Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 07 (18 page)

“Is that all?” she demanded. “Nobody else from, say, Farberville?”

I shook my head. “Anybody in particular who you think should be calling me?” She looked away, but not before I saw her eyes brim with tears and her face redden. Getting more baffled by the minute, I said, “Does this have anything to do with Kevin’s purported purported dalliance? Did you hire a private detective, Dahlia?”

“Dint hire nobody,” she said sullenly.

Mrs. Jim Bob’s car squealed around the corner. Fans scattered as she plowed through the crowd, floored it across the parking lot, and narrowly avoided the Matt-Mobile. Ignoring Dahlia’s squeal of terror, she rolled down the window and said, “Someone broke into the souvenir shoppe! The lock on the back door is busted.”

“Did you go inside?” I asked, just as though I didn’t already know the answer.

“I took the tire iron from my trunk and marched right in to show this burglar a thing or two, but he was gone. I don’t leave any money in the cash register overnight. Darla Jean and I looked over the merchandise, and neither one of us is sure that anything is missing. Darla Jean thinks maybe one of the ashtrays was taken, but we had a big crowd yesterday afternoon, and some of those children behaved like thievin’ gypsies—even with their parents standing two feet away.”

“As soon as the celebrities have moved on to the next item on the agenda, I’ll come have a look at the lock. I don’t suppose your burglar left footprints, did he?”

“I told Darla Jean to mop the floor so we’d be ready to open at ten sharp,” Mrs. Jim Bob said with a flicker of guilt. “Not that you could have learned much, anyway. Maybe I should have telephoned the sheriff’s department and had him send over some trained investigators. Can’t hurt to call him.” She rolled the window back up and drove away at a more decorous speed. Dahlia pulled her hat down and refused to answer any more of my questions, although I could tell she was disturbed by something. The fans shifted nervously, and I spent the next half hour attempting to look intimidating despite the fact that I’d forgotten to bring a bullet.

Ripley came out first, surveyed the crowd, and put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ve done an admirable job keeping the carnivores at a civilized distance. Matt’s just about finished, and Katie stopped to powder her nose. Matt is looking forward to seeing Auntie Adele after all these years. I hope she’s enjoying good health.”

“Me, too,” I said. Whatever was to take place at the Boyhood Home was between him and the Homecoming Committee, and I wasn’t about to be drawn into it.

The door opened and Matt Montana came out to the top step. “Sure was fun to meet all those folks and talk about the good ol’ days here in Maggody,” he called to his fans. “I’d about forgotten about the summer I tried to catch this granddaddy of a catfish down in the creek. That fish outsmarted me, and to this day, whenever my head starts getting swelled up, I remind myself I ain’t the wiliest of God’s creatures.”

“How perceptive,” Ripley murmured. “Where’s Katie?”

Matt continued to address the crowd. “Miss Katie Hawk’s looking forward to saying howdy to all you loyal fans, but you know how wimmen can be when it comes to fixin’ their hair and making sure their petticoats don’t peek out below their skirts. My ma used to tell me how she was late to her own wedding because she was upstairs painting her toenails pink! Finally the preacher had to go beg her to come on down the aisle before the flowers wilted and the organist got worn out and went home.”

This was received with thunderous laughter, and the cameras were clicking like a plague of locusts. Even Dahlia was beaming at him as if he were the reincarnation of Will Rogers, which I can assure you he was not. Katie Hawk came out and joined him. Her wave was less enthusiastic, as was her smile, but the two of them were presenting exactly what the crowd wanted: Ken and Barbie in cowboy drag.

The media people came out and hurried to their vehicles. Matt held out his hand to Katie and chivalrously helped her into the back of the Matt-Mobile, then tipped his hat to his fans and bounded in beside her. I told Dahlia to follow my car, then suggested to Ripley that he ride with me.

We moved slowly out of the lot and down the road to the highway. I was embarrassed by the waves of screaming fans, but all I could do was clench the steering wheel and focus on getting us there in one piece. Moving at the speed of lame turtles, we turned onto the highway and almost immediately onto County 102. The bodies were packed every inch of the way, their eyes too wide for my taste, their vocal cords suffering mightily.

“There’s the house,” I said with a heartfelt sigh. “The high school kids are guarding the driveway. I’ll park on the grass so Dahlia can stay on the gravel and everyone will have a wonderful view of Matt as he takes his first step onto the lawn of his official Boyhood Home. The first astronaut on the moon should have gotten this amount of coverage.” A roar of confusion from the crowd caught my attention, and I twisted around to stare out the back window.

The Matt-Mobile chugged past the driveway. Matt and Katie were frowning at each other, clearly bewildered at this sudden change in the itinerary. Dahlia, however, looked like she was ferrying passengers across the river Styx as she drove on toward the low-water bridge.

“Is she kidnapping them in broad daylight and in front of several hundred witnesses?” Ripley asked as we watched waves of fans fall in behind the wagon. “Or is this some sort of Pied Piper routine to lure all these people to certain death in that muddy little creek?”

It was not the time to explain that Dahlia’s motives were rarely discernible. “If I had the foggiest idea, you’d be the first to hear it, Ripley,” I muttered.

“What on earth is going on?” Ruby Bee shouted from the porch. She was wearing her best beige dress and, for the first time since Dahlia and Kevin’s wedding, a hat.

“This ain’t on the schedule!” added Estelle, also gussied up and with a hairdo that could have served for a centerpiece at a luncheon. A half-dozen little kids jostled behind one of the living room windows, and an equal number of teenagers in jeans and official guide Tshirts took off across the yard. The media people were trotting down the road in pursuit of whatever melodramatic turn of events was unfolding. One woman with a microphone tersely described “the hostage situation,” while her assistant stumbled backward and kept the camera aimed at her face.

“I don’t know!” I said as I headed across the pasture in an attempt to cut them off by the old chicken houses before they reached the bridge. Metallic gray clouds were moving into the valley; the filtered light gave the landscape an eerie, one-dimensional appearance. All we needed was for Rod Serling to pop out from a woodchuck burrow to capture the scene in his mildly apocalyptic voice: “Picture, if you will …”

I battled through the branches of a scruffy pine and lost my balance as I encountered a well-concealed irrigation ditch. I clambered up the far side, leapt over a perfidious tangle of barbed wire, and arrived at the charred remains of the first chicken house at the same moment Dahlia pulled into the flat expanse in front of it and cut off the engine.

The resultant silence was unsettling, to say the least. In the wagon, Matt and Katie were motionless, too alarmed to even look at their driver. The fans waited in the road, tensed to fling themselves into the ditches if gunfire broke out. After a moment, the media people looked at me for some sort of cue. I listened to my lungs heave as if I’d finished a marathon in record time. And Dahlia Buchanon sat like a statue on the seat of the tractor, her eyes shut and her mouth puckered so tightly I wasn’t sure she’d ever get it open again.

Before any of us could produce the obvious question, the door of the undamaged chicken house banged open, and out marched Raz Buchanon, a shotgun cradled in his arm.

“Git off my property afore I pepper ever’ one of you trespassers with buckshot,” he said, then frowned as he took in the rather formidable number of trespassers (we’re talking more than two hundred hundred within buckshot range), spat into the dust, and aimed his shotgun at Dahlia. “I reckon to count to ten, and if that contraption’s still on my property, you kin bend over and kiss yer ass good-bye!”

I was sure this situation had been covered somewhere in my police training manual, but the precise paragraph escaped me. “Now listen here, Raz,” I said, “you can’t—” I broke off as I heard Dahlia’s voice.

“You might as well,” she said. “Dying now ain’t no worse than wasting away in prison. I murdered a man in cold blood, and I deserve to be punished.”

“Ye did what?” demanded Raz. The barrel of the shotgun wavered and tobacco juice dribbled out of the comer of his mouth as he studied her with a dumbfounded expression. “Ye murdered some feller?”

She held out her arms in preparation to be executed, if not crucified. “You heard me the first time, Raz Buchanon. I wrasseled with my conscience all night, but there’s no getting around the truth. He’s deader ‘n a doornail—and I did it.”

“Wait just a minute,” I said, surely as perplexed as Raz, if not more so. Tobacco juice did not dribble out of the comer of my mouth, however, and the only thing I aimed at her was my trembling finger. “Who’s deader ‘n a doornail, Dahlia?”

The self-proclaimed murderess covered her face with her hands and began to sob. The fans moved in closer and the media people surreptitiously raised their cameras and positioned their microphones in hopes of a real bang-up of a segment for the six o’clock news. Matt grabbed Katie’s hand, and the two hopped out of the wagon and took refuge behind a stout couple in matching plaid slacks and windbreakers. Raz lowered his gun and gestured for Marjorie, who’d been hovering in the doorway, to come out. She glowered from the shadows. At least one camera shifted in her direction, thus ensuring our absolute and total humiliation at the hands of smirky, narcissistic newscasters.

“Dahlia,” I said, “are you sure about this?”

Tears dribbled down her cheeks and her voice was so ragged that I could barely understand her. “I took a skillet and murdered him. I did it in my bedroom, but I was too scared to leave the body lying there on the braided rug, so I brought him down here. I don’t know why I did that, except I was thinking nobody’d find him for a while and that’d give me a chance to figure out what to do.”

“When did this take place?” I asked … and on what planet?

“Long about nine last night. I sat for mebbe an hour, but his eyes kept looking at me and I finally just zipped him up in Kevvie’s sleeping bag, put him in the wagon, and drove out here. I stuck him in there so”—she gulped and grimaced—“the animals wouldn’t bother him.”

I turned to Raz. “Is there a body in a sleeping bag in there?”

“Ain’t nuthin’ in there,” he muttered. “And don’t you go poking yer nose in there, neither. I bought this piece off Adele Wockermann two years back and I got a deed to prove it. You jest tell ever’body to get their butts off ‘n my private property.”

I tried to ignore the hum of the cameras. “Raz, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to take that shotgun out of your sorry hands and tie it around your neck.”

Raz looked back at Marjorie for help, but she lumbered away. “G’wan,” he said grudgingly.

I heard a patter of applause as I stomped past him to the door, shoved it opened, and stepped over the threshold. I was sneezing when I reappeared. “There’s nothing in there,” I announced, “except petrified chickenshit and the rotted remains of a red flannel shirt.”

“No body?” yelled one of the reporters.

I shrugged eloquently for the camera’s benefit (and for Harve’s amusement when he caught the news). “No body that I saw, no bloodstains, and no fresh graves. As Raz said earlier, this is private property, so we all need to go back up the road to the Wockermann house and let Matt pose for the photographers.” I looked at Dahlia and lowered my voice to a snarl. “Drive this damn thing back and park it where you were supposed to park it twenty minutes ago. After you do that, I’d like to have a word with you in private.”

Raz’s renewed threats helped hurry everybody along. The celebrities came out of hiding, hopped back on the wagon, and after a moment, I decided to sit on the end of it in order to fend off the overly enthusiastic members of the infantry. The woman who’d been describing the “hostage situation” made a face at me as if I’d personally destroyed her chances for a slot on the network news team, but most of the fans seemed more interested in getting back to the business of idolization. We chugged up the road and into the driveway. Ripley swooped in to escort Matt and Katie onto the porch, then stationed himself as a buffer on the bottom step as the crowd surged forward to take photographs and beg for autographs.

I waited in the side yard until Dahlia joined me. “Okay,” I said angrily, “what was all that?”

“I thought about it on the way back here, and now it’s clear. I beaned Mr. Dentha hard enough to knock him out for a long spell, but I must not have killed him. He woke up in the chicken house, wiggled out of the sleeping bag, and staggered to his car and drove home. I ain’t saying he didn’t look and act like he was dead, but the only dead person I ever saw was a ninety-seven-year-old cousin who had such rubbery skin that she didn’t look any worse in her coffin than she did in her bed. Granny thought she looked a sight better.”

“Exactly how dead did he look?”

She put her hands behind her back and gazed guilelessly over my head. “Well, come to think of it, not more than half-dead, and he might well have been playing possum the whole time. He was probably so mad on account of the way I beaned him with the skillet that he wanted to teach me a lesson by letting me think I’d killed him.” She gave me a blessedly terse version of her previous night’s thought processes (they would not play in Peoria) and subsequent actions (ibidem), culminating with her drive down moonlit County 102 and the deposition of the contents of the sleeping bag/shroud. I regret to say it all made perfectly good sense, which was a grim reminder that I’d been in Maggody way too long. “Jesus H, Dahlia,” I said, shaking my head, “I don’t know what to do. If you’re positive this prowler was Mr. Dentha from the Vacu-Pro office, maybe you’d better wait here until I call and make sure he got back safely to Farberville.” Or if he ever left, I added to myself as I went to find Ripley and take a shot at explaining the incomprehensible before I found a telephone.