“I left them on my dash,” he said with a smirk. At least it looked like a smirk to her. “They seemed to be intimidating Mrs. Rogers, and since I wanted her cooperation, I thought maybe I should leave them off.”
“You never seem to worry about intimidating me.”
“You’re not easily intimidated. Now, show me those shovels.”
“Winnie needs to eat,” Jesse said, returning to her original train of thought before she was distracted by the incredibly dark eyes that were normally hidden from her view. “And she needs to take a nap before she drops. Most widows would have been in hysterics long before now.”
“I don’t mind her eating. But you will not ply her with alcohol, and you will not send her up to sleep before I get a chance to talk to her.”
“But…”
Jesse struggled for a reasonable argument, but since they had done exactly what he had described with Bliss the day her husband died, there really wasn’t a reasonable argument.
“I can take her in as a material witness and hold her for as long as it takes to get the answers I want,” he warned. “Don’t force me to take measures we’d both rather I didn’t.”
“God, you can be such a bastard!”
“Just doing my job, ma’am.” He smirked again, and this time there was no doubt it was a smirk. “Now show me the damned shovels.”
Thoroughly angry, Jesse whirled away from him and stood staring at the row of tools while she struggled to calm down. Concentrating on deep, regular breaths, she located the two that were out of place. “This one.” She pointed without quite touching the big shovel among the smaller ones. “And this one.” She indicated the smaller shovel that was next to a large one, which was next to a rake.
“Are you sure?”
This time, she smirked, but she kept her face averted so that only she knew. “They’re in order by size. Spade first.” She indicated the narrow trenching spade that was the closest to the corner. Then she motioned to the old No. 0 that probably went back generations and most likely would have been a lady’s shovel used in flower beds. Last, she pointed to the No. 4 next to the rake.
“See, this is bigger, heavier. The head on the shovel is broader and longer. It will move more dirt and weigh more when you’re using it. They’re different sizes and weights for different purposes, and Winnie keeps them in order. Somebody who didn’t know what they were doing put them back, probably without even noticing they were different.”
“Okay, I take back all my doubts. You really are a serious gardener. You explained that with a reverence that I have to respect even if I don’t understand it. Oh, Bob, hey.” Joe turned to greet the arriving crime scene tech. “There are two shovels here that are out of place and were probably used to make that hole out there.”
“Are you done with me?” Jesse asked, still smarting. She was too tired and hungry to have much patience with anybody at the moment.
“Not quite. Hold up, and I’ll walk with you to the house. It’s this one…” He pointed to the large shovel that was out of place among the small. “And this one.” His hand hovered just above the small one among the large. “Got that?”
“Yes, sir. This one, and this one.” Bob took each shovel, one at a time, in a gloved hand and held it aloft, then nearly dropped them both as a scream of combined fury and pain erupted from across the yard.
Chapter Twenty-One
“What the hell?” Joe demanded, whirling toward the sound.
Already in motion, Jesse called, “Sounds like Winnie found something she didn’t like.”
“With a scream like that, it had better be another dead body.” Catching up with her, he slipped his hand under her elbow and slowed her down. “No need to run. That scream had more ‘pissed off’ than ‘scared’ in it.”
“That’s what has me worried,” Jesse said. Switching from a jog to a fast walk, she still found herself hurrying to keep up with his long-legged strides. “Winnie’s really attached to her house. If somebody got in there and tore it up, that just might be the last straw. She’s already lost her husband today. She doesn’t need anything more.”
“Ex-husband,” Joe corrected. “And from what I understand, they had been separated for more than a year. That’s a lot of healing time.”
“Unless you happen to still be in love.” Almost to the house, Jesse could hear sobs coming from inside, and she wasn’t sure which she dreaded more, the screaming or the crying.
“Wait.” Without warning, he stopped. The hand on Jesse’s arm tightened, pulling her to a halt along with him and using her forward momentum to swing her around to face him. “Are you telling me that she was still in love with him?”
“Whoa, that was slick,” Jesse said, almost dizzy as she found herself suddenly looking into the dark intensity of his eyes.
“Cut the cute crap,” he snapped. His gaze shut out everything else as he loomed over her. “Are you telling me she was still in love with him?”
“What do you mean ‘cute crap’?” Jesse automatically snapped back at him. “That is so irritating. Can’t you just talk to me one person to another?”
Without releasing the tension on her arm, he threw his head back and let his breath out in a heavy sigh. When he looked down at her again, his gaze was less intense and a lot more impatient.
“Look, Jesse,” he began, clearly irritated with having to explain himself, “this is a murder investigation. And almost everybody I’m questioning is a murder suspect, since the only victims around here are the ones who are already dead. Now, do not ask me if you are a suspect, and please, answer my damned question.”
Knowing when she had pushed a point far enough, Jesse took a minute to remember the damned question, and then said, “Yes, at least, I think so. Winnie hasn’t actually said that she still loved him, but it’s definitely the feeling I get when she talks about him. But that’s no big deal. I mean, Roy Lee had been trying to reconcile, and Winnie kept refusing. So even if she did still love him, it apparently hadn’t made any difference.”
“Love always makes a difference,” Joe said quietly. “When you dig deep enough, love makes a difference.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing.”
He shrugged. “You do this job long enough, you get to see a lot of good things that turn bad.”
The back door of Winnie’s house swung open and Vivian stepped out onto the small porch. She fixed the two of them with a hard stare and cleared her throat for emphasis.
“Oops, we’re in trouble now,” Jesse said. She extricated her arm from his grasp and dutifully headed in Vivian’s direction, hurrying to the steps of the porch. “Is it bad?” Jesse asked, looking up as she felt Joe arrive behind her.
“Someone tore the house apart, looking for something I guess.” Vivian stood over them, unsmiling, like a mother surveying her wayward children. “The missing bone, I would suspect. Winnifryd’s wandering around inside gathering up pictures and knickknacks, holding them in her arms and crying like someone who seriously needs a valium.”
Joe made a sound that resembled a grunt. Jesse glanced over her shoulder to see that he was wincing.
Vivian held up her hands. “Don’t look at me. I’m not grabbing that stuff out of her hands, and you’re the one who decided to take a Sunday stroll over here from the barn.”
The sheriff’s wince turned to a sheepish grin, an expression Jesse would have taken bets that he was incapable of. “You are entirely correct,” he said. “I have been remiss.” He climbed the short set of steps and bowed as he passed Vivian on the porch. “I guess I’d better get in there and get the situation under control. Thank you for your assistance to this point.”
Vivian turned toward him and laid a restraining hand on his arm. “Be gentle. Her world is falling apart, and at the moment, she appears to be going with it.”
“Yes, ma’am, I understand.” Joe placed his hand over hers. “Believe it or not, I’m not always a hard-ass.”
“This would be a good time
to prove it,” she answered, giving his arm a squeeze. Her mouth turned up in a half smile that was a cross between stern and coquettish.
The sheriff’s tan flushed slightly as he withdrew his arm and continued into the house.
“Really, Viv?” Jesse asked with a shake of her head, to which Vivian laughed.
“Well, someone needs to flirt with him, and if you refuse to…”
“Hush!” Jesse was up the steps in a flash. “Don’t talk about that right now. In fact, don’t talk about that at all.”
Vivian waved the words away with a flutter of her hand. “I stand by what I said earlier. It’s obvious the man would be all over you with any encouragement at all. And neither one of you is getting any younger.”
Jesse cupped her hands around the nubby, lightweight wool of Vivian’s designer jacket just below the shoulders. “Vivian, we just watched a dead man get hauled out of a tree and found a hole in the ground where another dead body was until this morning. The man really is not in the mood for flirting right now. And at the moment, the only thing I can work up any enthusiasm for is a flank steak.”
Vivian arched her brows expressively and let her breath out in a huff. “Point taken. But we will return to this subject once this murder has been solved. Now,” she said, shifting her focus to the present, “if somebody tore that house apart looking for the missing femur, but they didn’t bother to hide the fact that they were here, what does that mean?”
“They could have been looking for something else,” Jesse suggested. “But either way…” She stopped for a moment, trying not to make any faces while she thought, but twisting her mouth and frowning in spite of her best efforts. “Well, there would only be two reasons I can come up with. Either there was something there that they needed, or they really were looking for the bone.”
“Let’s go with the bone,” Vivian answered, “since they could have noticed it was missing when they retrieved the rest of the skeleton. But why would it have been so important to find it, but not bother to hide what they were doing?”
“Because something can be learned from the bone that they don’t want known.” Jesse spoke slowly, thinking through what she was saying. “Bones can tell you the age, the sex, and the DNA of the person they belong to. Anything else?”
“Well, if it’s a missing person and their DNA is in a database, then the police would have the identity even without the rest of the body,” Vivian said, growing excited. “Or if they had other DNA to match it to, they could identify family members through common DNA markers.”
“Oh, my goodness, that means they’ll want a sample from Winnie to compare to since it was her backyard the bone was found in.” Jesse was still thinking furiously. “And Roy Lee’s for the same reason. And while it’s not unusual to have a shovel in your vehicle, still…”
“When I had a bigger car, I carried one in my trunk,” Vivian agreed. “But only when I was planning to use it. Did you have one in your truck this morning?”
“No, so you have to wonder why Roy Lee had two shovels and a tarp in his pickup when he died. Do you think we need to check on Winnie?”
“I think we’ll let the sheriff worry about that awhile longer,” Vivian said with a smile. “And I think we should go see what Bob’s doing right now.”
“Oh, good idea.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The afternoon sky had barely begun to dim when Vivian, Jesse and Winnie left their empty dinner plates on the kitchen counter and, joined by the recent arrivals, Sophia Camden and Connie Oliver, settled themselves on the terrace outside the kitchen. A decanter of Kentucky bourbon sat on the patio table in front of Winnie. For the others, a pitcher of daiquiris sat beside it.
“Luckily, I persuaded Matt that we didn’t need a man’s viewpoint this evening,” Connie said. “He does send his condolences, however, Winnie.”
Winnie nodded and took a sip from her highball glass. “Matt’s a great guy. Tell him I said ‘hi.’ Jesse, what did the sheriff mean when he reminded you not to get me drunk?”
Vivian let out a throaty chuckle that might have been a giggle coming from anyone else. “The night my niece’s husband died, we got her, shall I say, relaxed and put her to bed before the sheriff could question her a second time. She was exhausted, it was the right thing to do, and I’d do it again, but he doesn’t look at it that way. He still seems to have the opinion we were hiding her from him.”
“Were you?” Connie asked, not having been there that night to know firsthand.
“A little. Maybe,” Vivian conceded. Then she grinned and took another sip of her daiquiri. “We were all a little tipsy by then.”
“So, he’s coming by tonight?” Sophia asked, looking to her daughter for an answer.
Jesse nodded and took a sip of the frozen concoction her mother had been responsible for making. “Soon, probably. He’s a determined cuss, so I doubt that we can avoid it.”
“He followed me all over the damned house,” Winnie grumbled. “Why didn’t he ask his questions then? And why did that guy stick that Q-tip thing in my mouth? That was just weird.”
“Probably waiting until he has all the information from everyone else,” Jesse said, answering the first question. “And the swab was for a DNA sample.” She didn’t bother to explain what she suspected that was for.
From across the table, Vivian caught Jesse’s eye, raised her brows and jerked her head in a subtle motion toward Winnie.
“A DNA sample for what?” Winnie asked. Her eyelids drooped as she poured herself another two fingers of bourbon in her glass.
From across the table, Vivian stared pointedly at Jesse and repeated her brow raising and head jerking while Sophia watched Vivian, frowning, then turned to Jesse, looked at Winnie, and back to Jesse. Before things got any more obvious, Jesse took a deep breath and reluctantly began her own questioning, not at all sure how Winnie would react.
“Winnie, Bob—the guy who took the swab from you—said that when they took soil samples where the bone had been, they found a lot of wood chips, bark and insect activity that they would normally find on something like the floor of a forest. Had that been a compost pile or something before you decided to dig there?”
For an instant, Winnie looked confused and her eyes went blank. Then she blinked and thought began to return to her expression. “Uh, kind of. There was a wood rack there. We stored firewood there for a couple of years.”
“We?” Jesse prodded.
“Roy Lee. He moved it from the back of the yard to there so it would be closer to the house. Then, after I used all the wood this past winter, my dad moved the rack back to where it used to be. He said it was stupid to have a pile of wood in the middle of the yard. It got in the way when he mowed.”
“I’m confused,” Connie said. “I thought you and Roy Lee were divorced.” Then she glanced at Jesse and grimaced. “Sorry. Am I interrupting? I’ll be quiet.”
Jesse smiled at her and shook her head. She was glad for the interruption, but she didn’t want to make things harder for Winnie, and she couldn’t really explain what was going on.
“When did Roy Lee do that?” Jesse asked.
“Just before we separated. So it will be, what? Two years this July?” Winnie frowned, then nodded. “Yeah, July. I came home from work one day and there was this big rack of wood in the middle of the backyard, in the middle of the summer, piled to overflowing. Daddy was fit to be tied once Roy Lee moved out, ’cause he didn’t want to have to mow around it. But Roy Lee and his brothers kept the rack full of wood all through the next winter. And they kept the grass mowed around it, too, ’cause there was like the thickest, lushest, greenest grass you’ve ever seen all around it until winter killed it off.”
Sophia’s eyes grew round. Connie’s lower jaw went slack until she caught herself and covered her shock with admirable self-control. Vivian’s eyes sparkled with excitement, which she concealed by draining her daiquiri glass and pouring herself another before conveying her approval to Jes
se with a smile.
“Okay,” Jesse said, thinking that nothing said “decomposition” like lush, green grass suddenly appearing from nowhere.
She paused to take a sip of her own drink to wet the suddenly dry throat that accompanied her pounding heart, and the one swallow tasted so good, she took a second. “Gosh, Mom, you outdid yourself with this batch. These are good.” General murmurs of agreement around the table led to refills amid Sophia’s blushing acceptance of praise.
More relaxed, Jesse began again. “Okay, Winnie, to recap, it was a little more than eighteen months ago that Roy Lee moved a giant pile of wood into the middle of your backyard, where it stayed until you emptied the rack of wood just recently. Then, your father moved the rack to where it used to be kept, which was at the back of the yard out of the way. And because there was a bare spot where the wood had been sitting for a year and a half, you decided to put a vegetable bed there, and that’s when you dug up the femur. Where the wood had been for a year and a half. And where there is now a giant hole where somebody else dug up something just this morning.”
“Uh, yeah,” Winnie agreed with an uncomfortable looking frown. “That’s about it.”
“Okay, now, Winnie.” Jesse took another giant drink from the icy glass in front of her. She could feel her cheeks burning and her heart had begun to pound again, more from dread than excitement this time.
She really hated what was coming next. That is, if there was anything coming next. It could be that she would ask the question and Winnie would say, nope, she didn’t remember a thing, and that would be that. She looked up and found Vivian’s gaze locked on her with gentle understanding and encouragement.
Sliding her focus from Jesse to Winnie, Vivian smiled and asked gently, “Winnifryd, dear, can you happen to think of anyone… anyone at all… who moved away or just dropped out of sight during that summer, a year and a half ago? Anyone who just wasn’t around anymore? Anyone’s wife or girlfriend who left town and didn’t come back? Anyone who’s boyfriend ran off with someone in the middle of the night, and neither one was heard from again? Anyone at all who just disappeared?”
Murder Most Thorny (Myrtle Grove Garden Club Mystery Book 2) Page 15