Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 07 (7 page)

“Katie,” Matt whimpered through the locked door, “why won’t you let me in? I’m so lovesick I’m gonna die out here in the hallway.”

The door opened as far as the chain permitted. “You’re making a fool of yourself Go away.”

“Katie, you know how much I love you. I gotta come in where at least I can see you.”

“You’ve seen me before, and I haven’t changed. I haven’t changed my mind, either. I told you that I’m not going to mess with a married man. The way my pa carried on with every whore in the county liked to kill my mama, and I ain’t gonna be the source of another woman’s grief.”

He sank down to the floor, and if he’d had a tail, it would have been wagging pathetically. “Lillian understands. She’s seventeen years older than me.”

“Then go home and cry in her lap.” Katie tried to close the door, but Matt had managed to slip his boot into the crack in the midst of his eloquent entreaty.

“I’ve begged her to divorce me,” he continued, bravely ignoring the pain in his toes, which in all reality was a sight sharper than the one in his heart, “but she wants to think about it a little longer. I don’t want to hurt her, so I have to give her time to get used to the idea.”

“I’m closing the door. If you don’t aim to hobble through life without your toes, I suggest you move ‘em.” He did, and the door banged shut. He would have stayed if the elevator doors hadn’t opened and a woman with a bag of groceries hadn’t stopped in her tracks and gasped his name. He rose, gave her a shot of the aw-shucks, autographed her grocery list, and went down the stairs to avoid fans in the elevator. The tinted windows of his car protected him from further adulation, and after a few minutes of gazing at Katie’s window, he drove toward the Dazzle Club to see if the boys in his band might be in the mood for a couple of beers and a game or two of eight ball.

Lillian drove past the Dazzle Club and headed for her office. Matt wasn’t likely to get into too much trouble at this time of day. He’d been inside Katie’s apartment building for almost an hour, moping outside her door and making a fool of himself as he’d done the other times when she’d crept up the stairwell and watched him through the cracked window.

Unbeknownst to him, he was her fourth husband. She wasn’t trying to set a record; the first three just hadn’t worked out well. She’d been fond of them, but she’d known from the minute she saw Matt that she needed him in ways that frightened her. She was so tangled up in lust and tenderness and fierce protectiveness that his announcement that he wanted a divorce had left her shivering like a hound dog in a blizzard. But she hadn’t let it show; she wanted him, not his pity. All she could do was keep searching for ways to hold on to him until his infatuation faded and he could see how foolish he’d been. But now Charlie was back.

When I returned to the PD, the red rat’s eye was not blinking on the answering machine. I went ahead and called LaBelle, the day dispatcher at the sheriff’s department, to make sure they hadn’t forgotten to call with the information that they’d found Adele Wockermann and were offering her coffee and cookies in the lounge. They hadn’t, so they weren’t. LaBelle assured me that the sheriff himself, a sly ol’ boy named Harve Dorfer who took pride in playing the stereotypic southern lawman right down to the splintery cigar butt between his teeth and a beer belly that shielded his feet from the sun, was out checking logging trails in his own four-wheel drive. Every deputy was doing the same. We may not venerate the elderly in the outlands, but we do try to keep track of them.

“You know,” LaBelle continued, “I read just the other day about some senile old fool who wandered away from a nursing home over in Blytheville and was found three days later in the woods, stiff as a board. Animals had gnawed off most of his face but didn’t touch his feet.”

“Thank you for sharing that with me,” I muttered, then called the police department in Farberville to see how long it’d take to get a dog. A minimum of two hours, I was told, which would be about the time it began to grow dark … and the temperature dropped.

I called the county home and asked for Mrs. Twayblade. “No, no one’s spotted her,” I said in response to her question (which answered mine), “and we’ll have a dog to try to find a trail in a couple of hours. If you hear anything, call the sheriff’s department and have them get hold of me immediately.”

I was too anxious to waste time making further futile calls. I could think of nothing else to do but continue driving down the same back roads looking for a white-haired scarecrow in a dark coat, and I was halfway to the door when it flew open in my face.

“What’s this I hear about Adele Wockermann?” shrieked Mrs. Jim Bob, her face screwed up as tightly as I’d ever seen it and her hair as mussed. Her hat hung over one ear. Her fingers were blotched with anger and rigidly splayed as if she intended to throttle yours truly. The overall effect was that of a Queen Elizabeth impersonator on steroids.

“I don’t know what you heard,” I said truthfully, “but as much as I’d like to stay and find out, I’ve got more important things to do just now. Come back later and we’ll chat, okay?”

“I’ll say you’ve got more important things to do, Miss Chief of Police! The idea of that poor doddery thing wandering around in the woods! What if she was to trip over a log and break her hip? What kind of a chief of police would loiter in the office when someone is writhing in pain and being eaten by a bear?” She stopped short of shrieking “off with her head!” but it would have made a fitting finale.

“Not a very dedicated one,” I said, bemused by this display of irrational yet sincere compassion. Mizzoner was notorious for rattling rattling on about the depth and breadth of her Christian charity, but she’d never actually displayed any of it, as far as I could recall. “I’d love to hang around and discuss this flibbertigibbet of a police chief, but I need to go search for Adele Wockermann.”

“Why haven’t you organized a search party? Helicopters? Why don’t we have helicopters flying over the woods? How many helicopters can it take to find one old woman?” Suddenly her hands stopped rotating and fell to her sides. She went past me and sank down on the chair, now downcast and demoralized. I wouldn’t have characterized her behavior as manic-depressive, but she certainly wasn’t squandering time on the transitions.

“I cannot believe it,” she groaned. “I cannot believe this is happening just when I …”

I was becoming more and more suspicious with each of her utterances. “Just when you what, Mrs. Jim Bob? Do you know something about Mrs. Wockermann’s disappearance?”

“Of course not! This is a dreadful thing, and if I had even the tiniest inkling where she might be, I’d be over fetching her instead of putting up with your impertinence. You owe your job to the town council, missy, and you’d best remember who’s got the ear of the mayor of Maggody.”

She was back to lčse-majesté, and I hadn’t learned anything that might help me. “You’d better give it back,” I said as I started for the door.

Once again it flew open in my face, this time propelled by Ruby Bee and Estelle. The former grabbed my arm and began to shake it. “Where’s Adele? The minute we got back to town we heard how she dropped out of sight earlier in the afternoon and nobody’s seen her since.”

Estelle latched onto my other arm. “Adele’s nigh onto eighty, and there ain’t no way she’ll survive out in the woods all night!”

I jerked free before each of them ended up with a detached appendage, took refuge behind my desk, and said, “We have the makings of a fine search party. Why don’t the three of you draw straws to determine who gets to be the patrol leader and start combing the woods within a two-mile radius of the county home?”

It was such a preposterous suggestion that all three of them stopped gabbling at me and locked eyes (we’re talking five here; as I’ve said in the past, one of Estelle’s wanders). The unspoken communication flying back and forth was hard to miss, but harder to tap than a politician’s telephone line.

“I would dearly appreciate knowing what the hell’s going on here,” I continued, and rather nicely, considering. “If you all are so damned worried about Adele Wockermann, you might try to help me find her. For starters, let’s discuss this sudden interest in Adele’s wellbeing. Why don’t you go first, Mrs. Jim Bob?”

She looked down as she considered her response, which probably meant it wouldn’t be worth the expenditure of carbon dioxide. “Adele is Matt Montana’s great-aunt, and as you know, he’s coming to Maggody in a few weeks. He’ll be real disappointed if she’s not here to welcome him home.”

“That’s right,” said Ruby Bee. “He’d be heartbroken. You can tell from his photographs that he’s sensitive.”

Estelle ran a finger under her eye. “Imagine coming home for Christmas and finding out something terrible had happened to your beloved great-aunt … That’d sure take the twinkle off the tinsel.”

“In a flash,” Ruby Bee contributed sadly.

I waited in case the other two wanted to offer another shovelload of manure. “Then you all are motivated strictly by concern for Matt’s emotional wellbeing? You don’t have any self-serving motives?”

They were into denial. I listened to them bristle and sputter for a minute, then stomped out to my trusty police car and squealed out of the parking lot, all the while cussing up a storm and vowing to find a way to arrest the three of them so they could continue their mendacious little games under the supervision of a burly matron with an overabundance of body hair.

Halfway back to the county home, I realized I’d forgotten about the Wockermann house. It was a good five miles from the county home, and it didn’t seem likely that Adele could have made it that far on her own. Then again, there wasn’t much else to do until the dog and its handler arrived from Farberville.

I parked in the rutted driveway and unenthusiastically walked through knee-high weeds to the porch. The front door was locked, and there was no indication anyone had entered through a window. I went around the side of the house. The windows were too high to be entered by an elderly lady, no matter how feisty she was purported to be. In back, the cracked flagstones of the patio were ringed by yellow crabgrass and sow thistles. Beyond that was a screened-in porch, although the screens had pretty much disintegrated with rust and the door lay out in the yard.

I stepped over more broken glass and tried the back door. It opened with a shudder. It was just a big, vacant house, I told myself, and I was more likely to encounter roaches and rodents than characters from a Stephen King plot.

The kitchen was a holy mess, the floor thick with mud and garbage, the dinette set and appliances victims of brutality. The beer cans scattered about and piled in the sink let off a sourness that seemed to settle in my stomach. Everything was stale, dusty, in some stage of decay. No doubt Matt Montana would have bit his lip and held his tongue as he walked through the room. All I could do was grit my teeth.

The hallway led to a sitting room, where vandals had been equally successful in their impact on the interior decorating. I peeked in the other rooms on the first floor, then tested each step as I went to the second floor and regarded several closed doors.

The musty air was beginning to clog my sinuses, and the odd creaks to induce the stirrings of anxiety. I checked the bedrooms in rapid succession. The iron bed frames were broken. Mice had chewed the mattresses and left dribbles of stuffing on the floor. Cigarette burns marred the surfaces of dressers and bureaus, none of which had knobs. Initials had been carved in the drab wallpaper, and light bulbs methodically broken, the fragile glass mingled with the sturdier shards from mirrors. The porcelain fixtures in the bathroom had fared no better. A single sodden towel was so mildewed that its color was indistinguishable—not, of course, that I meant to hang it in my bathroom if it fit the decor. Relieved at not encountering any embodiments of my worst nightmares, I was about to go downstairs when I noticed a narrow door at the far end of the hall. Self-congratulations on this display of acuity were out of the question, but so was sneaking away without making absolutely certain Adele was nowhere in the house.

I went up the narrow steps to the attic. The only light came from long windows at the far ends of the three narrow corridors made all the more claustrophobic by trunks, stacks of boxes, and wardrobes with splintered panels. The shadowy rafters looked like a dandy place for bats. I explored one of the corridors, peering as best I could over and around the junk. The window offered a view of the road and the field across the street. I retraced my path and tried the center corridor, which led to an uninspired view of the chicken houses and the ribbon of sludge called Boone Creek. The last window was on the back side of the house. The yard looked no better from my lofty perspective, nor did the scrubby growth beyond it and the denser tangle of stunted trees and masses of thorns. Late afternoon sun glinted on the broken glass on the patio, reminding me that I needed to stop worrying about rabid bat attacks and find Adele Wockermann. She wasn’t hiding behind any of the trunks, and if she was hiding in one … well, I hoped she was in a nice one. A piece of white fabric on the floor caught my attention. I picked it up and went down to the second floor, where the light was better. It was a handkerchief, trimmed with frayed lace and darned in several places. The initials A.W. had been embroidered in blue thread on one corner.

I took it out to my car and sat down on the hood, staring at the handkerchief as if it were a map of Adele’s escape route to her current hideout. It was not remarkable to find an item initialed A.W. in the house. There well might be towels, sheets, and pillowcases with similar markings in one of the trunks. The “hers” of the towel sets would be initialed A.W. The reason that I was so baffled by the handkerchief was that it was clean, crisply ironed, and smelled faintly of lavender.

The radio in the car worked, although it crackled and popped periodically. LaBelle acknowledged my request for backup with a cheery “you betcha” rather than a trite combination of numbers, and ten minutes later, Les pulled into the driveway.