“Did you tell her who’d bought it?” asked Mayleen Richards.
“Yep. Gave her his phone number and e-mail and told her she’d have to find him before he sold it.”
“Did she leave her own name or address?”
The kid shook his head.
“What about the owner’s address?”
He looked at her as if her deck had a few missing cards. “Well, yeah, but she’s dead, remember?”
No point in reminding him that even old ladies have friends and neighbors. “Just give me the address.”
It was only a couple of miles away, a fifties-type brick ranch with empty windows and an air of expectant neglect. The foundation plantings had overgrown their allotted spaces and all the trimwork was in sore need of paint, but help was probably on the way if the real estate agent’s sign in the weedy front yard was any indication. It had a new red SOLD! sticker across it. She took down the agent’s number just in case no one else could help, then knocked on the door of the house across the road.
“Coming, coming, coming!” called a cheerful, if somewhat trembly, voice and the door was eventually opened by a very old, very frail white woman encumbered by an aluminum walker. She seemed delighted to find a female deputy in full uniform on her front porch. Smiling as Richards introduced herself, she invited the younger woman to come in. “I’m Liz. Liz Collins. Isn’t it just wonderful all that we can be and do these days? I’d give anything if I’d been born fifty years later. Not that I didn’t have an interesting time of it”—her gnarled hand gestured to a wall of framed photographs beside the door—“but these days I could have maybe made it into space.”
Mayleen Richards glanced perfunctorily at the photographs, did a double take, then looked more closely at the young woman in the cockpit of a plane, surrounded by other women in flying gear, getting a medal pinned to her jacket by a general, sitting on the wing of an airplane. “You were a pilot? Which war is this?”
“WW Two,” she said proudly. “I was one of the women that ferried planes from the assembly lines over to Europe. They wouldn’t let us join the Air Force or fly combat missions, but at least we got to do that much.”
From the next room came another cracked and trembly voice. “May I get you some tea?”
“No, thank you,” Richards said. She turned, expecting to see another elderly person in the doorway, but no one was there.
“That’s only Billy, my cockatiel.” The woman laughed and seated herself in a high rocking chair, the seat of which was made even higher by a thick cushion so that she didn’t have far to lower herself. “Please make yourself comfortable, Deputy Richards, and are you sure I can’t get you some tea?”
“Some tea?” the bird asked again.
Richards smiled. “No, ma’am, thank you.”
She explained the reason for her visit and Mrs. Collins nodded immediately.
“Carrie Sholten. Lovely woman. We were neighbors more than thirty years. Her husband died about eighteen months ago and her daughter wanted her to come live near her in Atlanta. Carrie wasn’t exactly sure about making it permanent, so she rented the house to his cousin and put her best pieces of furniture in storage while she looked for an apartment. But then, before she could find one, she fell and broke her hip and bless her heart, she never came home from the hospital.”
“What about her daughter?”
“Janice? Yes, she came up last month to put the house on the market and get Carrie’s things, but that shiftless cousin that was supposed to forward her mail never passed on the letter from the storage place that she was behind on her rent, so they sold everything at auction. Janice was mad as fire over that, but it was all legal. Nothing she could do about it. She did go find the high bidder and bought back some of the pieces.”
“Do you have an address or phone number for her?” Richards asked.
“Oh yes.” A telephone and a large businesslike Rolodex stood on the table beside her chair. Mrs. Collins spun the round knob until she found the card she wanted. “Janice Radakovich. She’s a civil engineer with the highway department down there in Georgia. Builds roads and bridges. Isn’t that wonderful? You young women today!”
About the time Deputy Richards was checking out the E-Z-Quik Mail and McLamb and Jamison were winding up their interview with Lamarr Wrenn, Dwight Bryant was ready to walk through the outbuildings at the old Hatcher place with Tally Ames. Not that he’d known the name given to the farm by local residents in this part of the county. All he knew was that Mrs. Ames had said it belonged to her grandparents and now to her.
“They were Hatchers? You any kin to Beth Hatcher over near Clayton?”
When she said no, he gave up trying to find a personal link.
Arnold Ames and their son Val were back in Dobbs, working on the innards of a motor that turned one of the kiddie rides and hoping to get it back in operation by opening time this evening, which is why it was Mrs. Ames who led him out from the carnival. He had offered to bring her in his car, but she had declined.
“Fish’s loading the truck with the rest of the stuff Braz bought so we can store it out there, and then I have to go over to the funeral home, okay? They released his body yesterday.”
“You’re burying him here?” For some reason, that surprised him. “I was thinking you’d want to take him back to Florida.”
“No, we decided to do it here,” she said, giving him an odd sidelong glance. She started to say something, then changed her mind.
She had parked the truck over by one of the sheds and the employee they called Fish was already undoing the tarp they’d tied over the load. There was a flash of bright colors inside their plastic covering as he let down the tailgate and rolled off the rack of lingerie Dwight had seen when the van was searched on Saturday. Mayleen Richards had interviewed the guy and reported that he’d spent Friday evening in front of the dunk tank, taking money from the customers who lined up to throw baseballs at the target that would trip a spring and dump their Bozo in the water. Dwight remembered the Bozo, who’d had such an insulting mouth on him that Colleton County youths were elbowing each other aside to pay for the privilege of drowning him, but he didn’t remember this Fish.
“Nice enough guy,” Mayleen had said. “Borderline retarded, though. Not bright enough to lie.”
Mrs. Ames got out of the truck clutching a handful of keys. She wore jeans and work shoes. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face today and tied at the nape with a red scarf.
Since getting the ME’s report, Dwight found himself conscious of footwear around the carnival. Not that he really thought Mrs. Ames had stomped her son. All the same, he gave her shoes a close look. These were buff colored with equally light gum soles. They were scuffed and dusty as if they hadn’t been cleaned in some time, but no apparent stains. When she walked over to the barn doors, he noticed that the shoes left a crisp ripple pattern on the dirt path.
Fish’s shoes were Nikes that had started out white but were now stained and dingy. The stains were either black, as from grease and oil, or were drips of crayon-bright enamels from helping to paint the rides. They, too, left distinct patterns on the dirt.
“Some woman from Georgia caught up with Braz a couple of weeks ago,” said Mrs. Ames, unlocking the first shelter. “I didn’t see her, but he said she was pretty mad about the locker place selling her mother’s furniture.”
“Was she mad at him?” asked Dwight.
“Well, she certainly wasn’t happy having to buy back the things she particularly wanted. He sold her a table, some chairs, and a framed mirror and he told me he got enough from those four pieces to put him in the black for that particular locker. Braz liked to drive hard bargains.”
She threw open the double doors, and Dwight saw a massive oak bedroom suite proportioned for a room with ten-foot ceilings.
“That came out of the same auction,” said Tally Ames, “but nobody’s called him about it. Over here’s the rest of that woman’s mother’s things.”
&nbs
p; It looked like ordinary furniture to Dwight.
“Cheap veneers and beat-up postwar era,” Mrs. Ames agreed, “but migrant workers will snap it up down in Florida. Fish, you can slide that rack in behind the dresser here, okay?”
“Okay,” he said cheerfully. He was early thirties, about five-nine, and well muscled with a heavy lower jaw and a bullet-shaped head made even more noticeable for being shaved smooth. Around his neck was a gold chain with a cross on it, and the cross banged his chin whenever he stooped to pick up something he’d dropped. Some of the filmy robes kept slipping off their hangers and he bent to retrieve them with a surprising delicacy of touch.
“They’re real pretty, Tally. You ought to keep these for yourself.”
“I don’t think so,” she told him with a smile. “Too fancy for me.”
They left him to finish unloading the truck, and Mrs. Ames showed Dwight some of the things her husband had bought, including the tools that incited the Lincoln brothers to slash the Pot O‘Gold slide.
They were headed for the far side of the compound toward a small shed that stood up on low rock pilings. “Braz’s office,” Mrs. Ames was saying when she broke off and quickened her step.
“Well, damn!” she exclaimed. “Somebody’s pulled the lock off.”
She was right. The lock was still closed tightly on the hasp, but the whole thing had been prized right off the door and now lay on the grass near an abandoned hammer. Inside was a shambles. A box of used books had been overturned and more loose papers fluttered off the old battered teacher’s desk as a breeze from the open doorway blew in.
“What on earth were they looking for?” Tally Ames wondered aloud.
“Try not to touch anything,” Dwight said, “but can you tell me if anything’s missing?”
“God, how would I know?” she said tartly. “Braz called this his office, but mostly it was where he kept the books and papers and pictures he and Arnie unload from the lockers. Arnie used to toss them in the nearest Dumpster, okay? But Braz once found a fifty-dollar bill in one of the books. And he was watching a rerun of Antiques Roadshow the night they showed how sometimes old tintypes and letters could be worth a few hundred. After that, he got Arnie to give him any papers he was going to toss and he’d go through them. We used to tease him about him and his slow dollar. We thought the only thing he’d found was baby pictures and old income tax returns. Nothing worth even putting in a flea market, much less on eBay.”
Dwight heard the “But” in her voice and saw the troubled look on her face.
“There was more?”
She nodded. “He was doing better than any of us ever realized. You gave us his wallet back Friday night, remember? Val was looking through it this morning. There was a little bankbook in the secret compartment. He opened a new account just last winter with a seventy-thousand deposit. We had no idea he had more than two or three thousand, okay? He must have found something really great in the books or papers and he never said a word to us, just sold it and hid the money. Like he was becoming a miser or something.”
“You don’t know what he found?”
“Whatever it was, he must’ve got it from Arnie and thought if he told, Arnie would want a cut. Like Arn’s ever gone back on his word once he’s made a deal.”
By now, Fish had finished unloading the back of the truck and had wandered over with a manila envelope. “Here’s more pictures Braz had from the new place,” he said.
“Mind if I take a look?” Dwight asked as they stepped back outside.
“Keep them,” she said. “He’d already looked through them. It’s just pictures of the woman in her night things.”
Dwight glanced inside and saw what were clearly amateur photos. Most were blurry and taken from such odd angles that her face wasn’t clear in any of them. He closed the envelope and tucked it in his jacket pocket to look at later, then went back to his car for latex gloves and an instant camera.
“Why bother?” asked Mrs. Ames as he snapped pictures of the hasp, the hammer, and the condition of the shed. “There was nothing in here worth stealing.”
“This your hammer?” asked Dwight as he lifted it by two fingers, being careful not to touch the handle.
“Naw,” said Fish before she could answer. “Arnie’s got all ours with him in the other truck.”
While Dwight was bagging the hammer, Fish stuck his head in the doorway, looked around, and said, “Hey! What happened to all them pictures for the haunted house?”
“What?” said Tally Ames. She took another look. “Didn’t Arnie put them in the other barn?”
Fish shook his head. “I stacked ‘em right back there. All those skeletons and ghosts and people on fire.”
“Now, who would steal junk like that?” Tally wondered.
“You’re sure it was junk?” asked Dwight.
“Believe me, I’m sure,” she said. “We’re not talking old masters or even old primitives on oil and canvas, okay? This looked like some kids had been given a lot of leftover house paint and some old pieces of plywood to paint Halloween decorations on. That’s it. There were about thirty-five of them, and Arnie and the boys were going to use them to decorate the outside of our haunted house. Braz thought it was all scrap lumber and old half-empty cans of paint when they opened up the locker and he put his flashlight on it. I think he got it for like thirty dollars and Arn gave him thirty-five for the lot since they’d be useful.”
The main part of the compound had been neatly mowed, but weeds were high around the side and Dwight soon saw where two vehicles of some sort had recently driven in there and turned around. Ragweed and goldenrods had been snapped off or crushed down and were barely wilted.
“Any of your people park there?” he asked.
Both Mrs. Ames and Fish shook their heads.
“Who knows you have this place?”
“All our own people have been out here moving equipment in and out,” she answered. “And some of the independents know about it. Braz told Skee, the guy runs the duck pond? His wife was like a grandmother to Braz. And Skee probably told the world if it sat still long enough.”
Dwight laid a ruler across the tire tracks and took careful pictures, but he knew he was just going through the motions. The tracks appeared to be the width of standard tires, the weeds hadn’t held any tread marks, and if there had been shoe prints in the dirt immediately in front of the wooden steps, their own shoes had obliterated them.
Bostrom’s Bigfoot U-Store was out on the bypass at the edge of Dobbs, and Bob Bostrom himself was standing in the doorway when Deputy Mayleen Richards got out of her patrol car. He was about her height, of slender build, with brown hair and brown eyes that were wary at first.
“Your feet don’t look very big to me,” she said in greeting.
The wary look disappeared and he laughed. “That was my dad. Size thirteen triple E. I got my momma’s feet, thank goodness. What can I do for you, Officer?”
When she explained and showed him the receipt he’d given Braz Hartley a couple of weeks ago, he led her into his small office and pulled out a file drawer. No computers here.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Now I remember. Young black guy showed up here wanting his granddaddy’s stuff back.”
He described the man’s outrage in a vivid, almost word-for-word reenactment for her.
“He said, ‘Gibsonton, Florida? This white bastard trucked my granddaddy’s pictures to Florida? How you got the right to let him do that?’
“I told him, ‘The state of North Carolina gave me that right when your granddaddy let the rent run out on his locker and the certified letter I sent him came back.’
“ ‘But he died!’
“I told him even dead people got debts, debts him and his family ought to’ve paid, and you shoulda seen him puff up at that,” Bostrom told Richards. “He was a lot bigger’n me, but I just started cleaning my nails with my pocketknife here”—as if by magic, a wicked-looking switchblade appeared in his hands—“and he
climbed back down. I told him to chill. He didn’t have to go all the way to Florida. The buyer was with a carnival right here in North Carolina. Ames Amusement.”
“So was his grandfather an artist or something?” asked Richards.
“You’d think he was Rembrandt to hear that guy run on about it, but the old man used to come over here and paint right out there in his locker. All the stuff I ever saw looked like the pictures my wife Jane puts on our refrigerator from our grandbabies.”
Bostrom showed her the deceased artist’s address. It was just over in Darkside, less than a quarter mile away.
CHAPTER 14
DEBORAH KNOTT
MIDDAY MONDAY
When I got back after lunch, I found April waiting impatiently by the rear door of my courtroom. She looked like a teacher again. Her brown curls were tidy, makeup tamed her freckles, and she wore a crisply pressed beige cotton jumper over a short-sleeved white shirt.
“Dwight’s taken her out to her place in the country,” she said as soon as I got close enough to hear her above passing clerks and several attorneys with their clients, “and her husband didn’t know when they’d be back. I called home and Andrew’s sober for the moment, so I’m going to go on now and talk to him before I pick up the children when they get out of school.” Her voice dropped. “I don’t want Ruth and A.K. hearing about this from their cousins. What I need for you to do is go out there when you’re through with court this evening and tell her that we’ll all be there for the service tomorrow. Minnie and Isabel and Doris and Mae are going to fix lunch and you know them. There’ll be enough to feed anybody she wants to come. I expect she’ll want her own friends to be there, so you be sure and tell her that, all right?”
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