A Widow's Curse Read online

  Deputy Melissa Mathews was young, but Skidmore had complete confidence in her, so I did, too.

  “Dr. Devilin!” she called from the front porch.

  I stood slowly.

  “Hello.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  She moved carefully through the front door and saw the body immediately.

  “Okay,” she hollered over her shoulder, “come on.”

  Several men and one gray-haired woman were coming up the porch steps by the time I got to the door to shake Melissa’s hand.

  “Thank you for coming so quickly,” I told her, feeling foolish—it was something you’d say to a plumber if your water was running.

  She held on to my hand.

  “Are you all right, Doctor?” She searched my eyes, genuinely concerned.

  “I—I’m a little shaken, actually. And my friend Dr. Andrews—have you met him?” I looked into the kitchen.

  Andrews looked paler than usual. He held up one hand to wave weakly in the direction of the deputy.

  “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure,” she said, all business. “Excuse me.”

  She held the door open and let the others in.

  “This is Chester from over in Pine City,” she told me, patting one of the men on the shoulder as he passed. “He gets fingerprints. And you remember Mrs. Tomlinson.”

  The grandmother nodded to me. She was carrying a Polaroid camera and had another, more serious one around her neck.

  It took me a moment to remember where I had seen her. She was the wedding photographer in town.

  “She’s going to document the crime scene.” Melissa pointed her in the right direction. “She’s done this sort of work for us before.”

  Mrs. Tomlinson started snapping Polaroids immediately, and Chester had already popped on latex gloves and a surgeon’s face mask.

  I thought I recognized the other man, a deputy, though I could not recall his name. He began to search the living room.

  Even for a million dollars, I could not have described any one of them the next day, except for Melissa, whom I knew. She’d been Skidmore’s deputy for over a year, and many people in town had suspected their relationship, but Skidmore was married to Girlinda, one of the finest human beings on the planet, and he knew it. Besides, it would never even occur to Skidmore that Melissa was attractive—and never would.

  Andrews, on the other hand, noticed right away.

  Melissa’s chestnut hair was pulled back in a braid that ran halfway down her back. Her expression was shy, but her stride was bold, and her mouth always seemed on the verge of a smile. She was still in her early twenties, and dozens had asked her out. She always refused.

  “Could we step into the kitchen, Doctor,” she said gently. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Of course.”

  Andrews stood when she came into the room and offered his hand. She took it and gave him what appeared to be a firm, masculine handshake.

  “Dr. Andrews, is it?”

  “It is.” He even managed a smile.

  “And you both found the body?”

  “I was first in.” I stood by the sink. “Do you want some coffee or something?”

  “No, thank you. Please have a seat.”

  Andrews and I sat at the kitchen table. She produced a small spiral notebook and a mechanical pencil and took a chair opposite us. For the next forty minutes, she took down the details of Shultz’s visit, information about the coin, even a paragraph or two about related folktales, an indulgence to me, I thought. We finished with our trip to the Taylor law firm and what we had discovered there.

  “All right.” She closed her notebook. “I think that’s enough for the moment. We’ll save the rest until the people from Atlanta get here.”

  “What?” I thought I’d heard her incorrectly.

  “I have to call Atlanta to notify the next of kin.” She sat back in her chair. “And I believe they may send someone up here to take a look at things.”

  “You mean I have to wait up—”

  “You can go on to bed if you want,” she interrupted. “We’ll be here.”

  “You mean I have to try to go to bed,” I said without missing a beat, “with the dead body of a very nice man lying on my living room rug?”

  She leaned forward.

  “I called Skid,” she whispered. “He told me to do it.”

  “You called him?” I was surprised at how relieved that made me—not because I didn’t trust Melissa, but because I wanted my old friend to be there. “What did he say?”

  “He said to try and keep you from doing anything until he got here. He left Alabama when he hung up the phone. He drives real fast. He might be here in a couple of hours, really.”

  I nodded, doing my best to rally.

  “Did he give you any advice concerning just how you might keep me from doing anything?” I lowered my lids.

  “You know those tranquilizer darts that we use on the rabid dogs?” She managed to keep a straight face, but her eyes were bright.

  “You brought more than one, I assume. I’m fairly riled up.”

  “Got a whole case out in the car.”

  “Well”—I stood up—“go ahead and hit me with at least one. I’d like to get a good night’s sleep.”

  “That’s a good one.” She finally gave in to her smile. It had exactly the opposite effect of a tranquilizer dart. “You surely are a mess, Dr. Devilin.”

  “Amen to that,” Andrews chimed in.

  He wasn’t looking at me; he was staring into Melissa’s eyes—or trying to. She looked away. I marveled at Andrews’s ability to pursue her in light of the circumstances. My own courtship with Lucinda had progressed at a glacial pace, and there had been nothing of what could be called “flirtation.”

  “I’m going upstairs to try and sleep,” I announced.

  Melissa nodded. Andrews ignored me in favor of her.

  I tried not to look into the living room on my way up the stairs.

  I was awakened by loud voices.

  I didn’t know if I had slept a minute or a day. I couldn’t tell what the voices were saying, exactly, but there was an air of disagreement that filled the whole house.

  I dragged myself out of bed fully clothed. I’d only taken off my shoes. I tried to get them back on, but gravity had somehow increased its angry control over my body, and nothing was easy.

  As I made it to my door, I thought that one of the voices might be Skidmore’s. That eased gravity a bit and propelled me through the hall and down the stairs.

  Before I hit the bottom step, I could hear the argument coming to a boil.

  “I don’t care who you think he is, Sheriff. I don’t care if he’s the mother of your children. He’s our suspect!”

  The man yelling was dressed in a cheap black suit and standing in my living room with his finger in Skidmore’s face. His face was like a Halloween mask, contorted and vaguely ashen. Another man, older, stood behind him, looking down at his own shoes. Skidmore had his back to me.

  “One more sentence,” Skidmore warned between welded teeth, “and you’re in my jailhouse.”

  “What?” the man exploded.

  “Let’s see. Assaulting a police officer, I think.” Skidmore looked toward the kitchen. “Deputy Mathews, did you see this man assault me?”

  “Yes, sir, I did,” she called back immediately.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Excuse me, Sheriff. I heard the whole thing.” I smiled at the faces suddenly turned my way. “It’s a clear case of mistaken identity. I am not, in point of fact, the mother of your children, and I have the medical records to prove it.”

  Skid’s face relaxed as he looked up at me.

  “Hey, Fever.” His voice was soft.

  I was dismayed to see, over Skid’s shoulder, that the body of Carl Shultz was still there.

  “And as I explained to the very capable Deputy Mathews,” I continued, entering the room, “Dr. Andrews and I were in
Pine City at a lawyer’s office when our friend here was killed.”

  “The time of death has not quite been determined,” Melissa told me, wincing as she said it.

  “You must be Dr. Devilin.” The man in the cheap suit gave me what is sometimes called, in lesser fiction, “the once-over.”

  “This is Detective Huyne from Atlanta.” Skidmore sighed. “Mr. Shultz’s family, apparently, exerts some influence there.”

  “Bite my ass twice,” Huyne growled.

  “In my house,” I said tersely, coming to stand just a little too close to the man, “I prefer better language. I’m not against profanity, exactly. I just think that any person with the intelligence required to become a police detective can probably think of ten or twelve better words to use, words that are more expressive and infinitely clearer. Now, if you have the idea that that you can bully my friends and me with an urban attitude and a few low-IQ insults, then I stand corrected in the matter of prerequisite brainpower for your job. Your bad manners, however, are only going to make it more difficult for you to accomplish anything on this mountain. So let me make things easy for you: I didn’t kill Shultz, I have a witness who was with me all day, I have a witness in Pine City who is a pillar of that community, and anyone you’ll ever talk to in Blue Mountain or in Atlanta will tell you I’m not capable of murder because I have too much guilt and psychological trauma as it is. I’m guessing that you haven’t found a murder weapon, and if you ever do, it won’t have a trace of me on it—this is assuming that he died from having the back of his head caved in. And on top of it all, my alibi in Pine City spoke to the deceased, who told him that a man had just broken into my house and was demanding to see me. It’s the reason we hurried home from the lawyer’s office—did I happen to mention that we were in a lawyer’s office? So, obviously, the man who broke in killed our friend here. Any questions so far, or should I continue?”

  “He did die from what they call a blunt trauma to the head,” Melissa assured me at a whisper, her attempt to ease the tension. “It was stove in like a mush melon. His head.”

  Huyne tilted his head sideways at me like a hunting dog.

  “You don’t talk like the rest of these locals much, do you?”

  Andrews appeared from the kitchen. I knew the expression he was wearing: rugby-ready for kicking the vital organs out of anything that crossed his path.

  “On the other hand,” Andrews said to me, voice knife-edged, “I was just thinking how your diction is much less pompous than it used to be. I think you’re kind of settling in here at home.”

  “I’ve only been home for a couple of years.” I smiled at Huyne. “I was gone from Blue Mountain a long while—teaching at a university in Atlanta.”

  “We’ll check out your alibi in—” He turned to his cohort. “Where was it?”

  “Pine City.” The man didn’t consult any notes; didn’t look up.

  He was a little older than Huyne and didn’t bother to hide his exhaustion. It seemed a fatigue built into his bones and sinews over years of dull dangers and sharp knives.

  “But it doesn’t mean much to me either way.” Huyne nailed his eyes to mine. “Time of death is close enough to indicate the possibility that you were in Pine City, motored home, killed Shultz, and called the local law enforcement. We get this sort of thing more than you know: The killer calls the cops, thinking we’ll never suspect him if he’s the one who reports the crime. ‘Why would I call you if I did it, Officer?’”

  “What about the man who broke in and threatened Shultz?” Andrews wasn’t very good at disguising incredulity.

  “Oh, jeez,” Huyne’s voice mocked with every letter he pronounced. “The murderer was a mysterious stranger. We’ve never heard that one before.”

  “And my companion/witness?” I indicated Andrews with my hand, as if I were asking him to take a bow. “The one who was with me all day and saw me not do it?”

  “He’s in on it.” Huyne never took his eyes from mine.

  “Okay.” I couldn’t prevent a slight smile from brightening my stare. “You’ve invented the opportunity. What’s my motive?”

  “A silver coin.” He tried to pierce my eyes through to the back of my skull with his gaze. “You don’t know where it is, do you?”

  I returned his stare with equal electricity.

  “It wasn’t in Mr. Shultz’s pocket? Could we suppose that the murderer got it?”

  Huyne turned to his assistant.

  “Frisk him.”

  The man moved instantly. Skid moved faster, coming between me and the man headed my way.

  “Not in my jurisdiction,” Skid hissed. “Nobody gets a frisking tonight. Are we clear?”

  Skid had his back to me, but I could recognize the threat in his voice.

  Huyne’s assistant looked out the kitchen window.

  “What’s so important about this coin?” Skidmore asked Huyne.

  “It’s valued at half a million dollars. Sounds like a motive for murder to me.”

  Andrews and I sat in my kitchen with Melissa Mathews, trying to keep our voices down while Skid conferred, at a low boil, with the policemen from Atlanta.

  “Where did he get that ‘half a million dollars’ business?” Andrews leaned into the table, almost hovering over it, his voice hushed, face drained of color.

  “How did he even know about the coin?” My arms were folded in front of my chest. I realized I was rocking back and forth just a little, and stopped myself.

  The air had chilled considerably after the rain; it was in the lower fifties outside. The sky was made of slate, an ancient blackboard with dots of chalk for stars, not made of air at all—or light.

  “That Detective Huyne man?” Melissa’s clear tones were bells compared to my grumbling fog. “Or however you say his name—I believe he came into this house already believing you killed the man, the dead man.”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked her.

  “Demeanor.” She nodded once. “And another thing. I didn’t ever reach any of Mr. Shultz’s relatives or anything, just left an urgent message, you know, on the phone machine. And that man showed up, out for blood.”

  “Well.” I shivered. “We’ve got to find out a whole lot more—”

  But one of the local deputies, a man who had come in with Melissa, interrupted my sentence.

  “Mel?” he said to Deputy Mathews. He sounded nervous, looked twelve.

  “Dr. Devilin, you know Crawdad, right?” She didn’t seem to think there was anything out of the ordinary about the boy’s name.

  His hand shot out before I could say anything.

  “It’s a honor.” He made the word honor sound holy.

  “I’m happy to meet you.” I took his hand; his grip was solid.

  “My mama? She told a story into your tape machine once, and you put it in a book. We got the book. It’s open in the living room so everybody can see.” He looked at Melissa. “They say that story’s in the Library of Congress. In Washington, D.C.”

  “Your mother is…” I’d collected so many stories over the years, it was impossible to remember them all.

  “Dolly Pritchett. She was a Mathews, like Melissa. We’re related some kind of way, but dang if I can suss it out.” He grinned.

  “You’re Crawdad Pritchett?”

  “Yes, sir.” He seemed a bit nervous at my suddenly aggressive tone.

  “I can’t believe it. I haven’t seen you in years.” I turned to Andrews. “This young man, when he was seven or eight, won a very important state fiddling contest. He used to jump up and down while he was playing, as if he were on a pogo stick. Great musician.” I turned back to Crawdad. “Are you still playing?”

  He shrugged. “I was in a rock and roll band for a while, but the deputy work, it’s hard and I’m kindly tired when I get home.”

  Kindly, I thought, marking his mispronunciation. If he’s anything like the rest of his family, that’s probably the way he would do anything: kindly.

  �
�Too bad.” I smiled. “How’s your mother?”

  “She passed.” He cleared his throat.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It was the lung cancer. Took awhile. We said our good-bye.”

  “You came in here for a reason,” Melissa said softly to Crawdad.

  “Oh. Right. Look: That beat-up old trunk in the back corner over there?” He shifted his eyes in the direction of Conner’s trunk, then lowered his voice considerably. “I believe it’s been tampered with. It’s the only thing in the house we can find that seems, you know, out of the ordinary. I ain’t told nobody else yet. I mean, it’s your trunk.”

  “This is why I brought old Crawdad with me,” Melissa said, voice hushed to match his, a smile crinkling her lips. “He’s better than anyone I know at figuring out what’s ‘out of the ordinary.’ Got a real sixth sense about it—eerie. That’s his genius. And he’s using it to help you out.”

  I understood. She was telling me not to bother him about his fiddle playing. He wasn’t called to music; he was called to this unusual ability at police work, somehow. I accepted her evaluation.

  “What’s strange about the way the trunk looks?” I tried not to look in the direction of it.

  “I got it figured like this: You had some things in that trunk, but they were things that nobody hadn’t looked at in a while—until today. The dust patterns on the top and inside that trunk are different from any other ones in the whole house. They look just the littlest bit frantic, the patterns do. Like someone was looking for something in there. That’s what I found strange.”

  “Why?” Melissa was watching the men in the living room.

  “Because there was all that activity in there recently,” Crawdad explained softly, “and there’s nothing inside of that trunk. It’s empty.”

  By midnight, the detectives from Atlanta had created as much ill will as they were going to for one night’s work. Huyne had insulted everything about Melissa’s enterprise: the fingerprint expert from Pine City, the Polaroid snapshots of the scene, and her management of the first moments at the crime scene. He stopped short when Skid renewed an interest in arresting him and carting him off to a small-town jail on trumped-up charges that would keep him in hell for months. The rest of us knew Skid was bluffing, but Huyne seemed nervous enough about the prospect to shut down his worst ire.