Easy as One Two Three (A Flap Tucker Mystery) Read online

  Still, I was puzzled by Cedar’s devotion to Minister Dave. “So why the affection for the guy?”

  “You’ll see when you meet him.”

  Dally pressed the next item on the list. “Ms. McDonner’s pills. Why’s she take ’em?”

  Cedar spoke softly. “Nerves.”

  “So we’ve been repeatedly told.” I stared at him. “What’s she got to be nervous about?”

  He started to say something again, then shook his head. “I don’t believe it has anything to do with this situation. And it’s also, by the way, none of your damn business” — glance to Dally — “sorry, ma’am.”

  She was about to let him have it right in his sorry, Ma'am. “Listen, Buster …”

  But I saved him. “If it’s got something to do with why she takes the pills that put her to sleep so she couldn’t hear her daughter get up and leave the house? I think it’s at least partially related to the situation at hand — wouldn’t you say?”

  He took a breath.

  Mustard rallied himself from his state enough to help. “Cedar? Flap’s got a sort of a God-given talent for findin’ things. But he needs to know ever’thing. He’s goin’ to use what you tell him to find Ginny, see? You can’t hold back on ’im — or we won’t find Ginny.”

  I saw the first signs of caving. “Yes. I know his reputation.”

  I smiled. “Okay. So are you going to tell me the story — or not?”

  “I don’t know how this will help,” Cedar began, tentatively.

  Dally was the most impatient. “What is it?”

  The Jeep slowed, just barely perceptibly, and Cedar’s shoulders sagged. We had turned off the main road and were headed up a steep, rocky dirt track. My mind was stretching to come up with a new definition for the word black. I was trying to deal with the void-darkness in the woods on either side of the truck. Even the snow was hidden by the deep cave of night.

  “If I tell you” — Cedar shook his head — “you have to say you won’t spread it around. This is for you to hear — nobody else, right?”

  I nodded big. “Who am I going to tell?”

  He turned and actually looked Mustard in the face for a second. “You too, brother.”

  Mustard squinted. “You know me better’n that, boy.”

  He took a quick shot at Dally. “As you seem to want to be one of these modern women, Ma’am, I’ll have to ask for your cooperation in this matter too.”

  She was stuck on terminology. “Modern women?”

  He was suddenly at a loss. “Look, Ms. Oglethorpe. I mean no disrespect to you at all, and everything I say seems to rub you the wrong way. So you just take it from me that I don’t mean to insult you, and I’ll take it from you that you don’t mean to be insulted. How about that?”

  With a fair-sized breath, Dally agreed. “Right. I’ll get over it. And I promise not to blab about Ms. McDonner — whatever it is that’s her deal.”

  He was satisfied. “The problem is nerves. What’s caused those nerves is the story.”

  The road got rougher and the Jeep slowed even more. We rounded a tough curve, and the headlights cut out across the black forest primeval. You could see eyes out there, honest to God. Could have been deer, could have been bear, could have been … almost anything, really.

  “You might have noticed that Mr. McDonner is a touch older than his wife.”

  Dally couldn’t keep quiet. “He’s a shove older, if he’s a day.”

  Cedar conceded. “Fifteen, years. They were very happy when Ginny was born. They’d had more than one miscarriage. But when Ginny came along, the old man thought he could still have a family, see? So quick as Ms. McDonner got back on her feet, after Ginny came home, they got pregnant again. Only something went wrong, or was already wrong to start with. The baby had something wrong with it, is what I mean. Mr. McDonner couldn’t handle it, so he … wanted his wife to take care of it.”

  Cedar fell silent.

  Dally had to prompt. “Take care of it?”

  Mustard helped. “Abortion, I b’lieve.”

  Cedar clicked his head. “You heard this before?”

  Mustard looked out the window. “There’s some that gossips.”

  Cedar looked away. “There’s no such thing as a secret on this mountain.”

  Dally turned to look at Mustard. “She got an abortion? There was something wrong with the baby, so she got an abortion?”

  He nodded. “Tha’s what I heard. They say the baby mighta had that Down’s Syndrome. And anyway, she didn’t get th’ abortion.”

  Cedar confirmed grimly. “I believe she did it herself.”

  Okay, that got me. “What?”

  Mustard shook his head. “There really ain’t no such thing as a proper abortion up here. Even if there was, most people wouldn’t do it. You got to go down to Atlanta — but there’s other ways.”

  Dally was staring. “What did she do?”

  Cedar had slowed the Jeep to all but a standstill. “There are some folk-style remedies that induce a premature labor.”

  Mustard nodded. “I heard it’s got some belladonna an’ some nightshade — mix it with saltwater … ain’t sure of the rest.”

  My voice was a little low. “Belladonna and nightshade … those are poisons.”

  Mustard nodded again. “Sure enough.”

  Cedar’s voice was even softer than mine. “All I know is I got a call about two in the morning from Mr. McDonner saying they had miscarried again and could I come take her to the hospital.”

  Dally shook her head. “He didn’t call an ambulance?”

  “Well, you can see how I live right next door, so I could get there quicker …”

  I had to add, “Not to mention that maybe you won’t ask the wrong questions.”

  He was harder again in his speech. “There’s no law against having a miscarriage.”

  Dally wanted to get on with the story. “So you got there …”

  He complied. “… and she was unconscious. She’d lost the baby and she was white as a sheet. We bundled her up and laid her out in the backseat. I flipped on the sirens and we were at the hospital in five minutes. I must have driven a hundred miles an hour.”

  I leaned forward again. “So what made you think it was something other than a miscarriage?”

  He was trying to be all business. “Well, in the first place she was in her third trimester, so strictly speaking —”

  Dally filled in. “— It was a premature birth.”

  He nodded slightly. “But the baby was dead and gone.”

  I fielded that one. “Gone?”

  Cedar cleared his throat. “Mr. McDonner told me he’d already buried the little thing. Baby girl, he said.”

  “Baby girl.” Dally looked away. “You didn’t think that was kind of odd?”

  “Sure I did, but the most important thing at that moment seemed to be getting to the hospital and keeping her alive. She was in a very bad way.”

  Dally sat back. “Go on.”

  “Doctors worked on her for hours. Wanted to know what she’d taken. They could see right away she had taken something, I guess. Mr. McDonner claimed not to know what they were talking about. They wanted to pump her stomach, but she’d already lost so much blood and so many fluids they were afraid to. Then, about dawn, she opened her eyes. The old man cried like a child. Maggie started in to praying just as soon as she could talk. The doctors said she was still under the effects of whatever medicine she’d taken. The prayers were … odd.”

  Mustard was calm. “Like what?”

  “Something about a baby playing ball. Then something about a terrible punishment.”

  Mustard looked at me. “Belladonna nightmare.”

  Cedar shook his head. “No: Seven years a bird in the wood, seven years a fish in the flood, then a tongue in the warning bell, and seven years in the flames of hell.”

  Dally looked back at me. “What’s he saying?”

  But Mustard took a heavy sigh, like he’d just rem
embered something. “You know that tune. I done sung it for you before, remember?”

  “What tune?”

  “They’s some that calls it ‘The Cruel Mother’, but I call it ‘Greenwood Side’. It’s about a mother that kills her little baby with a penknife.”

  Dally beat me to this particular punch line. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Cedar elaborated. “It’s a song.”

  I still wasn’t clear. “She was singing a song in the hospital when she woke up? I thought you said she was praying.”

  He nodded. “It’s probably on account of whatever it was she took to induce the labor — she had some hallucinations. She was talking out of her head.”

  Dally: “Such as?”

  Cedar slowed the Jeep to a near stop. His voice was very flat. “Said she saw a little baby playing ball out in the yard, and it had no clothes on. And she said, ‘If you were my little baby, I’d give you something warm to wear.’ And the baby said, ‘When I was yours, you left me cold and naked out in the woods.’ And then she said she knew it was her own baby that she’d got rid of — ghost of her own baby. So she asked it what her punishment would be. And that’s the part of the song about the seven years. It’s all from the song Mustard was talking about.”

  Mustard blew out a little breath. “Man.”

  Dally wanted more. “So, this again made you somewhat suspicious, I’m hoping.”

  Cedar nodded. “Sure it did.” He turned and looked Dally right in the eye. “But we never found the body of the little baby. You’re a smart woman. I assume you understand the problem here.”

  She sat back. “No body, no crime.”

  He took his eyes off her. “More or less.”

  I looked at Mustard. “People don’t still sing that song up here. It’s, like, an old ballad.”

  He shrugged. “You’d be surprised. Foxfire, the Folk School — lots of kids are interested in the what-was.”

  Cedar was more to the point. “Even if we don’t still sing the old-timey tunes every day, Mr. Tucker, there’s a good number that knows about them, remembers them.” He finally quit coasting and stopped the Jeep. “Just like a lot of kids up here are big Beatles fans.”

  That’s right. You don’t have to have been born in the milieu to dig it, to love it, to long to know it more.

  11. Pine Straw

  Dally looked out into the darkness. “Where are we?”

  Mustard shoved open his door. “This here’s the site of it.”

  “Site of what?”

  “It’s where the Little Girl of Lost Pines used to live.”

  We bundled up and stumbled out. Cedar had a searchlight-type lamp on the top of his vehicle. It scanned the night. Finally it fell on a barely discernible foundation and what was left of a stone chimney. On one side there was some cleared pastureland, maybe some fields; on the other, woods — lots of woods.

  Mustard’s voice was hushed. “That’s where she used to live.”

  The snow was blowing in odd diagonal patterns and looked almost blue in the searchlight.

  Dally matched her cousin’s volume. “What are we looking for?”

  Mustard started walking. “It’s got to be ’round here some kind of way.”

  She looked at me. “What?”

  I followed Mustard. “The thing. The legendary pine straw hut.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Cedar was still fussing with something in the truck. “Wait up. I got some flashlights.”

  He gave one to Dally, caught up with Mustard and me. I flicked mine on. It was like the high beam on a semi.

  I smiled at Cedar. “Great flashlight.”

  He was unmoved. “We start here, we walk due north no more than fifty feet away from each other. Last thing in the world I need is to get you all lost too.”

  I agreed. “Good plan.” I looked back at Ms. Oglethorpe. “I get to walk next to Dalliance.”

  Mustard piped up. “Me too.”

  Cedar nodded. “I’ll take the outside.”

  We started walking, Dally and me in between Mustard and Cedar, all sweeping our big lights out in front of us like alien spacecraft looking for cows. We scared some deer pretty good, but otherwise there wasn’t a sign of life. Anything sensible was inside a house or a hut or a warren or cave. Only the foolhardy ranged abroad on a night like that.

  The woods could have been what they’d been before European settlers ever came to America. They could have been what they’d been before human beings came along, for that matter. There were tall black trees and sloping rises, and the snow settled everything in a preternatural silence.

  We must have walked north for an hour before Cedar changed direction. “Can’t be this far away from the house, can it?”

  Mustard shook his head, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Mustard,” Dally prompted him, “can you let us in on your … intuition or whatever it is?”

  He shook his head again. That’s all.

  So we headed east. It was blacker than black. Beyond the flashlight beam you couldn’t see a thing. You’d think your eyes would adjust to the darkness after a while, but you’d be wrong. It just seemed to get darker.

  Forty-five minutes’ worth of east, and Mustard suddenly hooted. I mean hooo, like an owl.

  Cedar hollered back. “What is it?”

  “Somethin’.”

  There was a little dip, like a ravine, and Mustard was kneeling down in the snow over something. Dally got there first and just stared at it. I slipped in behind her. Cedar was there a second later.

  What Mustard had found was a tiny human skull on top of a pile of large stones.

  I couldn’t help myself. “What the hell is this?”

  Dally leaned back into me. “Looks like an altar or something.”

  Mustard reached out like he was going to touch it, then drew his hand back. “It’s like a baby skull.”

  Dally nodded. “Yeah, that’s exactly what it’s like.”

  She turned around to look at me. “Another item in the ‘too much of a coincidence’ column.”

  My eyes were on the skull. “Absolutely.” I glanced over to the constable. “You sure this thing’s human?” But I already knew the answer.

  “Sure. Look at it.”

  Mustard did just that. “Been here for quite some time.”

  It was just the top half, brown; the jawbone was nowhere to be seen. And sitting atop the stones as it was, it did seem like some kind of shrine or altar, not a burial place. I mean, in a burial place wouldn’t the skull be on the inside?

  Dally was obviously thinking along the same lines. “Could it be some kind of old Indian burial thing?”

  Cedar shook his head. “Naw. Those are big burial mounds — earth mounds, and they’re all put together sturdy. This is too … makeshift.”

  Mustard stood up. “This is some kids playin’ around.”

  Cedar nodded. “Most likely.”

  I had to be the one: “But where’d they get the skull?”

  Dally too: “And, you know, whose is it?”

  Mustard started walking east again. “I’d have to say I’m more concerned about the livin’ than the dead right at the moment.”

  I looked at Cedar. “We can’t just leave this here … I mean …”

  He took a deep breath and tilted his head in Mustard’s direction. “I think I’d have to agree with him. This little thing is beyond our ability to help, but Ginny McDonner is out there somewhere.” He pointed his flashlight after Mustard.

  The big boy called back to us over his left shoulder. “I b’lieve that thing there is a signpost. I b’lieve it means we close to the place we looking for.”

  Dally turned to Cedar. “Why would he say that?”

  Cedar just started walking. “You have to go hunting with Mustard sometime.”

  A quick look passed between Dally and me, and then we followed after.

  As we were pulling away from each other into our search positions, Dally whi
spered something odd to me. “Pretty little girls — one, two, three.”

  “Huh?”

  She didn’t look back at me, but she raised her voice a little. “The ghost of Lost Pines, the ghost of the Greenwood Side baby — and the ghost of Ginny McDonner. That’s three.”

  I shined my light in her direction. “Not like you to wax pessimistic.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Right.”

  She closed her eyes a moment. “And I’m just not in the mood to find a little girl’s dead body.”

  “Well — me neither.”

  “I was … thinking about Sissy’s little baby … and all …”

  I started walking east. “Oh.” But I had the idea I really didn’t know what she was talking about. After that there was a general consensus of silence.

  Another hour, and everything I had was cold. My hair was cold. My buttons were cold. I wanted a cup of hot coffee big enough to lie down in. I wasn’t watching where I was going. I slipped on a mossy patch under the snow and slid down a little embankment. It was very embarrassing. Everybody noticed.

  “Flap?” Dally came zipping down the slope like there were hundred-dollar bills at the bottom.

  I was lying, up on my elbows, in a good drift of white. “I’m okay.”

  Mustard and Cedar hit me with their flashlights at the same time, and I was made blind. I shoved my arm up in front of my eyes and fell back into the snow.

  Now, if you’re a Christian sort of person, I’m told you really ought to believe in a little thing called Providence — divine direction. There’s no other explanation for what happened.

  As I fell back, my flashlight pointed up into the tree I had fallen next to. As it did, I saw the tree house. I was the one who saw it first because I was flat on my back, on account of being a clumsy dope. Everybody else was looking at me. I was looking at the tree house — and I couldn’t get the words out.

  “Uh, it’s the … um …”