Subdued by our thoughts, we took seats in club chairs beside the empty desk and waited. The rippling waterfall mesmerized me, and I tried not to think or check my watch.
Tinkie stepped on my toes. “We’ll find her. Don’t look so glum.”
There was no time to answer. The door opened and a sharp-looking man in his fifties stepped into the room. “What can I do for you ladies?” Benny Hester asked. He checked his watch to let us know he had a busy schedule and that he’d made time for us.
“We’re here about some songs,” Tinkie told him.
“Yes, the McNair problem. The songs I’m representing are ‘Too Blue’ and ‘Baby Love.’” Hester went through some files on his desk. He handed one to Tinkie. “Standard agent agreement signed by Tally McNair. She presented herself as the creator of the songs. I had no reason to believe they were stolen.”
Our PI friend, Rick, had done a lot of the legwork for us and I was glad. “We’re not blaming you,” I said quickly. “When did Ms. McNair sign the contract?”
“October 15.” Tinkie pointed to a page in the file. “Right here.”
“Pleasant had been gone two days,” I said aloud. “Tally didn’t wait to see if she’d show up again because she knew she wouldn’t. I don’t care what that band director says, she knows plenty about Pleasant’s abduction. She can pretend she only overheard those girls plotting, but she capitalized on the situation and she knows more than she’s saying.” I couldn’t wait to call Coleman. He had Tally in a jail cell—unless she’d made bond.
“Rick Ralston filled me in on the situation. So the young woman who wrote the songs has vanished?” Hester asked. “Do you believe she’s still alive?”
“Yes.” Tinkie and I were in sync, as always.
“When you find her, I’d like to sign her. She’s talented. She’s got a great career ahead of her. Now I realize this isn’t your problem, but I have a music video I’ve paid for that I can’t release until the rights are clear on this song. I need to speak with Ms. Smith as soon as you find her. There’s a bonus in this for you if you turn her up before Thanksgiving. Say twenty grand?”
When we found her. If we found her. There was a lot more at stake here than a music video or even Pleasant’s career. Libby needed her mother. Tinkie was great. Amazing, even. If the baby was adopted by the Richmonds, she would have a privileged, secure, and loved life. But she would not have her natural mother.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Hester. The date on the contract is very helpful. We’ll be in touch as soon as we have any information.”
We left his office and took the elevator to the lobby. I’d learned three bits of valuable information. Tally McNair had sold Pleasant’s songs almost as soon as she disappeared; the high school trio was in this up to their ears; and Pleasant was the real deal. She was the one in a million who might break big in country music. It spoke to motive for her kidnapping, and not in a good way. Pleasant’s talent translated into money, and people did many regrettable things for money.
“Let’s zip back to the plane,” Tinkie said. She was itching to get home.
I pushed open the glass door and stepped on the street. And froze. Gertrude Strom was standing across Fifth Street glaring right at me. Incredibly she wore a khaki skirt and a red cardigan. She looked like someone’s grandmother. Except for the malice that contorted her features.
Tinkie saw her, too. “I have had enough.” She started to push past me, but the light changed and the road flooded with speeding vehicles. There was no way to cross. Gertrude made a crude gesture and walked into the crowd. By the time the traffic stopped, there wasn’t a sign of her.
18
On the brief plane ride home, I called Coleman and told him about Gertrude. His anger warmed the cockles of my heart. He was furious.
“How is she moving so freely and so fast?” he asked. “It’s a five-hour drive to Nashville. She must have left at dawn this morning, and how did she know you had a meeting with Benny Hester?”
“She could have driven up here after she left Dahlia House last night. But how did she even know I’d be in Nashville, much less the music agent’s name. She knows what I’m doing before I figure it out.” I took a breath and dove back in. “Flying around in Mr. Bellow’s private plane has given me some new perspective. I’m working on the suspicion that someone wealthy is helping her.”
“Good point. Any idea who that might be?”
It hit me. “Bijou LaRoche.” In the not so distant past, Bijou had involved herself with some pretty skanky characters. She was a wealthy plantation owner and well-known succubus, who’d gone to the dark side and managed to escape real punishment for a number of crimes by cooperating with the feds.
“She was my first thought,” Coleman agreed. “She doesn’t much care for you, Sarah Booth. You have that effect on people.”
His teasing note made me feel worlds better. The situation wasn’t so bad that we couldn’t laugh. “Thanks. So what are you going to do?”
“Sheriff Kincaid has agreed to put a deputy on watch near Carrie Ann’s place. I’ll ask Jaytee if he can bird-dog Bijou. She has a thing for good-looking men.”
“He has to sleep sometime. He’s at Playin’ the Bones all night.” I loved that my friends wanted to help, but the man couldn’t play music all night and gumshoe all day.
“Scott and the rest of the band volunteered to share shifts. They adore you, Sarah Booth.”
“If Bijou is harboring Gertrude, it could be dangerous work, and they’re musicians. They aren’t trained.”
“They’ve promised to watch and report. No heroics.”
I was still uncomfortable, but I didn’t have a better solution. Coleman was woefully understaffed, and that wasn’t going to change.
“We should be touching down in an hour,” I said. “I know Carrie Ann let you into her house, but could you really search? Maybe there’s evidence that Gertrude or Pleasant were there?”
“Waiting on the judge to sign a search warrant for her house. If there’s any trace that either was there, I’ll find it.”
“What about the three men who were murdered in the farm shed?”
“Mississippi Bureau of Investigation and the Memphis Drug Task Force want to take over the investigation. I’m going to let them. This is bigger than Sunflower County. They have more technology, more men, more surveillance equipment.” He chuckled softly. “They have drones, Sarah Booth. The really expensive kind.”
“Dammit. I want a drone.” I would be hell on wheels if I had aerial surveillance of Bijou’s property. I’d find Gertrude Strom, hog-tie her, and deliver her to the county lockup.
“So do I. Not happening anytime soon; we barely have a budget for gasoline. When you land, be on alert. There are roadblocks up on every road leading from the Nashville area into Mississippi, but there are so many farm roads, and Gertrude knows this area well.”
“Any luck identifying the young man Betty McGowin helped DeWayne with the sketch of?”
“We have a lead. I’ll tell you when you get here. This might tie in to the stabbing of Rudy Uxall.”
* * *
After we landed, I took Tinkie straight to Madame Tomeeka’s, where Libby had Tammy’s clients charmed. I swear, the baby recognized Tinkie when she walked in the door. Everyone said Libby couldn’t really see, but Libby seemed to perk up at the sound of Tinkie’s voice. They went to each other as if directed by some magnetic pull.
“This baby has a special mojo,” Tammy said as she gave the baby over. “She hasn’t cried at all. She’s a happy and secure spirit. This little girl will bring great joy to the world.”
“Great joy to me?” Tinkie asked.
“Doesn’t she already?” Tammy sidestepped the question easily. I wondered if she knew that pain loomed in the future for Tinkie. Through dreams and tarot cards and visitations from the dead, Tammy sometimes had a line on the future, but she practiced caution dispensing her intuitions.
“Ladies,” I had things t
o discuss with Tinkie. “I’m going to the sheriff’s office. Want to come along?”
I hoped Tinkie might offer to come with me, but no dice. She held the baby and crooned softly to her. God save me from the brain mush of motherhood. If it happened to Tinkie, it could certainly happen to me.
Since there were no takers on my offer, I left Tammy and Tinkie oohing and aahing and I went to work.
Coleman was executing the search warrant at Carrie Ann Musgrove’s house when I got to the SO. DeWayne hunkered over his desk writing reports. He threw the pen aside, eager to tell me the news on the composite he’d created with the midwife’s help. The man who’d been asking for cramp medication had been identified as Luther Potter.
“Luther Potter!” I was surprised. “He was over at Charity’s place asking about where Pleasant might be only a couple of days ago. He was also in a bar fight with Rudy Uxall about Pleasant.”
“I’ve done a lot of background research. Potter’s a bad dude, no way around it. The thing is, there’s no evidence to connect him to Pleasant or her abduction. I’m not saying he’s innocent, but folks are jumping to a conclusion here,” DeWayne said, clearly worried.
I snapped a photo of the composite and also took a physical copy of the flyer DeWayne had created. Yancy Bellow was offering five thousand dollars for information leading to Luther Potter, who had a criminal record on the east side of the state in West Point and Starkville. Potter had flunked out of Mississippi State University some ten years earlier. He’d been in the agriculture program, and reading his criminal past, I thought I understood what his academic interest had been. Judging from the classes he took, if Mississippi ever legalized the growing of marijuana, he would be well prepared.
During his tenure at MSU, he’d been a highly celebrated tight end on the football team. He’d also been charged with rape by a coed, but she’d dropped the charges after she’d been badly beaten. The accusation had derailed his football career, and he’d ultimately dropped out of school.
Things just went from bad to worse. Potter had been convicted of armed robbery eight years earlier in West Point, and he’d done a stint in Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. He’d been released six months earlier. He was not a good guy.
“It’s easy to see how someone would automatically think he might be involved in a criminal act.”
“What would this dude want with a pregnant woman and a baby?” DeWayne asked. “I’m just saying … there’s not enough evidence to arrest him.”
“Yet.”
“I’m working on connecting him to Rudy Uxall,” DeWayne said. “Then we’ll have probable cause.”
DeWayne had put the composite out on the wire and posted flyers around town. At least a dozen people had called who’d seen Potter or knew him, but none could pinpoint his whereabouts. Like Gertrude and other cockroaches, he had a good hiding place.
As a favor to DeWayne, I took the sketch of Potter and the information about the reward Yancy was offering over to the newspaper. Cece would do a story, and hopefully that would bring more leads to the sheriff’s office. I needed a chat with Cece anyway. I found her buried behind mountains of notebooks, newspapers, and a new addition to the clutter of her office—high school annuals.
“You can learn a lot by looking at annuals.” She flipped a Cotton Gin High School annual open to the junior class. “Recognize anyone?”
I sure did. It was the bitchy trio who tormented Pleasant. They were standing behind Tally McNair. To one side was the special honors band and on the other side the dance team. In several more photos, Tally and the girls were involved in projects. They looked buddy-buddy. It wasn’t new information, but it confirmed my suspicions that the teacher-student cabal had been in place for a long time.
I filled Cece in on what I’d learned in Nashville. She was discreet and wouldn’t publish anything that might harm our chances of finding Pleasant alive.
While I was at the newspaper, I decided to look up the events surrounding the day Pleasant disappeared. If Luther Potter was involved in Pleasant’s vanishing act, there might be a robbery or some other illegal act that had happened in the vicinity.
“Can I look at some back issues?” I asked Cece. In the good old days, the newspapers were bound in huge books and it was easy enough to leaf through the back editions. Now, everything was on computer, and while the digital system had some advantages, I missed the smell of paper and ink.
Cece took me to a cubbyhole fitted with a computer and a rickety chair. “This is the morgue now.”
“It’s perfect.” I sat down and went to work. My target dates were in the second week of October. I’d cull through the news articles to learn what was happening around the same time Pleasant disappeared. I was hoping for a new lead, some event that might reflect on Pleasant’s fate.
The Zinnia Dispatch was one of the last family-owned daily papers in the state, and I was surprised at the in-depth coverage as I rolled through the days and stories. I read the newspaper daily, but the weight of all the stories back-to-back reminded me how hard Cece and the other reporters worked. City and county board meetings were covered, weddings, funerals, sports. It was like peeling time backward and drinking in the essence of life in Sunflower County.
As I skimmed headlines and lead paragraphs, I found events that had slipped my mind. I’d forgotten the accidental electrocution of a teen who climbed a power pole trying to illegally hook up to cable. I’d also pushed to the back of my brain the terrible traffic accident that took the lives of two Ole Miss students who’d collided on Highway 8. There were house fires, burglaries, and also some wonderful stories of folks reaching out to help each other.
When the Caledonia Baptist Church was struck by lightning and caught fire, many churches in the county joined together for an old-fashioned church raising. The exterior structure went up in under three weeks because the community worked night and day to help.
Clicking through the pages, I was proud of my town and county. Tragedy happened, as it did everywhere, but Zinnia and the county knew how to pull together when it was necessary. Another example was the fish fry sponsored by the Rotary Club to buy radios for the sheriff’s department.
While I’d found plenty of news, there was nothing that might relate to the disappearance of a pregnant teenager. I clicked to the next page and a headline caught my eye. DEWEY BACKSTRUM KILLED ON HWY. 12. That was the road near the Three Bs convenience store where Pleasant was last seen.
I read the news story, which was inside rather than on the front page because the accident occurred in Bolivar County. The Dispatch focused primarily on Sunflower County news, though it did cover other counties and had a regional page, which is where I found this article, but also why I might have skipped over it when it was first published. Coleman wouldn’t have investigated the hit and run, either.
Dewey Backstrum was a fifty-two-year-old farmer whose truck had stopped on the side of the road. He’d been under the hood, working on the engine, when he was struck by a hit-and-run driver.
I checked the date, which matched the day Pleasant disappeared.
I didn’t have evidence to link the two events—yet. But my gut told me they were somehow connected.
I scoured the paper for more stories on the hit and run. Two additional articles gave a few more details, but nothing striking. Sheriff Hoss Kincaid said a black pickup had been seen near the vicinity of the accident. Kincaid had pursued a lead to the Riverview Motel, but the truck and driver had checked out.
No leads were forthcoming, and the case went cold.
I researched Dewey Backstrum, who was a longtime resident of Bolivar County, known for good deeds and kindness. He’d operated a forty-acre truck farm most of his adult life. A widower, he’d never had children. There had been no one to fight for justice for him. Sheriff Kincaid, like Coleman, was overwhelmed with other crimes. Once a case went cold, the likelihood of solving it dropped to less than ten percent.
I printed off the story, thanked
Cece, and headed to Dahlia House to pick up Sweetie Pie and Pluto. They would be ill-tempered because they’d been home by themselves all day. Spoiled didn’t begin to describe them. When they were loaded in the front seat, Sweetie with an old aviator hat to keep her ears warm and goggles to protect her eyes when she stuck her head out the window, we took off for Three Bs and a chat with Frankie.
It was a beautiful autumn day, the earth a dark brown and the sky a deep, cloudless blue. It was a good day for justice, I thought. Driving through the flat vista of the Delta, my thoughts drifted to the upcoming holiday. Thanksgiving would be here before I had time to count to ten. Thank god for Harold and his ability to take over a party, even when it was at Dahlia House. No matter how the holiday happened, I would be surrounded by friends and love.
Where would Pleasant spend Thanksgiving? If I didn’t find her, she wouldn’t be with her daughter. That was unacceptable. Thanksgiving was the family holiday. That baby girl deserved to be with her mother.
I’d chosen to drive along Highway 12, which went past the turnoff to Fodder Gin Road, where Pleasant’s family lived. This route made my journey a bit longer, but I was working on a theory. I wanted to pinpoint the spot Dewey had been killed. Far in the distance, little more than a speck on the horizon, was the convenience store where Frankie worked. I slowed to a crawl, using my imagination to play out the death of the farmer.
I could easily visualize his pickup on the side of the road as he tinkered with the engine. A black pickup had come from the east. I didn’t know if Dewey had stepped from behind the hood without checking the road or if the pickup had swerved into him for some reason. No one knew. If the driver was found, he’d be charged with homicide, though. He’d left the scene and hadn’t reported the accident.
The question I didn’t have an answer for involved Pleasant. Had she witnessed the hit-and-run? Had she maybe stopped to help Mr. Backstrum? Where was she when Backstrum was killed? My gut told me she was close. Involved. Was this the motivation behind her disappearance? Had she been in the truck that killed Backstrum? Or maybe she was a witness to the hit-and-run. I knew who to ask, and he was only a short distance away.
Rock-a-Bye Bones Page 18