A Body in the Backyard

by Elizabeth Spann Craig

  Chapter Twelve

  “What?” Miles looked as though she’d suggested a trip to Mars instead of the dentist.

  “I’m proposing that you have a dental cleaning, Miles. Men are notoriously bad at scheduling visits to take care of their health and I’m a concerned friend.”

  “Or a nosy one,” muttered Miles.

  “Regardless. When was the last time you had your teeth cleaned, Miles?”

  Miles tightened his lips.

  “That long, huh? Well, this will be perfect. We’ll head over to see Dr. Bass and I’ll come along for moral support,” said Myrtle.

  “My teeth are in wonderful shape. I’ve never even had a cavity.” Miles sounded sullen.

  “They certainly won’t stay that way for very long if you don’t get them cleaned. You’re clearly phobic, Miles. It’s a good thing that I came along when I did,” said Myrtle.

  “I have all my own teeth,” said Miles, stressing the point.

  Myrtle blinked at him. “For heaven’s sake. So do I! Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I have dentures. How biased of you, Miles.” Of course, most of her teeth had fillings in them, but she certainly wasn’t going to tell him that. It was all due to the fact that the tap water hadn’t had fluoride during her formative years.

  Miles groaned. “I can see I’m not getting out of this. I’d rather not see your dentist, though. Don’t you suspect him of murder? It seems dumb for me to put myself in harm’s way.”

  “He’s an excellent dentist. Besides, he’s the only dentist in town.”

  “I have a car. I could drive to another town to see a dentist elsewhere,” said Miles.

  “Don’t rub in the fact that you still own wheels, Miles. And there’s no point in seeing another dentist, because the whole reason we’re doing this is to find out what Dr. Bass’s connection with Charles Clayborne was.”

  “I thought the whole reason we were going was out of concern for my dental health,” grumbled Miles.

  “We’re knocking out two birds with one stone,” said Myrtle coolly. “Besides, I think you owe me a favor.”

  “For….?” Miles frowned at her.

  “Hosting a lovely reception for your cousin’s funeral, of course.”

  “Was it lovely?” Miles squinted doubtfully at the ceiling. “As I recall, it ended rather abruptly with a dead body on the premises.”

  “That was, naturally, out of my hands. I had no idea there was a body outside my house,” said Myrtle sternly. She pulled a small notebook out of her purse and opened it. “Here’s his office number.” Myrtle watched as Miles reluctantly walked over to the phone and made the appointment for the next morning.

  He sighed as he got off the phone. “Well, that’s done. Tell me again why you’re suspecting your dentist has something to do with all this?”

  “You remember my telling you about Elaine’s new hobby, don’t you?”

  Miles winced. “Yes. How is the hobby du jour going? Have you seen lots of headless people in her pictures?”

  “Mostly a lot of close-ups of Elaine’s fingers. But I have seen one interesting thing. I’ve noticed that Dr. Bass keeps popping up in her pictures,” said Myrtle. “He was in one of her pictures taken after the sudden ending of my reception.”

  Miles shrugged. “He’s a resident of the town. And the whole town was there. Maybe he just happened to be passing, wondered what was going on, and then decided to stop by.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Myrtle. “I think he was lurking there. He had to have known about the funeral reception—the entire town of Bradley knew about it, so why wouldn’t he? No, I think he was there for a reason…and I intend to find out why.”

  Dr. Bass wasn’t the one to clean Miles’s teeth, of course. It was that hygienist that had been Myrtle’s former student. Unfortunately, she appeared to harbor a grudge against Myrtle and it appeared she was taking it out on Miles’s teeth. He glared at Myrtle when the cleaning was finally over.

  “I’ll go get the doctor to check your teeth now,” said Pam, sounding surly. Myrtle noticed with satisfaction that the hygienist wasn’t calling her sweetheart or hon or darlin’ anymore.

  Nor, thankfully, did she come back in with Dr. Bass.

  Myrtle cleared her throat. “Dr. Bass! What a pleasure to see you again!”

  Dr. Bass’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “Oh. It’s very nice to see you, too, Mrs. Clover,” he said pleasantly.

  He was now looking at her as if she were a very foggy old woman. This was perfect, since Myrtle was adept at using that to her advantage.

  She was going to have to make this snappy, though, getting to the point more directly than she usually did. The dentist’s office was packed with patients and Dr. Bass was already giving her impatient looks.

  “You know my daughter-in-law Elaine, don’t you? Red’s wife?”

  “Yes, yes, of course I do,” Dr. Bass replied in a hurried voice. “Is she doing well?”

  “She’s just fine. She might need to make an appointment with you, though,” said Myrtle thoughtfully. That would be a good way to get back in here, wouldn’t it? Myrtle would need to watch Jack, of course, while Elaine got her teeth cleaned. “But what I was going to mention is that she’s working for the paper right now. As a photographer. You know how the Bradley Bugle loves its human interest stories.”

  Dr. Bass was signaling for Miles to open his mouth and was pushing a stool over to look inside. “That’s very interesting, Mrs. Clover,” he said in a distracted voice.

  “I thought so, too. I also thought it was interesting that she’d taken a snapshot showing you talking to Charles Clayborne.” Myrtle blinked innocently at him. “Elaine was showing me some of her photography and I saw this picture of the two of you talking together downtown. It didn’t look like a pleasant conversation, either.”

  She couldn’t have asked for more of a reaction from the dentist. A splotchy red blush started from his white coat all the way up to his red hair. Myrtle got the distinct impression, however, that the ruddiness was due to anger and not embarrassment.

  He shrugged and then examined Miles’s teeth, apparently trying to collect his thoughts or his emotions or both. “It’s a small town. I run into many people on a daily basis.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that’s true. Especially being a dentist. You’ve probably got most of the town approaching you to tell you all about their tooth pain or the problem with an old filling. But this is different, isn’t it? You’d told me just days ago that you hadn’t talked to Charles Clayborne in over a decade. And there you were, having a spirited conversation with him in downtown Bradley, shortly before Charles was murdered,” said Myrtle with a shrug of her own.

  Dr. Bass gave her a sharp look. “I’d forgotten, that’s all. And I’m sure it wasn’t a spirited conversation; it was probably a very boring one—which explains why I promptly forgot about it.”

  He looked away from her and back at his patient and Myrtle got that irritated feeling she always got whenever she felt dismissed.

  She cleared her throat. “There was one more picture that Elaine snapped. This one showed you talking with Lee Woosley. Actually, it’s amazing that Elaine would happen to capture you on film at all—you don’t get out much. Anyway—I was wondering what y’all were discussing. You and Lee.”

  Dr. Bass gazed at her with the same tired look he’d had in the photo Elaine had snapped. “Mrs. Clover, Lee Woosley has been trying to play matchmaker between me and his daughter ever since we were in high school together. I was fielding his latest attempt, that’s all.”

  Myrtle was just opening her mouth to follow up on that statement when Dr. Bass cut her off. “If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Clover, I need to finish up with Mr. Bradford.”

  Myrtle snapped her mouth shut as Dr. Bass suddenly grew very busy with Miles’s x-rays. “Unfortunately, Mr. Bradford, I do see some evidence of tooth decay here. You have a cavity right here.” He showed Miles on the x-ray. Miles looked completely horri
fied.

  “Are you sure about that, Dr. Bass? I mean, I’m sure you are. It’s just that I’ve never had a cavity before in my life. And my teeth haven’t been bothering me much,” said Miles, all in a rush.

  “But you don’t eat a lot of extremely hot or extremely cold food,” said Myrtle knowingly. “You’re not an ice cream or a soup eater. You might not have noticed it at all.” For some reason, it was giving her great glee that smug Miles was now afflicted with a tooth issue. And the fact that she had been the one to get him to the dentist made her fill with self-righteousness.

  “It’s a very small cavity, so you might not have been aware that you had a problem,” said the dentist mildly. “It’s good that you came in as early as you did, though—it won’t take much to fix this problem. We’ll make a follow-up appointment for you to come back to have the tooth filled.”

  Myrtle beamed at Miles and was rewarded with a dirty look.

  The short car ride home was tense. “All that trouble and you didn’t even find out anything,” grumbled Miles.

  “I did. I found out that Dr. Bass will lie when asked about Charles Clayborne. That says a lot, Miles. It tells us that there’s something between Charles and Dr. Bass that he doesn’t want anyone to find out about.”

  “If he’s so bound and determined to keep his secret, what makes you so sure you’re going to be able to find it out, yourself?” asked Miles. “Are you going to pin him down in his own dental chair and dope him up on gas and give him the third degree?”

  Actually, that sounded like a wonderful idea. If only Myrtle were just a few years younger.

  “No,” she answered briskly, “I’m thinking more that I’ve got to get this information from someone he knows. In a town like Bradley, somebody has to know something. Even if they’re the best secret-keeper in the world, if it’s a juicy enough secret and they’ve been hanging onto it for decades…they’re about ready to pop. I’m going to figure out who Dr. Bass’s friends used to be and who they are now. He won’t be keeping his secret for very long.”

  Myrtle stole a sideways look at Miles. “We also learned something else while we were at the dentist.”

  “What’s that,” asked Miles with a long-suffering sigh.

  “We learned that you have cavities,” said Myrtle, smiling.

  Back at home, Myrtle started making her list of people to talk to about Dr. Bass. The man wasn’t married, unfortunately, so there was no spouse to contact. The fact that Dr. Bass was unmarried likely accounted for much of his popularity in town—especially among the women. He wasn’t a bad-looking man and he was still a relatively young one. At her age, Myrtle considered him a mere infant.

  She was drawing a blank, though. What on earth did Dr. Bass do with his free time? Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t think of a time when she’d seen him around town. Oh, she’d seen him at the grocery store. But she never saw him walking into town, visiting with people as he went. She never saw him in the park, watching the free movies that aired every Friday night during the summer. He didn’t seem to take a boat out on the lake much. Come to think of it, she hadn’t seen him gracing the pews at church either. Of course, that could be because Myrtle’s attendance was a bit on the spotty side.

  Surely, the man did something relaxing in his free time! Did he just go home and lie around on his sofa eating cheese dip and watching television?

  Her ruminating was interrupted by a hesitant-sounding knock on her front door. Myrtle raised her eyebrows in surprise, putting aside her empty notepad. She was about to pull open the door without looking, when Red’s dire warnings about lurking murderers popped into her head. Myrtle looked cautiously out the window next to her door.

  Annette Dawson stood there, giving her a reassuring-I’m-not-a-killer smile. It was probably her “nurse face” that she would give patients before taking their blood or giving them a shot. Myrtle unlocked her door and opened it. “Good for you for being careful, Miss Myrtle. I can’t imagine how you’re able to sleep a wink at night. Two bodies in your yard!” Then she unexpectedly misted up, fishing in her purse for a tissue. Apparently, her own mention of a body had reminded her about Charles’s untimely death.

  Myrtle made all the appropriate concerned noises and ushered Annette to a comfy chair. “It’s all still really upsetting, isn’t it?”

  Annette gave Myrtle a relieved smile. “It really is, Miss Myrtle. Of course, you wouldn’t know that Charles and I were friends.”

  Myrtle tried to come up with a surprised expression but utterly failed, only conjuring a frozen look.

  Annette gave a chuckle that sounded like a sob. “So the gossip got all over town, did it? You obviously know we were more than just ordinary friends.”

  There was really no point in denying it at this point. “That’s pretty typical for Bradley, you know. When I gave birth to Red, the town knew about it before my husband even did. News travels fast here.”

  Annette nodded ruefully. “That’s what my husband was telling me. Silas said that the entire town knew about Charles and me and that he was a laughingstock.”

  “I don’t think he’s a laughingstock. This is fairly mild in Bradley, as far as scandals go,” said Myrtle in a comforting voice. Well, except for the murder part of it.

  Annette suddenly got a stubborn set to her chin that Myrtle recognized from the reception when she’d argued with Silas. “There really wasn’t anything dishonorable about Charles’s and my relationship. That’s because it was a love match. I had to spend time with Charles,” said Annette, leaning forward and peering intently at Myrtle as if looking to see if she believed her. “That’s what Silas doesn’t understand.”

  She bet he didn’t understand it.

  “He was so mad when he found out about us. He said these horrible things to Charles,” said Annette with a shudder.

  “Horrible?” asked Myrtle, mind racing. “Horrible like what?”

  “He said he was going to kill Charles,” said Annette, looking down at her hands. “Of course he didn’t mean a word of it,” she added quickly. “He was shocked when he heard that Charles was dead.”

  “But that didn’t mean that he was going to be happy about you going to the funeral,” said Myrtle.

  “Exactly. He flat-out told me not to go. He couldn’t stop me, though. After all, I wanted to pay my respects to Charles.” Annette teared up again.

  Bypassing the waterworks, Myrtle said quickly, “I did notice that Silas was trying to steer you out of my house during the reception. He was still pretty angry about the whole thing.”

  Annette nodded. “Like I said, he was furious. It was all because he thought the whole town knew about my affair.” She shrugged. “I guess they did, too, since even you know about it.”

  The suggestion being that Myrtle didn’t get out much.

  “But I know Silas couldn’t have killed Charles. He couldn’t kill anybody! Even as mad as he was,” said Annette.

  Myrtle wanted to have an opportunity to talk to Silas and determine that for herself. “Remind me again what Silas does for a living?” she asked. Maybe she could show up at his business to question him.

  “He’s an electrician,” said Annette.

  Oof. That was pretty expensive work to have done. She’d have to see if there was something she really needed looking at. Usually, the service call alone was worth more money than she could spare from her retirement pay.

  Annette was studying her curiously, as if wondering how they suddenly got on the topic of Silas’s work. Myrtle added, as if she were simply making conversation, “And you’re a nurse, isn’t that right? At the county hospital?”

  “That’s right. My shift recently changed, too. Now I’m working nights there.” Annette rolled her eyes. “It’s not my favorite shift, but I’ll adjust. That’s why I’m able to be here now instead of at work.” She smiled at Myrtle. “I didn’t actually come over for a visit, although it’s been very nice.”

  Myrtle had forgotten to
even wonder why she’d shown up at her house.

  “I was wondering if you’d come across my pocketbook. I must have put it down here at the reception and then left in such a rush that I forgot it,” said Annette.

  There had been no pocketbook left behind—of that, Myrtle was positive. “Didn’t it have your car keys and everything in it?” asked Myrtle.

  “No, I’d actually stuck my keys in my dress pocket, so I had those. By the time I realized that I’d left it, I knew the police had blocked off your house to do the forensic work. Then I forgot about it again until a little while ago.” Annette sighed. “I’ve just had a lot on my mind lately and it’s made me scattered.”

  “It’s always a relief to hear other people say that they’re forgetful,” said Myrtle. “I’d hate to think it was just me. But I haven’t seen your purse, Annette. I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for it, though. Are you sure you left it here? What does it look like?”

  Annette furrowed her brow. “That’s funny. Yes, it really has to be here. I know I had it with me when I left the funeral. It’s just a small, brown leather bag. It’s not anywhere here?”

  As if Myrtle’s house was voluminous enough to have many possibilities of harboring a missing purse. “Not that I’ve seen,” said Myrtle. “But I’ll do some digging around later. And I’ll ask the police if they noticed it while they were here.”

  “Such a horrible thing that happened during the reception,” said Annette, looking in the direction of Myrtle’s backyard with a shudder. “Do the police think it’s tied in to Charles’s death somehow?”

  “I think they have to,” said Myrtle. “After all, it’s not like the town is full of murderers. It’s a lot more likely that whoever killed Charles also murdered Lee Woosley.”

  Annette stood up rather quickly and said, “Such a shame. Well, I’ve taken up enough of your time, Miss Myrtle.”

  Her decision to leave was so abrupt that Myrtle wondered if Annette thought that she somehow had something to do with the two bodies in her backyard. “Oh, one quick question, Annette. I was…well, having a conversation with someone recently about Dr. Bass. It was mentioned that he’s rarely seen around town. Do you know if he has any close friends in Bradley?”

  Now Annette was grinning at her, seeming to have forgotten her misgivings. “Now, Miss Myrtle, you’re not thinking of sparking a relationship with Dr. Bass, are you? He certainly is good-looking, though.”

  Myrtle blinked at her in horror, imagining all the gossip that would fly around town if Annette Dawson started saying that she had a crush on the dentist. The poor man would probably not even schedule appointments for her anymore. “Heavens!” she said, in protest.

  Annette laughed. “I know, I know—I was only kidding, Miss Myrtle. I’m sure the dentist is young enough to be…um, your son.”

  Grandson, technically.

  “You’re probably matchmaking, aren’t you?” Annette gave her a mischievous, knowing smile.

  That explanation would work well. Myrtle nodded encouragingly.

  Annette said, “The only person I’ve seen him with, and I’ve seen him on more than one occasion with him, is this guy with real cropped, dark hair. Not a woman, since I know that’s what you really want to know. As far as I can tell, Dr. Bass is extremely available. Although I’ve heard that Peggy Neighbors is trying to make sure he’s not available.” She gave Myrtle a meaningful look.

  It seemed more likely that Lee Woosley was trying to make a match between the dentist and his daughter. Peggy was hung-up on Charles Clayborne, not Hugh Bass.

  “Do you know where Dr. Bass lives? I was wondering if he were someone I’d run into casually—say, if I were having a walk or something.”

  “He lives on the lake, but across the water from you. A pretty good-sized house,” said Annette. She glanced at her watch and raised her eyebrows. “Now I really do have to go. I’m going to be late for an appointment.”

  Myrtle sighed. She hadn’t been able to figure out an innocuous way to continue asking questions about the man with dark hair before Annette walked out her door.