Murder Carries a Torch Page 13

  Chapter

  Thirteen

  Betsy Mahall had given me directions to her house. Turn left on Three Fork Road, third driveway on the right. We’d see the name on the mailbox.

  “I think we’ve missed it,” Mary Alice said after we had passed two mailboxes and gone at least half a mile. We were in her Jaguar, just the two of us. I wasn’t sure how she managed it. But when she blew the horn and I went out, got in the car, and asked where Richard and Luke were, she said, “Don’t ask. They’re meeting us on the mountain at 1:00.”

  “Is Luke okay this morning?” I asked.

  “He ate three poached eggs and half a pound of bacon for breakfast. You think I was going to let him in my car?”

  So Sister and I had made the trip to Steele by ourselves. It was nice to have someone to talk to who was excited as I was about Haley and the pope.

  “I almost got to meet him,” Sister said. “Roger was Catholic, remember?” (Actually, I didn’t. But who could keep up?) “And he was saying on the plane right before he died, you know, when we were coming back from Europe, that the next time we went he was going to arrange for an audience with the pope, that he should have done it this time.” She paused. “I guess maybe his chest hurting made him think of it.”

  A red pickup truck passed us. The driver waved and we waved back.

  “And not a single priest on that plane,” Sister continued. “There we were, halfway across the Atlantic and Roger turning blue and not a single priest. Some nun, said she was a nun, anyway, didn’t even have on nun clothes, just a red knit dress, read him his last rites.”

  “That was Terry Mahall,” I said.

  “You know who the nun was?”

  “The guy in the red truck that just passed. That was Betsy’s husband. We’re not lost.”

  “Oh. Well, they sure as hell live out in the woods,” Sister grumbled.

  Actually Three Fork Road wound through a valley below Chandler Mountain, a valley that was lying fallow in January, but that was crisscrossed with fields that had yielded a harvest in the fall. Dead stalky plants marching down rows attested to that. Cotton? Soy beans? Any woods that might have been here once were only a memory. This was farm country.

  “There’s a mailbox,” I pointed.

  Mary Alice slowed down and we turned onto an asphalt driveway, a long driveway that led to a beautiful, large house, the type of house that Mary Alice has always wanted, a Tara with six columns across the front. The driveway circled around a grassy area that had in its center a fountain (a voluptuous woman pouring water from a jug into a small pool) encircled by pansies.

  “This has got to be the wrong place,” I said. “This isn’t somebody who works for the telephone company’s house unless he’s the CEO.”

  “It said Mahall on the mailbox.” Sister pointed. “Look at those columns, Mouse. Those aren’t that drivet stuff. I think this is a sure-enough antebellum house. One the Yankees missed.”

  “It’s money’s what it is. And I don’t think it belongs to Betsy and Terry. But I’ll see.”

  “See if whoever lives there will let us in, anyway,” Sister said as I got out. “I want to see the inside. I’ll bet it’s got those wonderful old Thomas Jefferson floors. You know, like at Monticello.”

  I had no idea in the world what she was talking about. Thomas Jefferson floors? But the house was certainly impressive. I crossed a short brick walkway, stepped up two steps to the red-tile porch that stretched the width of the house, and rang the doorbell. I heard the familiar “Avon calling” chime, and a dog began to bark shrilly. I also heard a man’s voice say, “Hush,” I assumed to the dog.

  I shook my head at Mary Alice. Wrong house. It had to be.

  The door opened, and an elderly man in a wheelchair looked up at me. He was wearing a pale blue sweater that matched his eyes, a faded blue. A small terrier sat in his lap, teeth bared.

  “Yes?”

  The man looked like Colonel Sanders, white hair, goatee. For a second I wondered if this is what happens when you get older, you’ve seen so many faces that they all begin to resemble each other, like Virgil Stuckey and Willard Scott. That maybe there are only so many faces to go around.

  “Yes?” he asked again.

  “Is this the Mahall residence?”

  “I’m Eugene Mahall.”

  “Does Betsy Mahall live here?”

  “I sure do.” Betsy came down the steps into the wide hall. “Mrs. Hollowell, this is my father-in-law, Eugene Mahall.”

  “I told her who I was,” the old man said.

  Betsy reached in her jeans pocket and handed me a key.

  “Mrs. Hollowell is going up to Monk’s house,” she explained to her father-in-law.

  “What for?” he asked. He and the dog both looked at me suspiciously.

  “They’re trying to find her cousin.”

  “Bunch of fools up there.” Mr. Mahall whirled his chair around and disappeared into the room on the left. The dog gave a bark.

  Betsy stepped out onto the porch. “Do be careful,” she said.

  The key was in my hand and I considered giving it back. “We’re not going to find any snakes up there, are we?”

  Betsy shook her head. “No. Terry and I were up there yesterday after the funeral looking for the cameo one more time. All’s clear.”

  I had to bite my tongue to keep from telling her the cameo had been found. As it was, I told her I was sure it would turn up soon.

  “I’m still hoping,” she said. “I’d go with you today, but I have to stay with the children.”

  “Are they okay?”

  “They’re fine. Ethan’s napping and Jamie’s watching Mr. Rogers.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m all right. Yesterday was rough.”

  “Betsy?” her father-in-law called.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hollowell. I’d ask you in, but things are sort of in a mess right now.”

  “That’s fine, Betsy.” I held up the key. “We’ll get this back to you later this afternoon.”

  “No problem. I doubt I’ll be going up there anytime soon.”

  “Betsy!” The call was a command.

  “I’ve got to go, Mrs. Hollowell.” She gave me an apologetic look.

  “I’ll talk to you later.”

  By the time I’d crossed the porch, I heard the door closing.

  “What was that about?” Sister wanted to know. “Who was the old guy?”

  “Her father-in-law. I may be wrong, but my guess is that this is his house and they live with him. I think Betsy’s got her hands full, you ask me.”

  “Did you see the floors?”

  “No, I didn’t see the floors.”

  But I had seen enough to know that the version I had had in my mind of the young Mahalls’ small-town life, neighbors, ordinary jobs, everything fine except for the lack of children wasn’t the truth. Not by a long shot. I admitted as much to Mary Alice.

  “You’re not like me, Mouse,” she said. “You tend to pigeonhole people.” Then, as we started up Chandler Mountain, “God, I hope none of those snake handlers are up at the church. They’ve all got to be crazy as bedbugs.”

  I ignored this. However crazy handling poisonous snakes might seem to us, I remembered what Betsy had said about her aunt, that she was trying to touch God. That deserved respect.

  There were no cars or trucks at the church except Monk Crawford’s paint van, which still stood in his driveway. Luke and Richard hadn’t gotten there yet.

  I held up the key. “You want to go in?”

  “Reckon they have a bathroom?”

  “I’m sure they do.”

  “Then I want to go in.”

  We got out and crossed the gravel walkway between the church and the house. I put the key into the lock and turned it.

  “I’ll bet the bathroom’s where they keep the snakes,” I said when I noticed Sister was dancing from one foot to the other.

  “Shit, Patricia Anne!”

  I m
oved aside. “Well, go ahead. Just watch your step.”

  Sister hesitated. “You’re just saying that, aren’t you?”

  Of course I was. But I wasn’t entirely comfortable stepping across the threshold.

  The ordinariness of the room we entered was reassuring, though. Sun shone across a white vinyl floor. The walls were painted a pale yellow, and the windows were framed with white lace curtains. A green-and-yellow-plaid sofa and two matching chairs in early-American design faced a large TV. Several magazines were arranged neatly on a pine coffee table and brass eagle lamps centered each end table. The brick fireplace had a gas space heater in it, and across the mantel were what appeared to be family photographs.

  Sister was reassured enough to go down the hall and yell back, “I found it, and it looks all right.”

  It was freezing in the house. There was a package of matches on the mantel advertising the Homestead Inn in Nashville. I took it and squatted down to light the space heater, something I hadn’t done in a long time. I turned on the gas cautiously, held the match to the heater, and Pow!, I was sitting on my butt with my heart racing. Damn dangerous things. Made you appreciate central heating.

  I scrambled up and replaced the matches beside a wedding picture, a thin young groom with a lock of dark hair falling across his forehead (I swear he looked like James Dean). He was wearing a black tux at least two sizes too large and, arm around his bride’s waist, he was looking down lovingly at her, a plump girl in a simple white satin wedding gown. On top of her teased blond hair was a circlet of flowers.

  Holden “Monk” Crawford and his wife. It had to be. And the other wedding picture was of their son Ethan and his wife Susan. The poses were startlingly similar, with Ethan looking down lovingly at Susan. She had worn her mother-in-law’s dress, I realized, a dress that had been scaled down a couple of sizes to fit Susan’s smaller body. On her head was an identical circlet of flowers, but it lay against smooth red hair. Ethan’s tux was identical to his father’s, too. But he was a much larger man and filled it out.

  Between these two pictures were smaller ones, family picnics, graduations, Ethan as a child. Ethan holding a baby. Ethan and Susan sitting before a Christmas tree, Susan holding a baby and Ethan with a toddler in his lap.

  Mary Alice had come up behind me and was looking over my shoulder.

  “This is sad,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Put your hands up,” a man’s voice demanded.

  Our hands shot up into the air.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “We’re friends,” Mary Alice stammered. “We come in peace.”

  A burst of laughter. “We come in peace? You hear that, Mama? These folks been watching too many of those Dances with Wolves movies.”

  We turned around cautiously to see a large bearded man dressed in overalls and a denim jacket. On his head was a ratty brown felt hat. Beside him was the ancient woman I had seen on TV, the woman who had been dipping snuff.

  “You can put your arms down,” she said, still laughing. “Bertie’s teasing you.” She waddled arthritically over to a chair, bent her knees, and fell more than sat. “But just what the hell are you doing here?”

  We looked at Bertie. He nodded, and we put our hands down.

  “Sorry I don’t have a peace pipe,” he grinned.

  “You hush, Bertie,” his mother said. “Let them answer.”

  Sister and I looked at each other. I answered.

  “We’re looking for our cousin’s wife. She was here a few days ago with Mr. Crawford, and we were hoping we could find something that would help us locate her. An address or something.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what we thought we might find, to tell the truth.”

  “She an old skinny blond woman with pretty teeth?” the woman asked.

  “Caps,” Mary Alice said. “All caps.”

  “Well, they look good. Real white. I bet they cost a lot.”

  “They did.”

  “Y’all sit down on the sofa. Bertie, get me some water. It’s pill time.”

  “No, it’s not, Mama. You just took them.”

  “Well, that’s why I’m so thirsty then.”

  We sat on the sofa as we had been instructed to.

  “I’m Mary Alice Crane,” Sister said. “And this is my sister, Patricia Anne Hollowell.”

  The woman nodded. “Beulah Packard. And that’s Bertie.”

  “Albert Lee, ladies. How do you do,” her son called from the kitchen. In a moment he was back with a glass of water, which he handed to his mother.

  “Thank you, baby boy,” she said.

  Baby Boy appeared to be in his early fifties. His beard was liberally streaked with gray. But I adjusted his age down when he sat in the chair opposite his mother and pulled off the disreputable brown felt hat. His hair was thick and dark. He ran his hands through it, propped his hat on his knee, and looked at us.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Well, what?” Mary Alice was getting her composure back.

  “You do know what’s been going on around here, don’t you?”

  “We’re the ones who found Susan Crawford’s body, if that’s what you mean,” I admitted. I looked from the son to the mother. “You’re neighbors?”

  Beulah Packard nodded. “Live right up the road by Horse Pens. Born and raised right here on Chandler Mountain.”

  “Not much happens up here Mama doesn’t know.”

  Beulah Packard frowned at her son. “I didn’t know Susan was lying over there in that church dead. Bless her heart. Her and Monk both gone.” She put her glass beside her chair. “I’ve got the cat. Guess I’ll keep her.”

  We must have looked puzzled.

  “Monk’s cat. I keep it for him when he’s gone. He brought it up last Friday, I think it was. Said he was going to be gone a couple of days. They were in that old lady with the white teeth’s car. She was driving.”

  “Did he say where they were going?” I asked, thinking this might be the answer to our questions about Virginia.

  She shook her head. “Just handed me Flossie and said. ‘Miss Beulah, I’ll be back in a couple of days. You take good care of my Flossie and keep an eye on my house.’”

  She reached in her coat pocket for a Kleenex. “He did love that cat. Lord, I’m going to miss that boy. There was no reason in the world for anybody to do what they did to him.”

  “Are you members of his church?” Sister wanted to know.

  “Dear Jesus, no.” Miss Beulah wiped her eyes. “I’m scared as hell of snakes. Worst whipping Bertie ever got was when he put a green snake down in my laundry pile. I like to have died.”

  “So did I,” Bertie said. “And I was sixteen years old.”

  “Just meanness. Meanest thing you ever did.”

  The two of them smiled at each other.

  “Bertie teaches English at the university,” his mother told us. “Monk sort of took his place, cut my grass, helped me plant my garden.”

  Miss Beulah held the Kleenex to her eyes. Mary Alice and I both looked at the mountain man on our right who was smiling at us. A teacher at the university?

  “It’s the January short term,” he said, as if that explained his appearance. “I don’t have any classes until February.”

  “My sister is an English teacher,” Mary Alice pointed to me.

  “Oh?” Albert leaned forward. “What’s your specialty?”

  Specialty? Smart aleck. His mother should have whipped him harder when he was sixteen.

  “Eleventh grade, but I’m retired. What’s yours?”

  “Chaucer. Every one of those people is right here on Chandler Mountain.”

  I looked around at the four of us and had to grin. He was right. There were questions that needed asking, though.

  “How long was our cousin here, Mrs. Packard? Do you know?”

  “Couple of days, far as I know. Monk was always bringing women home from his painting jobs. Rescuing them, he said. Bless his hea
rt.”

  “Do you know the names of any of the other women?”

  “Sally Jo was one of them. I don’t know her last name, but I remember last summer she came and picked some okra at my house. Said she fried it some kind of special way and she’d give me the recipe. But I think she left the next day. Never got the recipe.” Miss Beulah reached down, picked up her glass and held it out to Albert who got up and took it to the kitchen. “None of them stayed more than a couple of days.”

  “Did any of their husbands show up looking for them?”

  “Probably. I never heard of any trouble, though.”

  Albert Lee came back and handed his mother her water.

  “I think Monk was running an underground railroad for unhappy wives,” he said.

  “Could one of their husbands have hated him enough to kill him?” I asked.

  Albert Lee Packard shrugged. “Possibly. I’m assuming Susan and Monk’s deaths are connected, though, and there wouldn’t have been any reason for a cuckolded husband to have killed her.”

  “Bertie was in love with Susan,” his mother said.

  “Everybody was in love with Susan, Mama.” He sat down and cracked his knuckles. “Her and those damn snakes.” There was such a bitter tone to the last remark, that I realized he probably had cared deeply for Susan.

  “The snakes are the connection, ladies,” he continued.

  His mother shook her head. “But Monk had quit handling.”

  “Which would have been seen as a loss of faith, Mama. Suppose someone was furious at him because of that. What more symbolic way to kill him than to stick his arm into a basket of snakes?”

  Mary Alice had been unusually quiet. Now she shuddered and said, “It gives me the chills to think about it.”

  “I still think it could have been the Chandler Mountain booger broke Susan’s neck,” Miss Beulah said.

  We heard noises outside, car doors slamming.

  “That must be my cousin,” I said. I stood up to look. But a car and a pickup had pulled up in front of the church. Several people were getting out and going in.

  Albert had stood up, too. “Probably getting ready for Monk’s funeral,” he said.

  “Did you go to Susan’s yesterday?”

  “No. It was just a family graveside service.”