Edit to Death

by Elizabeth Spann Craig

  She rummaged in her purse for her money, but Sloan stopped her. “No, ma’am. I’ve got this. It’s the least I can do. The paper should be reliable. You’re absolutely right.”

  An hour later and after Myrtle felt fairly assured that the newspaper would indeed be coming out the following day, Myrtle set off for home, thumping her cane on the ground emphatically as she went. About a hundred yards from the newspaper office, she felt a familiar furriness brush against her leg and looked down to see Pasha walking closely next to her.

  Myrtle beamed at the black cat. “You kept an eye out for me, didn’t you, Pasha? What a brilliant little animal you are.”

  A voice from behind her drawled, “Nonsense. With all the thumping you do with that cane that cat could hear you from a mile away.”

  Myrtle turned to glare at Red who was slowly driving alongside her in his police cruiser. “Don’t you have anything better to do than to harass your poor mother? Like investigate a murder?”

  Red said mildly, “Now Mama, I’ll admit that the state police have reached the conclusion that Pearl’s was a suspicious death. I’d like to have a quick word with you about Pearl’s visit and what happened when you and Miles returned from lunch.”

  Myrtle pressed her lips together in annoyance as she continued making her way home. Finally, she said, “I suppose that’s fine. You’ll have to wait for me to walk back, though. I can’t relay a story like this from the sidewalk.”

  “I can give you a lift if you’d just stop for a second,” said Red, irritation in his voice.

  “That might be fine for me, but I doubt Pasha would care for it,” said Myrtle. “Pasha is outside seventy-five percent of the time. I’m pretty sure she can find her way to your house if you catch a ride with me.” Red’s voice was getting that tight sound.

  Myrtle said, “But she’s hungry. I can tell when the cat wants something to eat. Pasha won’t be happy losing sight of me when she wants cat food. Of course, when I have my own car, I can slowly get Pasha accustomed to being inside a carrier in the car. She’ll make a good passenger with some training.”

  There was a brief, stunned silence before Red growled, “Car?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” asked Myrtle, turning to look innocently at him. “I decided that I’m having to do far too much walking and far too much asking for rides from very busy people. You and Elaine are always in the middle of something important or taking Jack somewhere. It would be better if I had my own car and could simply drive whenever I wanted to.”

  “Mama, you haven’t driven in years!”

  “You know that isn’t true. I regularly borrow Miles’s car when he’s unable to drive me himself,” said Myrtle stiffly.

  “Regularly? More like once every few months,” said Red.

  “Which still qualifies as regularly,” said Myrtle.

  Red looked as though he very much wanted to pursue this conversation, but also wanted to get some information from Myrtle on what had transpired earlier in the day.

  “I’ll meet you at the house,” he muttered and drove on ahead of her.

  When Myrtle got home, she let both Red and Pasha in and then busied herself making Pasha some food.

  “The cat’s not expecting, is she?” asked Red suspiciously as Pasha gulped down the food in more of a canine than feline fashion.

  “I had her fixed, if you’ll recall. Elaine helped me trap her,” said Myrtle shortly. She was still annoyed about the car. Although she had no real plans to purchase one, she wanted to assert her independence. It was most annoying when Red pushed back.

  “Why is she inhaling her food then?” Red watched as Pasha finished her food and sat back, licking her paw and then scrubbing her face with it.

  “Because she’s eliminated her natural food source,” said Myrtle, still sounding cranky.

  Red frowned at her.

  “Nature,” Myrtle elaborated, pointing toward the window. “Birds, snakes, bats, mice, shrews. Pasha is too good at hunting.”

  Red tilted his head to one side in thought. “Come to think of it, I haven’t been awakened by the birds too often lately.”

  Myrtle shrugged. “Pasha has seriously eliminated the population.”

  “Shouldn’t you keep her in the house, then? It sounds like she’s creating some sort of environmental imbalance.” Red watched as Pasha now started giving herself a general bath, purring all the time.

  “Except that she’s feral. Pasha doesn’t belong to me. I’m helping by giving her more to eat. Maybe she’ll feel less-motivated to go hunt if it’s only for sport. Now, you wanted to talk to me about the murder?” asked Myrtle, pointedly glancing at her watch.

  Red sighed. “I’m willing to concede that it was a murder. I had a little voice inside me that thought it was murder this morning.”

  “That little voice needs a megaphone,” said Myrtle crisply.

  Red continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “The thing is, if anybody had asked me who the least-likely person in Bradley was to get murdered, I’d have said Pearl Epps.”

  “Not me?” asked Myrtle in fake hurt.

  Red snorted. “You’d win the prize of most likely to be murdered, Mama. You have people coming after you all the time when you’re snooping around.”

  Myrtle said, “Well, apparently Pearl is not the least-likely person to be murdered. Maybe she was before she wrote her memoir.”

  Red plopped down on her sofa and opened up his little notebook. “Right. Now, about this book of hers. Did you happen to read any of the pages?”

  Myrtle shook her head. “Not really. I glanced through part of it, but mostly just to scan for punctuation and obvious grammatical issues. I wanted to see how much work it would be to edit a book for her.”

  “You didn’t get a feel as to why somebody would be desperate to get hold of those papers?” asked Red.

  “No. Did you have any luck finding Pearl’s computer?”

  “Nope.” Red sighed. “I have the feeling that it’s at the bottom of the lake now.”

  “So it was missing,” said Myrtle in a smug tone.

  Red sighed again. “That’s right. We searched the house, and it definitely wasn’t there. Hubert agreed that it was missing. I sure wish I knew what was in that book.”

  “Secrets,” said Myrtle with a shrug.

  “But what kind of secrets?”

  “Does it even matter?” asked Myrtle. “Something that Pearl’s family didn’t want aired in public.”

  Red said, “I just can’t imagine what kind of secrets Pearl’s family could have. That Hubert prefers Fruit Loops for breakfast? That Rose is allergic to dogs, even though she’s a dog walker?”

  Myrtle said, “One would assume it’s simply dirty laundry that Pearl’s family didn’t want aired in a small town.”

  “Okay. Moving on to the theft of this book. How did someone get into your house?” Red’s eyes narrowed as he glanced around the room.

  “It’s hardly Fort Knox here, Red. But as I mentioned earlier, most likely they came in through the windows. I had them open for Pasha.”

  Red glared at the windows as if they’d personally affronted him. He growled, “I take this very personally. Some joker broke into the police chief’s elderly mother’s house. A police chief who, I might add, lives right across the street. In broad daylight. It’s insulting.”

  “You’re making me sound feeble, Red,” said Myrtle.

  “I said elderly. Not feeble.”

  Myrtle said flatly, “The break-in was no big deal. It was simply something of a surprise.”

  “You’d have been a lot more surprised if you’d walked in on a robbery in progress,” said Red.

  Myrtle put her nose in the air. “I’d have been perfectly fine. I can take care of myself as I’ve proven before. Besides, I had Miles with me.”

  Red rolled his eyes. “You’re right, Mama. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  He closed his notebook and then tapped his pen against it thoughtfully. “It seems
to me that I remember something about the Epps family from a long time ago. Am I imaging that?”

  “You’re imagining it,” said Myrtle. She paused. “Oh, wait. I know what you’re talking about, but it didn’t directly involve the family. It was decades ago . . . actually, when you were a teenager.”

  Red snapped his fingers. “That’s right. It was a big deal at the time, though. A girl ran away from home, didn’t she? Tonya? Tina?”

  Chapter Six

  “TARA,” SAID MYRTLE. Her expression became thoughtful. “I taught her, as a matter of fact.”

  “Naturally,” said Red. “Can you remember what happened to her? She ran away from home, didn’t she?”

  “And hasn’t been seen or heard from since. There was some investigation at the time and that’s probably why you remember the Epps family being involved. Tara was Rose’s best friend,” said Myrtle.

  “I’ll look in the old files. That’s odd they wouldn’t have put more time into the disappearance of a young person,” said Red, frowning.

  Myrtle said slowly, “The theory at the time was that Tara had been somewhat troubled and had threatened to run away before. But her parents never got over it. They moved away years ago.”

  Red strode toward the door.

  “What are you doing now?” asked Myrtle.

  Red said, “I’m going to ask the one person who spies on everybody in the neighborhood if she saw anybody hanging out of the windows at your house.”

  Myrtle made a face. “Erma Sherman! Ugh. That’s a waste of your time.”

  Red said, “How do you figure that? We’re talking about the woman who is so nosy about everybody’s business that she asked me the other day if Jack was feeling any better. She’d seen me come home and then leave again and bring in a bag from the pharmacy.” He shook his head.

  “But if Erma knew something about a break-in at my house, do you think that she’d been content to sit silently at home? No. She’d be hootin’ and hollerin’ at the person until somebody came over and hauled the burglar out.”

  Red considered this.

  Myrtle continued, “And then she’d have told everybody in town later how she saved the day and how she looks out for her poor, decrepit neighbor, Myrtle. She’d pressure the town of Bradley to give her a medal and throw a tickertape parade.”

  Red hid a smile that threatened to tug at his lips. “That’s true.”

  “Believe me, she doesn’t know a thing,” said Myrtle emphatically.

  Red said, “That may be the case, but I still need to drop by and talk to her. Maybe she saw someone lingering on the street. Maybe she noticed a car that isn’t usually here.”

  “Or maybe she has one of her frequent and disgusting illnesses and spent the entire morning in her bathroom,” growled Myrtle. “It’s my understanding that she’s been sick.”

  “Still, I need to go by there. You be careful, Mama, and leave those windows shut for now. Let Pasha scratch on the door if she needs something.” He hesitated and then gave her a light kiss on the cheek. This completely stunned Myrtle to silence.

  “See you later, Mama,” said Red as he left.

  Myrtle sat for a few minutes and then got up to pick up the phone. “Sloan? It’s Myrtle. It’s definitely murder now, so just take out my subtlety and any ambiguity. Somebody shoved poor Pearl down those stairs.”

  That night, Myrtle slept fitfully. She got out of bed at 3:30 and made herself a large breakfast. It was, she decided, a testament to her general sangfroid that when a figure appeared in her kitchen window while she was scrambling eggs, she didn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that it was a burglar. Instead, she calmly opened the window and let Pasha in.

  “What a bright girl!” crooned Myrtle as she opened a can of cat food. She frowned. The stock of cat food in her pantry was running lower than she’d thought. But today was the day of the sale. She just needed to make sure that someone could drive her to the grocery store. There was no way for her to handle a walk home with a cane and a large amount of canned cat food. She had the feeling that Red would be too busy to accommodate her. Elaine might be too if she was out doing photo assignments for the newspaper. Even Miles might be an issue if she didn’t intercept his morning newspaper with that horoscope in it.

  After eating a very large breakfast of eggs, sausage, and a bowl of grits, Myrtle heard a car and looked outside. Sure enough, it was the paper being delivered. She hurried outside to see what Sloan had managed to put in today’s edition.

  He’d done a fairly decent job turning Myrtle’s story into more of a crime story and less of a retrospective on Pearl’s life. Fortunately, she didn’t see any sign of typos in the copy. Then she glanced through the rest of the paper. There were the horoscopes and Miles’s warning from Wanda to beware of germs. She sighed. She’d simply walk over there really quickly and intercept the newspaper before he even realized it was out there. Then she’d suggest later that she give him her paper to read so he wouldn’t call Sloan about the delivery problem. Myrtle supposed that she’d need to have a terrible accident involving a large cup of coffee and the horoscope section.

  She slipped on a long robe and slid into a pair of hard-soled slippers. Then she proceeded into the night with Pasha following closely at her side. She stumbled a little over a crumbly part of the sidewalk and let out an annoyed cry. Someone in public works needed to do something about the state of the sidewalks.

  She had picked up Miles’s newspaper when there was a shout from behind her. “Stop! Thief!”

  Myrtle, clutching at the newspaper, frowned and glanced at the surrounding houses to see if she saw any burglars.

  Then a figure ran in front of her and came to a complete stop.

  The figure had just raised her arms in front of her to stop Myrtle’s progress when it dropped them. “Myrtle!” said the figure, her despised neighbor, Erma.

  Myrtle sighed. “What’s this all about, Erma?”

  A light in Miles’s front room turned on and his front door opened. “Who’s out there?” he asked suspiciously.

  Erma bellowed, “It’s just Myrtle. She took your newspaper. I thought it was that burglar that Red was telling me about yesterday. Just trying to keep our elderly residents safe, that’s all. I’ve barely slept a wink for worrying about it. Which is a shame since I have this awful health condition right now.”

  A voice from one of the neighboring houses called out, “Can you take it inside? No one can get any sleep!”

  “The nerve of some people,” said Erma in a huffy voice.

  “I wasn’t taking your newspaper, Miles. I was only collecting it on my way in for a visit.” Myrtle glared at Erma.

  Miles, who had shifted his weight from side to side when the neighbor complained, quickly said, “Let’s just come inside.”

  Erma’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Me, too?”

  Myrtle said, “Not you! I have something I want to discuss in private with Miles.”

  Erma said in a knowing voice, “Ohhhh, I see. Well, don’t let me disturb the two lovebirds.” Then she paused. “How about if I just come in for a few minutes before you discuss your private business? I’d like to ask what happened with Pearl yesterday.”

  Which was when Pasha, who’d leapt out of sight when Erma came charging up, returned, hissing and growling at her. Erma, allergic to cats, turned and hurried toward her house. “See ya later,” she blurted.

  Miles opened the door wider to let Myrtle in and gazed anxiously into the darkness outside. “Is Pasha coming in?”

  Myrtle led the way into Miles’s kitchen. “I doubt it. She’s already had her walk and then did her good deed for the day by scaring Erma off. The poor cat probably needs a nap now.”

  Myrtle carefully put the newspaper in front of her on the counter as she made the coffee.

  “Do you want anything to eat?” asked Miles. “I do have some of those good biscuits from the Piggly Wiggly.”

  “Let’s have biscuits and coffee then.” Myrtle was
more concerned about keeping Miles occupied than in eating. She needed him to be thinking about plates, warming the biscuits, and getting out butter and knives until she was able to make sure that his horoscope was out of commission. And despite the fact that she’d just eaten a large breakfast, she figured she could still manage to eat a biscuit.

  But apparently Erma and the odd encounter outside was still on his mind.

  “So you were just bringing in my paper for me?” asked Miles as he got the plates out.

  “The newspaper? Yes. I couldn’t sleep and decided to come over. I figured picking up your paper was the least I could do in exchange for coffee and breakfast,” said Myrtle graciously.

  Miles said, “I wasn’t sleeping well, either. So the newspaper—was your story in there?”

  “The story is in there. Oh, and I had a visit from Red last night.”

  “Did he tell you not to get a car?” asked Miles, trying unsuccessfully to hide a smile.

  Myrtle said, “He might have mentioned something about not getting one, although, that has very little importance since he has no control whether I get a car or not.”

  Miles said, “I suspect that you really don’t want a car. You haven’t really wanted one before. You’re just bored and stirring up trouble.”

  Myrtle took out the coffee mugs. “I can’t imagine what may have given you that idea, Miles. I’m planning on going to the used car dealership later today, as a matter of fact.”

  Miles said, “The one owned by Boone Epps?” He gave Myrtle a knowing look. “I’m assuming not the other used car lot here.”

  Myrtle shrugged. “It seems like serendipity, doesn’t it? I mention being interested in a used car. The next thing I know, a friend of mine is murdered, and her son happens to own a used car dealership.”

  Miles was busying himself with putting the butter on the table. Myrtle took the opportunity to destroy Miles’s newspaper with coffee by knocking the paper into the sink and then pouring coffee all over it.

  “Mercy!” cried out Myrtle.

  Miles turned as Myrtle held up the sopping wet paper over the sink.