“Peanutbutterjellysammich,” she said.
“Me too,” he answered. “Let’s go make some.”
As he put the sandwiches together and cut the crusts from Madison’s, his mind was on the bones in the old coffin. It certainly did add up to J.T. Collingsworth. The dogs barking, the shotgun fire, and then he was never heard of again. He had left his car behind, left with nothing but the clothes on his back, running, no doubt.
He shuddered, imagining that the dogs had caught Collingsworth, and that the wife had to call her sons to help her hide the remains. He wondered if the pathologist had looked for tooth marks on the bones.
It seemed like a good lead, and one that could be proved if they could figure out what dentist he used. They already knew it wasn’t one of the three dentists in Magnolia County, which had been a simple matter of making three phone calls.
He poured Madison a cup of milk, and got himself a glass of iced tea.
Of course, he had to admit, that the bones in the casket weren’t the priority case. The big one was finding out who shot that photographer.
And why on earth was a guy from Marietta way out there on the road to Bubba Shipley’s hangar and airstrip?
After Madison went down for her nap, Skeet went back to the sofa and let his mind idle, trying to think through every possibility that would have gotten Ned Thigpen out to that road to be shot.
At about 3 p.m., Shellie Carstairs hung up her phone and turned to her husband.
“John Robert, can you believe that Ronda Ransom pranced into the Methodist church this morning and sat right down with Sam and his family? That was Lilly Parsons. She says Rhonda was all dressed up in yellow and carrying a Bible and that the preacher made a special deal of welcoming her and then she tried to out sing the choir. She said Sam just looked straight ahead through the whole service.”
“Wonder if anybody heard the sermon,” John Robert said before going back to watching golf on television.
At about the same time, Sam Bailey got a call at home from Tyler Bankston.
“Sam,” he said, “I’ll get straight to the point. I want to know what your intentions are toward my Associate Editor. I have had a soap opera going on in my home ever since church let out, and I don’t want to have one at work all week. When are you going to ask that lovely young woman to marry you?”
Sam pondered the option of telling Tyler Bankston it was none of his business.
“And don’t tell me it’s none of my business,” Tyler said. “It’s very much my business. Ellie is after me to retire, and Hunter is the only employee I have ever had who is capable of running the paper the way it should be run, and I do not like having her distracted by all this nonsense with Rhonda. She’s worth twenty Rhondas. At the very least, she should have a ring on her finger. In my day..”
“I have the ring, already, Tyler,” Sam cut in. “And it isn’t any of your business but I was planning to take her out and ask her Thursday night, before our party on Friday night, which you and Miss Ellie are invited to. I’ve been planning it for some time.”
Tyler didn’t let up at all.
“So we have to have a whole week of melodrama at work while Rhonda behaves like the returning wife and mother, and you make restaurant reservations and party plans?
Sam was silent for a moment, and then fell back on courtesy.
“Tyler,” he said, “I appreciate your concern, and I’m sure you will be one of the first to know when Hunter makes her decision. I’ve got to go now.”
Two minutes after he hung up, his phone rang again.
“Sam? This is Rose Tyndale.”
“Miss Rose,” he said, laughing, “Tyler Bankston has already given me instructions.
“Well, I’m quite sure his main concern is for the paper,” she said, “but what I think you ought to know is that Hunter’s staying here, for the long run, depends entirely on how things go with her relationship with you. “
“Miss Rose,” Sam said, “I believe I have managed my life so far without having you and Tyler Bankston giving me marching orders.”
“Just trying to help,” Miss Rose said sweetly. “Tyler and I may have been wrong about the flood, but we are right about this.”
At 5 p.m., after some serious thought, Sam left Bethie with his ex-wife at the home of his ex-mother-in-law, where she was to spend the night. They were to leave the next morning for a shopping trip in Macon.
“My little girl has got to have something just beautiful to wear to the concert,” Rhonda said sweetly to Sam and, he thought, to some larger invisible audience she occasionally spoke to, “and so has Mama, and so have I.”
“Sam, won’t you stay for supper,” Rhonda’s mother asked. “I’ve made that pot roast you like so much.”
“Thank you,” he said with a genuine smile, “but I’ve got a date.”
Rhonda raised an eyebrow and left the room.
From there he went straight to Hunter’s apartment.
He hadn’t called in advance, and she met him at the door barefoot, in faded jeans and a tee-shirt with the words “Obstinate, headstrong girl!” printed across the front.
“I hope you’re not going to be obstinate and headstrong with me,” he murmured into her ear after wrapping his arms around her.
“It’s from Jane Austen,” she said, “Pride and Prejudice. Remember the part where Elizabeth is arguing with the Lady Catherine DeBourgh in the garden.”
Sam shook his head.
“We watched it together!,” Hunter said. “That’s one of the best scenes.”
“All I remember is feeling sorry for that Darcy guy when he proposed,” Sam said. “And she said that he was the last man in the world she would marry because he had not been a gentleman.”
“But he proposed later and she accepted,” Hunter said.
“I think I was probably asleep by then,” Sam said. “That was one long movie.”
“Well, you missed the best parts, then.”
“Let’s go sit on the stairs,” he said, “We need to talk.”
Hunter looked bewildered.
“It’s cooler in here,” she said.
“Come on.”
He took her hand and they walked down the stairs together.
“I think it was right here,” he said, about three steps from the bottom.
“What?”
“It was right here that I asked you to go to dinner with me the first time.”
“It was,” Hunter said, and laughed. “I think Miss Rose was spying on us then.”
“She’s spying on us now,” he said, “but it doesn’t really matter.”
Suddenly, Hunter understood what was about to happen.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
They sat down together on the steps and he took both of her hands in his.
“Hunter Jones,” he said. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Even if it means staying in Merchantsville for years and years?”
“Even if it means forever, Sam.”
He pulled the ring out of his pocket to slip it on her finger.
Behind her dining room curtains, .Miss Rose Tyndale nodded and smiled. At first she decided that it wouldn’t be appropriate to make any phone calls until Hunter had the chance to tell her the news in her own, but then she considered the joy of being the first to know, and went to call Tyler Bankston.
CHAPTER 17
IT WAS MONDAY MORNING.
“Something’s up,” Shellie said to Taneesha in the women’s room, where they had gone to talk.
“He came in all smiles and made a couple of calls and then left for the Social Security office, humming —Sam Bailey, humming! I hope it’s not about what happened with Rhonda at church yesterday.”
She filled Taneesha in.
“He’s not going to get back with Rhonda,” Taneesha said. “No way.”
“Well, he loved her enough to marry her one time, and he sure has bided his time with
Hunter.” Shellie said.
When they got back to the Sheriff’s offices, Bub and Skeet had both arrived and were laughing about what it was going to take to arrest Lucille Hollingshead if it turned out that the body in the casket was her husband, J.T.
“I’m thinking the National Guard,” Bub said, “and maybe Animal Control with a bunch of those tranquilizer guns.”
“I was thinking more like the Navy Seals coming in with a helicopter,” Skeet said.
They settled down to writing reports, and the office was quiet when Sam came back in, and called them all in for a meeting around his conference table.
“Looks like we’ve got some red tape to go through,” he said, “but we ought to have an answer from Social Security about J.T. Hollingshead by late today, or maybe tomorrow. T.J. is working on that, too, checking on his driver’s license, credit rating, whatever might tell us if he’s still around.
“And,” he said, “It goes without saying that we’ve got practically zero on the Thigpen murder, so I’m going to need some more leg work in Cathay, to see if anybody saw him talking with anybody. We know he talked to one of the Mennonite volunteers, and had a painting we’re pretty sure he bought at Sharon Bennett’s shop.”
“Which she didn’t tell us about before,” Taneesha said. “Of course I didn’t ask her if he bought anything, but I want to go back and talk with her, and I’d appreciate if one of you could go with me. She might have a better attitude with one of you. The only reason I’m bothering with this is that I want to know if by any chance she told him how to get to Grady’s house, and he just got turned around and asked somebody for help.”
“Skeet, you go with her,” Sam said. “Now I have an announcement to make,” Sam said. “Everybody in this department is invited to my house next Friday for a celebration. We’re going to grill steaks, and I’ll have beer, but we’ll have the breathalyzer there in case anybody needs to sleep over in the back yard. I need numbers by Thursday, so sign up with Shellie. Bring your families.”
There were smiles all around, and then Bub asked, “What are we celebrating?”
Sam got up to let everybody know the meeting was over and said, “You’re all trained investigators. I’m sure you can find out.”
“It’s Bethie’s birthday,” Taneesha said to Skeet on the way out.
“He wouldn’t make that big a deal over a kid’s birthday party,” Skeet said. “I say let’s go interrogate Hunter Jones.”
“No need,” Taneesha laughed, “There comes Novena.”
Novena smiled and waved, hurrying toward them.
“Isn’t it wonderful about Sam and Hunter?” she said. “And that is the most gorgeous ring I have ever seen.”
Their trip to Cathay was delayed while Taneesha went to hug Hunter and demand details.
No, they hadn’t set a date yet. No, Sam hadn’t taken her out to some fancy restaurant. He had proposed right on the stairs where he asked her out for their first date, and they were certain, Hunter said with a giggle, that Miss Rose was peeping through the dining room sheers.
“I told her this morning,” Hunter said, “And she put on a very good act of being surprised—better than Tyler did.”
She dropped her voice to a near whisper, “He just stopped at my desk and took my right hand and looked at the ring and then he said ‘Excellent’ and rolled himself away. Then he stopped and turned around, and I thought he was going to say something else about it, but he just said, “Don’t forget the County Commissioners Work Session tonight.”
Taneesha laughed and said. “That Tyler’s a real romantic.”
Cathay was full of volunteers and now they seemed to have come from all over the state, many of them retired men who had brought their own tools. The sidewalks were covered with debris as they gutted the buildings. Generators had been brought in to keep fans blowing on the brick walls.
“Who’s organizing all this?” Taneesha asked.
“I think it’s just a lot of good people,” Skeet said. “If somebody was in charge, it would probably just slow things down.”
Sharon Bennett was on the front porch of her house-turned-shop when they got there. She waved at Skeet .
“Hey, Miss Sharon,” he said. “Your place is looking good.”
‘ “Well, thank the Lord we only got a little of the flood,” she said, “and I had some insurance, so I’m going to have this place better than before.”
“We needed to ask you about something,” Skeet said.
“What now?” she said with a mock pout. “Sgt. Martin has already been here once.”
“You remember who Ned Thigpen is?” Skeet said. “The photographer who…”
“Of course,” she said. “He was such a nice man and I feel so bad about that happening to him right here in our county, but we just seem to have out-of-control crime these last few years.”
Taneesha knew this was a dig at Sam Bailey, but she kept her expression bland.
“Well, we wanted to know if by any chance you had sold him a painting?” Skeet asked.
“You know,” she said, thinking, “I believe he did buy one. There were so many people in and out that day, I was taking the money from one and talking to another. I think he bought one of Dee Dee’s pictures. Every now and then, somebody takes a fancy to her funny little paintings.”
“Did you have any conversation with him about Dee Dee or about her dad?” Skeet asked.
“No. Why?”
“We’re just trying to retrace all his steps and who he talked to,” Skeet said.
“Well, we did have a conversation” she said, “but it was about the flood and the damage to the store, and he took a picture of me out front. I told Sgt. Martin this before.”
“Well, you know, I’m a rookie,” Skeet said with an engaging grin. “I’m trying to learn how to do everything by the book.”
“You’re doing just fine,” she said with a smile. “Now if I’ve answered all your questions, could I get back to work?”
“Yes, mam, and you have a nice day,” Skeet said.
“Well, Opie,” Taneesha said when they were back in the car, “You think she was telling the truth?”
“Probably,” he said. “Or at least she said right away that she had sold him the painting. If she had claimed she didn’t sell him one, it would be different. You want to try to find that Mennonite guy?”
“No,” Taneesha said. “We know where to find him if we ever need to, but it’s probably just a wild goose chase anyway.”
Sam, who had by that time been congratulated by everybody in the courthouse, was a little sad to have to call Skeet and Bub in around 4 p.m. and tell them that J.T. Hollingsworth was alive and well in Panama City, Florida, according to the Social Security Administration.
“Or at least he’s drawing a paycheck and paying into Social Security from an outfit called Sunny Shores Solid Waste Disposal. And he’s got a driver’s license, too.
“T.J. got a number for the place if you want to try to reach him and verify that it’s the same J.T. Hollingsworth,” Sam said. “It probably is, but there is such a thing as identity theft.”
Skeet had Hollingsworth on the phone in five minutes, and put the speakerphone on so the others could hear.
“I was wonderin’ if anybody from up there was ever going’ to bother to look for me,” he said. “Yeah, I’m the one that Lucille Hollingsworth tried to shoot, but she missed, and at that point in my life I had this kind of sex addiction problem, you know. I had two nice ladies thinking I was going to marry them if I could get her out of my trailer, but that bullet passed close enough to the side of my head to give me pause to think.”
Therefore, he explained, he called his cousin on his cell phone, and left the next morning for Florida with nothing but the cash from his last paycheck.
“And I’ve done pretty well, in case Lucille wants to know,” he said, “but please don’t tell her where I’m at. How come you’re callin’ now anyway.”
“You heard about
the flood up here?” Skeet said.
“Yeah, did Lucille and them dogs get drowned?”
“No Sir, but there was this coffin that came over Timpoochee Dam and we’re trying to identify who was in it, and we got a call from one of your lady friends who thought it might be you.”
Hollingsworth was still laughing when Skeet got off the phone, and so was Bub.
“You forgot to ask him what dentist he went to, Skeet.”
Sam was laughing too, and then he got up and said, “I’ve got to go pick up Bethie. I’ll see y’all tomorrow.”
Hunter had been making calls and writing all day, and was about to leave and lock up, when Sam opened the door and came in holding Bethie’s hand.
Bethie broke free, ran across the room and hurled herself into Hunter’s lap, hugging her so fiercely, that Sam had to run to keep the chair from falling over with both of them.
He looked down at Hunter and said, “We seem to have her blessing.”
CHAPTER 18
SAM TOOK HUNTER AND BETHIE OUT to dinner on Monday night, as soon as the work session was over, driving 30 miles to Perry to eat at Bethie’s favorite seafood place, and to get out of the county so that they wouldn’t have to talk to everybody who walked by their table.
He was frustrated with the investigations. That was work, though, and he could put it out of his mind easily, feeling happy about having everything settled with Hunter, and seeing how happy Bethie was.
“Can I be a bridesmaid,” she asked Hunter between mouthfuls of fried shrimp. “I’m too old to be a flower girl?”
“You can be the Maid of Honor,” Hunter said, but we haven’t even set a date yet. You need to let your daddy and me decide some more things together.”
“Well can I have my hair curly? My friend Emily had hers curly when she was in the pageant, and it wasn’t a permanent. She said she went to the beauty parlor and they shampooed it and put it on rollers. She wore lipstick, too.”
Sam opened his mouth to object, but Hunter spoke first.
“Of course you can have your hair curly if you want to,” she said. “But no lipstick until you’re 16.”
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