Gone Crazy

by Shannon Hill

  Laura sighed as if her lungs were too tired to keep breathing. Those dead eyes of hers came up to mine. “Mama was so sick.”

  “Mushrooms’ll do that,” I agreed. “She must’ve been even more disagreeable than usual. Feeling as sick as she did.”

  I’ve dealt with sociopaths, but not one of them gave me the chills the way Laura did when she tipped her head to the side and asked in a puzzled voice, “Do you know, I didn’t think of that?”

  I wanted to scoot back the way Boris did. Instead, I asked very softly, “What did you think of?”

  “I was trying to help her,” said Laura dreamily. “She was sick to her stomach. In pain. Ranting at me. About how stupid and clumsy I am. It was like a song she’d sing to me. Stupid clumsy Laura,” she chanted. “Stoo-pid clum-zee Laur-aaaa. Over and over. And when I came back to see if she felt better, she was sleeping, really deep, breathing so loud I could hear her across the house, and…” Her hands fluttered, like moths, and fell to the table. “I went home and got the insulin. And I just kept putting the needle in the vial and in Mama until I ran out.”

  Her head dropped. Boris’s tail was perfectly still.

  “Were you planning to kill your mother when you took the insulin from Marilee?” I asked, surprising both of us. “Or were you planning to kill yourself?”

  Laura’s head floated up. “Mama, of course.”

  Boris’s tail twitched twice. But it wasn’t really important.

  Laura tipped her head, and in her brittle smile, she bore a sudden, unnerving resemblance to her late mother. “Sheriff, you ever been underwater, fighting not to drown, then you come up and you can breathe and it’s like the first breath you ever took? It was like that, seeing I could make Mama stop, instead of me.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I asked, “Just what was your mother doing that was so bad?”

  Laura’s smile slipped, and fell, and twisted to the kind of rage you only see in people who are so beat down their anger doesn’t even put off heat, just a sad kind of cold. “All we did for her, after all she did to us, and she never once said ‘thank you’. Not once. We had to be Miss Manners, but her?” A terrible shudder went through her, rattling her handcuffs. “Mama made the rules. She didn’t obey them.”

  When we’d finished up, Tanya and Harry and Kim and I stood out in the office feeling a little stunned, and slimy. You tell yourself the good law-abiding church-goers aren’t going to be the worst criminals. But sometimes, they are.

  ***^***

  It was too much to hope the other Colliers would follow Laura’s lead. A real legal war was shaping up not a day after the news hit the local papers about their arrests, but Harry wasn’t inclined to waste taxpayer money or his time. He told Ken and Rob flat-out they had a choice: a short stay in prison and testify against Honey and Rich, or a long stay in prison. He told me later it took them about twenty seconds to throw their sister to the sharks and swim for shore. As for Laura, well, she was already scheduled for sentencing. Harry didn’t feel like wasting the court’s time, either.

  I was thinking about Laura, wondering about her kids and why they weren’t lining up to defend her, when Cousin Jack found me. It wasn’t much of a trick. I was in my speed trap by Junior’s garden center.

  “Do you know,” he said, fanning himself with the Gazetteer, “I sometimes envy you.”

  I was sitting in blazing sun, the temperature in the nineties even in the shade, and he envied me? That I had to hear.

  “A mother can be a desperate curse,” he concluded.

  Comprehension came. “Ah. You read about the Collier thing.”

  “Hard not to. I don’t suppose you know which Collier can sell me Grenville?”

  “Not a clue,” I said cheerfully. “What can I do for you?”

  “Paperwork is done.” Jack handed me a packet. “One acre of land, all yours. But if I can ask…. How in God’s name are you going to afford a house?”

  “It’s called a mortgage,” I told him with a grin. “I’ll manage.”

  Plainly, Jack didn’t believe me, but he kindly left the topic alone. “Well, I’m glad to have you as a neighbor. I suppose Father’s turning in his grave,” he smiled sadly, “but you are family, after all. The only close family I have left, in fact.”

  I fell back on Aunt Marge’s opinion on that subject. “You need to get married.”

  Jack laughed, startling Boris out of his doze. “Yes, I know, I’ve been told. I’ll work on it. Now that LP Inc. is mine, I’ve got a lot of plans, but I should be able to find some time to date. Here and there.”

  “There would be better,” I warned. “You really don’t want to marry local.”

  He gave a shiver of mock dismay. “Perish the notion, Cousin.”

  I waved him off. How he managed to look cool and crisp in that weather was a bigger mystery than any I’d ever solved. Then I settled back to wait for someone to enrich the town coffers by breaking the speed limit.

  ***^***

  I had thought the Collier matter was ended, except for probate, and Honey’s trial. Okay, not so much ended as ended for the moment. But then my cell phone tweetled at me around three the next morning.

  I flipped it open and spoke into the earpiece. “Whassit?”

  I heard a faint squawk, turned the phone around, yawned out a massive, “Huh?”

  “Lily fair…”

  I groaned. “Harry. It’s too early for this.”

  “I concur, but you should know. There’s trouble. A shooting.”

  For such a peaceful little podunk county, we sure were seeing a lot of mayhem. “Oh Lord, who now?”

  “Who still,” Harry corrected gently. “It’s the Colliers.”

  I was totally awake, and didn’t notice that Boris swatted me when I dumped him off me as I shot upright in bed. “Oh no, no, no, no. I am not going back to Paint Hollow!”

  “I am not asking you to,” said Harry. “The state police are there. My fat-head cousin also declined to accept jurisdiction.”

  It’s a hell of a thing to discover, at three in the morning, that you have something in common with Chief Rucker.

  I rubbed my eyes. “So what happened?”

  “Army Collier and Hal Lynch had a confrontation. The Colliers aren’t talking.”

  “Oh, there’s a shocker,” I muttered.

  “But what we know is….It seems the two were arguing a lot the last few days. Army felt Eileen got off scot-free for her part in all this, and Hal apparently was of the opinion that Gloria must have known about more than she has admitted to, seeing as she is Rich Shenk’s sister.”

  “Get to the point, Harry.”

  “According to May, who is the only person talking at all to the police at this point,” Harry went on in a weary drone, “Army took up his shotgun and marched over to his sister’s house, and shot Hal. Then he shot Eileen. Then he came home, and shot himself.”

  My whole body turned icy. I blurted, “Harry, this isn’t funny.”

  “God damn it, Lil!” he roared. His voice broke. “I know that!”

  I cringed. I drew a deep breath. “Who’s dead?”

  “Army. Hal. They flew Eileen up to Charlottesville, but it didn’t look good. Head injury.”

  “What about Gloria?”

  “Not talking.”

  My brain kicked back into gear with a thunk. “This is really about Grenville, isn’t it? Who gets it, and the big money Cousin Jack’s offering for it.”

  “I fear so. There have been many calls to my office from anonymous Colliers insisting some other Colliers must be implicated, I suspect to cut down on the number of people who will share Grenville.”

  “Bad logic,” I pointed out. “The grandkids still all come in for a share unless their parents implicate them.”

  “Logic has no place in Paint Hollow, we’ve seen that,” replied Harry. “I can’t imagine it’ll take less than a decade to get all the various heirs of Vera Collier’s estate to agree to any sale of assets.”

/>   I did some math. Of Vera’s kids, only Buck, Marilee, Jeff and Davis were now eligible or alive to inherit. Add in Vera’s grandchildren, and that was about twenty people who by blood had right to Grenville and any profit from its sale. Somehow, I didn’t think they’d each be happy with a measly sixty grand or so, particularly once the lawyers took their cut. And it was still possible Honey and Rich could get acquitted, and that Beau would be deemed eligible.

  After Harry and I hung up, I got showered and dressed and went into the office. Boris curled up asleep on my lap as I read my original notes from the first interviews I had done with the Colliers. I looked at what had been said of them all, hardly a kind word about any of them except Laura, who had also distributed the most kind words. Yet she’d turned out to be Vera’s killer. If she’d waited a day, it would’ve been Honey and Rich, the way those mushrooms worked. None of it done for the money buried in the jars in the yard, or stocks, or Grenville. All of it to get rid of Vera.

  Aunt Marge swears God has a plan. I can’t imagine what it is.

  To cheer myself up, I petted Boris. He purred, and stretched, and rolled over on his back with his paws curling in the air. His face was idiotically happy. He wasn’t worrying about Colliers or their talent for intramural family murder games. He was ecstatically enjoying the moment.

  And we say humans are the smart ones.

  20.

  The summer went on forever. It stayed so hot and humid that the only crimes were minor domestic noise issues, usually because someone had finally lost patience with kids kept inside too long and let out a good primal scream. We also got a lot of calls about nude swimmers in the creek, but I ignored those.

  Work started on my house. I hired Colliers to build it. Adam Collier‌—‌cousin to Vera’s late husband‌—‌and his sons ran a good little firm, and they did good work. I had my water and sewer laid in, and the foundation poured, ahead of schedule. I’d be able to move in by mid-October, the benefit of having exactly four rooms: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, living room. The basement would be finished over the winter, after the carport was done. I’d never have been able to afford it, except Aunt Marge did something mysterious and possibly embarrassing that cut the cost of materials in half. I didn’t ask. Never look a gift house in the mouth.

  Eileen Collier lingered three weeks before dying. No one attended her funeral except me, Aunt Marge, and Harry Rucker. And Boris, of course.

  Ken and Rob testified at Honey and Rich’s trial. The jury deliberated three hours. Long enough, Harry Rucker told me with amusement, to make sure they got a lunch on the county’s dime. Once the pizza was eaten, they convicted Honey and Rich. Ken and Rob would be out in eighteen months with good behavior; it’d take Honey and Rich five or more years at best. Once Tom’s cousin and the medical examiner got done describing the effects of death caps, Honey and Rich didn’t have a prayer of less.

  May Payne Collier moved to Richmond. Gloria Shenk Collier, Army’s widow, left the county and no forwarding address. Lynne Collier, Rob’s wife, stuck it out. Seth Tyler didn’t. He filed for divorce from Laura and was last seen heading for Tennessee. Beau Collier divorced Donna, who was also in prison, for assaulting a cop in Lynchburg who’d pulled her over for a traffic violation. Honey’s son, Tip, moved in with his Aunt Lynne. Davis moved out of the hollow and into Gilfoyle, renovating the space above his café into a loft apartment. Jeff Collier continued to keep to himself.

  I heard most of this from Tom, who heard it from Tanya Hartley. It’d be another few months or even years before Vera’s estate would be sorted out. In the meantime, Tanya didn’t seem to mind spending her free hours with Tom. I was glad we’d brought Punk Sims aboard. It gave Tom more time off. And it gave Kim someone new to flirt with now that she and Len McDonough had parted ways. Punk took it in stride. Now he had a badge again, he took just about everything in stride, even Eddie Brady.

  Bobbi and Raj were planning an October wedding. Bobbi had found some beautiful red silk and was having it made into a dress with a sheer sort of sari-wrap to go over it in gold-edged fabric. I was wearing blue. Ruth Campbell was one step from wearing a white pointy hood, but no one was paying attention to her. They were busy talking about the mural Heather Shifflett had painted all over the side of Junior’s garden center. For pay, for once.

  Roger proposed to Aunt Marge. If he had proposed marriage, she would have turned him down. “At my age, a bride!” she had snorted to me. But he had proposed “enduring cohabitation”, with a very nice ring, so she said yes. Not that it changed anything on a purely practical level, but it did make them happier, if that was even possible. They were planning to adopt some kittens from the Littlepage Eller Animal Shelter just as soon as Boris and I moved out. I was already counting the days.

  All in all, life was very quiet when Labor Day rolled around. The heat had broken, and I drove with my windows down, Boris sniffing eagerly at all the fresh air he’d been denied by a summer in the air conditioning. I knew the quiet wouldn’t last. It never does. Eddie Brady was overdue a string of misdemeanors, and there was Bobbi’s wedding coming up. I tried to be like my cat, and enjoy each moment as it came, and kept failing. It’s against a cop’s training.

  Bobbi and Raj were throwing a small picnic that evening, and I was wondering what to bring as I rolled back into town on Main. Bobbi had embraced Indian cuisine with a vengeance, but Raj had talked her into traditional cookout food, and I was thinking about veggie kebabs when I caught sight of something at Shifflett’s Fuel and Service. Kids on bicycles, I realized, probably heading to Spottswood Park to enjoy the slippy-slides the fire department had set up at their fundraising picnic.

  Then I realized they looked scantily clad not because they were already in swimsuits but because they weren’t clad. At all. In anything but their birthday suits.

  That was about two seconds before I realized these nudists were girls.

  Male nudity has in it an inherent possibility for comedy. Female nudity usually starts a riot, whether religious or libidinous depends on the circumstances. And this was nubile teen female nudity, headed up by‌—‌I almost cried‌—‌Heather Shifflett herself. With her long dark hair unbound and flying. Behind her came, crouching shyly on her pink and yellow bicycle, the youngest of the Sims girls, red-headed Pammy. Renee Vogt in nothing but electric blue flip-flops on a rugged mountain bike. Then came Connie Mitchell, sister of Darren, blonde hair augmented by what looked like cheap drugstore extensions to cover a few essentials. The last of the group was none other than Claire Brady, whose mother worked for Dr. Mitchell at the veterinary clinic.

  I admit, I panicked. Then I hit my siren and lights. I would’ve pulled them over and caught them right there, but I had to deal with the small problem of Ty Campbell craning his head to look and driving into a telephone pole across the street from me.

  My radio squealed. My cell phone hooted. Boris was fluffed and twitching with excitement as I stopped the car. “I know,” I said as I answered my cell phone. Sure enough, it was Punk, filling in so Kim could have the afternoon off. “We need fire and rescue at the library.”

  Punk wheezed in surprise. “Lil, they called here before they… are they really….”

  A new thought froze me in place. “Yes, they are, and do not arrest them unless I’m there, I don’t want any angry daddies around!”

  “Not a problem,” said Punk fervently. “But you know what they said?”

  I braced myself for the worst. “Tell me.”

  “They said it’s a protest ride. A protest!” Punk’s twang got noticeably pronounced. “I said, protesting what, clothes? And they said, no, the fact boys get away with things girls can’t! And then they hung up! And I thought maybe it was a prank but then Dale over at the radio station looked out his window and called me and…”

  And by now it was all over town. Down Main Street, I heard enthusiastic honking. Ty was out of his truck and seemingly unhurt, so I hopped back in the cruiser. I was starting to laugh so hard I thin
k I felt a twinge in my ribs, even though they’d been healed up for ages. “Punk,” I sputtered, “do me a favor. You see those girls, you let them go on by.”

  “But they’re naked!”

  I cut my siren and lights, and dropped my speed down to a respectable five miles an hour as I came up alongside the girls. Two of them swerved. “I know,” I told Punk. “I’ll take care of it. You just…‌relax.”

  I hung up before Punk could protest. Then Boris and I sat back and escorted Crazy’s first annual Lady Godiva ride all the way to Spottswood Park.

  I love my job. I really do.

  THE END

  About the Author

  Shannon Hill lives in Virginia and treasures her privacy. Connect with Shannon online at www.shannonhillauthor.com

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

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  About the Author