by Ruth Moose
Chapter Forty-five
Few lights burned in any of the houses I passed, mostly from upstairs windows where someone lay reading in bed, but most probably watched TV. The good God-fearing people in Littleboro tended to go to bed early. Once in a while I’d hear a dog bark or howl, though there was no moon to howl at. Most dogs I saw outside these days were being walked on leashes, probably better for their own good and ours as well. “No moon” made me think of honeymoon and poor Reba. She’d never be a June bride and never have a honeymoon, or a groom.
When I was twelve I’d had a paper route, delivering The Mess Wednesday afternoons after school to these same houses, these streets. I had some frights being chased by dogs, especially one white German shepherd who loved to wait around the side of the house where he lived until I walked past. He’d come charging out, sharp teeth at the ready, chomping his chomps and a growl down his throat that made my heart drop to my shoes.
I made myself not run. Do not run. Do not show fright. Stay steady. Keep walking. Keep your hands close to your body. That’s what I told myself now.
I remembered when that white German shepherd got close enough that I felt his hot, wild breath on the back of my legs, he would slink back and sit down on the sidewalk. When I glanced over my shoulder, he seemed to be laughing. I know that dog laughed. Heh heh, scared you, didn’t I? Then he’d scratch awhile, lick his lower parts at length, and sprawl out on the sidewalk and go to sleep.
Even with so little light from the streetlights, I saw my shadow. It looked so alone and vulnerable, a clear target if there ever was one.
I began to recite from memory the Robert Louis Stevenson poem beginning “I have a little shadow that goes…” Mama Alice had taught me to read from A Child’s Garden of Verses. She read the poems so often to me she thought I’d probably memorized them so she pointed her fingers to words at random places on the page. I read them. “Lord,” she said to Mama, “this child can read.” After that there was no stopping me. I read every book in the children’s section of the Littleboro Library and started on the adult section, which meant I had to sneak past Hazel Grogan, the librarian. If I tried to check out a book she didn’t think suitable for my age, she’d withhold her inked date stamper high above the book and ask, “Did your mother approve your reading this?” Only after I lied would she reluctantly stamp the due date and hand it to me, shaking her head as if to say, “What is this world coming to.”
After I finished reciting “The Land of Counterpane” and “The Swing,” I started on Bible verses: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” Maybe I should have said those first?
Quiet hung over the neighborhood like fog. I heard my own footsteps, sounding hollow and afraid. I kept walking. Two streets to go. No traffic. I smelled gardenias, heavy, brown-tinged and sweet. I always hated the smell, same with magnolia blossoms. Too sweet, like too much vanilla or rotting fruit. Or overripe bananas?
I kept walking. Then I thought I heard a rustle in the shrubbery, saw something move. Oh damn, I thought, is this the house where that white German shepherd lived? He’s got to be dead by now. Some people though, when one dog died, they just replaced it with another of the same kind, same color, hoping for the same personality. I hoped the German shepherd was not among the replacements.
I kept walking. Something white slunk from the bushes. Smaller than a dog, moving very quietly. Had to be a cat. A white cat. One of Sherman’s friends? Did Sherman prowl this far? I’ll bet he did. “Here kitty,” I called to the white cat and it came over, let me rub it, arched, purred under my fingers, made me feel better for a few minutes. Then the cat turned and went down the street the way I had come.
That’s when I saw the parked car I hadn’t noticed before. I had walked past that car and never thought a thing about it. Now I looked back, saw its low lights on, heard the motor running. Waiting for someone? A date? Movie? Not this time of night. It was nine thirty and Littleboro’s only movie theater had closed years ago. For a while afterwards some church held services in the theater and I thought, why not? Good job, reuse existing space. They used the old movie marquees for cute sayings like SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT PRAYER MAKES ONE WEAK or WITHOUT THE BREAD OF LIFE, YOU ARE TOAST.
Whenever I looked back the car kept coming closer, moving very quietly, very slowly behind me. Spooky. The car stayed with me. What the hell?
Chapter Forty-six
To get to the Dixie Dew I would have to cross the street but if I crossed, the car could speed up, run me down. Wham, whap, I’d be flat on the ground in seconds and the car long gone, roaring up the street with no witnesses, no one the wiser. Hit-and-run, plain and simple. Would Ossie even investigate? I somehow couldn’t see him going door-to-door asking for witnesses. I’d probably not even make the front page of The Mess, just a line or two at the bottom of the obituary page.
I could knock on the door of one of these houses, ring a bell, ask for asylum, but would anyone answer, much less let me in this late at night? It wasn’t really late and this was Littleboro, but no one I knew lived in these houses. Their kids had grown up, gone away to college, joined the military, discovered the world and never come back. No jobs here, no reasons to return. The parents? They’d died, sold or left most of these houses to move to a retirement community. They rented them out or left them vacant. A lot of the houses looked vacant, but I couldn’t tell at night. I couldn’t see if there were cars in the driveways, bicycles on the lawns or furniture on the porches. It was so damn dark.
I kept walking. The car kept following. One more block and I’d be on Main Street at the Dixie Dew. Then I saw someone standing on the sidewalk in front of me. A man. A man holding out something in front of him that glinted in the streetlight. Metal? A gun? He stood in front of me, the menacing car still following behind. I heard the low growl of its motor.
I felt trapped tight now. If I kept walking I’d run into the man in the dark on the sidewalk in front of me. He could be working in tandem with the black car following me. If I tried to cross the street, the car could speed up and run me down, leave me mangled and bleeding on the street.
The man kept coming closer. Whatever he had in his hand was at his side now. He stopped beside a tree, waited, still holding the thing that glinted in his hand. He lowered it. I heard a metal click and a whirring sound like fishing line being reeled in. It looked like a dog leash, one of those string things you control with a trigger to lengthen it or make it shorter, but I didn’t see a dog.
He stopped, waited there on the walk. I walked nearer, relieved. A dog walker would be friendly, safe, kind, take me in, let me use his phone or drive me home. All the above or any of the above. I’d take any of the above, with pleasure and appreciation.
“Dogs,” the man said as I got closer.
I recognized the voice. Pastor Pittman, dressed in striped pajamas and red felt slippers.
“Yes,” I said, “dogs.” Then I saw the dog that walked him, a blond cocker spaniel who trotted out from a big boxwood beside Pastor Pittman.
“Honey,” he said.
Me? I wanted to ask. Was he making a pass at me? Honey? I wanted to answer yes. Hug me. Hold me. Make me feel safe. Call me anything. Just thank you for showing up when I needed somebody.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“The dog,” he said. “That’s her name.”
“Nice name, Honey,” I said and reached down to pet her. Cockers waggle all over and melt when you touch them. “Nice dog.” Oh, nice, nice dog. Thank you for being here.
The car behind me in the street suddenly brightened its lights, sped toward us and roared past. I felt a rush of cool air.
“Kids,” Pastor Pittman said and shook his head.
“Kids, I’m sure,” I agreed and crossed the street toward home. “Nice night.”
I started running toward the Dixie Dew. Running as if my life depended on it, which it very well may have. Whoever was in that car was not making nice with me. They were following me,
out to do me harm, but why? Hadn’t stolen anything or cooked up anything. I was so ordinary, so law abiding, so careful in my little life, my everyday days. I hadn’t rigged the Miss Green Bean contest or thrown any beans in the food fight.
I ran like the Devil himself was after me. Ran, ran, ran as fast as I could. My breath got shorter and my heart felt hard in my chest. When was the last time I’d run? Walking didn’t cause the frantic, fast breathing I felt now in my chest.
Chapter Forty-seven
When I saw the porch light of the Dixie Dew—my own porch light—one last spurt of energy got me to the steps, where I almost collapsed. I stopped for a second to catch my breath a little, then ran inside, locked the door behind me and stood with my back against it. Still breathing hard, I closed my eyes. I was home. I was safe. I was alive. I let out a long, slow, relieved breath. Whew. Thank you, Jesus.
I heard a noise and opened my eyes to see, halfway up the stairs, two very small, white feet. Real? or did Dixie Dew have a ghost? Who stood on the stairs in the Dixie Dew? Who? Miles Fortune was the only guest and he either wore custom-made running shoes or very elegant Italian loafers. And he had big, male feet!
These little white feet belonged to a child or someone small, someone in a long white dress. A ghost? We didn’t have a ghost at the Dixie Dew. Not unless Miss Lavinia, the first guest who’d died in my B and B, had come back to haunt me. Debbie Booth was too newly dead to be a ghost yet.
“Go away,” I said, and waved my hand. “Go on. Get out. Get you gone.” That sounded pretty good. Commanding. Definite. “Git.”
“Beth?” squeaked out a tiny voice. “It’s me. Lesley Lynn Leaford?”
“What are you doing?” I demanded.
She let out a small sort of strangled sound and I saw another person on the stairs behind her, holding her left arm around Lesley Lynn’s throat and waving a gun with the other.
“Awurk,” I said. “Who are you?” I must have sounded like a very confused owl.
The person holding the gun pushed poor Lesley Lynn down a few steps and I saw the flyaway, crazy blond hair, the tattoos on the arm holding the gun. Mrs. Butch Rigsbee. Lesley Lynn gurgled.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” I finally blurted.
The woman laughed. “What do you think? You hussy.”
“Not me.” I put up both hands.
“You were in his motel room. I saw you go in. You answered his phone. I saw you go out, hiding behind that preacher man.” She was screaming now. The spit from her words glistened on poor Lesley Lynn’s left cheek. Lesley Lynn squeezed her eyes closed.
“I wasn’t seeing your husband. I don’t even know your husband. Never saw him before in my life. Honest.”
Lesley Lynn waved a frantic arm.
“Let her loose,” I said to Mrs. Rigsbee. “She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“Please,” Lesley Lynn said, grabbing at the muscled arm around her throat.
“Let her go!” I said again.
“Okeydokey. Here she comes!”
The woman turned Lesley Lynn loose and she slid down the stairs, bumpety, bumpety, bump, landing at my feet. She stood and shook herself, like she could shake off this whole nightmare.
“What did she have to do with anything?” I asked as I reached for Lesley Lynn.
“Why, nothing,” the woman said and waved her gun. “I had to have somebody hostage. I had to have somebody between me and this ‘who’s on first, doesn’t know shit from shinola’ law enforcement in this town. They sure didn’t seem concerned when I talked to them earlier this week. Nothing. Acted like a cheating husband was just another cheating husband. Podunk. This town is Podunk. I’m holding this so-called beauty queen and marching her down to that little bitty hole of a police station until I get somebody in this town serious about finding my husband.”
Nobody had told her that her husband was dead. That Bruce and Ossie had even identified the killer. They had probably been trying to contact her where she lived and didn’t know she was here in Littleboro. Of course if they had listened to me in the first place, I could have helped them find her. Ossie thought from the get-go I had made up the whole thing about her threatening me.
“So that was you in the car? The one following me.” I put my arm around poor Lesley Lynn, who was shivering like Sherman does when he comes in soaking wet. I looked down to see if she was licking herself. No, just shivering. Poor thing. One minute she’s onstage in the spotlight getting her crown of glory and the next being kidnapped by a crazy woman. What a roller coaster of a night.
Lesley Lynn wavered and rocked against me. I put both arms around her. Both of us rocked.
“Stand still,” Mrs. Rigsbee said. “So I can shoot you.”
Lesley Lynn still rocked. I put up my hand, as if that would do any good, as if it could stop a bullet. Used to work in the Wonder Woman comic books. Or was it Superman? I read more Wonder Woman than Superman when I was growing up.
“Don’t you dare.”
“I mean it,” Mrs. Rigsbee said, and came down a few steps closer.
I thought about her shooting the balloons at the fairgrounds. Practicing. Maybe she’s not such a good shot.
“Don’t do it!” I screamed.
Chapter Forty-eight
About that time the gun went off with a loud pop. Mama Alice’s big hall light fixture came down on me and Lesley Lynn in a lot of hard chunks and knocks and clatter. I instinctively put up my arms to try to shield us as the little glass hangy-downs rained around. Some of them hit my head and probably Lesley Lynn’s, too. Glass fell in tinkles at our feet, all those hanging doolollies Mama Alice used to put me on a ladder once a year with a bucket of soapy water to clean, were now broken shards of glass. It looked like somebody had dumped a barrel of cracked ice on us. All that glitter. Glass and more glass.
With a dull thud followed by some bumps and thumps, Mrs. Rigsbee rolled down to land at the foot of the stairs. She lay still, glass on top and all around her. And us. For a moment the loud bang and crashing thumps still rang in my ears, then it was quiet. A strange sort of eerie quiet seemed to surround us.
At the top of the stairs stood Miles Fortune, holding Mama Alice’s Gone With the Wind lamp. “I hit her with it,” he said with a laugh. “And it didn’t even break.” He put the lamp back on the small hall table that stood on the landing. Mama Alice loved that lamp with its round white globes, the pink and green painted flowers.
Mrs. Rigsbee lay in a tangled heap at our feet. Miles came down the stairs.
“Is she dead?” I asked.
He lifted her limp wrist and bent to check the pulse in her neck, which I noticed had a tattoo of a match in flame on it. Weird. But so was this whole thing.
“I didn’t hit her hard enough to kill her, I don’t think,” he said.
By this time Lesley Lynn had let go of me and stood looking down at the body on the floor. She wrapped both arms around herself like she was freezing cold. Both of us just looked at the body at our feet, a very large, lumpy, not moving body at the foot of the stairs. By some miracle nobody was bleeding.
Miles Fortune pulled his cell phone from his pocket, a phone whose battery wasn’t dead like mine, and called 911. I heard him tell them no one was hurt. I looked at Lesley Lynn, who nodded she was all right. I echoed her nod as Miles talked. “We don’t need medics,” he said, “just the local law people.”
By this time Mrs. Rigsbee had come to, sat up and asked for a slug of “something to cut this hellfire headache.”
I groaned. At least the ambulance and the EMTs wouldn’t come, but where was Ossie when I really, really needed him? At a bachelor party, probably paying some lap dancer or pole dancer or whatever guys thought was wild and funny. And getting looped, or snookered or whatever they called it. I hoped he’d get stopped on the way home. Pulled over, maybe ticketed for DUI by the highway patrol. Or did professional courtesy come into play more often than any of us ordinary citizens thought? Scott was
with Ossie. Maybe as best man he’d be the designated driver. “Best man”! Just the two words reminded me how Reba got confused and started this whole mess.
Miles and I helped Mrs. Rigsbee to the living room where she sat on the couch, bent at the waist, head down and holding it. “When I find whoever hit me, he’s gonna be a dead SOB,” she muttered.
Miles and I exchanged looks that said don’t say a word. Say nothing.
I handed Mrs. Rigsbee a small cordial glass of Mama Alice’s blackberry wine. “Sip it slowly,” I said. I even gave her a cocktail napkin, which she promptly unfolded and used to mop her face.
“Air,” she said. “I need air.”
Fifteen minutes later Bruce Bechner rang the doorbell. I let him in, showed him into the living room.
“This woman”—I pointed to Mrs. Butch—“kidnapped Lesley Lynn, tried to shoot me, shot down my grandmother’s chandelier and I think you need to arrest her.”
Mrs. Butch stood and took a few steps toward Bruce. She had both hands on her hips and walked hard, like she was ready to stomp a hole in my floor. (I knew it wouldn’t take much.)
“My husband is missing. He was last seen in this piddly Podunk town and somebody, somewhere better find him for me or—”
“Let’s go down to the station.” Bruce took her arm, smiled at her sweetly and started to lead her from the room. “I’ve got a fresh pot of coffee brewing. We’ll sit down and have a nice little chat. Then we’ll talk about your good husband.”
“He wasn’t good!” she screamed as they left. “He was a no-good, rotten, lying, thieving snake. He turned on me. Turned rotten after I married him. More rotten every year.”