When we finally did see Woodley around 11:30, it didn’t go the way we expected. He threw open the front door, came halfway in, and shouted, “Nellie Phlint?”
Caught by surprise, Nellie looked at him and raised her hand slowly.
“Come with me,” he barked.
“Am I under arrest?” she asked.
Dolores Pettigrew, who was in the café area showing off her new perm, said, “Remember you get one phone call.”
Woodley looked exasperated. “Come right now!” he insisted. “It’s your son.”
Had they tracked down Aubrey for hacking into the law enforcement network? Egads!
Pete didn’t have a client at the moment, so I motioned to him to take over the cut I was mostly done with and hurried out the door. I expected to see Woodley bundling Nellie into his white Ford Expedition, but they had gone past the Expedition and were hustling down Clifton Street in the direction of Botowski Hardware. I hustled after them.
To my surprise, they ran past the hardware store and turned left at the corner. As I passed the hardware store, I noticed Burl in the chainsaw section, fastening down a McCulloch model with a wire cable.
I rounded the corner in time to see Nellie and Woodley dash into Dr. Cason’s office. It dawned on me that this might have something to do with Dale. But why was Woodley involved?
When I got into the doctor’s office, Woodley was standing in the waiting room shaking his head. The door to the back was open. I heard Dale telling his mother loudly that he was all right. Woodley motioned me out the door and came out with me.
“What’s wrong with Dale?” I demanded.
“He’s been shot. A little,” Woodley explained. I turned to go back in the doctor’s office. He stopped me.
“Don’t worry,” he reassured me. “As Dale said, he’s all right.” Woodley let out a deep breath. “Could easily have been much worse.”
“What happened?” I asked. “You didn’t shoot him?”
“Me?” he asked incredulously. “Why would you even think that?”
“Why else would you be involved?”
“Because I saw it happen. I was driving down Tennessee Street to come to your shop and saw three children playing — near your house, as a matter of fact. I noticed that they were playing with a very realistic-looking rifle, and then it went off.”
Woodley turned and put his hands on the brick building. He was trembling. Without thinking, I put my hand on his arm. He looked at me. “I see a lot of things in this line of work,” he said. “Seeing something bad happen to a child...” He left the thought unfinished.
“Let’s walk a little,” I suggested.
He shook his head and straightened up. “I’ve got to get the rifle to the forensics lab in Baton Rouge.”
“I’ll walk you back to your car,” I said. “Where did the kids get the rifle?”
“They found it in a ditch.”
Those kids had been playing a couple of doors down from my house. “You think it’s the gun that killed Annie.”
“Looks to me like it’d been in that ditch a week, max. We’ll see what forensics thinks.”
We said our goodbyes and I watched him drive away. Then I walked quickly back to Dr. Cason’s office.
The bullet had grazed Dale’s shoulder and forehead, but his biggest injury was powder burns because the gun had gone off so close to him. His hearing seemed to be OK, though his ears were ringing badly. Dr. Cason gauzed him up so that he looked like a mummy, which Dale didn’t think was funny.
After Nellie got the mummy buckled into the SUV, she told me that when she had arrived at the Tickfaw campground the night before, she found her boys hard at work messing with Annie’s laptop. They told Nellie that night time was best for what they were doing because they had the laptop all to themselves. Aubrey said, “The guys in the state forensics lab are not putting in any overtime.”
The boys told her they could secretly help the forensics team by adding passwords to their database. And they could easily spread some of the photos of August and Burl around the Internet. “Yay,” was Nellie’s comment on that activity.
Nellie insisted on helping them pick photos that were relatively mild, which meant paging through the collection. “Looking through porn with your small boys is odd,” she said. “Potentially educational when we have the time to chat about it.”
The boys also told her they had decrypted more photos from Annie’s laptop.
“They were in a crypt?” I asked.
“Spooky, isn’t it?” Nellie said. “Want to guess who was in these photos?”
“Connor?” I guessed. “And August?”
“Reasonable guess,” she said. “Try Dr. Cason.”
“Dr. Cason with August?” That wasn’t reasonable. Doctors were supposed to be above this, weren’t they?
“Some of the photos were taken in the examining room where he was treating Dale,” Nellie said. “Once I realized that Dale would be OK, I looked around and recognized a landscape print on the wall. It was all I could do to keep from saying something about playing doctor in that room.”
“August is definitely a slut,” I observed, thinking out loud. “Which is unbelievable, so I’m also starting to believe the more unbelievable thing: that August is a murderer.”
“At this point, I can believe just about anything.”
The mummy was starting to raise a ruckus in the SUV. Nellie told him to hang on. She opened the driver’s side door and stopped.
“The problem is,” she said, “once we start believing unbelievable things, where do we stop?”
Chapter 15
When I got back to the salon, I told people that Dale had accidentally been shot with the murder weapon. Or probably the murder weapon. Everyone wondered why the police hadn’t found the rifle before the children did.
“Aren’t they supposed to search for something like that?” Dolores Pettigrew asked.
“Looks like the police should be hiring children to do the searching,” some wag commented.
They should also be hiring children to hack into laptops. That thought reminded me that the excitement with the rifle had kept Woodley from interviewing Nellie about the August/Burl photos. The forensics people should have those photos when Woodley showed up with the rifle, so Nellie might be off the hook.
Now if Woodley could identify the murderer based on all that, we could all go back to whatever it was we were doing before this mess started. I had a vague recollection that everything was nice and unexciting.
The odd thing was, so many people had been living lives that were different from what we thought. Rudy and his granddaddy were moonshining. Burl, Dr. Cason, and possibly Connor were moonlighting with August. Annie was tormenting half the population.
In a small town, everybody is supposed to know everybody’s business. Apparently, that hadn’t been true in Knockemstiff for a long time. At the rate we were going, though, everybody was going to end up knowing way too much about everybody’s business.
In the salon, we talked about everybody’s business. The highlight of this afternoon was when Angela Ladecky brought in blueberry mini-muffins to sell in our café area. Just after that a light drizzle of rain set in, and everything seemed subdued and quiet. The light of the day faded early.
Tonight was my usual night to have dinner with friends at the Bacon Up. As I closed up the salon, I thought about the fact it had been a week since I’d found Annie dead on the side of the road after my last dinner at the Bacon Up. The thought didn’t inspire a craving for bacon. I’d be happy with yogurt and a Godzilla movie.
Just when I had decided to walk around to the Bacon Up and let them know I was cashing out early tonight, my friend Eva saw me and waved. I tried to tell her that I was skipping the bacon this time, but she said, “What? My hearing aide batteries are about dead.” (She doesn’t have hearing aides.) Then she grabbed my arm and led me to the Bacon Up in the drizzling rain.
A couple of hours later I was walking back to
where my car was parked, and doing pretty well since I’d only had one beer this time, when I saw a big, dark figure lurking in front of the salon. I was wondering what it was about bacon night that led to seeing scary things when I heard the figure call “Savannah?” in an Irish accent.
“Connor?” I said. “What are you doing out here?”
“Savannah, sorry to startle you. I brought the new part for your rack.”
“Rack?” I said. “Now?”
I couldn’t see how one beer could keep me from understanding how working on the rack at this hour made sense. I was pretty sure this did not make sense. “This doesn’t make sense,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I was going by the diner, and I saw you, and I was hoping we could talk.”
“Talk?” I said. “Now?”
I don’t think I’m an overly judgmental person. (If I did think that, I’d be overly judgmental, wouldn’t I?) I figure people can pretty much behave however they want. If I don’t care for someone’s behavior, I’ll spend my time with someone else. That’s not a judgment; that’s a preference. And when I make my preference, I’m impatient with people who insist that I mustn’t misunderstand them. I want to say, I’m sure you have perfectly good reasons for behaving like a dope; I don’t care. That does sound a bit judgmental. Oh well.
I was about to tell Connor that he could make an appointment to get his hair cut, and I would listen to him talk for half an hour, when he said “Please, Savannah” with such deep Irish anguish in his voice, it somehow reminded me that this wasn’t only about my preference. This might have something to do with a murder.
“Damn!” I muttered under my breath. Good thing little Sarah wasn’t around. I’d be setting a bad example.
I fished the tangle of keys out of my purse, and as I turned the key in the lock, it occurred to me to wonder if this was a safe move. Specifically: was Connor a murderer? Had Annie been jealous of Connor’s thing with August and tried to blackmail him? Or had Annie just wanted to expose what was going on in a way that ruined August’s relationship with Connor? Had that made this Irish poet angry enough to kill? Did he now intend to kill me because I knew too much?
It’s amazing the number of thoughts you can have in the space of time it takes to turn a key. You can break out in a cold sweat just that fast, too.
It seemed a little late to run away. I pushed open the door and tried to think of something that might serve as a club that I could stand next to. The coat rack? Broom? How about something sharp?
Before I turned on the lights, I walked to my station, thinking I could grab my scissors in the dark and hide them behind me. I knew exactly where they were.
I was picking up the scissors when the lights came on. Connor had found the switch. He was looking at me, frowning, holding a cloth bag in his hand that was obviously heavy.
“Ah,” he said, looking at the scissors in my hand. “You think I’m here to kill you.” He sat in a chair in the café area and put the cloth bag down with a metallic plonk. “And why wouldn’t you think that?”
“I don’t know what to think about anything anymore,” I said. “Everyone turns out to be different than they seemed a couple of weeks ago.”
“I’m certainly different,” he said. “But I’m not here to kill you.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?” I asked automatically. If he wasn’t going to kill me, I felt like I should be a good hostess.
He laughed. “Yes, that would be lovely.”
I put down the scissors. He really didn’t seem like a killer.
While I filled the electric kettle, Connor began to tell me why he had come. “It hurts that you think ill of me,” he said, “I can chalk that up to my own folly. But after I’m gone, your thinking ill of August will hang like a millstone around my neck.”
“You’re going away?” I asked in surprise.
“It’s for the best. I can’t see how August can continue to live here, but in case she wants to, I’d like for you to understand her a little better.”
“Well,” I said, “I understand pretty well that she’s your slut.”
He winced. “Savannah, she’s the opposite of that. She’s like a flower child from the 1960s. She sees love as a form of play. She doesn’t understand why other people take it so seriously. She just wants to revel in it.”
“Why can’t she ‘revel in it’ with boys her own age?”
“I think she figured out early on that boys her age were certainly willing to play at love, but they were mostly interested in their own fun and saw her as a plaything. She had the idea that love could be a complete communion of two people, a commingling of mind, body and spirit. I’m sure there are any number of 20-something boys in the world who have the same idea, but August didn’t know any in Knockemstiff.”
I handed him a cup of hot water with a teabag in it. “So you volunteered to commingle with her,” I said.
“She approached me, Savannah. She heard me read at open mic several times and told me she liked my poetry.” He dunked his teabag reflectively. “You’d be surprised how many women are attracted by poetry.” He gave me a little of his sly Irish smile.
I dunked my own teabag reflectively, thinking how nice it would be if they made teabags that would brew a cup of beer instead of tea. I’m not much of a tea drinker, especially when I’m listening to a tale that cries out for a beer.
I sighed. “August found your poetry irresistible. One thing led to another. And the ‘nother’ looked very much like August being your slut, only it wasn’t that.”
“Exactly!” Connor said as if I’d just clarified everything. He took the teabag out of his cup and looked around. I held out a trash can for it and added my own teabag to the can.
“August wanted to create a separate space for love play, where two people could go into a room and express themselves with a sense of joy. When we came out of that room, we left it behind. It wasn’t about obligations or expectations, except that we committed to keep it private and never be hurtful. It was play.”
“What a peculiar idea,” I said, “that you could go into a room, do whatever you pleased, and when you came out, all the consequences would stay in that room. Connor, forgive me, but this sounds like a male fantasy.”
“It was a male fantasy. And what I’m telling you is that it was also a female fantasy. I wanted to bring August with me, so she could tell you herself, but she still isn’t entirely well.”
“August is ill?”
“She has had a medical problem, thanks to Annie Simmerson.”
He stood up and started pacing and waving his hands. “When August went to Dr. Cason to get her prescription for birth control pills renewed, Annie added a second prescription for an antibiotic that’s closely related to one that August is allergic to. August didn’t think anything about it. She took both prescriptions to the pharmacy in Paudy, where they don’t have a record of her allergies, and she started taking the antibiotic. When she had a reaction, she still didn’t think about it and kept taking the pills. She ended up with a severe reaction and other problems, I think.”
He stopped pacing and looked at me. “That Annie was a devil.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said. “Is August going to be all right?”
“Dr. Cason says so. He gave August something to stop the allergic reaction from closing off her windpipe. That was last Wednesday. Mostly after that it was just a matter of time.”
He took a sip of his tea, and then put down the cup and picked up the cloth bag. He took it over to the metal rack.
“Someone mentioned they saw you and Dr. Cason rushing away from his office last Wednesday, each of you with a sheaf of papers.”
“That was after I figured out that Annie had caused August’s problem, and I remembered what happened with Mrs. Toler when Annie got her to cut her insulin.” He sat down on the floor and pulled tools out of his bag.
“How did you know about that?” I asked.
“I’m the one who f
ound Mrs. Toler almost dead. I used to visit her from time to time. She didn’t get out, and she sometimes needed something fixed, or mostly just someone to listen for a few minutes. Anyway, I told Dr. Cason that we had to search for other cases of Annie mischief. We found lots. Some of them we couldn’t get on the phone right away, so we divvied them up and went out to make sure people were OK.”
“Were people OK?”
“A few were in a very bad way. One old guy is still in critical condition.” He was taking the bolts out of the old part. “I don’t know why Dr. Cason didn’t check for these problems sooner, unless Annie had some leverage on him.”
Did Connor not know that Dr. Cason had a thing with August? Or did he not know that Annie knew? Maybe Connor just didn’t want me to know.
He was already bolting the new part on the rack.
“Connor, how did you make that new part without taking measurements?”
“I wondered if you would notice that. This rack was made by the smith who owned my forge before me. When I bought the forge, he left behind an identical rack in the workshop. He was meticulous in his specs. I knew that if I made a part that fit my rack, it would fit the twin that you have here. And there it is.”
He pulled the brick out from underneath the rack, put his tools back in the cloth bag, and walked out of the salon without another word.
Chapter 16
The drizzle was still coming down on Wednesday morning. Betina came in all in a tizzy about seeing someone prowling around her cottage after midnight.
“It wasn’t exactly strolling weather,” she said, “so he was obviously up to something. I couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night.”
“Wasn’t it awfully dark with the rain and all?” I asked. “How could you tell it was a he?” I was wondering if Connor had skulked all over town after he left the salon.
“My neighbors left one of their outside lights on,” Betina said. “I could see it was a man all right, a big man. He stood outside and looked directly at my window for a long time, at least five minutes.”
A Hair Raising Blowout: Cozy Mystery (The Teasen & Pleasen Hair Salon Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) Page 12