Wish You Were Here Page 6

  Upon seeing Harry through the window, Maude waved her inside. Mrs. Murphy and Tucker trotted into the store.

  “Harry, what can I do for you?”

  “Well, I was cutting up the newspaper to send Lindsay a clipping about Kelly’s death and then I decided to send her a CARE package.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Heading toward Italy. I’ve got an address for her.”

  Mrs. Murphy nestled into a basket filled with crinkly paper. Tucker stuck her nose into the basket. Crinkly sounds pleased the cat, but Tucker thought, Give me a good bone, any day. She nudged Mrs. Murphy.

  “Tucker, this is my basket.”

  “I know. What do you think Pewter meant?”

  “A bid for attention. She wanted me to beg her for news. And I’m glad that I didn’t.”

  As the two animals were discussing the finer points of Pewter’s personality, Harry and Maude had embarked on serious girl talk about divorce, a subject known to Maude, who endured one before moving to Crozet.

  “It’s a roller coaster.” Maude sighed.

  “Well, this would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to see him all the time and if he’d take a little responsibility for what happened.”

  “Don’t expect the crisis to change him, Harry. You may be changing. I think I can say that you are, even though we haven’t known each other since B.C. But your growth isn’t his growth. Anyway, my experience with men is that they’ll do anything to avoid emotional growth, avoid looking deep inside. That’s what mistresses, booze, and Porsches are all about.” Maude removed her bright red-rimmed glasses and smiled.

  “Hey, I don’t know. This is all new to me.” Harry sat down, suddenly tired.

  “Divorce is a process of detachment, most especially detachment from his ability to affect you.”

  “He sure as hell can affect me when he doesn’t send the check.”

  Maude’s eyes rolled. “Playing that game, is he? Probably trying to weaken you or scare you so you’ll accept less come judgment day. My ex tried it, too. I suppose they all do or their lawyers talk them into it and then when they have a moment to reflect on what a cheap shot it is—if they do—they can wring their hands and say, ‘It wasn’t my idea. My lawyer made me do it.’ You hang tough, kiddo.”

  “Yeah.” Harry would, too. “Not to change the subject, but are you still jogging along the C and O Railroad track? In this heat?”

  “Sure. I try and go out at sunrise. It really is beastly hot. I passed Jim this morning.”

  “Jogging?” Harry was incredulous.

  “No, I passed him as I ran back into town. He was out with the sheriff. Horrible as Kelly’s death was, I do think Jim is getting some kind of thrill out of it.”

  “I doubt this town has had much excitement since Crozet dug the tunnels.”

  “Huh?” Maude’s eyes brightened.

  “When Claudius Crozet finished the last tunnel through the Blue Ridge. Well, actually, the town was named for him after that. Just a figure of speech. You have to realize that those of us who went to grade school here learned about Claudius Crozet.”

  “Oh. That and Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, I guess. Virginia’s glories seem to be in the past, as opposed to the present.”

  “I guess so. Well, let me take this big Jiffy bag and some colored paper and get out of your hair and get Mrs. Murphy out of your best basket.”

  “I love a good chat. How about some tea?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Little Marilyn was in today, all atwitter. She needed tiny baskets for her mother’s yacht party.” Maude burst out laughing and so did Harry.

  Big Marilyn’s yacht was a pontoon boat that floated on the ten-acre lake behind the Sanburne mansion. She adored cruising around the lake and she especially liked terrorizing her neighbors on the other side. Between her pontoon boat and her bridge night with the girls, Mim kept herself emotionally afloat, forgive the pun.

  She’d also gone quite wild when she redecorated the house for the umpteenth time and made over the bar so that it resembled a ship. There were little portholes behind the bar. Life preservers and colorful pennants graced the walls, as well as oars, life vests, and very large saltwater fish. Mim never caught a catfish, much less a sailfish, but she commissioned her decorators to find her imposing fish. Indeed they did. The first time Mrs. Murphy beheld the stuffed trophies she swooned. The idea of a fish that big was too good to be true.

  Mim also had DRYDOCK painted over the bar. The big golden letters shone with dock lights she had cleverly installed. Throw a few fishnets around, a bell, and a buoy, and the bar was complete. Well, it was really complete when Mim inaugurated it with a slosh of martinis for her bridge girls, the only other three women in Albemarle County she remotely considered her social equals. She’d even had matchbooks and little napkins made up with DRYDOCK printed on them, and she was hugely pleased when the girls noticed them as they smacked their martini glasses onto the polished bar.

  Mim enjoyed more success in getting the girls to the bar than she did in getting them to her pontoon boat, which also had gold letters painted along the side: Mim’s Vim. With the big wedding coming up, Mim knew she had the bargaining card to get her bridge buddies on the boat, where she could at last impress them with her abilities as captain. It wasn’t satisfying to do something unless people saw you do it. If the bridge girls wanted good seats at the wedding, they would board Mim’s Vim. Mim could barely wait.

  Little Marilyn could happily wait, but being the dutiful drudge that she was, she appeared in Maude’s shop to buy baskets as favors, baskets that would be filled with nautical party favors for the girls.

  “Have you ever seen Mim piloting her yacht?” Harry howled.

  “That captain’s cap, it’s too much.” Maude was doubled over just thinking about it.

  “Yeah, it’s the only time she removes her tiara.”

  “Tiara?”

  Harry giggled. “Sure, the Queen of Crozet.”

  “You are wicked.” Maude wiped her eyes, tearing from laughter.

  “If you’d grown up with these nitwits, you’d be wicked too. Oh, well, as my mother used to say, ‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.’ Since I know Mim, I know what to expect.”

  Maude’s voice dropped. “I wonder. I wonder now if any of us know what to expect?”

  6

  The coroner’s report lay opened on Rick Shaw’s desk. The peculiarity in Kelly’s body was a series of scars on the arteries into his heart. These indicated tiny heart attacks. Kelly, fit and forty, wasn’t too young for heart attacks, but these would have been so small he might not have noticed when they occurred.

  Rick reread the page. The skull, pulverized, yielded little. If there had been a bullet wound there’d be no trace of it. When the men combed through the mixer no bullets were found.

  Much of the stomach was intact. Apart from a Big Mac, that yielded nothing.

  There was a trace of cyanide in the hair samples. Well, that was what killed him but why would the killer mutilate the body? Finding the means of death only provoked more questions.

  Rick smacked together the folder. This was not an accidental death but he didn’t want to report it as a murder—not yet. His gut feeling was that whoever killed Kelly was smart—smart and extremely cool-headed.

  Cynthia Cooper knocked.

  “Come in.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m playing my cards close to my chest for a bit.” Rick slapped the report. He reached for a cigarette but stopped. Quitting was hell. “You got anything?”

  “Everybody checks out. Marie Williams was right where she said she was on Monday night, and so was BoomBoom, if we can believe her servants. BoomBoom said she thought her husband was out of town on business and she was waiting for him to call. Maybe, maybe not. But was she alone? Fair Haristeen said he was operating late that evening, solo. Everyone else seems to have some kind of alibi.”

  “Funeral’s
tomorrow.”

  “The coroner was mighty quick about it.”

  “Powerful man. If the family wants the body buried by tomorrow, he’ll get those tissue samples in a hurry. You don’t rile the Craycrofts.”

  “Somebody did.”

  7

  BoomBoom held together throughout the service at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church at the crossroads called Ivy. An exquisite veil covered her equally exquisite features.

  Harry, Susan, and Ned discreetly sat in a middle pew. Fair sat on the other side of the church, in the middle. Josiah and Mim, both elegantly dressed in black, sat near the pulpit. Bob Berryman and his wife, Linda, were also in a middle pew. Old Larry Johnson, acting as an usher, spared Maude Bly Modena a social gaffe by keeping her from marching down the center aisle, which she was fixing to do. He firmly grabbed her by the elbow and guided her toward a rearward pew. Maude, a Crozet resident for five years, didn’t merit a forward pew, but Maude was a Yankee and often missed such subtleties. Market and Courtney Shiflett were in back, as were Clai Cordle and Diana Farrell of the Rescue Squad.

  The church was covered in flowers, signifying the hope of rebirth through Christ. Those who could, also gave donations to the Heart Fund. Rick had to tell BoomBoom about the tiny scars on the arteries and she chose to believe her husband had suffered a heart attack while inspecting equipment and fallen in. How the mixer could have been turned on was of no interest to her, not today anyway. She could absorb only so much. What she would do when she could really absorb events was anybody’s guess. Better to bleed from the throat than to cross BoomBoom Craycroft.

  8

  Life must go on.

  Josiah showed up at the post office with a gentleman from Atlanta who’d flown up to buy a pristine Louis XV bombé cabinet. Josiah liked to bring his customers down to the post office and then over to Shiflett’s Market. Market smiled and Harry smiled. Customers exclaimed over the cat and dog in the post office and then Josiah would drive them back to his house, extolling the delights of small-town life, where everyone was a character. Why anyone would believe that human emotions were less complex in a small town than in a big city escaped Harry but urban dwellers seemed to buy it. This Atlanta fellow had “sucker” emblazoned across his forehead.

  Rob came back at eleven. He’d forgotten a bag in the back of the mail truck and if she wouldn’t tell, neither would he.

  Harry sat down to sort the mail and read the postcards. Courtney Shiflett received one from one of her camp buddies who signed her name with a smiling face instead of a dot over the “i” in “Lisa.” Lindsay Astrove was at Lake Geneva. The postcard, again brief, said that Switzerland, crammed with Americans, would be much nicer without them.

  The mail was thin on postcards today.

  Mim Sanburne marched in. Mrs. Murphy, playing with a rubber band on the counter, stopped. When Harry saw the look on Mim’s face she stopped sorting the mail.

  “Harry, I have a bone to pick with you and I didn’t think that the funeral was the place to do it. You have no business whatsoever telling Little Marilyn whom to invite to her wedding. No business at all!”

  Mim must have thought that Harry would bow down and say “Yes, Mistress.” This didn’t happen.

  Harry steeled herself. “Under the First Amendment, I can say anything to anybody. I had something I wanted to say to your daughter and I did.”

  “You’ve upset her!”

  “No, I’ve upset you. If she’s upset she can come in here and tell me herself.”

  Suprised that Harry wasn’t subservient, Big Marilyn switched gears. “I happen to know that you read postcards. That’s a violation, you know, and if it continues I shall tell the postmaster at the head office on Seminole Trail. Have I made myself clear?”

  “Quite.” Harry compressed her lips.

  Mim glided out, satisfied that she’d stung Harry. The satisfaction wouldn’t last long, because the specter of her son would come back to haunt her. If Harry was brazen enough to speak to Little Marilyn, plenty of others were speaking about it too.

  Harry turned the duffel bag upside down. One lone postcard slipped out. Defiantly she read it: “Wish you were here,” written in computer script. She flipped it over and beheld a gorgeous photograph, misty and evocative, of the angel in an Asheville, North Carolina, cemetery. She turned it over and read the fine print. This was the angel that inspired Thomas Wolfe when he wrote Look Homeward, Angel.

  She slipped it in Maude Bly Modena’s box and didn’t give it a second thought.

  9

  A pensive Pharamond Haristeen drove his truck back from Charlottesville. Seeing BoomBoom had rattled him. He couldn’t decide if she was truly sorry that Kelly was dead. The zing had fled that marriage years ago.

  No armor existed against her beauty. No armor existed against her icy blasts, either. Why wouldn’t a woman like BoomBoom be sensible like Harry? Why couldn’t a woman like Harry be electrifying like BoomBoom?

  As far as Fair was concerned, Harry was sensible until it came to the divorce. She threw him out. Why should he pay support until the settlement was final?

  It came as a profound shock to Fair when Harry handed him his hat. His vanity suffered more than his heart but Fair seized the opportunity to appear the injured party. The elderly widowed women in Crozet were only too happy to side with him, as were single women in general. He moped about and the flood of dinner invitations immediately followed. For the first time in his life, Fair was the center of attention. He rather liked it.

  Deep in his heart he knew his marriage wasn’t working. If he cared to look inward he would discover he was fifty percent responsible for the failure. Fair had no intention of looking inward, a quality that doomed his marriage and would undoubtedly doom future relationships as well.

  Fair operated on the principle “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but emotional relationships weren’t machines. Emotional relationships didn’t lend themselves to scientific analysis, a fact troubling to his scientifically trained mind. Women didn’t lend themselves to scientific analysis.

  Women were too damned much trouble, and Fair determined to live alone for the rest of his days. The fact that he was a healthy thirty-four did not deter him in this decision.

  He passed Rob Collier on 240 heading east. They waved to each other.

  If the sight of BoomBoom at her husband’s funeral wasn’t enough to unnerve Fair, Rick Shaw had zeroed in on him at the clinic, asking questions. Was he under suspicion? Just because two friends occasionally have a strained relationship doesn’t mean that one will kill the other. He said that to Rick, and the sheriff replied with “People have killed over less.” If that was so, then the world was totally insane. Even if it wasn’t, it felt like it today.

  Fair pulled up behind the post office. Little Tee Tucker stood on her hind legs, nose to the glass, when she heard his truck. He walked over to Market Shiflett’s store for a Coca-Cola first. The blistering heat parched his throat, and castrating colts added to the discomfort somehow.

  “Hello, Fair.” Courtney’s fresh face beamed.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. What about you?”

  “Hot. How about a Co-Cola?”

  She reached into the old red bin, the kind of soft-drink refrigerator used at the time of World War II, and brought out a cold bottle. “Here, unless you want a bigger one.”

  “I’ll take that and I’ll buy a six-pack, too, because I am forever drinking Harry’s sodas. Where’s your dad?”

  “The sheriff came by and Dad went off with him.”

  Fair smirked. “A new broom sweeps the place clean.”

  “Sir?” Courtney didn’t understand.

  “New sheriff, new anything. When someone takes over a job they have an excess of enthusiasm. This is Rick’s first murder case since he was elected sheriff, so he’s just busting his . . . I mean, he’s anxious to find the killer.”

  “Well, I hope he does.”

  “Me too. Say, is i
t true that you have a crush on Dan Tucker?” Fair’s eyes crinkled. How he remembered this age.

  Courtney replied quite seriously, “I wouldn’t have Dan Tucker if he was the last man on earth.”

  “Is that so? He must be just awful.” Fair picked up his Cokes and left. Pewter scooted out of the market with him.

  Tucker ran around in circles when Fair stepped into the post office with Pewter on his heels. Maude Bly Modena rummaged around in her box, while Harry was in the back.

  “Hi, Maudie.”

  “Hi, Fair.” Maude thought Fair a divine-looking man. Most women did.

  “Harry!”

  “What?” The voice filtered out from the back door.

  “I brought you some Cokes.”

  “Three hundred thirty-three”—the door opened—“because that’s what you owe me.” Harry appreciated his gesture more than she showed.

  Fair shoved the six-pack across the counter.

  Pewter hollered, “Mrs. Murphy, where are you?”

  Tucker walked over and touched noses with Pewter, who liked dogs very much.

  “I’m counting rubber bands. What do you want?” Mrs. Murphy replied.

  Harry grabbed the Cokes off the counter. “Mrs. Murphy, what have you done?”

  “I haven’t done anything,” the cat protested.

  Harry appealed to Fair. “You’re a veterinarian. You explain this.” She pointed to the rubber bands tossed about the floor.

  Maude leaned over the counter. “Isn’t that cute? They get into everything. My mother once had a calico that played with toilet paper. She’d grab the end of the roll and run through the house with it.”

  “That’s nothing.” Pewter one-upped her: “Cazenovia, the cat at Saint Paul’s Church, eats communion wafers.”

  “Pewter wants on the counter.” Fair thought the meow meant that. He lifted her onto the counter, where she rolled on her back and also rolled her eyes.

  The humans thought this was adorable and fussed over her. Mrs. Murphy, boiling with disgust, jumped onto the counter and spat in Pewter’s face.