Tall and lanky, Coleman walked up and rested a booted foot on the landscape timber that marked one boundary of my herb garden. I noted that his boots were worn but polished. Coleman was like that. He took care of things. It was one of his nicest qualities.
"Well, well, Sarah Booth, I didn't know you were a gardener."
Brushing my dirty hands on my jeans, I slowly rose. "I read Lawrence Ambrose's herb book. I thought I'd give it a try. He claims herbs are easy to grow."
Coleman's doubtful expression made me survey the ground I'd trenched by hand. It was still a little weedy.
"I'm delivering a message," he said. His blue eyes were hidden by shades, but his mouth let me know that it was, indeed, bad news.
"I'm flattered. Personal delivery by the top law enforcement official of Sunflower County," I said. "I'm all ears." My attempt at light-heartedness fell flat.
"Lee McBride is down at the jail. She's asking for you." His delivery was completely without inflection.
I was struck by a vivid memory of Eulalee McBride astride a powerful gray stallion, her red hair flying out behind her. She reminded me of a Viking princess. We'd known each other since first grade.
"What's up with Lee?" I tried to keep it casual.
"She's confessed to the murder of her husband, Kemper Fuquar."
Coleman acted like he was on Dragnet. Just the facts, ma'am.
"She killed her husband?" Repeating bad news is a Daddy's Girl tactic to elicit a response from the other party to see exactly what reaction is expected.
"She's confessed."
I sat down on the landscape timber by Coleman's leg and tried to think. Kemper Fuquar had never been on my list of favorite people. He was handsome and charming and entirely worthless. Sure, he looked like Zorro on a horse—dashing and stylish—but there had always been an edge to the man. I didn't run with the horsey set, so my exposure to Kemper had been limited. But the few times I'd been around him, he'd made me ill-at-ease.
"Did she say why she killed him?" I asked. The sun was hot on my back but I didn't want to move. Coleman faced the light, giving me the advantage. I felt I needed it. There was something distinctly odd in Coleman's stiff behavior.
"Lee needs a good lawyer. Maybe you can make her see that. She knows her rights, but she isn't paying much attention to them."
"Did she do it?" I asked him.
Coleman lifted his shades and finally looked at me. "It isn't my job to determine guilt or innocence. That's for a jury."
I knew then I was walking on delicate territory. I just didn't know why. Coleman was a professional, but he'd known Lee for as long as I had. Because of Lee's interest in horses and the outdoors, she'd been close friends with many of the boys, including Coleman.
"Lee confessed to the murder?" I asked, going back to a safe question to which I knew the answer.
"She came in this morning and turned herself in."
"How was he killed?"
Coleman cleared his throat. "It was a bad scene. She said she hit him in the head with something, but it's hard to tell."
"A head wound sounds pretty definite."
"Not after the body's been trampled by a fourteen-hundred-pound horse. There wasn't a solid bone left in him, Sarah Booth."
2
The Sunflower County jail jutted off the east side of the courthouse, an old wing of crumbling red bricks that was an architectural eyesore and looked incapable of holding any serious felons. I'd been inside once before, and I knew it wasn't a place of sunshine and light. Maybe that was what depressed me when I saw Lee sitting on the blue-ticked mattress. She'd always been a creature of the sun and of action, her red hair flaming and her green eyes burning. The woman in the cell had not heard us approach, and her posture registered defeat. Coleman hesitated a moment and then stepped back several feet.
"Eulalee," I said softly, wanting to alert her to my approach. She instantly straightened, once again becoming the undefeatable Viking princess, the slender girl who'd turned her back on inheriting a fortune to follow her dream.
"I knew you'd come, Sarah Booth. I don't have any money and I know a private investigator costs a good bit, but once I'm out of here, there's money coming down the road. By next year, Avenger will be bringing in the stud fees that will put Swift Level in the black." She hesitated a split second. "Can you wait?"
Her green eyes held worry and resignation. In the past few years I'd seen her only a handful of times, and I remembered that she'd been injured on almost every occasion. Horses were dangerous animals. Even when playing, they were capable of inflicting serious damage.
"Money isn't the issue," I lied. Money was always an issue with me as I hung on to Dahlia House by scheming plots and Irish luck. Still, I was more than a little surprised by Lee's blunt admission of financial straits. Lee ran a full-scale breeding and training operation at Swift Level, and it was the home of the very glamorous Chesterfield Hunt. The spit-and-polish, gleaming-white-fence elegance was splashed all over Cece Dee Falcon's society pages during hunt season. There were foxhunts, elaborate hunt breakfasts, hunt balls, hunt blessings—all requiring boodles of money.
"Money isn't the problem, here," Coleman said. He was at my side, and he spoke to me, not Lee. "The trouble is that Lee's confessed. You can't help her, Sarah Booth, as long as she insists that she killed him."
Lee looked at him, a long look that held regret and sorrow and sympathy. "I'd like to speak with Sarah Booth alone," she said.
"Talk to her, Lee, then shut up. And get a lawyer. A good one. Boyd Harkey might—"
"No lawyer! I can manage this myself. Sarah Booth is all I need. If she'll help me, I'll be okay."
Coleman's left eyebrow arched up half an inch and spoke volumes of his opinion on that. He said nothing, just turned and left the jail. Lee and I were alone.
"I've made a real mess of things," she said. With Coleman gone, she relaxed her shoulders and I saw how thin she'd become. She had always been lean, but her body was now so sharply defined that it looked as if her shoulder blades might cut through her blouse.
"You want to tell me about it?"
"There's not much to tell. Not much that will make a difference. Right now my concern is for Kip." She bit her lip hard enough to whiten it, and it was sheer willpower that dammed her tears. "I'm worried about her. Will you look out for her until I get out? It's a lot to ask, I know. She's a difficult child. She's smart. Sometimes I think she's too smart. And she's been through a lot. Way too much for a child her age. Could you take her, just for a while?"
"You want her to stay with me?" I wasn't known as the nurturing type.
"Just for a little while."
"Your folks—"
"I'm dead to them."
I'd heard that Lee was estranged from her parents. The gossip around town went that Lee had been disinherited shortly after she'd returned to Zinnia from Lafayette, Louisiana. She'd come home pregnant and married to Kemper. Shortly after Kip's birth, Auralee and Weston McBride had moved to Italy. They hadn't returned to Zinnia in fourteen years. Talk was that they'd never even seen their only granddaughter.
Lee's attention was focused on the jail floor, a dirty gray cement. "Kip needs someone to watch her. In many ways, she's a very special child. She's also angry, about a lot of things."
"I don't know anything about kids, Lee."
She finally looked at me. "With Kip, it wouldn't matter if you did. She's not exactly your average teenager." She paced to the end of the cell.
Baby-sitting a teenager wasn't exactly how I saw my career as a private eye developing. I was about to decline when she spoke again.
"There's no one else I can trust to do this. Kip needs someone tough. Someone she can't manipulate or run over. You can manage her, Sarah Booth. Will you?"
"Okay. Now tell me what happened," I said, glad to shift the focus, at least for a while.
Lee shrugged. "Kemper and I got into it last night. He was drinking and he slapped me around." She began pacing the ce
ll. "That was always the preliminary to a real beating. A few slaps. Then it could go either way. Sex or a beating. Lately Kemper seemed to favor beating me more than screwing me."
She swung around to face me, and I was stopped by the haunted aspect of her features. Shadows seemed to dance in her eyes. She shrugged. "I went down to the barn. Kip had told me that Avenger had a loose nail in a shoe. With Kemper drunk and mean, I decided to try to stay out of his way. He seldom went in the stallion barn. He hated Avenger, and the horse returned the sentiment."
Her voice was shaky, but she kept talking. "I had Avenger's front hoof in my hand. The nail was going to have to be snipped off and the shoe reset the next morning, when I could call the farrier. The nail was too dangerous to leave, so I had the nippers so I could cut the head off."
She wet her lips. "Avenger tensed, and I looked up. Kemper was standing in the barn aisle. He walked over to the wall and picked up a riding crop. Then that smile came over his face. The bastard looked right at me, smiling like he did when he was going to do something cruel, and he said, 'Come on out here. I'm going to beat you within an inch of your life, and then I'm going to work on that horse.' "
She turned away abruptly so that she spoke in profile to me. "Avenger was going crazy, so I stepped out into the aisle. He started hitting me across the back. During the past few weeks, he'd gotten meaner and meaner, but this time he acted like he meant to kill me." She rubbed her forehead with one hand, shielding her eyes. "I'm so ashamed for you to know how we lived. It was so sick."
"What happened, Lee? You have to tell me the truth, with as much detail as you remember."
"I ran into Avenger's stall, trying to get away from Kemper. He was afraid of Avenger. The horse hated him, and I thought if I could just get into the stall, Kemper would leave me alone. Avenger was rearing and pawing the air, kicking the walls. I remember that the hinges on the door gave this terrible shriek, and I wondered why Bud didn't hear the commotion and come down. I found out later he had a date."
"Bud?"
"He's the trainer." She looked up for a moment. "Sarah Booth, this has been going on for so long. You can't begin to imagine."
How true that was. I couldn't imagine the Eulalee McBride that I remembered from high school taking the first fingertip of abuse from any man. Lee had defied her parents, the school, and anyone else who tried to wrap her up in a neat little package. It was hard to believe that she'd lived with a man like Kemper for longer than five seconds.
"You went into Avenger's stall," I prompted.
She nodded and picked up the story. "Kemper was so angry that he came in after me. He was wild with rage. I'd never seen him so out of control. Anyway, Avenger lunged at him." She swallowed and took a deep breath.
"Go on," I urged her.
"Kemper grabbed my hair. He was slashing at me with the crop. I got free and he lunged at me again, but I was quicker. I stepped aside and tripped him. He crashed headfirst into the wall. He was drunk, and for a moment he just moaned and thrashed around in the shavings. Avenger was dancing and pawing." She finally looked into my eyes. "I tried to get out of the stall, to get away. Kemper grabbed my ankle. He jerked, and tried to pull my feet out from under me. It was all I could take. I had the nippers in my hand. I hit him. I brought the nippers down on his skull as hard as I could."
Up to the point of bashing his brains out, I'd held out a glimmer of hope for accidental death. I reached through the bars and touched Lee's arm. "Did you tell all of this to Coleman?"
"Every word of it."
"You need a lawyer, Lee. A good one."
She shook her head. "I don't want one. I'm going to represent myself."
Lee had always been headstrong. She refused to go to Ole Miss and pledge Phi Mu, the McBride heritage sorority. Her folks had withdrawn college money, so Lee had packed up her things and caught a bus to Lafayette, Louisiana. She got a scholarship and a job, and in three years earned a bachelor's degree in animal husbandry from Northwest Louisiana Tech.
Though the general consensus of our group was that Kemper was a charming scalawag and a scoundrel, he and Lee seemed happy. They had renovated the old Parker place, renaming it Swift Level, and Lee began breeding and training horses. "And they lived happily ever after" should have been the concluding line of their story, not "Rest in peace."
"Lee, Coleman is right. Boyd may be the only person who can help you."
"You can help me, Sarah Booth. You're the person I want."
"How?" I asked.
"By digging up all the dirt on Kemper you can find. I've got this all worked out. I'm going to plead not guilty, and my defense is going to be that Kemper needed killing. With your help, I can convince a jury of that. We can do it."
I saw the fire in her green eyes. She wasn't kidding. "That's not a defense," I said, holding on to the bars for support. "That's a good way to go straight down the road to Parchman prison. Maybe you could plead self-defense, get it reduced to manslaughter—Boyd might be able to get your confession suppressed."
"No! My confession stands! That bastard deserved killing, and I'll be tried on the merits of that. My only regret is that I didn't do it years ago. If I'd known how easy it was going to be I would have done it much sooner."
"Lee!" I reached through the bars and put my hand over her mouth. "Hush up! You keep talking like that and you'll die in prison."
She pulled away from my touch. "I can convince a jury that I did the right thing, but I need your help. I'm not going to be able to make bail, so I can't get out and gather evidence. You can do it, and keep an eye on Kip."
I was truly frightened for her. She had the look of Joan of Arc right before they torched the dry twigs at her feet. "This isn't about what a bastard Kemper was or wasn't. It's about killing someone. If you admit you did it because he deserved it, that could go as premeditated murder, Lee. That's murder one—that's life."
She came up to the bars and circled her hand over mine. "I didn't go into the barn planning to kill him, but I did it just the same. If I get the right jury, I can explain to them how years and years of abuse finally just piled up too high. It's been done before, and I've got the medical records to prove my case. They're filed in the barn." She walked to the back of the cell and stood under the bright glare of the fluorescent light.
I'd noticed before how thin she was. My gaze lingered on her back, the white of her thin cotton shirt, the outline of her bra, and the lack of any visible marks of a beating on her back.
Lee McBride was lying through her teeth.
The main house of Swift Level was at the hub of a circle of impressive buildings. The gracious old home had been built along the same lines as Dahlia House, and dated back before the War Between the States. Though Swift Level was older than my home, it was better maintained.
The front porch was painted and swept. Planters full of brilliant red geraniums and trailing clumps of phlox added color to the stark white of the painted brick walls.
Around the house, like the spokes of a wheel, were the stables and outbuildings. Some were new, others renovated. All were crisp white with the same green metal roof. Lush pastures spread out behind the buildings, and in the distance horses grazed. I slowed my car and simply stared at the vista. Lee had brought a dream to life. This was the exact farm blueprint that she'd drawn out in eighth-grade science class. I remembered, because while all the rest of us had sketched our "dream" homes, Lee had executed a series of architecturally accurate drawings, including all the barns, sheds, training paddocks, and living quarters for the help. She was, of course, teacher's pet for the rest of her school days.
I clearly remembered Tinkie Richmond's, nee Bellcase, comment when Eulalee unveiled her drawings. "That girl is crazy. She doesn't care about dancing or boys or anything except horses. She'll spend the rest of her life with horse manure on her shoes and trouble dogging her footsteps."
Well, Tinkie had proven almost as psychic as my other friend, Tammy Odom, better known currently as Madame Tomee
ka, Zinnia's answer to The Psychic Hotline. As soon as I got back to Dahlia House, I needed to give Tinkie a call. Although she was a Daddy's Girl to the max, she was also my partner in the Delaney Detective Agency. Tinkie had been my first case, and in my second run as a P.I., she'd proven to be a loyal and dependable friend. Married to Oscar Richmond, banker and deep pockets, Tinkie might be a big help in trying to convince Lee to hire a lawyer. For all of her wilting femininity, Tinkie had a good brain and amazing powers of persuasion.
I eased down the drive toward the main house with two goals in mind. Hopefully I'd find the medical records Lee had told me about, which would document the numerous beatings she'd endured. If they existed. Of more concern was my second assignment, Lee's fourteen-year-old major disciplinary problem masquerading as her daughter.
I'd heard enough about Kip to know difficult didn't begin to describe her. I'd seen enough of Kip around Zinnia to know my minimal parenting skills were going to be less than useless. In a town of fewer than two thousand it was hard not to notice a tall, slender beauty who wore a fierce look of defiance, black leather, and spiked hair dyed a burgundy red. The heavy eyeliner and shadow that she sported made her look nineteen rather than fourteen. I got the impression she was going for the look of twenty-five.
Knocking at the front door, I tried to compose a speech. I was unprepared when Kip flung the door open and glared at me.
"If she sent you, tell her to go to hell."
She tried to slam the door but I was quicker, using a body block. "Kip, I need to talk with you."
"Talk won't undo what's been done. Let 'em both rot in hell."
I had expected shock, grief, maybe even worry. The lack of all three made me testy. "Your mother's life is on the line, Kip." I pushed the door open and was surprised at her strength as she resisted. For a string bean who looked sickly pale and anorexic, she was very strong.
"She made her choices." Kip vibrated with anger. "They both did. And neither of them gave me a goddamn thought except to keep me obedient and on a horse."
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