The jail was completely empty, except for Melva. Cody figured the rain took the aggravation out of people, and they stayed home till the skies cleared. That was all right with him, because it had been way too busy for his taste.
He stopped in front of the cell. She was reading a romance magazine from a stack someone had brought her. “Melva?”
She glanced up. “Can I leave now?”
“No. I think you’re gonna be here for a long while. I know about you, from the time you were born in Pea Valley to New Boston. I know about your marriages and your kids. I know how people died. I know about the insurance policy you have on Leland that you aren’t going to collect on. You killed him, didn’t you Melva? He was walking to Ike’s house because you wouldn’t give him the keys and you ran him over with Marty’s old truck. No one would suspect it, parked right back where it was, but you missed your mark and I saw where it had been moved.”
She giggled and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t drive.”
“Yes, you do. You don’t have a license, and no one ever saw you drive, but you know how. What happened? The poison wasn’t working fast enough so you had to run him down?”
Her eyes flashed, and he knew he was right.
He left and sent Deputy White to check the house and barn for arsenic.
He came back three hours later with two bottles and several jars of home-canned jellies and stewed prunes full of the stuff, as was Leland himself.
He was too tough to die from it.
Four hours later, in the same room where her son confessed to his participation in the murders of two men, a sociopath named Melva Hale stuck her tongue out and wrote of how she’d killed men, women, and babies because they annoyed her.
Chapter Ninety-five
I tell you what, a lot of things popped around here at the same time. The phone rang with all kinds of good news, after we heard some bad news first.
Uncle James called to tell us that Grandpa was in the hospital in Kingman. The doctor explained to Miss Becky the infection in there was one of the worst things that could have happened and it nearly killed him. They had to do some emergency surgery on his bullet wound and got it stopped, but barely, by using that thick white penicillin that hurt so bad when they gave it to me in a shot. They gave him gallons of the stuff, the way they talked.
Uncle Cody bought Miss Becky a plane ticket, and she flew out there to meet Uncle James, Norma Faye, and Aunt Ida Belle in Flagstaff, then they drove on out to see to Grandpa. Everybody, including that fartknocker Cale Westlake, got a trip out West but me and Uncle Cody. Even though I did the right thing all around, I had to stay with him at night after I got home from school.
It wasn’t fair.
Grandpa took a while to get better, but after a week, they let him come home. He still had drains in him, though, and once he was back, he kept having to take even more penicillin for a long time.
The first week of December was cold, and Sunday dinner was more like Thanksgiving. The house was full with folks laughing and talking. When Miss Becky called everyone to eat, I saw two more plates set at the corners of the table with cane-bottom chairs pulled up there. They were for me and Pepper. That’s when I knew things had changed and the adults didn’t think of us as little kids anymore.
We sat down at our places and Grandpa was filling his plate with mashed potatoes and peas. Though his stomach was better, the doctors still had him on soft foods for a while, but I could tell it was aggravating him, because he dearly loved Miss Becky’s fried chicken.
Uncle Cody took a chicken leg off the platter. “Anna’ll be back to work after Christmas.”
Grandpa salted his potatoes. “She’s the best thing you’ve done since you took the sheriff’s job.”
Everyone laughed and Uncle Cody passed the beans. “Oh, like solving the murder of two strangers here in town, and getting convictions on Melva Hale for all those murders through the years.”
“I believe Anna had a hand in most of that, and Top,” Grandpa said. I felt myself blushing, but appreciated his acknowledgement that I’d done the right thing.
“I can’t believe that crazy old woman confessed to killing a bunch of people, and even her own grandbaby that she said was born dead.” Norma Faye came around with the tea pitcher.
“They said Leland would have died anyway, without being run over, because his body had enough arsenic in it to kill a normal person.” Grandpa picked a biscuit apart. “Her problem was she got impatient, and that’s what finally caught up with her.”
“Well, Marty’ll be in prison for life. Like mother, like son.”
Miss Becky and Aunt Ida Belle kept checking on Pepper like she was gonna slip out a window and be gone again. I couldn’t stand it anymore and figured as long as I was an adult at the table, or almost an adult, anyways, I could start my own conversation. “Hey Pepper, so how was your trip?”
We hadn’t much talked about her running away. I figured at first she’d talk about it, but she didn’t have much to say.
Everyone at the table got quiet and I wondered if I’d made a mistake. She shrugged and locked her fingers together over her empty plate. “Living on the road wasn’t much fun. We hitched quite a bit, but we walked a lot, too.”
The silence after that stretched for a while, and I figured the old folks at the table were thinking way too hard.
“Did you get enough to eat?”
“We were lucky, we had Cale’s money for a while.” She stopped, remembering where the money came from, so she plowed on ahead to get out of that particular row. “But a lot of the kids had to panhandle, or beg for food, if they couldn’t find anything out behind the restaurants. We did better, but we were still hungry most of the time.”
“What’d you think of it?” I cut my eyes toward Miss Becky, realizing she was nudging the conversation toward the catch pen she favored.
Pepper saw the chute Miss Becky was herding her toward, but wouldn’t have any of it. “The worst part is all that free love crap. I had to slap some jaws to get those guys to leave me alone.”
Aunt Ida Belle covered her mouth in shock, but Uncle Cody threw his head back and laughed. “Atta girl! Keep ’em at a distance.”
Miss Becky wouldn’t quit. “What did you learn?”
All those strong-willed women were after the answers they needed, and so I backed out to listen.
Pepper gave up and gave them what they wanted. I think she was wanting to tell them how she felt, and that the whole thing had been a mistake. It was just the opening she needed. “While I was gone, I realized that things are about the same no matter where you go.” She ran a thumb up and down her sweating tea glass. “You know, this place isn’t as bad as I thought, in some ways. Most everybody here at least tries to take care of one another.”
“Folks should be that way everywhere,” Miss Becky said, satisfied by what she heard.
“Well, it kicked in with Cale.” Grandpa dipped a spoonful of beans. “I’ve never seen such a change in a person. He’s cut his hair and took a job up at the old folks home in Chisum. They say he’s doing a good job there, taking care of them that’s worst off. I hear he’s started working at the hospital some, too. Says he wants to make a doctor when he’s grown.”
“Praise the Lord.” Miss Becky held a hand skyward.
They were getting close to following a different trail, but I wanted some answers to things that I didn’t understand. “It was a good thing you left, though.” Pepper raised her eyebrows at me. “John T. was looking for you, and if you hadn’t gone, he might have done something bad.”
Aunt Ida Belle pursed her mouth. “We don’t need to talk about that.”
“Top’s right.” Uncle Cody gave me a wink. “John T. was up to no good. He was the worst of the bunch, and I don’t doubt he’d have hurt Pepper. It’s good that she got out of the line of fire for a while until we fi
gured it all out. I hate for any man to die, but that one was a rabid dog, and there’s only one thing to do with them. You put ’em down. Like Ned says, some folks just need killin’.”
“Those others will do their time in jail.” Grandpa was ready to eat, but all the talk had us stalled for a minute. “Marty’s just like his mama, and I believe he did a lot more meanness than we’ll ever know. Freddy, though, is another thing altogether. He’ll be all right when he gets out of Huntsville, and he’ll get a job where he won’t have to talk much. ”
“Bless his heart.” Miss Becky finally quit fiddling around and sat down.
“Ned told us not all the folks y’all ran into was our kind of people.” Aunt Ida Belle remembered what Grandpa told us about his search for Pepper. “There was the young boy in Dallas that had something to do with women.…”
“That’d be a pimp,” Uncle Cody said, grinning.
“Well, I won’t speak such words, but from everything I heard, I believe I’ll stay right here where I know people.”
“Some of the ones you know, you can’t trust.” Uncle Cody glanced out the window, as if someone were coming up the drive to give us bad news.
Miss Becky finally took her seat. “Grandpa said the only light he saw while they were gone was the Indian woman who prayed for him in the backseat of the car.”
You couldn’t convince Grandpa it was an Indian woman, though. He swore up and down that it was Tom Bell who met them at the hospital to say a prayer. We all knew Mr. Tom was gone, but he said that right after they talked, he got easy and everything came together. Once he was in the emergency room, Uncle James called home to tell Miss Becky and he found out that Aunt Ida Belle and Norma Faye were with Pepper and only two hours away in a Flagstaff motel.
Miss Becky reached out and stroked Pepper’s long hair. “Honey, the world is full of dark places, but the light is here, in this place, with us. We’re thankful that you’re home.”
I saw that the conversation drifted away from what I wanted to know about Pepper’s trip, but that’s how adult conversations go. “You think that Crow feller will ever show up?”
Grandpa shook his head. “He’s a drifter, a travelin’ man.”
“He was a liar, a thief, and as sorry as the day is long.”
“Ida Belle, you weren’t there.” Uncle James motioned for her to be quiet. “You weren’t there. Crow didn’t do right by us, but at the same time, he got us close to Pepper and in a roundabout way, saved Dad.”
I’d heard bits and pieces of what happened in the desert, but they didn’t talk about it much when us kids were around.
“Crow was sent to us,” Grandpa said. “I believe in a way that this family has a guardian angel watching over us, and sometimes that angel nudges people in our direction to do what needs doin’.”
I noticed Grandpa’s ice-blue eyes were moist and everyone got quiet around the table. “Crow was meant to be there at just the right time. What he did wasn’t right, but it wasn’t completely wrong, neither. We’d have helped him find that gal of his, if it had been around here under different circumstances. He used us, but if you look at it, we were using him to find Pepper, so there ain’t no fault. Now, bow your heads.”
Grandpa cleared his throat for the blessing, but Pepper interrupted. “Grandpa? Can I do it?”
Miss Becky smiled. “Why sure, hon.”
We bowed our heads.
“Dear Lord, thank you for this family.…”
After that, I didn’t pay much attention to what Pepper said, because it was the same one we all used. I was kinda glad, because it gave me more time to think about what was going on in my own head about her being home again…and that was the best part.
But I couldn’t get my new job off my mind, the one Uncle Cody got for me, taking care of Doc Daingerfield’s stupid monkey until he came back from Dallas, after Christmas.
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