Hornswoggled - An Alafair Tucker Mystery

by Donis Casey

  Martha was typing financial reports for Mr. Bushyhead, a task which she could practically do in her sleep. And therein lay the problem. Martha’s fingers were so adept at expressing at the typewriter keys what her eyes were seeing on the page that her brain hardly needed to be engaged. So she had developed a number of techniques to keep her mind from wandering. One technique consisted of pausing at the end of each page of figures, fingers on keys, and looking out the window, trying to see how many passers-by she could identify in half a minute.

  At the end of page five, she looked up to find her view blocked by the body of one of the tellers, Mr. Keane, who was standing in front of her desk with a flushed, squat little woman in tow. Martha’s eyes widened in surprise, since she hadn’t heard them approach, but she recovered quickly and gave the pair a businesslike smile.

  “Excuse me, Miss Tucker,” Keane said, “but Miz Tolland is here to make the loan payment for her husband this month.”

  Martha nodded at the woman by way of greeting before addressing the teller. “Thank you, Mr. Keane. Mr. Bushyhead isn’t here right now, Miz Tolland, but I can take care of you.”

  Keane briskly returned to his cage, leaving Mrs. Tolland standing uncertainly before Martha’s desk.

  Martha gathered up her papers into a neat pile and put them aside. “Have a chair, ma’am,” she invited, gesturing at the slatback chair beside her desk. “It’s nice to see you, Miz Tolland,” she said, once the woman was settled. “It’s always been your husband made the loan payments before now. I hope he isn’t sick or some such.” Martha was intrigued by this turn of events, since Nellie Tolland was Louise Kelley’s sister. She had no idea how she could gain information that might be useful in resolving Alice’s plight, but she was determined to become Mrs. Tolland’s dearest friend in the next five minutes, in case the opportunity should present itself.

  Nellie shifted in the chair, obviously out of her element and not happy with the task she had been given. “No, he’s fine, Miss. He just can’t leave the cotton field right now. He done told me what to do, said I was to bring him a receipt.”

  Martha nodded. “Like I said before, Mr. Bushyhead and the assistant director Mr. Cecil are out of the office right now. You’re welcome to wait, but I can take the payment and give you a receipt. I often do that when the bank managers are away.”

  “Well, how long do you think it’s like to be before Mr. Bushyhead comes back?” Nellie wondered.

  Martha tugged at her ear thoughtfully. “He and Mr. Cecil have been making calls since ten o’clock this morning. They’ve gone over by Checotah to inspect a plot of land that a client wants to put some wells on. After that, Mr. Cecil told me they’ll be calling on Mr. Greyeyes in Council Hill. I don’t expect them back ’til three or four o’clock.”

  Mrs. Tolland winced. “I got to get home before that. I reckon my husband won’t be bothered if I get a proper receipt from you.”

  Martha smiled and rose to take the receipt ledger from the shelf behind her. “I do it all the time,” she assured the woman. “I’ve taken the payments from your husband once or twice before when the bank officers were out.”

  That information seemed to relieve Nellie. She relaxed back into the chair and began rummaging in her handbag for the money. Martha sat back down.

  “By the way, Miz Tolland,” Martha said nonchalantly, as she flipped through her ledger. “I haven’t seen you since your sister died here awhile back. I want to tell you how sorry I am for your loss.”

  The look of bitterness that crossed Mrs. Tolland’s face gave Martha a start. She hadn’t particularly noticed the resemblance between the two sisters before, since Nellie was a little woman and her sister was big, but Nellie’s sour expression was the mirror image of Louise’s. “Thank you,” Nellie managed, tightlipped.

  “I surely hope they catch the men who did it,” Martha ventured, as she prepared to count the money.

  For a long moment Nellie said nothing, and Martha counted in silence, convinced that her probing had come to naught. But suddenly Nellie sat up straight in her chair and her cheeks purpled with emotion. “It was that awful husband of hers killed her,” she exploded in an enraged whisper.

  Martha looked up from her hands, her eyes widening. “Gracious,” she exclaimed. “You don’t mean it! I thought he was in Missouri at the time.”

  Nellie had embarrassed herself with her outburst. Her cheeks reddened, and she blinked and flopped back in the chair. “Well,” she said, flustered, “I don’t reckon he did it himself, but he might as well have, the slimy critter. I’d bet any amount of money that he hired that man to kill poor Louise.”

  Martha lowered the money to the desktop. Her fingers had suddenly gone numb. “Why, Miz Tolland, what makes you think such a thing?”

  “Oh, he’s a evil one, all right,” Nellie told her. She hitched her shawl up over her shoulder in indignation. “He never did anything but make my sister’s life a misery all the years they was married, what with all his tomcatting around. I know for a fact that he was looking to get rid of her, get himself some younger woman.”

  Martha realized that she could hardly breathe. She swallowed. “For a fact you know this?”

  “Louise told me so herself. He never come right out and said so to her face, but he sure spent enough time looking for somebody to take her place.”

  It seemed to Martha that this was conjecture on Nellie’s part, which made her feel a little better. She clucked sympathetically. “Did you tell the sheriff about your suspicions?”

  “I surely did, Miss Tucker, but you know he said that was just something called ‘specruration’, and hearsay, and not hardly no proof. But I told him that I knowed that man for years, and I know what he’s capable of. I hate him like sin itself for the way he treated Louise, I’ll tell you.” She edged forward in her seat again. “Why, why, when they was in Missouri, he stepped out on her so much that everybody in Kansas City made jokes about it. Louise like to left him more than once, but he’d make out like he was sorry, and she’d take him back.

  “I told her not to stay with a man who took her so lightly, but my sister was a good Christian woman and felt it was her duty to stick with that dog, if she could. He swore up and down to change his ways, though, and they left Kansas City and come here for a fresh start. Louise thought for a long time that things was better. Then that Crocker gal showed up on her front porch saying she was in a family way and expected that Walter would be asking for a divorce directly so they could marry up.”

  Nellie shook her head. “That’s what done it, I think. Louise like to went mad. Thing is, it wouldn’t have been so bad if she didn’t love the snake so much. Couldn’t stand the shame, knew he wouldn’t change, and didn’t really want to leave him, to boot.”

  Martha was listening to this diatribe with as much skepticism as she could muster. Nellie would naturally place as much of the blame on Walter as she could. Martha wished she could think of some way to ask Mrs. Tolland about her husband Ned’s rumored affair with Louise, but she didn’t dare. All this venom gave Martha a cold feeling around her heart, and for a moment she was torn between probing further and changing the subject.

  “I heard that your sister Alice likes that devil,” Mrs. Tolland said, making the decision for her.

  Martha was seized with a sudden dislike for the bitter little woman. She was not happy to hear Alice’s name bandied about, especially in this context. Her eyes narrowed, and she stabbed her pen into the inkwell. “You heard that, did you?” she said coolly. “Can’t say I know anything about that.”

  Nellie leaned her elbow on the edge of the desk and peered at Martha slyly. “Well, if there’s anything to the rumor, you’d better warn your sister. I will say that Alice is just the type he’d go for; pretty, innocent, and young. Good family, too. Oh, yes, he’d love to get his hands on someone like your sister, I guarantee…”

  “Well, Miz Tolland,” Martha interrupted her with forced cordiality, “here’s your receipt, all nice
and proper. You can tell your husband that I entered his payment in the book. It looks like this loan is almost discharged, only two payments left.”

  Mrs. Tolland swallowed her invective, distracted by the turn of the conversation. “Ned will be pleased to hear that,” she said.

  ***

  “This surely don’t make me feel any better about things,” Alafair said to Martha, after listening to the whole story in silence.

  After bicycling home from work that afternoon, Martha had found her mother in the vegetable garden behind the house. Alafair was dressed in her weeding garb, a poke bonnet and an apron smock over an old brown skirt and a long-sleeved calico shirt. Her hands were covered by two old socks with holes cut out for her fingers and thumbs, and she stood with one hand on her hip and the other on the hoe handle as she listened to Martha’s tale of the unpleasant Mrs. Tolland. Shaw’s bitch hunting hound, Buttercup, trotted up to greet Martha, and after putting a wet nose to Martha’s hand, returned to sniffing up and down the rows of okra seedlings. Grace observed the proceedings from a blanket-lined clothes basket at the side of the garden, her black eyes peeking over the rim, her dolly in her lap, noisily gumming her fist. Martha leaned over and picked her sister up as Alafair watched them from the tunnel of her bonnet.

  “I thought you might be interested in what Miz Tolland had to say, Mama,” Martha told her, “but after talking to her for a bit, I don’t know how much faith I’d put in her story. It seemed to me that she enjoyed telling me her bad opinion of Walter way too much. I wouldn’t put it past her to make things up so he’d look bad.”

  Alafair shook her head, but she agreed with Martha’s assessment. “Well, maybe a sour disposition runs in that family, though if Walter really did do his poor wife that way, I don’t blame her for being sour. However, it is just one more bad opinion of Walter in a pile of bad opinions. There’s no middle ground in folks’ feelings about the Kelleys, is there? Their neighbor, Miz Grant, was more than eager to talk down about Louise and make Walter out to be half-way to a saint.”

  Martha shrugged. “You know, I was talking to Aunt Josie about it when I went to her house for dinner, and she told me that she had heard from Cousin Hattie that Ned Tolland had been sweet on Louise Kelley at one time.”

  Alafair chuckled. “That Hattie knows something about everybody,” she observed.

  “That’s what comes of running the mercantile.”

  “I reckon. Still, I’ve wondered before if Ned Tolland had improper feelings for Louise—did Josie say when this was?”

  “Not long ago, I gather. Back about the time that the Tollands’ boy Eddie was born, Aunt Josie said, and he’s about four years old, now. Seems there was a right old brouhaha about it. Nellie tossed Ned out in the road and everything. I guess they worked it out, though, to judge by the way they act toward one another now.”

  “Gossip,” Alafair snorted. “Can’t tell what’s true and what’s just made up. Even so,” she added, blithely dismissing her own caveat, “if Louise and Ned were misbehaving, it could be that Nellie isn’t quite as heartbroke at her sister’s death as she’s letting on.”

  Martha was momentarily distracted by the drool on the front of her crisp white blouse. “I declare, Grace, you’re as slobbery as a newborn calf,” she said, wiping herself off with the corner of Grace’s flour sack smock. Grace cooed at her, unrepentant. Martha wiped the baby’s face with the tail of the smock and turned her attention back to Alafair. As the eldest of ten siblings, Martha was hardly put off by infant fluids.

  “It seemed to me that Nellie was saving all her anger for Walter,” she told her mother. “She didn’t appear to have any to spare for Louise. Are you thinking that Nellie might have had something to do with her own sister’s murder? Maybe she’s making Walter out to be worse than he is, so the sheriff won’t be inclined to look in her direction.”

  Alafair took a desultory swipe with her hoe at a weed among the okra plants. “Oh, I doubt it. But I wonder why she’s so certain that Walter hired somebody to do in Louise? Is it just that she dislikes him so much that she’s convinced herself he must have done it, or does she have some better reason for thinking so?”

  “Surely she’d have told Cousin Scott long before now if she had some real evidence that Walter hired a killer.”

  “Surely,” Alafair agreed. She began chopping at the weeds with a vengeance now, and Martha stepped back to avoid the bits of flying dirt. “Still…” Alafair added absently. “I’d like to know what Nellie Tolland thinks she knows about her sister’s murder.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Alafair’s large family of children fell into three natural groups. The four oldest girls were all born within four years, by virtue of Phoebe and Alice being twins, and all four were grown women now. Gee Dub and Ruth formed their own little unit. Both were thoughtful and quiet youngsters, keeping afloat in the middle of a sea of brothers and sisters. Charlie was the head of a gang that consisted of himself, Blanche and Sophronia, still children. Grace, however, was a creature all unto herself, destined to be spoiled, Alafair feared, born to be the practice baby for all her elder siblings.

  It was Sophronia who was practicing on Grace today, happily playing with her in the middle of Alafair’s big bed while Alafair gave Blanche a sewing lesson. Sophronia was sitting with Grace in her lap, her legs stretched straight out in front of her, putting on a puppet show with her feet. She had pulled her stockings half off, letting the toe end drape down the bottom of her foot like long hair. She wiggled her toes to animate whichever foot puppet was speaking at the time. As near as Alafair could tell, one foot was called Cinda and the other Minda, and judging from the throaty chuckles she was hearing, Grace was enjoying the show. Alafair made a mental note to make Sophronia some yellow stockings so she could add some blondes to her foot acting company. Alafair and Blanche were huddled together in front of Alafair’s treadle sewing machine, which was sitting by a window in a sunny corner of the bedroom. Blanche had pride of place in the chair, and Alafair bent over the almost-eight-year-old, guiding her hands as she sewed a seam.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to sew my finger, Mama,” Blanche confessed.

  “Just pay attention and you’ll be fine,” Alafair assured her. “Fronie,” she said over her shoulder, “don’t let Grace fall off the bed, now. She’ll sure get away from you before you know what happened. All right, Blanche, you’re doing fine. Now, just push down with your right foot on the top and the left foot on the bottom, and get a smooth rhythm going. Pull the material real gentle. Good! Keep straight now.”

  A movement on the road from the front gate caught Alafair’s eye, and she lifted her head to peer out the window. She smiled when she recognized the little woman on the big horse trotting toward the house.

  She picked Blanche’s hand up off the machine and straightened. “Here comes Grandma, girls.”

  “Grandma!” Sophronia cried, and Grace squealed, overjoyed at Sophronia’s joy. The girls bounced out of the room and Alafair scooped the baby up from the bed, and all four of them were on the front porch in time to meet Grandma Sally as she dismounted in front of the house.

  “Come here, girls,” Sally called from the yard, “and let me love your necks.”

  The girls bounded down the steps and threw their arms around their grandmother’s round form. Sally seized each girl’s neck in a wrestler’s hold and squeezed them to her sides, and all three of them walked up the path and up the porch steps like a knot of arms with six feet.

  “Come on in, Grandma,” Alafair invited. “I’ll declare! It’s a treat for you to come visitin’ us two times in one month.”

  “Got some news for you, Alafair,” Sally told her, flopping into the porch swing. “Let’s set here on the porch a spell. It’s a warm day for an old woman to be riding.”

  Alafair sat down in a rocking chair next to the swing. “Blanche,” she said, “there’s some tea syrup in the ice box. Pump up some cool well water and make your grandma and me some tea. T
here’s already some ice chipped in the little tin bucket in the top of the ice box. I don’t want you messing with the ice pick, now. Fronie, go help your sister with the pump. And watch your hands!” she called to their backs as they flew through the front door.

  Sally leaned over and relieved Alafair of the baby, who gleefully gripped her grandmother’s index fingers and stood up on the old woman’s lap. “Whoo, this child is getting strong,” Sally observed. “She’ll be walking in no time,”

  “I’m afraid so,” Alafair said with a smile. “It’s been a long time since I had a toddler around here. We’ve already cleared the house of everything below knee level, but I’m going to have to make a new tether for her. She’ll be moving fast enough to get into trouble just about cotton picking time.”

  “I guess when you gave all your baby things to Hannah, you didn’t figure on having to ask for them back,” Sally said.

  “Grace took me by surprise, for sure,” Alafair ceded. “I’m practically forty years old, after all. It’s almost embarrassing.”

  “She didn’t live, but I was forty-three when my last one come along,” Sally pointed out.

  “Mercy, Ma, don’t remind me,” Alafair chided.