by Ken Casper
Confusion knit Gwyn’s brow. “But why would he cover up a serious crime?”
“He claimed there was no proof that a crime had been committed,” Jed informed her.
Joleen carelessly brushed away ashes that had fallen on her dress. “Male vanity. That’s all it was. He’d just been elected sheriff and he didn’t want an unsolved case on his record, so he tried to pretend nothing happened.” She ground out her butt. “He knew better, though.”
Jed raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
Joleen narrowed her eyes and tightened her mouth into a wrinkled scowl. “He questioned everybody in town, didn’t he? Took statements, didn’t he?” She tapped out another cigarette from her half-empty pack. “He knew what happened to her, I tell you. He just wouldn’t admit it.”
“Knew she was dead?” Gwyn couldn’t hide the shock in her voice.
“He’s an ass.”
“Could he have had something to do with her disappearance?” Gwyn asked.
Both Jed and Joleen stared at her as if she’d just said something idiotic—or brilliant.
“What are you suggesting?” Jed asked.
“Wouldn’t you expect a new sheriff to jump on a crime like this? His first big case—”
“I told you,” Joleen interrupted with exasperation. She picked up her lighter. “He couldn’t solve it, so he just swept it under the rug.” But there was a hint of doubt in the declaration.
“Tell me what you remember about that day and the days leading up to it,” Jed urged.
Joleen tightened her mouth. “Frannie was there Monday afternoon when I stopped by after work for tea. Everything was fine.”
“What did you discuss?” Jed asked. “I never paid much attention when the two of you had your heads together.”
“Nothing special. They’d just added a new wing onto the geriatric center where I worked. We were getting more new patients and I told Frannie about some of them. I never worried about discussing my patients with her because I knew she’d never repeat anything. It was nice to have someone like her to talk to. After she . . . there was no one I could trust the way I did her,” she added with quiet sadness, then seemed to catch herself. “I could always count on Frannie.”
“Did she mention us?” Jed asked, suddenly curious.
Joleen actually chuckled. It was a rusty, not particularly pleasant sound. “All the time. She told me about the fights you used to get into with Will. Then the two of y’all would go to school and you’d—” she pointed at Jed “—get into more fights defending him. Didn’t make much sense. I thought it was a mistake taking in that troublemaker, but she insisted he was a good kid.” She looked at Jed. “They ever find him after he run off?”
He shook his head. “I never heard from him or from Emmy.”
“Emerald,” she said wistfully. “They shouldn’t have done what they did to sweet Emmy. It wasn’t right taking her away like that before they even knew what happened to her Mom Fran.”
“Did you try to find out where they placed her?” Jed suddenly asked.
She grunted. “Those Social Services people can be tighter with information than a doctor is with a buck.”
“I guess Frannie had her hands full with her three foster children,” Gwyn offered.
Joleen gazed at Jed and smiled. “Y’all were a trial. That’s for sure.”
“Did Frannie ever talk about getting away?” Gwyn asked.
Joleen shook her head. “Frannie was happy. She worked her butt off, had to pinch pennies, but get away? How? She had no money, and she would never have left the kids. They were her whole life. Emerald couldn’t have been more a part of her if she’d been her own flesh and blood.”
Joleen peered at Jed. “She was proud of you. Said you had what it took to make something of yourself.”
Jed fidgeted, uncomfortable with the compliment.
“Was Frannie seeing anyone?” Gwyn asked.
“You mean a man?” The older woman wagged her head. “I told her she ought to find herself another husband, but she said her life was already full. Said she’d had one good man and reckoned that was more than most women got.”
“What did she mean?” Jed asked.
Joleen snorted. “When you clean other people’s houses on a regular basis you get to see plenty more than the dirt on the floor. She saw what a lot of married couples went through.”
“Did she talk about them?”
Joleen waved the question aside. “Not by name, but I knew who her clients were, so it wasn’t hard to figure out.” She snickered. “Like Lottie Mickels. Everyone knows about the reputation traveling salesmen have for playing around. Nobody talks about their wives. Harry Mickels was gone a good deal of the time selling insurance or whatever. He was hardly out of the driveway before Lottie was entertaining her gentlemen friends.”
“And Frannie knew about this?” Gwyn asked.
Joleen smiled. “She changed the bedsheets and did the laundry.”
“Who were her other clients? Do you happen to remember?”
“Of course I remember.” There was umbrage in her retort. “I’m not doddering.”
“Sorry,” Gwyn replied sincerely, “I didn’t mean to imply anything. I just wondered if you knew who all her other clients were.”
Only slightly mollified, Joleen nevertheless replied. “Sure I knew who they were.” She rattled off a list of names. Jed added a few and together they identified the days of the week when Frannie went to their houses to clean.
“So on that Tuesday,” Gwyn ventured, “she would have cleaned the Jennings’ home, then Reverend Briggs’s and Mrs. Colby’s. In that order.”
Joleen’s mind seemed to have wandered off.
“She changed the order once in a while,” Jed commented, “if one of them asked her to. Mrs. Colby was ninety-two and a shut-in, so it didn’t make any difference when Frannie showed up, and the Reverend Briggs or his wife occasionally had meetings at their house right after lunch and would ask Frannie to come in the morning, but that didn’t happen very often.”
A cuckoo clock in another room chimed, reminding them they’d been there over an hour.
“Was the order changed that day?”
Jed paused to consider. “Not according to Catherine Jennings or the Briggs. But she never showed up at either place.”
Gwyn addressed Joleen. “Can you think of anything Frannie said in the days or weeks leading up to her disappearance that might give us a clue who murdered her or why? Anything unusual or troubling her?”
The old woman shook her head unhappily. “She seemed thoughtful . . . preoccupied the last time I saw her. Something was bothering her, but when I asked her what it was she claimed she was just annoyed at the mess Hank Belmonte was making.”
Jed and Gwyn exchanged glances.
“Is that the way you remember it?” Gwyn asked him.
“Frannie liked things neat and orderly,” he confirmed. “Hank wasn’t particularly well organized . . . left tools about, scraps of lumber—“
“If he was so unreliable, why did she hire him?”
“He was a good carpenter when he was sober,” he explained. “The secret was to not pay him a penny until he was finished. Otherwise he’d go off on a bender and might not return for a month.”
“He wanted money,” Joleen blurted, then retreated again into silence.
“I remember now,” Jed added. “He asked Frannie for his pay to date that Monday night. She refused, told him he’d get paid when the job was done and not before. He claimed he was so broke he didn’t have enough money for food. She said he was perfectly welcome to stay and have dinner with us.”
“Did he?” Gwyn asked.
Jed laughed. “Nope. I guess he wasn’t that hungry—or that broke.”
“Frannie had his number,” Joleen said with a chuckle that deteriorated into a cough.
Gwyn thought a moment before turning to Jed. “You said that was on Monday night. Did he show up for work on Tuesday?”
Jed’s eyes shifted as he pondered, his expression distant. “No,” he replied slowly, “he didn’t, now that you mention it. The job wasn’t completed until months later, after the bank repossessed the house and had a licensed contractor finish the job.”
“I told Fielder about Hank,” Joleen went on peevishly. “But he just dismissed it as a coincidence, said Belmonte likely just went off on one of his binges. ‘Without money?’ I asked. But Fielder wasn’t interested in looking for him. Said he’d come back when he sobered up.”
“Did he show up again?” Gwyn asked.
Joleen shook her head. “I haven’t seen or heard of him since.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“WHAT ARE you thinking?” Jed asked as they drove back to Beaumarais in his Jaguar. The air-conditioning hummed softly.
Gwyn tapped her finger on the tip of the armrest. “I’m thinking there are probably more people in this town who might have had a motive to kill Frannie than we thought.”
He twisted his hands around the leather steering wheel. “I can’t imagine her being a threat to anyone, Gwyn. Even if she might have known, for example, that Lottie Mickels was playing around on her husband, apparently half the town did, too. And she wouldn’t have blabbed anything to Harry or anybody else. Besides, killing her after the cat was out of the bag wouldn’t have accomplished anything.” He looked over at her critically. “And if you’re suggesting that she might have tried to blackmail one of the lovers, forget it. Frannie just wasn’t that way.”
Gwyn gazed out at the forest of green gliding by. It looked so peaceful and quiet. Thinking about murder seemed a desecration of its pristine beauty, except the cycle of birth and death . . . and violence was going on there, too.
“Suppose it wasn’t just private immorality she’d discovered,” she said at last.
Jed’s brow furled. “Sorry, you’ve lost me.”
“Lottie’s infidelity was sort of a closed loop. It involved only Lottie, her husband and her lover. Their business, no one else’s. But what if Frannie found out about something going on that had wider repercussions and affected innocent people?”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Maybe this Reverend Briggs was stealing church funds—”
Jed laughed. “I’ll have to introduce you to Horace Briggs. Not a chance.”
“I’m not accusing him specifically, Jed,” she said, annoyed that he was dismissing her idea so quickly. “I’m just using it as an example. Suppose she discovered something like that. Would she make it public?”
He glanced over, saw she was serious, faced forward and stroked his chin. “I see what you’re getting at.” He considered the matter for a minute. “Frannie had a strong sense of right and wrong, but she also believed in forgiveness. I’d say she’d confront the offender first, give him or her a certain amount of time to make restitution—”
“And if he didn’t, she’d go to the authorities,” Gwyn finished for him.
He nodded vaguely and turned into the driveway. He stopped in front of the mansion and faced her. “Do you think that’s what happened?”
“I don’t know, but I think it’s a possibility we’ve got to consider.”
“You’re suggesting she confronted someone, and rather than face exposure, that person killed her and buried her.” It sounded far-fetched, preposterous.
“We know,” Gwyn said defensively, “she was killed, and we know she was buried here on Beaumarais. Can you think of any other reason why?”
They released their seat belts but didn’t get out.
“You hypothesized the other day,” Jed reminded her, “that it might have been an accident and that the person with her was afraid of being blamed, so he buried her. Still think it’s possible?”
She took in his profile. “Don’t you?”
He glanced over with a scowl. “Stop answering questions with a question.”
She quirked a facetious grin at him. “Why?”
They both laughed, exited the vehicle and went into the house.
“Seriously, though, do you think Hank Belmonte might have done it?” he asked after closing the door behind them.
Gwyn pondered the question a moment before answering. “You were acquainted with the guy, so you’d be in a better position to answer that, but it seems to me the circumstantial case against him is at least as strong as it is against you, maybe stronger.”
“I’ll grant you that Hank Belmonte might have had means and opportunity, Gwyn.” He steered her toward the library. “But I have to question his motive. Hank wasn’t a violent man, and he wasn’t a thief. I don’t know what psychological hang-ups drove him to drink, but I never felt he was a dangerous person.”
“What about the incident at Catfish Corner?” she asked.
June appeared. “Is there anything I can get y’all?”
Gwyn sighed and grinned. “Something cold to drink would be wonderful.”
Jed nodded agreement. “You wouldn’t happen to have any of your lemon-tea, would you?”
June smiled. “I just made a fresh pitcher.”
“Hank had a temper tantrum at the Corner,” Jed resumed after June left the room. “He was drunk, which was why Gus Ferguson threw him out of the place.”
Gwyn settled on the couch and crossed her legs. “So he was capable of violence when he was drinking.”
Jed absently pawed through the correspondence June had piled on his desk. Mostly bills and junk mail. “We’re all capable of violence from time to time. One incident doesn’t establish a pattern.”
“But Frannie had refused his request for the money he had coming to him—”
“Until he finished the job,” Jed interjected uncomfortably. “Hank knew the rules. He was just testing her, and she called his bluff about going hungry.”
“I’m not questioning the propriety of what she did, Jed. It was a wise decision. But from Belmonte’s perspective, you can see it could have been the reason for his having a fight with her. We don’t know he intended to kill her. Maybe in the heat of emotion he pushed her and she fell. He panicked . . .”
Jed had to concede the possibility, though he obviously didn’t agree with it. “It would explain why he took off and never came back. God, Gwyn, I’d hate to think Frannie died because of a few bucks of booze money.”
She rose, walked around the side of the desk and placed her hand on his. “If that’s the way things happened, it wasn’t over money—it was over a principle. I think Frannie would tell you that’s a good thing to die for.”
He faced her and looked deeply into her eyes. “You really can find silver linings, can’t you.”
She grinned. “It comes from being born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”
“I like the taste of your mouth,” he muttered, and skimmed his lips over hers.
She clasped her hands behind his neck. “You do, huh?”
A discreet cough announced they weren’t alone. With a soft chuckle, Jed buzzed her nose as she slid her hands down his chest.
“Thank you, June,” he said to the housekeeper, who was placing a tray with two glasses, a crystal ice bucket with tongs and a pitcher of cloudy pale-amber beverage—half iced tea and half lemonade—on a side table. There was also a wooden bowl containing corn chips.
“I thought in this heat you might like something salty to go with it,” June said, betraying just the hint of a smile.
Gwyn and Jed looked at each other and burst out laughing as June left the room.
Gwyn lifted one of the glasses and passed it to Jed. She picked up her ow
n drink and took an appreciative sip. “Maybe Thorny can put pressure on Fielder to try to find Belmonte.”
Jed rolled the cold wet glass across his forehead. “Find an alcoholic drifter after nearly twenty years? It doesn’t sound very promising. Chances are he’s dead by now.”
“Maybe.” Gwyn reclaimed her seat on the end of the couch. “Or maybe one morning he woke up, decided to get some help and turned his life around. Such things have happened.”
Jed shot her an appraising glance. “You know, I hope he did.”
She took a long swallow of her drink, idly picked up a chip, but didn’t eat it. “What’s the story between you and Fielder, Jed? Why is he so hell-bent on pinning this murder on you?”
Jed had wondered when she would get around to asking him that.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“IT’S COMPLICATED.” Jed settled into the corner of the couch and extended his long legs, the cold drink dangling from his hand beyond the end of the sofa arm. “We’d never had any problems with the law or any of the people in the sheriff’s office until Will McClain came to live with us. He’d had a pretty rough life. I was an orphan, but I wasn’t unloved, either by my mother or by Frannie.”
But he’d known rejection, Gwyn thought, first by the father he’d never met and later by the uncle who’d shunned him. As sensitive as Jed was about his illegitimacy, it was a mark of the man that he was able to focus on the positive people in his life.
He sipped his lemon-tea. “Will had grown up in a broken home. His parents split up when he was a baby. After that his mother had a string of men, some of whom were abusive. He was a scrawny kid of thirteen when he came to live with us. By then he’d learned to look out for himself. Sometimes that involved physical violence. He had a pretty big chip on his shoulder.” Jed smiled with unmistakable fondness for the foster brother he’d lost. “Will McClain didn’t shy away from a fight. In fact, he seemed to look for trouble wherever he went, and he wasn’t averse to bashing heads when he found it.”