If I hadn’t wanted to be a thoughtful houseguest, I don’t know when we would’ve found the body in the barn. But I remembered Dottie admiring a hand-carved picture frame in an antique shop once, and I was sure I’d seen one like it hanging in our loft. It had been carved by Great-Great-Uncle Edgar during his whittling period, my father said. My parents found the barn loft a convenient place to keep broken furniture you might want to repair someday, old radios (who knows what they might be worth eventually?), the set of dishes Mom got with Green Stamps, and not-quite-discarded picture frames.
Dottie had begun redecorating her small apartment, but had to stop when Martha’s Journal folded. Maybe this gift, dusty though it may be, would renew her spirits. And it would be perfect, I thought, for that spot in the corner of her guest bedroom. I swung open the barnyard gate feeling proud of myself for having thought of it, but as soon as I stepped inside the building it became obvious something had died in there—and not too recently.
He lay as if he had been flung there about midway inside the barn, still clutching in one fist what looked like a handful of straw. His head was turned at a most peculiar angle, and the eye I could see seemed to be staring at my feet. Jasper Totherow hadn’t smelled like a rose in the best of times, and this was definitely not the best of times. The stench of him made me gag and dash for air. I almost made it to the fence before I lost my lunch. Ralphine Totherow wouldn’t be bothered by Jasper again.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Something was dreadfully wrong, and Aunt Zorah wasn’t talking. I had fled to her home from Smoke-rise as soon as the police were satisfied I hadn’t put an end to Jasper Totherow and didn’t know who did. I had an idea who might’ve though, and so did they. Jasper’s wife Ralphine headed the list, although I doubted if she’d done it. If Ralphine Totherow was going to do away with her husband, she would’ve done him in long ago. However, she did have opportunity—and oodles and oodles of motives. And from the way the people investigating the crime scene scurried about with smug expressions, I had a feeling they knew more than they were sharing. Sheriff Bonner was also interested in my mysterious “bearded” visitor and took note of every minute detail I could remember about his car, his clothing, and the little I managed to see of his appearance. It wasn’t much.
I left them photographing the pathetic remains in our barn and drove to Aunt Zorah’s intending to spend the night. Our barn lot was becoming a much-too-popular spot for dead people, and after what had happened to Jasper, the idea of a night alone at Smokerise didn’t seem at all beneficial to my well-being. The sheriff had asked me to stick around in case the bearded man turned up, so Dottie agreed to get word to Rob when his flight arrived the next day. They had rental cars at the airport, and Rob knew how to drive. I just hoped he remembered to drive on the right side of the road.
No one answered when I’d telephoned my aunt, so I assumed she hadn’t yet returned from the big family whoop-de-do, but a dim light burned in the back of her house and I knew where she kept a key.
I found Aunt Zorah in the semidarkness of her sitting room, still in her hat and coat, luggage at her feet, and after discovering one corpse that day, I was horrified to think I’d found another. Fortunately this one spoke.
“Prentice, that you? I didn’t hear you. What is it?”
“I tried to call you a couple of times but nobody answered. Did you just get in?” I couldn’t tell if she was coming or going.
“A little while ago. Just had to sit down for a minute.”
My aunt was practically mumbling and that alarmed me. Dad said she sounded so much like his army drill sergeant he’d felt right at home during basic training.
“Are you all right?” I felt her forehead. “You’re not sick, are you? And it’s freezing cold in here. I’ll turn up the heat.”
“Not sick, just tired,” she said as I rubbed her cold hands in my warm ones.
“What’s wrong? Have they found Uncle Faris?” Aunt Zorah seemed to be in shock. I gently removed her green knitted hat, slipped off her shoes, and placed a footstool under her feet, almost forgetting for a moment what I had found in my own backyard. I didn’t know if I would ever be able to go inside that barn again.
I took a few deep breaths, thought blue, and made tea. My aunt took a couple of sips and said it was just what she needed, but I noticed that her hand trembled when she replaced the cup in the saucer. “Are you going to tell me what brought this on?” I said. “I thought you went to some kind of family reunion.”
“Ran into some difficulty,” she whispered, raising the cup again to her lips. “Rather unpleasant situation . . .”
“What kind of situation?” Did somebody get in a huff because they were left off somebody else’s guest list? I didn’t roll my eyes, but I thought about it.
“I’m afraid my silver was taken,” she said.
“Your silver? All of it? Oh, Aunt Zorah!” You see! We knew all along this was going to happen! Why, oh, why, did you insist on carting that stuff around? The words came to my lips, but mercifully stopped there. It would only hurt to say it, and besides, she knew this already.
She closed her eyes and patted my hand. “It’s all right. It was returned.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good. Where is it?”
Aunt Zorah nodded in the direction of her suitcase. “It’s all there, I guess. Doesn’t matter.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t?”
“I’m really tired. Think I’ll go on to bed,” my aunt said. “It’s been such a trying day. You just wouldn’t believe it, Prentice.”
“Try me,” I said, but she didn’t answer.
“My Lord, Prentice!” Rob McCullough said the next day. “What on God’s green earth have you gotten yourself into?”
I didn’t remember having a choice in the matter, but I decided to overlook his thoughtless remark since he’d driven, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, straight from the Atlanta airport.
We sat in a dark corner booth in A Fine Kettle, Liberty Bend’s only restaurant, and drank coffee—or Rob drank coffee. I had a ham sandwich and apple pie à la mode, since yesterday’s lunch hadn’t stayed with me, and supper at Aunt Zorah’s had been tuna on crackers and a raw carrot.
“Now you know why I couldn’t fly to London,” I said, scooping up the last dollop of ice cream. “It’s been a busy season.”
“Sure seems like it.” Rob reached for my hand and squeezed it. “But you’re all right?”
“So far, so good.” I smiled. I liked having him there, liked his holding my hand. “If we could just straighten things out with Sonny’s hairy relatives and find out who did away with ‘Madam X’ and Jasper we’d be well on the road to almost normal.”
“Sonny?”
“Sonny Gaines, the guy Maggie married. Remember? I told you about him.” When Rob first arrived I’d tried to explain to him where my mother was and why.
Now he nodded. “Right. The little boy’s father.” He pulled a paper napkin from the dispenser and reached into his pocket for a pen. “So what now?”
“Now we keep our heads down and don’t look up,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Cousin Be-trice is headed this way,” I muttered. “Maybe she won’t notice us.”
No such luck. “Why, Prentice Dobson, where’ve you been? I ought not even speak to you the way you’ve been ignoring me!”
I should be so lucky, I thought as my cousin swooped upon us, arms full of bundles, and plopped down beside Rob.
“And who’s this handsome hunk? Have you been keeping secrets from me?”
“You remember Rob. You met him at Dad’s funeral last fall.” I introduced the two again and Rob twisted awkwardly in the small booth and shook her hand. Cousin Be-trice had large, bony hands, protruding teeth, and ears the size of saucers. In fact, when I was a child I always pictured my cousin as the wolf when my mother read the story of “Red Riding Hood.”
Now she patted lank brown hair behind her ears and smiled at me over th
e bulging shopping bag. “Lotta excitement out your way, I hear. Is it true you were the one who found him? They say he’d been lying there dead as a doornail for who knows how long.” Cousin Be-trice leaned across the table so closely I could count the hairs on her chin and spoke in a chilling whisper. “Mercy, Prentice! That must’ve been awful! What’d he look like?
“Over here, Inez!” She signaled to the waitress who was serving another table. “I’ll have a cheeseburger and fries.”
I kicked Rob under the table and gave him my slitty-eyed look. “Hate to rush off and leave you,” I told my cousin, “but Rob has some phone calls to make, and I promised to go to the store for Aunt Zorah. She’s not feeling so great.”
Still Be-trice didn’t budge. “That Zorah! She’s been up to something this time—don’t ask me what, but it wasn’t any family reunion.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“I get the same information she does, although I usually don’t have time for such foolishness with a job as demanding as mine.” (Cousin Be-trice compiles the news of local social events every week for the Liberty Bend Gazette, but you wouldn’t want to believe everything she writes.) Now she smiled her rabbity grin and reluctantly slid over to let Rob out of the booth. “There was no reunion last weekend,” she announced. “If there had been, I’d have known it.”
Back at Smokerise, while Rob crashed on the sofa I phoned the number Mom had given me to reach them at Ellynwood Cottage. We’d be delayed a couple of days, I said, and explained about Jasper Totherow’s unfortunate demise.
“My gracious, Prentice!” my mother gasped. “What’s going on out there? Do they have any idea who did it?”
“Ralphine comes to mind,” I said.
“Bosh! Not that Jasper wasn’t a worthless piece of nuisance, but he really wasn’t worth killing. Ralphine knows that better than anybody.”
I agreed. “I think the police are on to something,” I said. “They’ve searched our place inside and out, but I have no idea what they’re looking for.” I still didn’t say anything about the man with the beard. After all, Jasper had been dead for at least a couple of days before the stranger showed up at my door. “How’s Joey?” I asked, eager to change the subject.
“Brilliant. Prentice, he’s starting to crawl. And I think he likes me,” Mom said. “I’m sure he knows I’m his grandmother.”
“And Ola. She okay?”
My mother hesitated. “Uh-huh.”
“I guess she must be close by,” I said.
“Why yes, that’s right.”
“And still acting weird?”
“Well . . . some of the time, but the weather here is lovely, Prentice, and the little house is charming. I don’t understand it, but it smells like strawberries here.”
Jasper had died of a broken neck, Deputy Weber told me when he came by later that day. Since Rob was still sacked out on the sofa, the two of us sat on the back steps in the fading afternoon sun. I tried to avoid looking in the direction of the barn lot.
“How do you know he didn’t fall?” I said. “Maybe he’d been drinking.”
“Of course we considered that,” he said, “and as it turns out, he had been drinking a little beer.”
“How much is a little?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Well, in Jasper’s case, not enough to cause him to fall. Plus, in addition to a broken neck, he had a concussion that couldn’t have come from the fall.”
“You think somebody hit him? With what? What else did you find out there?” I’d seen them taking photographs and knew they had checked for fingerprints, but that wouldn’t account for all the hush-hush and huddle going on. “Something must’ve turned up. I saw that detective crawling around in the muck out there. Come on, Don, you can tell me.”
But the deputy clamped shut tighter than a miser’s purse. He’d already said more than he should’ve, he told me.
He did say he thought it would be all right if Rob and I took off for a day or two as long as they knew where to reach me—just in case the bearded man turned up. And maybe it was my imagination, but there was something in the way he said it that led me to think they weren’t all that sure there was a bearded man.
The next day temperatures were mild for March as Rob and I started for the mountains with a couple of overnight bags and a hurriedly packed picnic basket in the trunk.
Rob, in the passenger seat, leaned back and sighed. “What a grand idea, Prentice! You just don’t know how many times I’ve thought of doing something like this.” And he smiled at me with his blue, blue eyes. “Will it take very long to get there?”
“Not too long. There’s a park just above Dalonega where I thought we’d eat our lunch. It’s right on the river and there are hiking trails and cabins . . .”
“Forget the hiking trails,” Rob said, reaching up to touch my neck. “Hey, where are we going now?”
“Into a ditch if we’re not careful,” I said. “Don’t mess with me if you don’t want me to run off the road!” I caught his hand and kissed it. “First, though, I have to stop at the library.”
He grinned. “Don’t tell me you plan to read?”
“Nope, but I do want to check on Aunt Zorah. She was acting stranger than usual yesterday, and I just want to be sure she’s okay.”
But my aunt hadn’t come in that day, the Piranha said. “Says she wasn’t feeling so good. I expect it’s all that running around she does. Bound to take its toll, and Zorah’s not getting any younger either!
“How’s your mama today?” she asked as I was leaving.
“My mama?” I hesitated.
“You said she had the flu?”
“Oh. Right. A little better, thanks, but she’s still running a slight fever.” I had almost forgotten my mother’s trumped-up illness.
Rather than use the phone at the library, I telephoned my aunt from a public booth on our way out of town. She sounded as if she’d been asleep a hundred years.
“Aunt Zorah? Did I wake you?”
“No. No, just resting. Can’t seem to find the energy to get up out of this chair.”
“Rob and I are on our way to the mountains. Are you sure you’re all right? Can I get you anything before I go?”
“No, you go on. I’m fine, really. It’s just old age creeping up, I’m afraid.”
“Promise you’ll call the doctor if you don’t feel better.” My aunt had a list of physicians beside the phone that would reach to Texas and back, and frankly I was surprised she hadn’t called one already.
“I promise,” she said. “But all I need right now is rest.”
“Maybe you picked up some kind of bug at the reunion,” I said. “Where was it this time? I forgot to ask.”
“Sugar, I believe I hear my kettle boiling,” my aunt said. “Call me when you get back.”
Maybe this time Cousin Be-trice was right, I thought as I hung up the phone. But if Aunt Zorah hadn’t gone to a family reunion, where on earth had she been?
I didn’t worry about it long. I got back to the car to find Rob on the driver’s side, and he leaned across to swing open the door. “Hope you don’t mind if I drive,” he said. “We have a lot of time to make up for and only a couple of days to do it. Now, which way are these cabins?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
We sat by a stream that sang of spring, our lunch on a blue flowered cloth before us, and Rob, who had said he wasn’t hungry, ate two huge sandwiches, potato salad, a pear, and four peanut butter cookies. The blue cloth reminded me of Augusta. Or maybe it was the soothing sound of the stream. Trees were just beginning to bud into leaf, but the woods wore a winter look in soft shades of brown and gray like an old photograph. I could feel at peace here if it weren’t for the car that had been behind us a few miles back and Rob’s smug attitude.
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe you were right.”
He chose just the right pickle before answering. “Right about what?”
“Maybe I am being paranoid, but it loo
ked like he was following us.”
“If he’d been following us, why would he turn off before we did?”
I shrugged. “A trick? Maybe he knows a shortcut.”
Rob shook his head and halfway smiled at me, as though I’d said I had been abducted by space aliens. “And you seem to see a beard around every corner. Prentice, that man didn’t even have a beard.”
“Then he had a bad case of five o’clock shadow!” I gathered up what was left of our lunch and jammed it into the basket. “Okay, so it probably wasn’t him, but at this point I’d actually like to see the bearded man again.”
Rob’s hand closed over mine. “Hey, I’m on your side, remember? We’re here for a picnic. I just want you to relax, forget about bodies, missing uncles, and sinister bearded men. Okay?”
“I’ll try,” I said. And for a little while I did. Our cabin was still being cleaned so we left our luggage in the car and climbed the trail to a clearing above the river where we could look across at the distant hills.
“It’s beautiful here . . . and so are you.” Rob wrapped his arms around me from behind and kissed the top of my head, my neck. He smelled of something wonderful and woodsy and I drew down his head and kissed him, delighting in the warmth and strength of his body against mine, the sweet closeness of his face. He spoke softly somewhere near my ear. “I’ve missed you, Prentice. God, it’s good to be with you again.”
“And I’ve missed you.” I kissed him again and waited for him to say what I wanted to hear. “I’ve thought of you a lot since you left. I know I didn’t handle things too well. I’m sorry.”
He held my hand against his chest. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve changed your mind?”
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