bag at her feet which I hadn’t noticed before. Pulling out four hardbacks, she offered them to me.

  I took them from her, scanning the titles. A Writer’s Guide to Getting Published. Drug Abuse: Traitor to Humanity. Videotaping for Fun. Living with Alzheimer’s Disease. It made for a curious reading list.

  Shannon watched my face. “That book on Alzheimer’s made me wonder if she was coming down with it.”

  “Hardly. My mother has Alzheimer’s, though, and she made that list of Beta’s.” I set the books down. “I have no idea why Beta was interested in these other topics.”

  “My aunt never had a wide range of hobbies,” Shannon said dryly. I liked her even more.

  I ran a thumb along the book bindings. Alzheimer’s and my mother, and now Beta with a book on the painful subject. I wondered if some similar connection existed between Eula Mae and this book on writing. And what about the others? I couldn’t imagine Beta doing drugs—but I did know that Matt Blalock smoked dope. Maybe Beta knew, too (although I couldn’t imagine Matt caring). If she did know, she hadn’t turned him in. And I couldn’t picture Beta submitting an entry to America’s Funniest Home Videos. So why the videotape book?

  Shannon cleared her throat and stood. “Well, I appreciate your hospitality, Jordy.” She nodded to Sister. “Thanks for the tea, Mrs. Slocum. Nice to have met you, Mark. Now you stay handsome, hear?” Before Mark could burst a blood vessel, I put my hand on Shannon’s arm.

  “Stay for just a moment, please. I want to ask you something.” She shrugged and sat back down.

  “Your aunt had just deposited $35,000 in her savings account before she died. I understand that was an unusual amount for her to have.”

  Shannon examined one of her fingernails. “I’m not sure I should discuss my aunt’s financial situation with you. That was, after all, her business.” And now it’s mine was the unspoken ending to that sentence. I waited patiently for her to look at me. She did when I didn’t speak.

  “Those of us who are involuntarily involved in this case have thought that Beta might have been getting money. By extortion.”

  Shannon looked at me with wry amusement. “My aunt? A blackmailer? Get real, Jordy.” She sighed. “I guess I have to tell her secret, not that it matters now. She was hoarding that money for a long while. She was going to open up her own church in Houston.”

  Her own church? I was glad my jaw was hinged, otherwise my chin’d be scraping the ground. “Beta wasn’t an ordained minister.” I managed to say.

  Shannon laughed. “Oh, that didn’t matter. It was going to be a nondenominational, fundamentalist church. She didn’t need to be ordained for that; she just needed money, time, and some real estate.” Shannon shook her head. “She’d told me all about it. She’d saved up a bunch of money, and she was going to go to Houston and find her some office space she could convert. No pun intended.” She laughed, any grief over her aunt forgotten. “She was supposed to come out to Houston next month and sign a lease. She was going to drag me into this whole mess. I work as a music promoter for several bands in Houston. She kept going on about how I could be the music director for her church. God, I wanted to avoid that, if possible.”

  Enough to kill her? I wondered. “If she’d saved all this money, how come she made it in one big deposit? Why not let it grow in the account and accrue some interest?”

  “I don’t know. She was goofy.”

  “But she wasn’t stupid. If she was saving up to start a church, she’d want as much money as possible.” I shook my head. “I’m not calling you a liar, Shannon, but I don’t believe she had that money stuffed into a mattress all these years and just decided to put it in her account.”

  Shannon’s eyes steeled. “Then it must have been donations from supporters. You know, like the TV evangelists get. It doesn’t matter anyhow; that money is mine now.”

  “Not if it came from illegal means,” I said simply. “You already know she had a list of people on her when we found her. I’ve been talking with all those folks and they’re each as skittish as a waterbug during a drought. Maybe there’s a connection between her list, these books, and that money.”

  “Maybe she was researching her first sermons,” Sister volunteered and I shot her a black look. She shrugged.

  “She was religious,” Shannon argued. “Religious people don’t break the law.”

  “She was in a library after hours, ready to torch it,” I retorted. “I bet you if we look in the Texas Penal Code we’ll find arson mentioned.”

  “So what do you want from me?” Shannon demanded. Her eyes flashed, and I guess the thought of losing that money was the spark.

  “I want you to save yourself a lot
of grief later on,” I answered. “If the money is genuinely your aunt’s, then it’s yours and the matter’s settled. But if she got it through blackmail, we need to know now. That way you won’t have to worry about the police coming and asking you for it down the line.”

  Shannon weighed her choices. The lovely skin tightened across her high cheekbones as she thought. She was a smart woman.

  “Fine,” she finally said. “I’ll cooperate. What do you want?”

  “I want us—meaning you, me, and Chief Moncrief—to search your aunt’s house for any evidence that she was blackmailing someone.”

  She shook her head, but not in disagreement. “The police already went through the house when she was killed. They didn’t find anything.”

  “Then we go through it again. Junebug’s fellas probably wait for something to announce itself before they notice it. If we don’t find anything there, your aunt is probably innocent of extortion and I’ll apologize to her at her grave. But if she was, we might find who killed her.”

  “I want that,” Shannon said bluntly. “I want to know who killed her and I want them to pay for it. I won’t pretend that she was my favorite person in the world, but she helped me when I needed it. It’s not right that she died that way.”

  “I want that, too,” I said, but for an entirely different reason. It wasn’t right that Beta was murdered, but in my humble opinion it was less right that I be arrested for it.

  She glanced at her watch. “I have an appointment with Reverend Hufnagel. He’s conducting the funeral service. How about around three this afternoon?”

  “I’ll call the chief,” I said, sure that he would not be pleased about me inviting myself along for the ride.

  She stood, eager to be gone. She said her goodbyes again to Mark and Sister. I walked Shannon to her car, noticing that two doors down Janice Schneider was pulling into her driveway. Time to pay my kinfolk a visit.

  I went back into the house. Mark was still moon-eyed over our visitor, but that wasn’t keeping him from toying around with expensive hardware. He pulled wires and cords from the TV and the VCR.

  “Wow, she’s real pretty, huh, Uncle Jordy?” he said, yanking on a cord that looked costly to replace.

  “Yes, she’s very attractive. And too old for you and too young for me.” I watched as he broke the bonds that hooked together TV and recorder. “What exactly are you doing, Mark?”

  He began lugging the VCR up the stairs. “You said we all had to make our adjustments with Mamaw’s illness. Well, my adjustment for today is watching a Schwarzenegger tape on the TV in your room, so I can blare the volume and not freak out Mamaw.” He vanished up the stairs and into my private sanctuary. Great, I thought. That room always had been a magnet for teenage male mischief.

  Ever go into someone’s house and feel more like you’ve stepped into a catalog than a place where people actually live? I felt that way everytime I went into Janice Schneider’s house. Note that I said house, not home. I swear to God there was no way this woman had three males actually living in this house. It was as pristine as new crystal and as tasteful as money could make it. There had been enough money, all right.

  Janice’s living room wasn’t much bigger than ours, but it was as white as a snowy field. The carpet, the upholstery, the throw pillows were all various shades of ivory. The furniture that wasn’t white seemed to be all glass and chrome, so you could see through it to the white or have the white reflected back at you. I thought the TV might only pick up static, just to fit in. If I’d been a speck of dirt in that room, I would have died of loneliness.

  Janice bravely served me coffee in that expanse of snowy home furnishings. I say bravely because if I were her, I wouldn’t allow anything that could make a stain in that room. Janice seemed to have total confidence in my ability to not spill, however.

  She was still as pretty as she’d been in school, with brown hair and pert features. She looked strained, though, around her eyes and mouth. I think it was all that perkiness. She was always the happiest, smilingest person you ever saw. God, she was annoying. Civilization could be falling around your head and Janice’d just giggle and say we could have a bake sale to help the survivors. Where Beta had been dour about folks’ relationships to their Maker, Janice was sure that God really did love everybody and that he’d give those extra bad sinners a pat on the head and forgive them right away, so they wouldn’t even get their toes warm before they strapped on their angel’s wings. She sided with me against Beta in the censorship fight, to my surprise. But I felt that Janice had stuck by me because her God liked Mark Twain and Maya Angelou and Jay McInerney and all those other folks Beta objected to. Her God liked everyone, even me.

  “I just can’t tell you how devastated we all are,” Janice sniffed as she dumped a chunk of sugar in her coffee. I didn’t think she could get any sweeter, but I refrained from comment.

  “I saw Hally the other day. He said that Beta baby-sat for y’all sometimes.”

  Janice nodded, looking desolate. She caught herself, though, and perked right up. “Yes, Miz Harcher was real sweet to our Josh. I know that might be hard for you to believe, Jordy, but she truly was fond of Josh. I think she sometimes wished she had children of her own.”

  “I must’ve missed her maternal streak.”

  “Oh, it was there,” Janice assured me. “But, you know, living alone in that old house, with no real involvement in her life but church—” Janice faded off, shaking her head.

  “We all make our choices,” I answered.

  “Yes,” Janice agreed. “But I tried to help her. Before all that to-do over the library, I even tried to set her up on a date.”

  “Date?” My throat caught. A date. With Beta Harcher. One could only imagine the possibilities, since none of them would ever take place.

  “Yes,” Janice smiled, remembering, “but her reputation preceded her. I couldn’t find a willing widower in all of Bonaparte County.”

  That seemed to me the saddest part of all. I felt bad for Beta all of a sudden, despite everything. No matter how much trouble she’d caused folks, each day she had to wake up and live the hell of a life she’d created for herself. Alone and unloved, and now cold in the morgue with hardly a person to mourn her.

  I got up from the couch and walked into the warming sunlight streaming through the sliding-glass window that led to the Schneiders’ porch. I felt Janice’s eyes follow me.

  “You were working with her on the Vacation Bible School plans, weren’t you?” I could almost hear her relax behind me.

  “Yes, I was. I have to admit, I think both Tamma and I were dreading it after her getting kicked off the library board. But she was easy to work with, undemanding and even calm.”

  “Did you know that she was planning on moving to Houston and opening a fundamentalist church there?” I asked, turning back to her.

  Janice obviously didn’t. Her perky face tightened in surprise. “Beta? Her own church? I find that hard to believe.”

  “Believe it. She told her niece all about it and stashed away a little money as her start-up funds.”

  “How … surprising. I’m sure folks at church didn’t know anything about this.” She paused. “If it’s true, maybe that’s why she’d gotten even more involved in the administrative side of the church lately. The youth trips, the rummage sale, the school. Maybe she wanted to learn how to run such things.”

  I nodded my agreement.

  Janice cleared her throat and tried to change the subject. “How is Anne doing? Are you and Arlene holding up?”

  “Fine, thank you for asking,” I answered, keeping the sarcasm out of my voice. I wanted to say: come down and see her for yourself—it’s not catching; but I refrained. I walked back to Janice, sitting perfectly on her perfect little couch in her perfect little house. I pressed onward.

  “You know that when I found Beta, there was a list of names in her pocket. With Bible quotes next to them.”

  Janice set her coffee cup back in i
ts saucer with a rattle. “Yes, I know. Junebug Moncrief told us when he came to ask Hally some questions.”

  “Then you know that Hally’s name was on that list.”

  She nodded. “The whole thing’s silly. Hally had nothing to do with Beta.”

  “Except that she went to his church, he headed up a youth group that she chaperoned, and she baby-sat for his brother.”

  Janice took refuge in silence. She sipped at her empty coffee cup.

  “Most of the other names of people on that list are library board members. There are a few, though, that aren’t. Hally made it onto Beta’s list, and you didn’t. I’m curious as to why.”

  “To know that, I’d have to know why she made that list,” Janice countered. “I don’t. Do you?”

  “I have my suspicions,” I answered airily. Suspicions and no proof. “The quote next to Hally’s name was ‘Fools make a mock of sin.’ Do you have any idea what that means?”

  “None whatsoever. Hally is beyond reproach,” she snapped. I must’ve hit a nerve; she’d stopped smiling.

  “Please, Janice,” I smiled. “He’s a teenager. Teenagers do dumb things sometimes. It doesn’t mean he’s not a good kid.” I glanced around at the ideally pristine room and wondered if anything less than perfection was acceptable in Janice’s eyes.

  “I don’t know of anything that Hally has done that Beta could find fault with,” Janice asserted.

  “Beta found fault with things most people would consider faultless. Like D. H. Lawrence and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” I reminded her. “I had a talk with Hally yesterday. At the very mention of Beta Harcher and her death he was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I’m just wondering why.”

  “How dare you!” she sputtered, jumping to her feet. “How dare you come into my home and suggest that my son had anything remotely to do with a murder.”

  I crossed my arms. “Spare me the histrionics, Janice. I’d never have suggested it if Beta hadn’t had his name on that list and if he hadn’t acted so skittish.”

  “Of course he was skittish. He knew her. She was murdered. That’s upsetting to people!” It certainly seemed to upset her.