Knot the Usual Suspects Page 24

  “Not to worry,” said Shirley. “We’ll be your eyes and ears.”

  “Full report later,” Mercy said.

  I gulped and left.

  * * *

  The posse gathered in the TGIF workroom later that afternoon. I was last to arrive and found them at one of the oak worktables instead of the circle of comfy chairs where we usually sat and knitted. No one was knitting now, and I took that as a measure of how urgent they felt the situation had become with Gladys’ death. Everyone but Joe had made it to the meeting. Geneva was there, too, still hovering at Ardis’ side. She was somber, too, only raising a hand in greeting, then putting a finger to her lips. They’d rolled the whiteboard in. Ardis nodded her approval when I closed the door and took the seat they’d left for me at the head of the table.

  “John suggested the table,” Ardis said, “to put us on a more serious footing.”

  “I like the closed-door policy, too,” Mel said. “It’ll keep out that law enforcement riffraff that’s wandered in a time or two. And I get the feeling our secret plans weren’t so secret after all.”

  “Me, too. How’s Ambrose?” I asked John.

  “He put a hole in the screen door with his cane when I got him home. Then he slept like a baby and mended the screen when he got up. I think the evening did him some good.”

  “Daddy, too,” Ardis said. “He thinks he and mother were out dancing last night at Pokey’s roadhouse.”

  “Pokey closed that roadhouse twenty years ago,” Thea said.

  “And Daddy hasn’t been there in thirty, but he wants to go at the weekend for the live music.”

  “Let’s get started,” I said.

  “And let’s finish it, too,” Ernestine said, “so we can put a stop to this terrible business.” She slapped her hand on the table. “Oh.” She put both hands in her lap. “We should sit at the table more often. That was very satisfying.”

  “What’s first, then,” Ardis asked, “a recap of the questions from the last meeting, or reports?”

  “Reports,” I said. “They’ll answer some of the questions.”

  “And add more,” said John. “It’s worked for us before; let’s hope it does again.”

  I went first and told them about the connection between the two murders—that Gladys had seen something in the park that night—and how we knew. “We think she saw the murderer if not the actual murder,” I said. “We can’t be sure, of course, but it fits, and we know she didn’t want to go to the police.” I hesitated before using Aaron’s name, but decided to go ahead.

  “Another person who might not be comfortable going to the police,” Ernestine said. “And such a nice young man, too. I hope you warned him not to let anyone else think he knows what Gladys saw.”

  “I think he’s taking the possibility of danger seriously,” I said.

  “And he’s a Carlin,” Ardis said, “so he knows how to disappear. But this question of trust in the police brings up an interesting wrinkle. Cole Dunbar’s been suspended.”

  Ernestine and I had heard that at breakfast, but it was news to the others. Reactions ranged from Thea’s mouth hanging open to John’s fingertips tapping the table as though they were recording the thoughts running through his head.

  “Coffee,” Mel said. “I need coffee to process that.” She’d set the refreshments up on the Welsh dresser, the way we usually did, but brought it all over to the table now. “Help yourselves,” she said. “It’s nothing but marble pound cake. If I’d known you were going to drop that bomb, I’d have brought rum cake. And possibly left the cake out altogether.” She poured a cup of coffee and drank half of it. “Okay. Cole’s suspended. Why?”

  “He wouldn’t say.” Ardis crumpled a napkin and dropped it on the table. “When he came to pick up the list and timetable this afternoon, I gave him every opportunity. I haven’t offered that man so much sympathy or so many chances to come clean since he was a boy and put a bar of soap in Dee Dee Williams’ sandwich and refused to admit it.” She crumpled another napkin. “Dee Dee was a snotty thing and deserved it.”

  “Are we guessing why?” Mel asked.

  “No,” said John. “That doesn’t sound safe or smart. Or kind. It might be a personal matter.”

  “Best left under a rock?” Mel said. “Fine with me. He was in uniform this morning. When did it happen?”

  “Maybe it had just happened,” I said. “Nasty surprises like that get sprung on you sometimes.” Nasty surprises like a phone call telling you your job’s been eliminated, which was what had happened to me. The shared experience of a sucker punch like that should have made me more sympathetic toward Clod. But there was a difference in our situations. My boss had cried when she told me the news and had made it clear it wasn’t my fault. Clod’s boss seemed to think something was his fault.

  “He doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to being suspended,” Ernestine said. “He asked for that timetable and list of names.”

  “Darla doesn’t, either. She was there giving him an update on Hugh’s truck this morning. I wonder if she’ll tell us anything about the suspension.” I made a note to call her. “It’s probably hard to step away from a case like this. Cole was pretty psyched about Hugh being in town.”

  “Speaking of the truck—” Ardis put the envelope with Joe’s pictures on the table. “Score one for our team. Joe found the truck first. Did you find out where, Kath?”

  “Score zip for my team,” I said.

  “Oh, poor baby,” said Thea. “You’re not scoring any these days?” She smiled and moved her chair out of reach of my foot—too close to Mel. “Ow. Okay, let’s see the pictures.”

  They passed the pictures around and I went to the whiteboard. Geneva followed me. Filling up the board’s clean expanse with questions, facts, and theories always seemed to help me. Geneva usually left the room when we got it out. Knowing now how much she missed drawing, I could understand. I picked up the marker and drew a tiny ghost in a corner of the board.

  “That looks nothing like me. Please erase it.”

  I rubbed it out and looked at her.

  “She isn’t wearing her braided bracelet.”

  I took my phone out and looked at it as though I was checking to see who was calling, then put it to my ear. “I know.”

  “I didn’t notice that until now. Some detective. Some great-great-aunt. Not so great at anything. I will be in my small room. It’s like a coffin. That’s something I did notice.”

  “I’ll come talk to you later,” I said, but I wasn’t sure she heard me.

  “Are you making notes up there, Kath?” John asked.

  “Yeah.” I slipped the phone back in my pocket. “Columns, then notes. Columns with all the names we’ve had floating around. Ardis and I started a list Thursday morning.”

  “That was yesterday,” Mel said.

  “Yow. Doesn’t seem possible.” I wrote Hugh McPhee in the upper left corner, and next to that Gladys Weems. “Ardis, will you read the other names from the list? It’s in my notebook.” I wrote them across the top of the board as she read—“Olive Weems, Sheriff Haynes, Cole Dunbar, Al Rogalla, Rachel Meeks.” For good measure, I added Tammie Fain and Wanda Vance.

  “Does anyone know who the Register of Deeds is?” Ardis asked.

  “Lois Poteet,” Ernestine said. “Why?”

  “I’ll let Kath tell you,” Ardis said. “It’s her report. I’m still skeptical, but . . .” She let the thought hang while I started to write Lois Poteet on the board. I got as far as Lois Pot, stopped, and turned around.

  “Oh boy—with everything else going on last night, I forgot that I heard something else, and this one’s a doozy.”

  “We haven’t heard the first part of your report yet,” Mel said, “but go ahead and lay the doozy news on us.”

  “Hugh and Rachel were briefly married.”

&
nbsp; That was an even more impressive bomb than the news of Clod’s suspension. No finger tapped, no hand reached for the coffee.

  “None of you knew that?” I asked.

  “Did you hear this from the same source?” Ardis asked. “The Spivey vine?”

  “Is that where you heard about the meetings at the bank and the courthouse?” Thea asked. “And you wanted to rearrange the teams to follow up on Spivey information?”

  “The meetings have been confirmed,” I said. “What Ardis and Thea are talking about is something the twins told me Thursday afternoon—that Hugh and Al Rogalla, on Tuesday afternoon, met with Lois Poteet at the courthouse and then with Rachel at the bank. At the bridge last night, I asked Al, and he confirmed it.”

  “And I can now confirm the marriage, through the wonders of online public access records,” Mel said, holding up her smartphone.

  “Did Al tell you why they met with Lois and Rachel?” Ardis asked.

  “No.”

  “Any more reports from Spivey Central?” Thea asked. “Because I’d like to go next. I clearly need to redeem myself, both for doubting the Spivey Fount of All Knowledge and for last night’s duck disaster. I have more background information on Hugh. Although the fact that I totally missed the marriage blows my mind.”

  “Forget your mind,” Mel said. “Will the shoes recover?”

  “That jury is still out. Okay, here are my notes, raw and in order of discovery, not in timeline form.” She settled a pair of reading glasses on the end of her nose. “Age, fifty-three; graduated from UT Knoxville 1983; English major, history minor; junior year abroad, Edinburgh University, Scotland; graduate studies at Edinburgh, attaining a doctorate in Scottish studies and fluency in Gaelic; learned to play the bagpipes, too, in case you didn’t notice. An interesting aside—he was one of the injured in the Sheffield Soccer Riots of 1989. Suffered a head injury but made a full recovery. He returned stateside, bounced from job to job, ended up back at UT Knoxville working in the math library, there not being much of a job market at American universities for someone with his expertise. He’s been at the library for fifteen years.”

  “In Knoxville,” Ardis said, “and never came back here.”

  “At least not with the kind of splash he did this time,” Thea said. “And maybe not ever. He wasn’t hiding over there. He just quietly faded into the background. Except when he’s playing the bagpipes. Hard to fade into anything when you’re blowing them and dressed to the teeth. The guy whose funeral he played for—Walter Jeffries—was a colleague at UT. Hugh was somewhat active in an online Gaelic society. Not into other social media, though.”

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “I think that’s darn good for one night.” Thea folded her glasses and set them on the table. “I will now sit back with a keen ear for further points of online inquiry, and fortify myself for tonight’s foray.” She refilled her coffee and took a slice of pound cake.

  “Good job, Thea.”

  “Of course.”

  “How does it change things, if we know Rachel and Hugh were married?” Ardis asked.

  “That’s one of our new questions,” John said, “with a whole cascade of questions below it. Are there any other reports before we jump to those?”

  “A few observations from Handmade,” I said. “They might give some direction to the new questions, but I’ll try to keep them objective. Rachel was there. She wasn’t limping—and as an aside, Joe was beginning to ask her questions last night, working his way toward the bank meeting, when she twisted her ankle and went home. He didn’t see it happen. She said it wasn’t bad.”

  “But she called me this morning and said she was staying off it,” Mel said.

  “And I really didn’t see anything wrong this afternoon.”

  “Did you talk to her?” Ernestine asked

  “No, but I saw her talking with Al Rogalla in one of the booths. They were sitting behind the display table. Al seemed to be manning the booth, but Joe said that neither Al nor Rachel is registered for one.”

  “He should be able to tell you who is registered for the booth, though,” Ardis said.

  “I’ll ask him. The booths have been a major headache, partly because of the way people were allowed to register for them. More than one person might be involved with a booth, but the registration only asked for one name.”

  “Isn’t there a master list of registrants?” John asked.

  “Supposedly. But Olive has it and Joe says she’s enough of a technophobe that she only has a hard copy and only the one copy.”

  “Good Lord,” John said.

  “Hey, don’t knock it,” Thea said. “If her system works for her, it works. You won’t catch me with files of personal information available for any hacker or voyeur to find.”

  “Or librarian,” said Mel.

  “That’s hardly the same thing as keeping accurate records in an accessible format,” Ernestine said. “I’m a firm believer in working smarter, not harder. I love spreadsheets.” She reached over and patted Thea’s hand. “I’m sorry, dear; sometimes I revert to my secretarial days. Pokey is Mayor Weems, and Olive is Mrs. Mayor Weems, but they still live over on Third Street in the brick ranch they started in. I don’t believe Olive ever had the good fortune to stretch her wings beyond joining her various social clubs. And I hope you know that I mean that only in the nicest possible way.”

  “Olive was there today,” I said. “And Pokey.” I told them about the Spiveys standing in for Pokey at the ribbon cutting, and about being run into by Olive. “Olive and Pokey both looked pretty ragged, and she wasn’t happy that we let the sheriff think the yarn bombing was part of Handmade.”

  “It is part of it,” Thea said.

  “Not officially, and she doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. Oh, but you know who does?” I took out my phone and showed them Abby’s OMG puddle. While John and Ernestine were chuckling over it, a text alert came in.

  “Shall I see who it is, Kath?” Ernestine asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Look at this, Thea.” Ernestine turned to her, flashing my phone. “Do you think Olive knows how to retrieve a text? I do. Oh my goodness.” She dropped the phone. “It’s them.”

  John looked at the display. “Spiveys,” he said, and pushed the phone across the table to me with the tip of a gingerly finger.

  “Hoo boy.” I took a swig of cold coffee and read the text aloud. “Fistfight at O.K. Gymnasium. Al from Chicago versus Cole Dunbar. Yippee-i-o-ki-ay.”

  Chapter 28

  “Right.” Ardis stood up. “We need to get over there. This could be the break in the case we’re looking for.” Hands on her hips, chin up, she looked like a seventy-something Valkyrie in a popcorn stitch shawl. “Who has their car here?”

  John raised his hand. “Unfortunately it’s Ambrose’s old MG. I take it out a couple of times a month to keep it running.”

  “Damn. Never mind. You take Kath, John, and the rest of us will walk.”

  “The rest of us might walk down the stairs and see them off,” Thea said, “and read about the bloody noses in the Bugle on Thursday. But the fight will be over by the time we can get there on foot. And before we do go, tell me why Olive and Sheriff Haynes are on the whiteboard. What am I looking for if I troll for them tonight?”

  “Anything,” Ardis said. “If reports are accurate, they were both shocked to see Hugh.”

  “Gladys was tickled,” I said.

  A car horn blared in the alley and another text alert burbled on my phone.

  “Spiveys again. All it says is ‘WAITING.’ All caps. Shall we go, John?”

  John and I headed down the stairs, a stream of advice rolling after us as the others followed. The car horn blared again, drowning the back door as it baaed. And there, idling in the alley at the bottom of the steps, stood the Spivey mobile, wi
th Spivey One and Spivey Two gesturing madly for me to hop in.

  * * *

  I sat between Ardis and Mel in the backseat of the Spiveys’ Buick. They cinched their seat belts tight, and I hoped they’d keep me from flying forward in case of a sudden stop. Not that Shirley made any stops between the shop and the school.

  “I’m rarely terrified,” Mel said on one side of me. “But I wish I had a Saint Christopher medal.”

  “This thing is as safe as a tank,” Ardis said on my other side. “Step on it, Shirley.”

  Shirley did, and we arrived before John and Ernestine in the MG. Thea had opted to stay behind, saying she’d do more good with her fingers on her keyboard. She was right, of course, that the fight was over before we got there.

  “We did our best,” Mercy said. “You might chip in for gas money sometime.” They dropped us at the door to the gym and went to park.

  * * *

  We got the bare facts of the fight from Joe. He’d gotten them from Shorty, because he’d missed it, too. The fight had erupted on the other side of the gym from Joe’s boat booth. Al Rogalla, standing under the basketball goal, had been delivering his memorial tribute to Hugh McPhee. Clod showed up, listened, and waited until Al finished; then the two came together. No one was quite sure what triggered the fight—Al said or did something, or Clod did, or it was a mutual conflagration. No one was sure who swung first. And although the fight was over before most people were aware of it, there were plenty of people in the gym who might have seen something.

  “A veritable who’s who of our whiteboard,” Ardis said, scanning the crowd.

  Olive and Pokey stood under the basketball goal talking with Darla. Sheriff Haynes walked past us and out the door. Tammie Fain, encumbered by one grandchild, chased down an aisle after another. To our right, Wanda Vance was trying on a quilted jacket.

  “Everybody but Rachel,” Ardis said.

  Ellen and Janet, who’d spent so much time knitting in the front room upstairs at the Weaver’s Cat, saw us, and rolled their bags over. They were beginning to seem like old friends.