A Tough Nut to Kill (Nut House Mystery Series) (25 page)

The trip into Houston was a quiet one. We had to get there
fast. I could feel the urgency. We didn’t have hours or even minutes to spare. I was too used to having someone snatch things away from me, someone very evil who watched what I, and Miss Amelia and Hunter, did and laughed at us. I grew more and more afraid we’d get there and Virginia would be gone. I called Dr. Lambert and explained what was going on. One o’clock was fine with him.

“You heard about Martin?” Hunter asked after a while as we made our way by the Columbus exits. He turned his strong, narrow face to me. More as if he was asking some other question.

“He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?”

He nodded. “Doctor’s bringing him out of the coma. Should be awake by tomorrow.”

Too much. This could all be over by tomorrow . . . tomorrow . . . tomorrow. That’s all I heard: tomorrow. Maybe Martin didn’t see who attacked him. Maybe he was surprised. Maybe he’d just discovered the trees and was knocked out before he heard the man behind him.

“Or by the time we get back from Houston. If we’re lucky,” he added as if he actually believed it.

“The sheriff called the hospital,” he said. “He wanted to make sure somebody would be with Martin from here on in. We’ve got the feeling this might be a critical time, one way or the other.”

Part of my brain took in what he was saying. Martin was in danger too. Like fighting a hydra—arms and heads all over the place. Virginia. Martin. All of us.

“Juanita said she would be there all today and tonight,” Hunter went on. “And Jessie’s coming part of the time. Guess there are others willing to stay.”

“Ben?” I asked, then wanted to bite my tongue.

He nodded. “Ben and Harry and Chastity and Miss Ethelred. Probably anybody Juanita wants will be glad to chip in. Just need folks around him.”

“Meemaw and Mama would but for the news they’re waiting for.”

“Already got it.”

“Got what?”

“News.”

“About Daddy? And you didn’t tell me! Hunter!”

“I told Miss Amelia I’d tell you on the way to Houston.”

“Fine. I should be home with my family.” I scowled hard at him. “So?”

“I don’t know if this is what you’re expecting or not.”

“Just tell me. Was my daddy murdered or was it an accident?”

“Amos was right. And Justin—right all along.”

It was a stunner. Maybe either way would have been a stunner.

“Stabbed in the back, Lindy. What that old coroner took to be mower blade nicks on his backbone weren’t. Too narrow for that, this new man says. And too consistently in one place. A mower would have moved on as it rolled over him. This is a tight series of nicks. Stab wounds on the spine.”

How could I be any sadder than I’d already been about Daddy dying? Something moved inside me. Hatred. Rage. But not sadness. More like at last we had something to fight. At last we could put Jake Blanchard to rest and know it was done. And at last, there was a tangible thing to look at: knife marks on my daddy’s spine.

“You okay, Lindy?” He looked over at me.

“I will be. Soon as this is over. Let’s get to Houston.”

• • •

This time we ran up the clinic’s steps as fast as we could
run, then over to the front desk. The woman took us straight back to Dr. Lambert’s office. I knocked but didn’t wait to be invited in.

A woman sat in a chair across from Dr. Lambert. Maybe she was in her forties, but showing a lot of hard wear. Her head hung down between her thin shoulder blades. She turned around, almost cowering in her seat. Her blond hair was thick and badly cut. The outfit she wore—a summer skirt and lace-trimmed blouse—looked as if it had been washed a hundred times too many. Washed out and sad—all of her.

Her hands, worn and red, clutched a manila envelope in her lap.

She relaxed when Dr. Lambert greeted Hunter and me, then introduced us.

“This is Lindy Blanchard, Virginia.” The doctor kept his voice artificially calm, the way people do with frightened children. “And Deputy Austen.”

I took the chair next to her. “I’m so happy you agreed to meet us,” I said, wanting to take her hand but afraid to startle her.

She nodded at me, and then at Hunter, eyeing him warily, taking in the uniform, the stiff hat he held under his arm, his “at attention” stance.

“Are those the reports?” I nodded toward the envelope she held, getting right to the reason we were there. Every moment felt urgent to me, as if being away from Riverville signaled a kind of desertion.

She nodded, pulled papers from the envelope and handed them to me. With a sigh, she settled back in the chair, relieved of a burdensome duty.

I took the papers into my lap and scanned them once, and then a second time, looking for Ben Fordyce’s name—in case Virginia had missed it.

Hunter read over my shoulder until I handed the papers up to him and put a hand over my eyes. He flipped through paper after paper then began to read aloud.

“This one’s Donny Fritch’s report. It’s all about somebody named Harold Tompkins of . . . let me see here . . . Terre Haute, Indiana. Born in 1959, in Lexington, Kentucky, to a Verna and Ferlynn Tompkins. Married a Joslyn Franklin in 1985 and divorced her in 1989. Joslyn was caught cheating and didn’t contest the divorce, Fritch says here. No children.

“High school graduate.” He went on reading aloud.

“Hmmm . . . says the guy was a traveling salesman for Pullman’s Seeds during his first marriage. After the divorce he was an appliance salesman at Sears. That job lasted . . . let me see . . . six months. Seems he was fired for unstated reasons.”

I sat up and took the reports from his hands. None of this was about anyone we knew. Why would Daddy have paid a thousand dollars for it? And why did Amos want it so badly he paid another five hundred? Or maybe even more.

Nothing to do with Ben. Ben would have given Daddy a reason to pay the money for the report—believing in his friend. Maybe it would have given Amos a reason to finish paying for it—getting even with the attorney who helped fight Amos off when he was at his worst.

But that wasn’t true of Amos anymore. Virginia wasn’t lying about Amos coming back to Riverville to make it up to us; nor about Amos knowing something that could stop whoever wanted to hurt us.

This had to be a path through the maze we’d been drawn into. I sensed that these pages and articles would lead directly to whoever killed my daddy and Amos. It would lead to the person who hurt Martin; took my trees; destroyed my records.

So maybe this had been all about my work after all

Or a ten-year-old death in Indiana.

Or one of Amos’s scams.

But then how was Daddy involved and why was he murdered back before any of this began?

My head was spinning.

I read on from where Hunter had stopped: “In 1998 Harold Tompkins was in Terre Haute, Indiana, and married Sarah Mann, a wealthy woman. They moved into her estate on Cressley Road in Terre Haute. He wasn’t working but went to Ivy Tech for two years, then got a job at an attorney’s office in Terre Haute. In January of 2001 Sarah Mann Tompkins was found murdered. Thought to be a suspect in the murder, Harold left town two weeks later and hasn’t been seen since.”

I read to myself, skipping repetitions. Donny Fritch traced him to California where he disappeared again. That was about all the report said except it included interviews with neighbors and a police lieutenant and mentioned the woman: Charlene Cooksey. She’d either disappeared too or a woman, by that name, never existed.

“It says: ‘See articles attached.’” I picked up the yellowing newspaper stories to read from the first account of the murder to a rehash written in 2009, stating that Mr. Tompkins was still missing and wanted for questioning as a person of interest in his wife’s murder.

I read the other articles, stopping at the word “estate.” Sounded to me as if this Tompkins man had married way up in the world.

All of the articles detailed what the police discovered at the Cressley Street house on that January evening. Harold Tompkins found his wife’s body on returning from a trip to Bloomington. The house was torn apart, many items missing, including his wife’s jewelry, insured for one million three hundred thousand dollars.

There was a professional photograph of Sarah Mann attached to the article. Surprisingly she was a much older woman. I looked back at the report. Tompkins was born in 1959. Thirty-nine when he married Sarah.

The setting in the woman’s photo was very formal. Her gray-streaked hair was rolled up and back from her face; the corners of her mouth were drawn into a pleasant smile. Her eyes weren’t cold so much as wary. She was seated forward on a brocade-covered Queen Anne chair; knees together under her blue lace dress; feet, in sensible low-heeled shoes, planted firmly on the carpet; hands folded decorously in her lap. She looked like every moneyed matron ever photographed for posterity, the only ostentatious thing about her being a necklace with a large stone at its center circled by what looked to be diamonds.

Included beneath her picture was a photo of her home, the Mann estate, where she was murdered. A huge, austere house set back on a long lawn, surrounded by well-trimmed hedges.

I went again to the detective’s report while Hunter read the articles. From the Terre Haute Police Lieutenant Donny Fritch interviewed, I learned that there was something about Mr. Tompkins’s cell phone records on the day his wife was murdered that raised suspicion. He’d made repeated calls to a number in Terre Haute around the time of the murder. The calls pinged off a tower within the city, very close to the Mann estate, proving he wasn’t in Bloomington as he’d claimed. The police got a court order for the numbers he called and found that most went to a local hotel, to a room assigned to Charlene Cooksey.

So that was where the woman came into the story.

I read on. The woman checked out the morning after the murder. She’d left an address in Bloomington but when the address was checked the people living there had never heard of a Charlene Cooksey. She was untraceable. They got a description from the hotel clerk. She’d been in her forties, a lot of brown hair piled up on her head. Wore a big fur coat. High heels.

Could be anybody.

Fritch, in his summation at the end of the report, added that the police suspected an affair of long standing but found nothing more on the pair. It was as if they’d vanished. Speculation was that they’d left the country. A nationwide alert was sent out but there’d been nothing new until, in 2005, a piece of Sarah Mann’s stolen jewelry was discovered. Sold to a dealer in Dallas.

After that the trail went cold.

I read the last paragraph of the report. Donny Fritch offered to do a more exhaustive search for either Charlene Cooksey or Harold Tompkins if Mr. Blanchard thought it important.

A blurred photograph was stapled to the back of the last report page. The Post-it note attached said the man was Harold Tompkins and the woman with him was presumed to be Charlene Cooksey, taken at the Terre Haute International Airport. It had been taken by a a neighbor of the Tompkins who’d been seeing his daughter off. The man thought it odd to run into Tompkins there, two weeks after his wife’s murder, and with another woman in tow. Though the photo had been enlarged, it still looked like something from an old newspaper.

In the picture Tompkins was of average height. His face was turned to look back over his shoulder at the camera. In this bad picture the round face was nothing more than a flurry of dark dots under a hat

A woman walked beside him. She’d turned to the camera, too. Her face was clearer, but nondescript. A woman you wouldn’t look at twice, dressed in a dark pantsuit, high heels, a large bag slung over her left shoulder. Her ample dark hair was pulled back away from her face. She wore large sunglasses.

“Anybody we know?” I held the photo out to Hunter.

Hunter shook his head slowly. “That would’ve been what? Ten years ago? If I’ve ever seen them, they’ve changed from what they looked like than.”

Dr. Lambert, who’d been quiet while we sorted through the papers, cleared his throat. “I have appointments. Maybe you could take this out to the lobby?”