The Cover Story

by Deb Richardson-Moore

  The waitress brought their soup, brimming with tomatoes, okra, onions, corn and green beans from the summer’s bounty on the Marshall family farm. Branigan offered Malachi the basket of fragrant cornbread. He took the largest piece and slathered it with butter.

  “But what made you think the diary and phone were in the office?”

  Malachi took his time, chewing cornbread and taking a few spoonfuls of soup before answering.

  “That girl,” he said finally.

  “Anna Hester?”

  “Yeah, the way she act Sunday night.”

  “How did she act?”

  “Like she the reporter and you some kind of groupie.”

  Branigan cocked her head.

  “Miz Branigan, I read The Rambler enough to know you a damn good writer. I seen years you won all them Georgia Press awards and maybe even a national or two if I ’member rightly.”

  Branigan shrugged an assent.

  “But that girl actin’ like she’s the Diane Sawyer of Georgia. So I have to wonder, ‘What she got up her sleeve?’ Tha’s all.” He returned his attention to his soup and cornbread.

  “You got all that from walking her to my car Sunday night?”

  “And ridin’ to her sor’ity house.”

  “I know you’re observant, but I can’t imagine she was throwing off that many vibes.”

  He put down his spoon. “Miz Branigan, what you think is the No. 1 require-ment for a reporter?”

  “Accuracy. Fairness.”

  “No, before that. What’s the thin’ makes you want to be a reporter in the firs’ place?”

  “Curiosity, I guess.”

  “Zactly! So you and this Anna hear somebody next door in her office on a Sunday night when ain’t nobody supposed to be there. Then a homeless guy jumps out of the bushes and grabs you. Then you pretty much accuse her of meetin’ with the daddy of one of them dead girls. And what does she say?”

  “She didn’t say much of anything.”

  “Zactly! She didn’t say nothin’. She didn’t ax no questions. Either she ain’t got the curiosity God gave a cat, or she so focused on somethin’ else she can’t see what’s in front of her.”

  Branigan sat back. “You amaze me. You don’t look at what’s there, but at what’s not there.”

  He shrugged.

  “I remember last summer, you kept harping on about the respect that wasn’t there for Vesuvius Hightower’s painting,” she continued. “And you were right. That’s what led you to the answer. And, incidentally, to pricing Vesuvius’s work out of my range.” She smiled. “But anyway, about Anna. You may be onto something. When I first met her, she was eager to watch me and Jody work. Later she became almost dismissive.”

  “Like the cat ate the canary, my granny used to say.”

  Branigan grinned. She found Malachi’s mixture of sophistication and rural-speak hilarious. He was like no one she’d ever met – a homeless man with deep wells of knowledge and intuition.

  “I’ve felt all along that she knows something about Maylene and Ralph that she’s not saying,” she mused. “Before I went into her office that night, I saw her messing with two phones. She slipped one inside her purse. I think it might have been Ralph’s with the video.”

  “And since she knew Miz Maylene…” Malachi trailed off. He changed tack abruptly. “What kinda purse she carry, that Miz Anna?”

  “Uh oh. What are you thinking?”

  “You never mind. What kinda purse?”

  “Black pebbled leather with a single shoulder strap. They’re called hobo bags or slouch purses. They hold a lot of stuff.”

  “Hobo bags, huh? You think Jericho Road’s coat room might have one?”

  Branigan look puzzled. “No, but the Salvation Army thrift store might.”

  Malachi pulled a pencil and piece of paper from his coat pocket, and scribbled a note.

  Branigan went back to her original concern. “I think she’s trying to write a blockbuster story for this Saturday’s Swan Song.”

  “Then one way or ’nother, we gonna know what she up to.”

  Branigan thought Malachi looked worried at the prospect.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Liz, Liam and Charlie sat down to a dinner of pork loin, mashed potatoes, French-style green beans with almonds, and sourdough rolls.

  “Comfort food for the day you’ve had, my dear,” said Liz, kissing the top of her daughter’s head. “Or rather, the winter you’ve had.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” Charlie spooned a huge helping of potatoes onto her plate. “This hits the spot.”

  Charlie and Liam had spent the afternoon on the phone with Detective Scovoy. He’d arranged for Charlie to visit a therapist the next morning – one who specialized in hypnosis. Nearing retirement, Dr Mellicent Hayes was easing out of her private practice and spending time at the counseling center at Rutherford Lee. She agreed to fit Charlie in between student clients mid-morning. Both the detective and Liz planned to be in the waiting room.

  After dinner the Delaneys turned on the gas fire in their living room – Liz’s one modern concession in renovating the early twentieth-century house – and settled in to watch Forrest Gump on HBO. They’d seen it before, lots of times in fact. But Liz and Charlie cried every time the young Jenny threw stones at the house where she grew up, and Forrest said, “Sometimes, I guess there just aren’t enough rocks.”

  As the feather floated away at film’s end, Charlie wiped her eyes. “Dad, do you think that’s what happened to Tiffany Lynn?”

  Liam had lost the thread of her thinking. “Do I think what happened?”

  “Sexual abuse.”

  “Oh. Yes, it’s possible. I think most of the homeless people we see – women and men – have sexual trauma in their backgrounds.”

  “And they never get over it?”

  “I wouldn’t put it like that exactly. But sure, sometimes it can victimize a person, sort of set them up for repeated incidents of abuse. Prevent the development of self-esteem. Make them define themselves by their relationships. That’s where we run into trouble getting people away from their abusers.”

  “Like Maylene?”

  “Like Maylene. We can see that a woman has so much potential, talent, intelligence, you name it. But if she can’t see it, we’ll talk ourselves blue in the face and make no headway.”

  “But the story in The Rambler about Maylene made it sound like she wasn’t like that. She was smart, acted in theater, worked with the homeless. Her family sounded normal. What would make her stay with that loser Ralph?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I still have no idea what was going on there. We do occasionally see people from middle-class or even wealthy backgrounds who want nothing to do with their families. You never know what’s really under the surface. But the fact that Maylene told her family she was in Atlanta rather than homeless in Grambling sounds like she deliberately misled them. Whether that was out of shame, or fear that they’d force her to come home, I have no idea.”

  “It’s sad, isn’t it, Dad? For people to live like that.”

  “Oh, yeah, Charlie. Very sad.”

  The hearse was inches from Charlie’s driver’s side door, flying down the road beside her Jeep. Next to her, Janie Rose was splayed against the seat, her face like white plaster.

  Suddenly the hearse jerked toward the driver’s side, and Charlie tried to scream as the Jeep sheered over the embankment, rolling over and over. She tried again to yell and couldn’t. But someone was. Piercingly. And in the fogginess that surrounded her brain, she realized it was Janie Rose. Then the Jeep made one final roll and slammed into something, and all was silent. The silence was even worse than the screams.

  Charlie was trapped. She felt herself trying to wake up, to open her eyes, to move an arm or a leg, but she seemed to
be pinned under a great weight. Then she heard the far-off jangle of bells that came closer and closer until a sleigh passed the Jeep’s cracked window. Outside, there was snow on the ground – and a white-haired Mrs Claus, wearing a red suit trimmed in white fur, drove a team of reindeer. Atop each reindeer was a giggling, tiny elf in a shiny green suit, turned-up slippers and a pointy green hat.

  Charlie tried to scream again, and this time she must have managed some sound, for someone was touching her shoulder, shaking her, trying to break through the heaviness that was on her chest.

  Charlie woke with an ear-splitting shriek, flailing against Liz’s grasp.

  “Charlie, Charlie, it’s all right,” her mother said. “You’re having a bad dream.”

  She looked around wildly, heart pounding, not entirely sure Mrs Claus and those elves weren’t there in her dresser mirror, behind her mother in the darkened room. Gradually, her heart slowed. But she had no desire to return to sleep, to risk the possibility of sliding back into the dream. She sat up.

  “What was it?” asked Liz.

  “I was back in the Jeep,” Charlie said slowly. “But I actually had the wreck this time. The Jeep flipped and we hit the tree. And then there was snow on the ground and Mrs Claus and the sleigh and the reindeer and the elves were right outside my window.” She glanced at her bedroom window as if a sleigh might appear there. She shuddered. “Mom, I know it sounds crazy. But it seemed so real.”

  “That’s how dreams are.”

  “Do you think this therapist can get rid of them?”

  “I sure hope so.” She smiled and hugged her daughter. “Otherwise nobody’s going to get much sleep around here.”

  Liz finished a rather fitful night in Charlie’s double bed. They slept past 8 o’clock and had a leisurely breakfast of oatmeal and toast, dawdling over coffee and passing The Rambler back and forth. Together they did the paper’s word puzzles, trying to beat each other to the answers.

  They left in time to be at Rutherford Lee’s counseling center well before Charlie’s 10:30 appointment. The center had its own private, pillared entrance on one end of an academic building that housed the history, psychology, English and foreign language departments. Inside its comfortable waiting room, Charlie and Liz joined Detective Scovoy.

  Charlie was too nervous to read the Time magazine she picked up; she discarded it in favor of the week’s Swan Song. She scanned an editorial page rant about the administration’s refusal to allow guns on campus. Hang tough, she silently encouraged administrators. Her eye skittered to a column at the bottom of the same page on recent actions taken by the Honor Council. A thumbnail photograph of the author, Dr Sylvia Eckhart, showed an attractive woman with a sleek white bob framing her face.

  Suddenly, Charlie’s breathing quickened, and with a shaking hand she tugged on Detective Scovoy’s sleeve.

  He leaned toward her. “Charlie, what is it?”

  Charlie pointed to the picture. “I don’t have to be hypnotized,” she said, pointing. “There’s Mrs Claus. I remember now.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Branigan and Jody got soft drinks from the vending machine at the Law Enforcement Center as they awaited a statement on officers’ interrogation of Sylvia Eckhart. Jody had already learned that Dr Eckhart was not being immediately charged but was being interviewed as a “person of interest”. He wouldn’t have gotten that much had he and Branigan not arrived at the LEC on the heels of Scovoy and the professor. They had Charlie to thank for that.

  The police had sequestered Dr Eckhart for two hours, during which time a gray-suited woman entered the room. The reporters exchanged glances, knowing that the presence of an attorney raised the possibility of charges. The two were discussing which one should remain and which should return to the newsroom when the door flew open and a grim-faced Detective Scovoy emerged. “The PIO will have a statement at 2 o’clock,” he said, referring to the department’s public information officer. He strode off down the hallway.

  By unspoken agreement, Jody followed the detective, and Branigan hurried to the parking lot to take up a position near Dr Eckhart’s Prius. She remained out of sight until she saw Dr Eckhart shake hands with her attorney. The lawyer hoisted her briefcase into a black BMW and left. Branigan stepped forward to intercept Dr Eckhart before she reached her car.

  “Branigan!” she said, visibly shaken to see her. “So you know?”

  Branigan didn’t know nearly as much as she’d like to, but hoped to learn more by pretending she did. So she nodded. “Charlie identified you as being at the wreck site. She said you came down the embankment and looked inside her car. Why didn’t you help her?”

  “I did! Who do you think called 911?”

  Branigan was startled. “You forced the girls off the road and then called for help?”

  “No! No! I wasn’t in the hearse. I came along minutes later and saw the wreck and called it in. The police checked my phone and verified it.”

  “But why didn’t you stay? And why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “Because I was afraid that exactly what has happened would happen. I’m being charged with accessory after the fact and obstruction of justice. My lawyer talked them into letting me turn myself in tomorrow morning.” She strangled back a sob. “I swear I didn’t hurt those girls. I was not in that hearse.”

  Branigan looked at her skeptically. “But you know who was.”

  Dr Eckhart shook her head. “No. I didn’t know it would come to this. How could I?”

  Crying in earnest now, Dr Eckhart got into her Prius and wheeled out of the parking lot. Branigan saw an unmarked Crown Victoria pull out of a spot on the far end and turn in the same direction.

  Branigan was waiting in the newsroom when Jody returned from the Law Enforcement Center. It turned out the police were being more cagey with information than Sylvia Eckhart had been. Jody suspected that the cops had gone along with her attorney’s request for a day to get her affairs in order in the hope that Dr Eckhart would lead them to the hearse driver.

  The reporters huddled with Bert Feldspar at the city editor’s desk. “I don’t have much on the record,” Jody admitted. “The police haven’t released the charges, since they don’t have Dr Eckhart in custody.”

  “We have to have their confirmation,” said Bert. “They might have been trying to scare the professor and won’t actually charge her. We’d end up running a retraction.” He turned to his computer. “Tell me the minute you get something solid, and we’ll run with it.”

  Branigan and Jody retreated to the conference room and shut the door. “Let’s not worry about what we can run for a minute,” she said, “and think about what might have happened. Do you know what Dr Eckhart told the police?”

  “I got this off the record from a uni, not from Scovoy. She denied everything except stumbling upon the accident. They verified that she did call 911, but she was gone by the time the Georgia patrol got there. That’s why they know she’s hiding something. It doesn’t make sense that she’d leave the scene, especially since she’s a colleague of Ina Rose Carlton. I mean, what kind of monster leaves a friend’s daughter like that?”

  “Why does she say she did?”

  “Something about fear of being blamed.”

  “But why would she be blamed, if she’s sitting there in a friggin’ red Prius?”

  Jody shrugged. “If she thought both girls were dead, there’d be no one to say it was a hearse and not a Prius that ran them off the road. Maybe the person in the hearse threatened her with that scenario.”

  “That’s an interesting idea.” Branigan paused. “But say it’s not fear of being blamed. Is there anything else that could explain why Dr Eckhart would follow the hearse and then protect the driver?”

  When Jody was silent, she answered her own question. “Maybe she’s more afraid of the driver than she is of the police.”

&
nbsp; “Or if not fear, then what?” Jody followed her line of thinking. “Loyalty? Didn’t you say she was a Kappa Ep? Could she be protecting them? The hearse is theirs. They’re the most obvious candidates. Greeks gone wild.”

  Branigan ignored the quip. “But Jones Rinehart dates Maggie Fielding, who’s also a Kappa Ep. So he would have easy access to the hearse key too. And he used to date Janie Rose Carlton.”

  “Have you given up any idea of Harry Carlton’s enemies or creditors having a hand in it?” Jody asked. “I can’t imagine what connection they’d have with Dr Eckhart. Unless maybe she knew the Carltons before they ever came to Georgia? Where is she from originally?”

  “I don’t think I know. She said she went to the University of Michigan. Maybe that’s a place to start.”

  “And let’s not forget Ralph. He’s still a prime suspect for Maylene’s murder. So if the two deaths are connected…”

  “You’re giving me a headache,” Branigan said.

  * * *

  Back at her desk Branigan placed calls to her grandparents, the University of Michigan and the national Kappa Epsilon Chi sorority as she began to gather information on Sylvia Eckhart. Maybe something in her background would trigger an explanation for her bizarre behavior.

  Mid-afternoon the receptionist rang her. “Catherine Reisman and Emma Ratcliffe to see you.”

  “Really? Send them up.” Branigan walked to the elevator to meet the girls. Catherine wore a camel-colored fedora pulled low over her auburn bangs that didn’t hide the angry contusions on her face as much as she probably hoped. Emma had an arm around her, as if to steady her friend.

  Both girls wore knee-length overcoats over tapered slacks and boots. Emma was the first to speak. “Miss Powers, the police have questioned Catherine, but they won’t tell us anything. We read your story about her attack this morning. We were hoping you could tell us if they’re close to finding who did this.”

  Branigan ushered the girls through the newsroom and watched her colleagues’ eyes follow them, openly inquisitive. Malachi had a point. Reporters were a curious bunch, and didn’t bother hiding it. She started to invite Jody to join them, then thought the girls might be more forthcoming without him. She wanted to use this time to do more than share what she knew.