Deliah Dickenson Mystery 01-Frankly My Dear, I''m Dead

by Livia J. Washburn

“Well, no offense, Miz D, but it’s sort of … none of your business.”

  I didn’t like it, but I knew he was right. So I reined in my temper and told him, “All right, keep going. You and this girl Lauren were in love.”

  He nodded somberly. “I thought so. And then at the beginning of senior year, she … she broke up with me.”

  “Dumped,” Augusta said. “Always tragic.”

  “And I’ll bet Steven Kelley had something to do with it,”

  Amelia said.

  “Yeah,” Luke said. “They had gotten together somehow over the summer between junior and senior year. And of course he took her away from me. Was there ever any doubt?

  He’d had his eye on her ever since we started going together.

  If I had something, he always wanted to take it away from me.

  It just took him longer this time than it usually did. But in the end, he wore down her resistance and … he got what he wanted.”

  I thought about Lt. Farraday’s attitude earlier. “This doesn’t make sense, Luke,” I said. “Are you tryin’ to tell us that Farraday thinks you killed Kelley over a high school break-up? I know it must’ve hurt, but that was years ago. And you’re hap-pily married now. At least, you’d better be.”

  “Of course I am. Melissa and I are happy as we can be. But you’re right. Lieutenant Farraday does think I’m a suspect in the murder.”

  “Because of an old girlfriend Kelley took away from you?” I shook my head. “That’s crazy. Anyway, how did he even know about what happened years ago in another town? He couldn’t have found out about it tonight, in the time since he got here.”

  Luke took a deep breath. “That’s not all the story. You see, Kelley did more than just take Lauren Holcomb away from me.” His eyes were more haunted than I’d ever seen them.

  “He killed her, too.”

  CHAPTER 13

  All of us stared at him this time, obviously finding it difficult to grasp what he had just said. Augusta was the one who spoke up first.

  “You mean, the guy who got murdered tonight murdered your old high school girlfriend?”

  “The one who tragically broke up with you because of him?”

  Amelia added. “It’s like a novel by one of the Brontë sisters!”

  “He didn’t murder her,” Luke said. “They were in a car wreck a few weeks later. Kelley was driving, going too fast like he always did. And Lauren was killed, while he walked away with hardly a scratch.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “If he was driving too fast and somebody was killed, shouldn’t he have gotten in trouble with the law?”

  Luke nodded. “He did. I’m sure that’s how Lieutenant Farraday was able to find out about it so quickly. He probably had a couple of his deputies runnin’ everybody through the computers as soon as he got our names. Kelley was arrested and charged with vehicular manslaughter. But his parents had a lot of money and got him a hot-shot lawyer, and the lawyer got him off. He even walked on the stage at graduation. The principal wanted to keep him from doing that, but his folks threatened to file a lawsuit if he tried it.”

  “And this is the fella who wound up playing Rhett Butler for a bunch of tourists?”

  “He was in the drama club at school, always had the lead in the plays they put on, of course. And I heard he got his doctor’s degree in theater from one of those Ivy League schools.

  My guess is that he worked here because he liked it.”

  “And so that he could hit on hot teenage tourists,” Augusta put in.

  I thought she might have something there. Plenty of attractive women would pass through during the tours of the plantation, and if Kelley had really been a sex addict, as Amelia speculated, he would have had plenty of chances to approach some of them with a proposition.

  Of course, he was married and his wife worked right here on the plantation with him, I reminded myself. She even played Scarlett to his Rhett. But clearly, based on what had happened with Augusta and Amelia, that didn’t stop Kelley. Carrying on right under his wife’s nose might even make it better for him.

  I was making a lot of assumptions and jumping to a lot of conclusions about the man, considering that I had never seen him before today and hadn’t spoken to him even once. But Luke knew him, and I believed my son-in-law. I believed my nieces, too, at least about Kelley’s behavior in the stables. I thought I had enough evidence to reach some of those conclusions in a logical manner.

  But I had no evidence whatsoever about who might have killed Steven Kelley. As far as I could see, that was still completely up in the air. Lieutenant Farraday had his suspicions about me, Augusta, and Amelia, but right now, based on the grudge that Luke had held against the dead man, he had to be the leading candidate for the role of murderer.

  “You said you weren’t here in the ballroom all evening, Luke.

  Where did you go?”

  He looked up at me. “Miz D! Don’t tell me you think I killed him, too?”

  “Oh, of course not.” I stopped myself before I called him a lunkhead. “I just want to know if you’ve got an alibi.”

  “Not really.” He glanced at Augusta and Amelia and then lowered his voice. “I was indisposed.”

  Mr. Cobb said, “Boy must mean he had the trots.”

  Luke glared at him. “I have a delicate stomach sometimes.”

  I happened to know that was true. Luke was a big strong boy with the stomach of a little girl. “So you were in the bathroom.”

  “Yeah. And since I was in there by myself …”

  “No alibi.”

  “That’s right. I could have slipped out of the ballroom, stabbed Kelley, and gotten back in without anybody noticing because there were so many people around and there was so much going on.” Luke grunted and shook his head. “That’s the way the lieutenant sees it, anyway.”

  And I had to admit that it was a fairly strong theory, especially to somebody like Lieutenant Farraday who didn’t know Luke. Who didn’t know that he couldn’t possibly murder somebody, even a sorry son of a gun like Steven Kelley. Like Luke had said when he found out what Kelley had pulled with the girls, he might take a swing at somebody who deserved it, but that was as far as he would ever go. I believed that with all my heart.

  On the other hand—and I hated myself for thinking this way—all I really knew about Luke Edwards was how he had been the past few years, since he’d met and married my daughter. I didn’t want to believe that Melissa could have married a murderer.

  And I wasn’t going to believe it.

  “Dad gummit,” I said, “it doesn’t matter what Lieutenant Farraday thinks, Luke. We know good and well you didn’t do it. Don’t we, girls?”

  “Sure,” Augusta said, and Amelia nodded.

  “I don’t think you did it either, son,” Mr. Cobb said. I didn’t point out that he barely knew Luke. At the moment, any voice of support was welcome.

  “At least he didn’t go ahead and arrest me,” Luke said.

  “And it’s not like I’m the only one he’s holding here, either.”

  I looked around the ballroom, which was still crowded with tired, impatient, frustrated people, and said, “Not hardly.”

  “You know,” Augusta said, “if the guy was such a sleaze that he hit on innocent teenage girls, there could be a lot of people here who were mad at him. He’s bound to have done other things he shouldn’t have.”

  That made a lot of sense, I thought. And then Amelia brought up something else that was worth thinking about.

  “Where’d the knife come from?”

  I had no idea, and somehow I didn’t think that Farraday would tell me what they’d found out about the murder weapon, even if I asked nicely. But I was going to keep it in mind and keep my eyes and ears open for a possible answer.

  The idea was taking root in my brain that if I could figure out who killed Steven Kelley, this whole crazy nightmare would be over.

  The murder wasn’t the only mystery, though, I recalled abruptly. I che
cked my pockets again. My cell phone was definitely gone. I hadn’t used it since I’d checked in with Melissa at the office during the afternoon, and I was sure I’d had it after that. So I didn’t think I had laid it down anywhere and acci-dentally walked off and left it.

  Thinking of the call to Melissa reminded me that by now she might have heard that there was trouble here at the plantation, especially if it was all over the TV news like Mr. Cobb said. The media didn’t have the full story yet, but they might know that there had been a murder. The way they reported it might range all the way from “one person suspected to be dead” to “an alleged bloodbath among the magnolias.” Melissa hadn’t been expecting us back until the next day, but if she heard that sort of report on TV, she would probably be scared out of her wits.

  “You have your cell phone?” I said to Luke.

  “What?” He was still distracted by being suspected of murdering somebody. “Oh. Yeah, sure, it’s right here.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “Or here.” He slapped his trouser pockets, then frowned. “That’s funny. I was sure I had it.”

  I turned to Augusta and Amelia. “Girls?” I knew at least one of them would have a phone. Even though we had all put our bags in the rooms we’d been assigned earlier for the overnight stay, no teenage girl was going to be without a phone.

  Both of them looked completely aghast, though, as they searched their pockets and didn’t find their phones. “It’s gone!” Augusta announced in a shocked voice.

  “That does it,” I said. It looked like there was some truth to Gerhard Mueller’s story about things disappearing.

  I told Luke, Mr. Cobb, and the girls to stay put, then went looking for Elliott Riley.

  Even though I had no proof that Riley was a pickpocket and a thief, he was where I was going to start. It was bad enough that somebody had gotten murdered on my first tour; I sure didn’t want the word getting around that my clients got robbed, too.

  I spotted Riley standing by himself—that was no surprise—

  and was making my way toward him when the doors into the ballroom opened and an angry-looking Lieutenant Farraday came in, followed by a couple of deputies. Farraday raised his voice and called, “Everyone give me your attention, please!”

  It didn’t take much to quiet the place down since all the conversations in the room were pretty subdued by now. In fact, things got noisier as people turned toward the lieutenant and started calling out questions, all of which could be summed up as “When the heck do we get out of here?”

  Farraday had to lift his hands over his head and call for quiet several more times before the room settled down again.

  Then he turned to gesture at his deputies and said, “My men are going to confiscate your cell phones. I hoped that it wouldn’t come to this, but I have no choice.”

  That brought more protests. Farraday let them run their course, then went on, “I should have done this as soon as I arrived on the scene, but I thought it might be a good idea to let you people contact your loved ones if you needed to, since you’re going to be stuck here for a while. Unfortunately, several of you decided to contact the news media instead.” His expression was as dark as a thundercloud. “In fact, some of you even sent video footage of the crime scene to local TV

  stations. I suppose your fifteen minutes of fame was more important to you than allowing the authorities to do their job and catch a killer,” he added bitterly.

  That answered the question of how the TV news crews had come to show up at the door of the plantation house. And Farraday was right, of course: these days everybody with a camera phone has the potential to be as famous as that Zapruder fella with his JFK film, or whomever it was who shot the Rodney King video. All you needed was to be on hand for a big enough news story. Heck, Larry King might even call and want you to appear on his show.

  One of the tourists asked, “If we give up our phones, how do we know we’ll ever get them back?”

  “Yeah!” another man said. “What if you keep all of them as evidence?”

  “The likelihood of that is remote,” Farraday answered,

  “and you’ll all get receipts for the phones.” He didn’t bother trying to keep the disgust out of his voice as he added, “Believe me, people, we have more important things to do than try to steal your cell phones.”

  The police might have had more important things to do, but somebody sure as heck didn’t, because over the next couple of minutes all sorts of commotion broke loose in the ballroom as people reached for their phones and found them gone, just like Luke and the girls and I had done. As the angry outbursts spread, it took Farraday several minutes to restore order.

  People weren’t just yelling about their phones being gone, either. Wallets and jewelry were missing, too, as Mueller had told me earlier. Once Farraday realized that he was dealing with widespread robbery as well as murder, he looked like he was torn between the urge to shoot us all or sit down and cry.

  What he wound up doing was ordering his men to search us.

  “Each and every one,” he said. “Call for more female deputies if you need to. But it’s past time we find out what everybody in this room is hiding.”

  Lindsey Hoffman, the good-looking blonde in the low-cut Southern belle outfit who seemed to be Perry Newton’s girlfriend, said in an outraged voice, “Do I look like I could be hiding anything in this outfit, Lieutenant?”

  “Lady,” Farraday said, “you could have an elephant under those hoop skirts for all I know!”

  CHAPTER 14

  Lindsey was outraged by Farraday’s comment, of course. I would have been, too, if I’d been wearing hoop skirts.

  Not that I ever would. And because Lindsey was mad, Perry was, too, and the feeling spread quickly among the other performers from the plantation, which added to the already prevalent ill-feeling in the ballroom.

  But there was nothing anybody could do except submit to the patdown that Farraday’s deputies carried out with brisk ef-ficiency. Searching the men went quicker that it did with the women, because Farraday had brought only two female deputies with him. They led the women one by one into a small cloakroom just off the ballroom and conducted the searches there. The men were frisked out in the open.

  Most of them didn’t like it. I could tell they felt humiliated and angry, and despite the fact that Lieutenant Farraday wasn’t one of my favorite people, I felt a little sorry for the guy.

  There were going to be plenty of formal complaints lodged about this investigation, and maybe even some lawsuits. But all Farraday was really trying to do was find out who killed Steven Kelley, and that was something I wanted, too. It was too late to salvage any sort of success out of this tour, but I wanted the damage minimized as much as possible. That was all I could hope for at this point.

  While I was standing in line with Augusta and Amelia, waiting to be searched, I kept an eye on Elliott Riley. By now I hoped that he really was the thief, as Mueller had claimed, and that the deputies would find the stolen items on him.

  That would put an end to this part of the debacle.

  But from the usual smirk Riley wore as one of the deputies patted him down, I knew that the search wouldn’t find anything on him. Of course not. He couldn’t hide dozens of cell phones and wallets in his suit, even though it was a little baggy.

  No, Mueller was right. If Riley was the pickpocket, he had already stashed everything he’d taken or passed it on to someone who was working with him. It seemed unlikely that he could have done that with so many deputies around.

  But maybe he did it before the murder was discovered, I thought. I hadn’t missed my phone until later; it was possible that was the case with most of the other victims, too. They could have had their pockets picked during the dance. It would have been easy for somebody who knew what he was doing.

  I had no proof that somebody was Riley. I told Farraday about the dispute between Riley and Mueller the day before, but that wouldn’t prove anything.

  Especially since Mu
eller was braying like a jackass about being searched and making comments about America being a police state while his long-suffering wife just stood in the women’s line and ignored him. He was just about as unlikable as Riley was; given the choice, most folks wouldn’t want to believe him or Riley.

  The girls and I were getting closer to the head of the line.

  They were in front of me. Amelia looked over her shoulder and said, “I don’t like this very much, Aunt Delilah.”

  “Neither do I,” Augusta said. “It’s creepy.”

  “I know,” I told them, “but there’s nothing we can do about it except wait for it to be over.”

  Amelia frowned. “It’s not like you to be so passive, Aunt Delilah.”

  “Yeah,” Augusta agreed. “You usually don’t put up with something if you don’t like it.”

  They were right. I’d never been the sort of person who kept my mouth shut if I thought something wasn’t right. I spoke up instead, and raised my voice if I had to.

  But everything that had happened this evening—the murder; the things I had learned about Augusta, Amelia, and Luke; falling under suspicion of being a killer myself—had all combined to beat my spirits down, I supposed. I thought that I had dealt with some hard times in my life, including that recent divorce, but never anything like this.

  I was about to tell the girls that I was sorry when I realized it didn’t have to be this way. I felt my backbone stiffening as I said, “Wait here.”

  “Uh-oh,” Augusta said. “We shouldn’t have said anything. I know that look.”

  “Please, Aunt Delilah,” Amelia said. “Don’t get into trouble on our behalf.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with you girls,” I told them. “This is all me.”

  I left the line and stalked toward Lieutenant Farraday, who was standing by as some of his deputies searched the men.

  One of the deputies keeping the women in line called out to me as I made my move, but I ignored him.

  I had barely gotten started, though, when a hand grasped my arm, not roughly by any means, but firmly enough that I had to pause and see who it belonged to.