A Widow's Curse Page 10

  After what Crawdad had told us, it was all I could do to keep myself from looking in my great-grandfather’s trunk. The fact that it was empty did nothing to subdue my great desire to peer inside and see.

  I was almost happy when Huyne made a point of saying goodbye to us in the kitchen.

  “Dr. Devilin?” He stood in the archway between the kitchen and the living room, glaring down at me. “You don’t leave town. You don’t mess with anything. You don’t look cross-eyed at anybody. And if I find out you have that silver coin, I’ll beat you hard with a tire iron. I can see that you have friends here, people who prevent me from doing what I ought to do. That won’t last. I’ll be back, and you’ll be screwed.”

  “There’s that language issue again.” I stood. “I’m letting it go because I’ve determined you actually can’t think of anything better to say. As to where I go and what I do with my time, you have less chance of keeping me in one place than does Deputy Mathews. She has a tranquilizer dart.”

  She looked up at Huyne.

  “It’s true.” She smiled sweetly. “Out in the squad car.”

  Huyne looked at his nameless companion.

  “I can’t tell if they’re really like this,” he said, throat dry, “or they’re putting me on.”

  The man nodded, avoiding all eye contact.

  “Where are we staying?” he asked the man.

  “Mountain Vista Hotel,” the man answered, “in Pine City.”

  “I’m making calls,” Huyne assured me.

  I had no idea what he meant.

  Without another word, Huyne vanished into the night.

  Or at least he made it out my front door before stumbling down the front steps, offering us his loudest, most vile curse yet, plunging into his car, and tearing up the gravel in the road as he tore away.

  “I thought he’d never leave.” Andrews yawned. “I’m checking your trunk.”

  Skid ambled into the kitchen.

  “Don’t bother. Crawdad told me about it; I looked. Everything’s gone. Sorry, Fever—all those stories and papers about your great-grandfather.”

  Skidmore had seen me at that trunk a dozen times; heard me tell stories about Conner for most of my life. Andrews accepted Skid’s assessment of the situation and kept his seat at the kitchen table.

  “Why would the killer take that stuff, those dusty old stories?” Andrews looked at Skidmore. “And nothing else in the house?”

  “I’m afraid that’s what Fever is going to try and find out.” Skidmore sighed.

  He was too tired to say more on the subject. He knew it was useless to talk me out of doing anything, and that knowledge, apparently, took a lot of wind out of his sails.

  “Well.” I stood. “Do you want some coffee?”

  “Not the crankcase oil you make in that thing.” He glared at my espresso machine, then sat.

  “No hard caffeine for the sheriff.” I went to the cupboard and fetched the French press. “How about this?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “How was Alabama?”

  “Hot. Look, Fever, we have to get some things straight here. My investigation will assume that the intruder is the murderer. That’s what we’ll pursue. But this guy Huyne? He’s not going away. He thinks you killed a man, and he’s really hammering me. He’s letting me handle the investigation for the time being because he has to. It’s my jurisdiction. Only, I predict that Huyne will be trouble. For both of us.”

  “What exactly is his damage?” Andrews rubbed his eyes.

  “He told me that Mr. Shultz’s father,” Skid began, failing to prevent his distaste for the subject from filling his words, “is a very wealthy man in Atlanta. He knows people who know people, and he’s set Huyne on this like a pit bull on a rabbit. Huyne resents doing it, so he’s taking it out on everyone else. Mostly you, but also me. He wants me to arrest you, hold you as a suspect until the evidence can be examined by someone he trusts, which would not be Chester and Mrs. Tomlinson. He sent them home.”

  “Fine by me.” I wrestled with the cord to the coffee-bean grinder. “The so-called evidence is on my side.”

  “Not really.” Skid let go a sigh made entirely of lead.

  “What?” I stopped what I was doing.

  “Huyne also told me that the Shultz family really has valued this coin thing at half a million dollars—very recently. And of course we know that the victim brought the coin to you.”

  “I said that—”

  “I’m not finished.” Skidmore looked out the kitchen window at the moonlight. “At the moment, I’m not going to ask you where the coin is, or if you have it here, because I don’t want to know. But if it comes to be important, I’ll have to hear what you have to say about it. Am I clear on this?

  “What would be my reason—”

  “Huyne knows that the coin used to belong to your family.”

  “What?” I froze. “How could he possibly—”

  “I have no idea.” Skid interrupted a third time, “but this Detective Huyne has no difficulty believing you’re guilty—seems to have some kind of Deliverance nightmare playing in their heads: mountain-folk revenge and greed rampant—”

  “Inbred flesh-eating hillbillies,” Andrews interrupted sagely, barely able to keep his head up. “I can understand that.”

  I wasn’t the only one glaring at Andrews, just the only one who spoke to him.

  “What’s the matter with you sometimes?” I shook my head. “You know these people up here, what they’re really like.”

  “I need sleep.” He yawned again. “There’s a dead body in the next room—of a guy I was actually getting to like. And worst of all, Deputy Mathews won’t give me the time of day. Jesus!”

  Suspicion of murder and proximity to a corpse, it seemed, had done nothing to quell the mighty libido of Dr. Winton Andrews. There would always be an England.

  Eight

  The next morning was blinding—sky scrubbed, air glass-clear.

  Of course, the beauty of such a morning was lost on me. I couldn’t sit in my own living room, I’d been up since 6:30, and my brain was a rabid simian: branch to branch, chattering senselessly, trying to quell a mighty panic. The previous night seemed more a hallucination than an experience. Little about it was coherent, even upon ardent reflection.

  How could the Shultz family have known that the coin belonged to my family? How was it possible that they’d valued it at half a million dollars? Clearly, the man who had disturbed Shultz’s sleep was the murderer. And Shultz seemed to think it was someone I knew. Why had the man taken everything in Conner’s trunk? Who was he?

  And as my mind sailed from branch to branch on the Tree of Distraction, I knew I was avoiding the darkest shadows, the places where the sun couldn’t reach, even on so bright a day. Part of the dexterity in my mental gymnastics was an ardent attempt to avoid thinking about Shultz, or facing the fact that a very nice man had been killed in my home. But it was always there, the image of the corpse, an oozing heap, just at the corner of my eye.

  Skid and the rest of the local constabulary had stayed long enough to make certain that the dead body was properly removed by the Deveroe Brothers Funeral Parlor not long after midnight. That had been a strange affair: silent, slow; I’d stayed out on the porch for most of it.

  Before he left, Skid reminded me that, legally, I was a suspect in a murder investigation and that, technically, I ought not to leave the house.

  By my fifth espresso that morning, I was holding the keys to my truck in my hand, waiting for Andrews to wake up.

  Jangling the keys in my hand, I kept thinking, over and over, Why did I ask Shultz to come up here?

  It wasn’t like me to have company. What had compelled me to do it? Lucinda’s absence couldn’t completely explain it. She’d been gone before. We’d been separated for years, in fact, before I’d come back to Blue Mountain.

  Extraordinary heat in September—that was a better answer.

  But the truth was that my own
ennui had brought me to my state: a bizarre lack of direction, an aimless emptiness that wouldn’t fix itself and was immune to hard work, mental distraction, or the promises of domestic joy.

  That thought only made it harder for me to focus on any one of the dozens of bursting paranormal aneurysms that were exploding in my skull. But it did make the necessity for clarity paramount if I wanted to do the work I had to do.

  And that work seemed fraught with psychological dangers. I had helped Skidmore investigate murders. I’d even gone looking for killers. This was different: It involved my family, my heritage—my home—more deeply than any enterprise before it.

  I almost leapt out of my chair when I heard Andrews at the top of the stairs.

  “God, how could you sleep like that?” I tried not to sound like a lunatic, but that didn’t work out.

  “What?” Andrews was holding on to the banister for dear life, barely able to make out the sound of my voice.

  “I’m jumping out of my skin.” I shook the keys in my hand. “I have to go.”

  “Where?” Andrews was managing his way down the steps with a pace and care generally given to brides headed toward an altar.

  But he did have a point. Where indeed?

  “I have to do something.”

  “I know.” He achieved the last step. “Just let me—” He couldn’t seem to remember the next words in his sentence.

  “Espresso.” I shot to the machine.

  He leaned on the door frame.

  “How many shots have you had?”

  “We have to find out about the three items that Conner insured.” I ignored his question. “That’s the starting place.”

  “Possibly.” He scratched the back of his head. “But have you tried to figure out why everything in that old trunk of yours was taken—and nothing else is missing from the whole house?”

  “That’s correct.” I got out a cup for Andrews. “My assumption is, obviously, that the intruder came here for the coin, somehow knew that Shultz had brought it here. Shultz said he didn’t have it. The intruder asked him where it was. Shultz said it was with me. The intruder asked where I was. Shultz couldn’t remember the name of the lawyer but said I’d found his name in the trunk. The intruder looked in the trunk, found all sorts of things about Conner, and by Conner, and tried to go through them because Conner was connected with the coin, as we now know. Shultz objected. Maybe there was a struggle. The intruder killed Shultz. Then, realizing he had to get out, the killer gathered up everything in the trunk without looking at it, imagining that there would be valuable information somewhere in all those papers. He was wrong, of course, but he had no way of knowing.”

  Andrews stared.

  “Jesus.” He shook his head. “No more espresso for you, and I mean it.”

  “I have to do something. Any action is better than inaction.”

  “Well.” Andrews sat. “Let’s start with your basic premise: The killer was after the coin. Who knew about the coin?”

  “God, that doesn’t help. Anyone could have known: insurance agents, office workers, anyone who overheard something or saw some kind of paperwork—”

  “Also Hek and June,” Andrews interrupted. “Therefore, all manner of local people hereabouts, and, we must assume, lawyer Taylor. Not to mention the fact that Shultz, bless him, was not exactly tight-lipped on the subject. So, I agree: That doesn’t help. Serves me right for trying to think before coffee.”

  “The more I consider this question,” I concurred, “the larger the number grows of people who might have an interest in the coin.”

  “You still have it with you, I presume.” Andrews deliberately avoided looking at me. “The coin.”

  My hand shot to the left pocket of my jeans. They were the same ones I’d worn the day before. I’d slept in them.

  The coin was there, a mocking imitation of the moon.

  I took it out and showed it to him.

  “Interesting how you didn’t tell Detective Huyne that you had it.”

  I put it back in my pocket, then instantly began thinking where I could hide it.

  “I didn’t deny that I had it.”

  “No.” Andrews didn’t sound himself.

  “What is it?” I glowered at him. “Why is your voice like that?”

  “I’m just wondering.” He finally looked at me. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d think that you were feeling a sense of entitlement where this coin is concerned—that it belongs to you.”

  I let a number of angry responses pass through my mind without giving them voice, because it also occurred to me that he might, in some small way, be correct. Perhaps something in the murkier parts of my subconscious did make me think I had a right to the thing.

  When my throat finally did let several syllables go, they were fairly innocuous.

  “Single or double? Your espresso.”

  Andrews smiled.

  “Don’t you have any bigger cup than that?” It was clear he had nothing but absolute, righteous disdain for the demitasse I held in my hand.

  I reached up into the open cabinet and retrieved a mug, held it out for his approval.

  “I suppose it will do—if you fill it to the brim.”

  “With this espresso.”

  “Absolutely,” he confirmed. “I had a bad night.”

  “You had a bad night? Let me tell you what an actual bad night looks like. Start with an inability to sleep. Make that inability a door that opens out onto a landscape of your worst, most personal demons and terrors. Step across that threshold and find yourself wandering aimlessly in a world of shadowy Jungian swill that occasionally and without warning vomits out the worst monsters of your id: grotesque, deformed images of your parents and a tangle of brambles that wrap around your ankles and keep you from moving toward a peaceful horizon. And then, when you can’t move, you have the slow realization that in some way you’re actually wanted for murder in a world more real than your little hometown. And worse, the true murderer is wandering around in that same hellish landscape, looking for you, because he hasn’t found what he wants, and you have it in your pocket. Then—”

  “Christ, I get the picture.” Andrews rubbed one eye with an open palm. “I should know never to go head-to-head with you in the Festival of Angst.”

  I realized my fingers were shaking just a bit.

  “Well.” I exhaled, deliberately calming myself. “When you’re the one who invented the game, you always have a pretty good chance of winning.”

  “If I don’t get caffeine in three seconds, I swear to God—”

  I shoved the mug under the espresso machine’s spout and pushed the button. The whoosh of the steam was, at that moment, the most comforting sound in the known universe.

  Andrews decided to have the rest of his espresso on the front porch. I sat with him, impatient, biting the inside of my cheek. The morning was still chilly, but it was a welcome relief from previous weeks of stifling heat and unusual humidity.

  Something had broken open the hard shell of autumn, and the crack of blue sky, the thrill of cold fingers, the contrast of warm sun and bracing wind—all were a healing tonic for those last, sick days of summer.

  He set his mug down on the floor of the porch and sat back in his rocking chair. Dressed in sweatpants and a flannel shirt, hair dangerously exploded from his head, Andrews was still a man on vacation, however horribly it had gone wrong.

  I, on the other hand, was ready for battle: black jeans, work boots, light leather jacket over black T-shirt—perfect for a man who expected to be walking in shadows most of the time.

  “So what now?” Andrews stared out at the mountainside directly across from my porch.

  “Well, from what we saw yesterday—which seems a hundred years ago—I mean at the lawyer’s office: Conner acquired three items at the same time, and those three items are related to me. They turned out to be things that were used in order to fund my college education. Now one of those three items is the center of a very bad sequ
ence of events, and we have no idea where the other two are. I believe we have to find out as much as we can about all three of these things, including, especially, who has been interested in them recently. As in: Has someone else contacted lawyer Taylor? Or did someone else contact Shultz’s father not long ago?”

  “Sorry, your diction’s falling apart a bit. Why would you say that last one?”

  “What made Shultz’s father change the insured value of the coin from five thousand to half a million and not tell Shultz?”

  “Oh.” Andrews sat forward in his rocker. “We have to find out more about those three items.”

  “Brilliant. I knew you’d think of something.”

  “It hasn’t occurred to you that the sale of the coin might have been what put you through college?”

  “For five thousand dollars? It was more than that a year.”

  “Okay.” He hesitated. “But didn’t the police tell you not to leave home?”

  “All this world,” I pronounced, “is my native home.”

  “Then why are we sitting here on this porch?”

  Clearly, his large dose of espresso had kicked in nicely, and Dr. Andrews was ready to move.

  “We’re waiting for you to change clothes, I think.” I eyed his flannel shirt.

  “It’s your funeral.” He stood immediately. “I won’t be a moment.”

  And he was off.

  “I’ll follow you up,” I called after him. “I have to do something in my mother’s room.”

  I clutched the coin in my pocket. Andrews was already in the shower.

  Andrews had dressed in his own kind of armor: rugby shirt, baggy shorts, tennis shoes with no socks. The day was attempting an early autumn, a crack in the air, sky as blue as Blind Willie McTell’s soul. I was standing in the yard, looking into the woods.

  “Okay, cappie.” Andrews clamored down the steps. “Where are we going?”

  “Cappie?” I shook my head. “That’s what you’re calling me?”