Death of an Irish Diva (9 page)

It tugged at Beatrice, this knowing more historical goodies existed in her backyard and it would probably be another week or so before the dig would commence. First the earthquake, then meetings in Richmond. So she decided to get down in the trenches and dig around a bit. After all, it was her backyard. If there were valuable objects of history, she'd happily turn them over to the state. She didn't feel the need to own any of it, but she did feel the hunger for knowledge.

“What are you doing down there?” Jon hissed out the upstairs bathroom window. He'd been taking his morning constitution, and Beatrice knew if she was going to get into the ditch, she'd have to do it when he was otherwise occupied. Men!

She shrugged. “What does it look like?” She held up her shovel.

“Bea!” he said, leaving the window.

She couldn't help but smile. She certainly was in good enough shape to be trudging round in a hole in her backyard, but at one point in her life, she'd have made an issue out of his concern. Now she was just glad he cared about her, glad to have someone in her life, old fool that she was.

She thrust her shovel in the earth next to the spot where the archeologist had told her there was a bigger box. She felt it with the edge of her shovel. She ran it along the box, which was about two feet wide. Who knew how deep it was?

She lifted small patches of earth from on top of the box. The scent of the ground filled her and moved her, as it always did. She loved the red Virginia earth, the way it smelled, the color of it, the feel of it between her fingers, beneath her feet. By the time Jon got to her, she had shoveled the dirt off the trunk, which was, most assuredly, what it had been and maybe still was.

“Fascinating,” Jon said. “Now, let me help you up out of there.”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “I'd like to at least try to lift the lid, if not get the whole box out of here.”

Jon made a ticking noise with his tongue, looked around, and said, “Beatrice, let me see if I can find something.” He walked off to the side of the house.

He was as intrigued as she was. Once again, Beatrice found herself smiling.

“Hurry up, would you?” Beatrice called after him.

She crouched over and brushed more dirt off it. She drew in a breath. Amazing. This trunk had probably been here a hundred years or so. What kind of wood was it? Maybe chestnut, which she knew to be one of the strongest, most water-resistant woods. How did it last so long unprotected in the ground?

Jon came barreling around the corner, his dark eyes lit with excitement. “I found something,” he said and held up a crowbar.

He stepped down the stepladder into the deep ditch, grunting, his hair blowing a bit in the breeze.

He stuck the crowbar down along the edge of the trunk. “Ah-ha,” he said. “There is the groove I need.” He pushed down on it, and the lid came off.

Beatrice leaned farther down and lifted the lid gingerly off to the side and gasped, turning away. Hair, tiny limbs, clothing . . .

“It's a doll!” Jon said, reaching for her.

“Oh!” she said and laughed. “Thank God. I thought it was a child.”

She looked closer at it. A doll, all right, and very old, she reckoned. The face was barely there, embedded in a mass of hair and clothing. Maybe its arm was detached.

She reached in and touched it. Damp cloth. Soft hair. Porcelain cool face.

Moved by the innocence of the doll, and that of the girl who had once played with her, Beatrice swore she could almost hear a child's laughter, singing, see a child dressing the doll as she hummed some favorite song.

She ran her hands along the side of the doll and found something sticking out from under her. In fact, there was a good bit of stuff under her, in the deep chest.

“Oh!” Beatrice exclaimed as she lifted a musty book from underneath the doll.

Jon whistled. “A book? A diary?”

“Mama!” Vera's voice rang through the house.

“Oh, bother!” Beatrice said, shoving the book into her jacket pocket as Jon placed the cover back on the trunk.

“Mama?”

“After you,” Jon said, waving for Beatrice to go up the ladder first. She did so and hurried through the back door of her screened-in porch.

“There you are!” Vera said as she entered the room. “Mama, you're filthy!”

“Oh,” Beatrice said. “Yes, I was just outside, puttering around.”

“Oh,” Vera said.

“Where's Lizzie?”

“With Bill. He was a little miffed about my having her late to him the other day because of my sleepwalking, so I let him have her a little longer. He's dropping her off here,” she responded. “Got any coffee?”

“Yeah, sure. Just made a pot,” Beatrice said. “Help yourself.” She followed Vera into the kitchen, itching to get her out of the house so that she could look through the book in her pocket. She had no idea what kind of book she'd found. All she knew was that she wanted to look it over in private.

Annie headed down the stairs to the new visitor room at the jail. It used to be that she sat in the same room with the prisoners, but not anymore. She figured that Cookie's escape had shamed the police force into getting with the twenty-first century and placing a glass barrier in the room, among other things.

Luther was already sitting behind the glass when she entered.

“Luther,” she said, making eye contact, then reaching into her bag for her recorder.

“Annie,” he said, looking more clear-eyed and alert than the last time she'd seen him. Medication?

“How are you?” she said and clicked on her recorder.

“Fine,” he said, then lowered his eyes. “Well, as fine as I can be in jail.”

She took a deep breath.
Don't feel sorry for this man. He carved runic patterns into the bodies of young women after they were killed.

“How can I help you?” he said and smiled. Charm oozed from him now.

“I'm investigating the murder of Emily McGlashen,” she said.

He nodded. “Yeah, I read about that. Too bad.”

“I spoke with her parents a few days ago, and they mentioned that Emily knew you.”

He cackled. “Yeah, but I've been in here. I don't know anything about who killed her.”

“I didn't say you did,” she snapped at him, with her eyebrow lifted.

He jumped back, startled. “Well . . .”

“I'm trying to find out more about her. That's all.”

“And?”

“Exactly how did you know her?”

“She hired me. I do research on the side sometimes. She contacted me a couple of years ago, when I still lived in Pittsburgh. Told her I really couldn't help her then, but that I was thinking of moving here.” He stopped. “And might be able to track some stuff down for her.”

“And did you?”

He grinned. “Of course I did. I was only too happy to make money for the NMO. Or what I thought the NMO was. At the time.”

Annie knew the “story” of how he had a nervous breakdown in Pittsburgh after his family died. How Zeb and the NMO reached out to the brilliant young scientist. How he claimed he was in too deep before he knew what was really happening. And before he knew it, he was a slave to meth and would do anything for Zeb just to have it.

Annie wasn't buying his story, at least not completely. She was no scientist, but she was a writer and knew a walking cliché when she saw one.

“So what did you learn about her?”

“I was able to trace her lineage back to the much-vaunted McGlashen family. She seemed pleased and then began writing to me about feeling the call to come home to Virginia,” he said and smiled. “Very romantic, don't you think?”

Annie couldn't help but smirk. “Misguided, to say the least.”

“Humph,” he grunted.

She took a good look at him. Blond. Blue-eyed. Not wearing his earrings anymore. The first time she saw him, he had a rune in his ear. She sat back in her chair. His skin and eyes were much clearer, and it looked like he'd gained weight. No drugs. Jail was good for some people, especially addicts who couldn't get ahold of their drug. He looked like a shining example of a healthy male.

“There was also this about her,” he said, leaning toward the glass. “She was really smart. I was surprised, you know, little Miss Irish Dancer. I thought she'd be a bit vacuous or something, but she wasn't. She was well read. And she was one of the few people I know that picked up languages very quickly. She spoke like . . . I don't know . . . seven. Let's see. Spanish, French, Greek, Italian . . . hmmm, yes, and she even knew a bit about runes.”

“Really?” Annie tried not to appear too interested.

“Yes. She fell in love with the designs, you know, the looks of them. She was thinking about getting a tattoo. I don't know if that ever happened,” he told her.

One mystery solved,
Annie thought. She may have had nothing to do with the NMO, other than she hired one of its leaders to do research. But then again, Luther could be lying about the whole rune thing.

“Yeah, now that I think about it, Emily said she knew Russian, Arabic, and Hebrew.” He emphasized Hebrew.

Annie looked him straight in the eye. “Hebrew?”

“Yes, you know, she grew up in Israel,” he said and smirked.

Annie smiled.

“What?” Luther asked.

“Nothing,” she said with an even voice, belying her inner turmoil. “She didn't grow up in Israel. I just spoke with her parents.”

“What? Her hippie-dippy parents are here? She told me all about them.” He sat back and laughed. “Well, well, well . . . I'm just trying to imagine them walking down the streets of Cumberland Creek in commune clothing.”

Annie grimaced. “There's nothing funny about that, Luther.”

She stood to go, began gathering her things.

“Wait. Why are you going?” he said.

For a moment, Annie could see a different guy sitting there. Was it the way the light played off his skin? He looked younger, more innocent, even though she knew exactly that he was a neo-Nazi who soon enough would be out of jail, wreaking havoc.

“I don't want you to go,” he said. “C'mon.”

“Let's get one thing straight, Luther,” Annie said as she flung her bag over her shoulder. “I really don't care what you want. I just came here to question you about Emily to help solve her murder for her family. So they can have a sense of peace, of closure.”

She turned to go.

“You're looking in the wrong places, Annie. Word on the street is that your friend Vera went a little crazy and offed her,” he said.

She spun back about and glared at him. “You shouldn't believe everything you hear, Luther.”

He looked her straight in the eye and frowned.

Something about the look in his eye unsettled Annie. It went back to the first day she met him, when they were stranded along the road to Jenkins Mountain. Even though he was definitely clean now, he flustered her. She took a deep breath as she closed the door behind her. His trial was next week. He was pleading temporary insanity because of his drug-induced state and the fact that he was addicted at the time.

Annie swallowed hard as she made her way out of the jail, certain Luther Vandergrift would be a free man way too soon.

After a particularly grueling session with her new therapist, Dr. Long, Vera stopped at Pamela's Pie Palace to treat herself to a slice of chocolate pie. She always felt a twinge of guilt coming here, rather than going to DeeAnn's Bakery. But sometimes only pie would do, and DeeAnn made and sold mostly bread, muffins, and pastries.

She loved the atmosphere of the Pie Palace: black-and-white tile floors, red vinyl booth seats, and jukeboxes on the tables. The waitresses were all dressed in cute little black dresses with white ruffled aprons, darling little hats on their heads. She just loved the theatricality of it, but even better than that, the pie was divine. Even Beatrice, not easily impressed with anybody else's pie, was entranced by the quality of the pie.

Vera slurped her coffee while waiting on her chocolate coconut pie, then smiled at the waitress who brought it over to her. She would not look her in her eye.
She must be shy,
Vera thought.

“Thanks,” she said.

The waitress nodded, gave a quick smile, and walked away.

Vera took a bite of her pie and nearly swooned over the deep, rich chocolate set off by graham cracker crust, with a fine layer of coconut in between. A mile-high meringue topped it.

With the next bite, an image of her therapist invaded her thoughts. He was kind of boring and vanilla, she decided. And he wasn't helping her at all. Every session it was the same questions.

“How is the medicine working?”

“Fine.”

“Have you had any indication of sleepwalking?”

“None.”

“How are you feeling otherwise?”

“Just fine.”

“Hmmm. How is business?”

“I'm hoping it will pick up.”

“Do you like your new apartment?”

“It's fine.”

“Have you had any strange dreams lately?”

“Not really.”

“Any dreams at all?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Hmm. Do you feel sad at all these days?”

“Sometimes,” she would say and shrug.

Today she had told him something that would give him a little to chew on. “Sad? I don't feel sad . . . or anything. Why should I? I have a wonderful daughter, and we are both happy and healthy. I wish people would stop trying to project themselves and their sadness onto me.”

“Well,” he had said, “you seem to have everything in perspective. Have you given any thought to what's caused your sleepwalking incidents?”

“No. Have you?”

“I'd like you to think about hypnosis,” he said.

That came from out of nowhere, she thought as she savored another bite of chocolate pie. Hypnosis, indeed.

“For what?”

“I think you are sadder than what you let on. Sometimes we can't look at our sadness. When we continue to push it inside, it has to come out other ways.”

“But I'm not sad. I just told you.”

“Can we give the hypnosis a try? At least think about it?”

She shrugged. “I guess so.”

“I mean, a woman doesn't lose her marriage and almost lose her business, isn't questioned for murder without there being a little sadness, right? So, let's start to prepare for hypnosis.”

“Whatever you say,” she said.

But it irked her. Of course she was a bit sad from time to time and more than a bit angry at the way her life had recently shifted. But she was not one to dwell. What good would it do her to sit around and cry over her asshole ex-husband sleeping with a twenty-four-year-old woman on a nightly basis now? Or over the fact that her business was faltering?

She suddenly wondered if that was what people expected of her. And why she sometimes caught them looking at her like she had just landed there from Mars.

“That's her,” she could swear she heard someone say.

“Are you sure?” another voice said in a hushed tone.

She turned around to see who they were talking about. The two women looked away. A little girl just then hopped up to her table.

“Miss Vera!” she said.

“Well, hi there, Kelly,” she said, placing her fork down. “How are you?”

“Mama's paying for our pie,” she said. “I'm good. I sure do miss you.”

“Come back and dance with me anytime,” Vera said.

“Mama says no. Says she won't have her money supporting a killer,” Kelly said.

Just then, her mother came to the table and grabbed Kelly. “Let's go,” she said.

“Nice to see you, Jane,” Vera managed to say. She felt as if her heart was going to pound right out of her chest. Sweat beads formed on her forehead. Several customers were looking her way. A group of people shuffled by her and exited. One turned and looked at her out of the corner of her eye. No, Vera wasn't imagining that.

Vera lowered her eyes, looked at the remaining chunks of pie, and felt her stomach turn. She took some deep breaths, but it was pointless. The pie, which had once looked joyful, comforting, and delicious, now looked and tasted bitter.