Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 07 (28 page)

“I tol’ ya not to rile her. When she gets in a mood like this, the last thing ya want to do is rile her. I reckon she’ll come to her senses here in a minute and let you be. She shore ain’t been her sweet self lately.”

I scrambled on top of a wobbly wardrobe, again bumping my head, and peered down like a minor griffin on the side of a cathedral. It was not a dignified position, particularly since I’d misstepped as mentioned earlier and was now conveying miasmatic matter on the bottom of my shoe. However, it seemed to be a relatively safe position until Marjorie gave up her quest for fresh, juicy flesh. Raz seemed content to wait on the steps, bleating about his sow’s delicate sensibilities.

There were other topics he and I needed to discuss.

Earl had fallen asleep on the sofa by the time Eilene was done with the dishes. She stood in the doorway, looking at him but wondering what to do about Dahlia and Kevin. It was awful to think they might not be celebrating their first Christmas as newlyweds. Dahlia’d been acting crazier and crazier every day, mumbling to herself while she drove the Matt-Mobile, lashing out at folks in the supermarket—and she’d been driven that way by the disgraceful behavior of one Kevin Fitzgerald Buchanon. He wasn’t the brightest thing to come down the pike, but he’d been raised to be honest and forthright, not to lapse into the sinful ways of someone like Begonietta Buchanon, who’d wept at the gravesides of five husbands and three gentleman callers (two of ‘em funeral directors) before anyone tactfully inquired into her recipe for strawberry-rhubarb compote.

There was only one thing to do, Eilene decided. She put on her coat, took Earl’s keys, and went out to his truck. She was going to their house. This whole business was going to be brought out into the open and resolved before the night was done. There might be tears. There might be angry words of accusation. There might even be pots and pans flying and dishes shattering. Half the town might hear the fracas from their porches, but Kevin and Dahlia would iron out their problems by dawn.

The Matt-Mobile was parked beside the house, but no cars were parked in the driveway. Eilene sat in the cab of the truck for a moment, her resolve weakening as she contemplated the dark house. She probably should have left a note for Earl in case he woke up.

It was too late for regrets. She would go inside and fix a pot of coffee and be sitting in the middle of the sofa when the kids came home. If the door was unlocked, of course, because it was one thing to mend a marriage and another altogether to break a window. That was an act of desperation.

The latter was not necessary. Eilene turned on the overhead light, started coffee in the kitchen, and returned to the living room just as Elvis pointed his short arm at the numeral eight on the clock. Dahlia wasn’t much of a housekeeper, she thought as she took dirty dishes into the kitchen, then gathered up some of Kevin’s shirts and shorts and went into the bedroom to put them in the hamper.

It took her a few attempts to find the light switch. As soon as the light went on, the clothes fell out of her arms and she staggered back through the doorway, unable to keep from gaping at the bed. She bumped into the edge of the sofa and sat down hard enough to rattle her teeth. How could she have doubted Dahlia?

“This,” I said, “is Raz Buchanon. Some of you saw him this morning when he threatened to fire his shotgun at those of us who were trespassing on his property.”

We were in the high school gym rather than a Bethlehem barn, but I had a reasonable cast assembled. The role of the shepherds had gone to the boys in the band. If you’ve seen a pageant, you know they don’t do anything more challenging than sit with the sheep, and they never have any lines. The angel was to be played by Katie. The three kings consisted of Harve, Les, and Tinker, who’d traveled afar from Farberville.

Two of the coveted leading roles were going to Lillian and Ripley. If they did not exactly regard themselves as Matt’s parents, they behaved as if they were his keepers, and that was close enough for me. Which brought us right to the babe in the manger, little Moses Germander, now all grown up and blessed with a new name, pretty white clothes, and an award for best original song of the year. Now he awaited further acclaim when his album of original Christmas songs hit the market. Who would have dreamed that a boy from Maggody could grow up to be a renowned country songwriter? My, my.

Raz Buchanon had no place whatsoever in the script. None. I just needed him nearby as I tried to sort through the last twenty-four hours. Marjorie had been lured out of the attic with a jar of hooch and was locked safely in the chicken house. I could have used Dahlia, but she wasn’t home. The Homecoming Committee members were not present. If any of them had walked into the gym, I might have borrowed Harve’s gun and introduced a level of violence heretofore unseen in your standard Christmas pageant.

Relying on the prerogative of the director to seize center stage, I did so. “This may well go back to the birth of a baby, but we’re going to skip ahead to when Pierce Keswick got the bright idea to send Matt back here to rescue his image as a hometown boy. No one could even remember him, but some of us spotted the potential to exploit the Nashville folks while they exploited us. A perfectly reasonable symbiotic relationship, born and fueled by greed.” I waited until everyone nodded, even Raz, who wouldn’t know a symbiotic relationship if it bit him on the butt. “But, as I said, no one in town remembered Matt. Essential to the picture was Matt’s white-haired great-aunt, who could tell lively stories of his summers here in Maggody and give credibility to the scenario. However’ Adele’s stories were not at all what the image makers wanted. She remembered what a hell-raiser he was, drinking beer and going after—”

“Boys’ll be boys,” Matt interrupted, grinning as if I were about to present an award of an entirely different nature, “and girls’ll be girls, ‘specially in the moonlight down by Boone Creek.”

I waited politely until he shut up. “Adele mostly remembered how he went up to the attic and pawed through his great-uncle’s boxes and trunks and cartons. In them were letters that had been collected, notebooks from school days fifty or more years ago, books and hymnals, original poems of unpublishable quality, and some that could be converted into lyrics for country songs.”

Matt laughed and said, “You’re outta your mind. All that was up there was broken fishing poles, boxes of musty old clothes, and stuff like that. If there were any of these so-called lyrics, I sure as hell never saw ‘em.”

“How about a poem concerning a sweet angel named Jaylee at the top of a tree?” I suggested helpfully.

Ripley and Lillian were watching without expression. I hadn’t expected to surprise either of them with my revelation. Katie wasn’t exactly bowled over, either. Les and Tinker poked each other and whispered, while Harve puffed contentedly like a Buddha. The boys in the band wandered away, perhaps to keep watch over their flock by night or to compare tattoos. Raz scratched his chin.

“Never heard of anyone named Jaylee,” Matt said, having a little trouble with his grin. He was doing his best to imbue it with warmth and sincerity, though, and I was impressed. “Accusations like this are real common, you know,” he continued. “You have a hit, then some asshole claims he wrote the song and sent it to you the year before, Lawyers get to slinging letters at each other, and it turns out the asshole really did write a song—it just happens to be completely different except for two words and three chords. Country music is about women and whiskey and love. I wrote Christmas material. Yeah, there’s an angel and a Christmas tree. I couldn’t seem to get the Easter Bunny to come hopping down the trail.”

I shook my head. “You even came back two years ago to see if you could find some of those notebooks that you found so diverting as a teenager. One would almost suspect this ‘Detour on the Highway to Heaven’ song came as a result of that expedition, but if it did, surely the source has been destroyed.”

“It had better have been!” yelped Ripley. Lillian whispered something to him and he smiled benignly at Matt.

“But there was this problem about Adele,” I said, resuming my lecture to the cast. “She’s not the sort who can be fed lines for a press conference or told what to remember and what to forget. So there was Pierce, all excited about reuniting Matt with his great-aunt, and there were others who realized the potential for disaster. The last thing any of them wanted was for Adele to make remarks to the press and ruin Matt’s career, especially when it was possible that Country Connections could be sold for a tidy profit. The only solution was to remove Auntie Adele from Maggody—and I’d like to say it was in keeping with the Christmas spirit to do so without any undue physical discomfort or unpleasantness.”

Katie looked as confused as Les and Tinker, who were redefining the term. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “I saw the old lady this morning. She was sitting in a rocking chair in the living room.”

“That was a substitute,” I said. “The real Adele Wockermann was whisked away to a motel and tended to by a sincere if overly imaginative nurse’s aide. I was convinced this had something to do with Pierce Keswick’s death, but it did so only indirectly. He came to Maggody because Katie called him yesterday afternoon and hinted darkly that Matt had been writing his lyrics in the Wockermann attic. Pierce was the honest one among you. He would have canceled the tour, killed the album, and exposed Matt’s plagiarism, even if it ruined the company.”

“Plagiarism?” Matt began loudly and indignantly, then stopped as every last one of his companions glared at him. “Okay, okay, so maybe I got some ideas from a notebook or something. Inspiration, rhymes, stuff like that.” It took him a moment to realize what else I’d dropped. “Katie, my sweet angel, did you really call Pierce and tell him that?”

“I wanted to make sure he kept his promise about my album. I made it clear I wasn’t going to tell anyone else, but he got awful upset and hung up on me.” Licking her lips, she tried to smile at Ripley. “Pierce mentioned hunting for some new material right away. I do hope you’re gonna honor his promise.”

Ripley studied his cuticles.

I grabbed Raz’s gnarly arm and dragged him in front of the bleachers. “What happened next is this old fool’s fault. He drove down to his temporary warehouse, a load of moonshine in the back of his truck and his demented sow in the cab, and found a body. Rather than inform the authorities like any law-abiding citizen would do”—I stared at the conspirators in front of me in case they missed the irony—“he got the brilliant idea to move it to another location so no one would link it to his property.”

Harve came out of his stupor to ask, “Are we getting to that body Dahlia was talking about? I thought he called from Little Rock this morning.”

“I don’t know where he is right now,” I said, still clutching Raz. “Tell them what happened.”

“Well,” he said, yanking on his whiskers and pretending to be a prime example of American Gothic, all glassy-eyed with virtue and about to take root in the amber waves of grain, “it seemed to me all this bother about the ol’ Wockermann place was the cause of the troubles. Goddamn cars and trucks on the road all the time, folks wanting to take my picture like I come off a flying saucer, making Marjorie fractious. So there’s this feller in the chicken house and I decide I’m jest gonna take him up the road apiece and let somebody figger out who it is. I git him on the porch swing, and then all of a sudden I hear glass break in the backyard. Marjorie comes tearing outta the house like greased lightning, we toss the feller back in the truck, and git outta there.”

To Harve, I said, “Raz finally admitted that he kept the body in his barn all day and took it back to Dahlia and Kevin’s house earlier this evening. I have no idea who it is, but perhaps one of your deputies could check this out. There’s liable to be a wallet in the body’s pocket. If you call McBeen, please don’t mention my name.” I waited until Tinker left, then related my experience in the attic, omitting only the detail about where I’d stepped. I kept everyone’s attention to the end, then gave them a while to assimilate it.

Lillian was the first to try. “Are you saying that this pig frightened Pierce so badly that he fell out a window?”

“She’s a pedigreed sow,” Raz said churlishly, then scuttled away and sat down near the door, his eyes shifting from me to the empty hall as he considered his chances.

I told him I expected to find a whole lot of chickens in the chicken house by morning, and let him leave. I sat down next to Harve and waved away some of the smoke. “I don’t seem to have the proper equipment to take the pig into custody, nor do I intend to have my leg chewed off while trying to do it. You want to arrest Marjorie, it’s okay with me. If she gets the electric chair, Ruby Bee makes a tasty barbecue sauce.”

“Seems to me these folks stirred her up,” Harve said.

“That’s not all they did,” I said as I stood up and confronted Ripley. “Jim Bob recognized some of his lyrics when the bus arrived yesterday, and he told you his notebook was likely to be in the Wockermann attic. You went over there to make sure there was no evidence, and found Pierce’s body on the patio, didn’t you? I kept asking myself why someone wanted to draw attention to the souvenir shoppe or send some sort of metaphorical message about Matt. Your reaction was as simple as Raz’s: move the body to draw attention away from the scene. The souvenir shoppe was the closest place, and the switch with the mannequin would only confuse things further.”

Matt turned around to stare at him. “You put Pierce in the window dressed like that? How’s that supposed to make me look?”

Ripley gleefully considered his response, but Lillian dug her fingers into his arm until he shrugged and said, “Perhaps just a tiny metaphorical message, as Arly so nicely put it.”

“That’s creepy,” Katie said.

Matt scooted across the metal seat and patted her knee. “Yeah, it is. Thinking a dead person could take the place of a mannequin dressed like me.” He realized what he’d said and slumped forward, his head propped in his hands. He may not have been thinking deep thoughts, but he appeared to be trying.