When Did We Lose Harriet? (26 page)

The
LORD
works out everything
for his own ends—even the wicked
for a day of disaster.
Proverbs 16:4

Jake shifted himself on his pillows and pulled the covers up around his chest. “All right, now, begin at the beginning and tell us everything.”

“Do you think you are up to this?” Glenna reached out an anxious hand to touch him. She was perched awkwardly on the bed at his waist. Joe Riddley sat leaning up against the footboard, and I leaned against him. Ever since I fainted, I’d needed him real close by.

“Nora pulled a gun on my big sister,” Jake said indignantly. “I want to know why.”

“Because MacLaren had to have one of her Co-colas.” Joe Riddley put his arm around me and squeezed, then left it there. “I was so involved with my movie, I didn’t think about what she was doing until she was out of sight. I called Carter, and he pointed out that she could be in danger if she ran into somebody out there alone, so he
said we ought to go after her. By the time we got to the vending room, though, she’d gone to the lobby. We went back to the room, thinking she’d gone back a different way, and when she wasn’t there, we panicked and started combing the halls. We got back just in time. You do beat all, Little Bit, for getting around!”

I laid my head on his shoulder. “You’re a fine one to talk. Look at how much effort I wasted trying to keep you from opening the danged door. I’d have let Nora beat on it till she was blue in the face, if I’d known you were out gallivanting.” I lifted my face for a kiss.

“You two can smooch later,” Jake said grumpily. “What about the story?” I didn’t blame him for sounding peeved. We’d roused him up from a sound sleep much too early, but Joe Riddley and I had been at the police station for hours. We’d decided to wake Glenna and Jake and tell them everything right away, then we could all go to bed.

“You are
certain
Nora killed Harriet?” Glenna twisted her hands in her lap.

I nodded. “Positive. She told me she did, then made a full confession to the police before William and her lawyer got there. Now they have persuaded her to take it back, of course, but Carter doesn’t think they’ll have much trouble proving it.”

Her gray eyes were huge with pain.
“Why,
Clara? Why would she do such a thing?”

“Dee’s mother’s money. Nora knew—even if Lou Ella didn’t—that William’s business was in hot water. She wanted them to have enough to send Julie to what she calls ‘a quality college.’“

I paused for Jake’s predictable reply. Sure enough, “Send her to Auburn.”

“It was William’s insisting on sending her to Bama that started all this,” I informed him. “Nora felt if they had more money, though, they’d be willing to send Julie to one of the colleges Nora planned to show her, and she
was dead certain Julie would like one of them better than a big state school. Also, as we grandmothers tend to do, she felt her own granddaughter both needed and deserved that money far more than Harriet. She decided to get it for her. Nora insists she didn’t set out to kill Harriet, though. She just wanted to pressure her into signing a paper giving her inheritance to Julie. So, on June fourth, Nora called Harriet at the club, pretended to be her mother, and set up an appointment in the cemetery. She met Harriet there and took her up to the lake house—promising that her mother would be waiting. All week she kept her there, insisting she sign the paper.”

“Why didn’t Harriet just run away?” Jake wondered. “She seemed to have plenty of gumption the one time I saw her.”

“Nora kept her sedated,” I explained, “and told her she had the flu. She also kept promising to take Harriet to her mother as soon as she felt better and signed the paper. Harriet, however, kept refusing to sign, and the Sykeses were supposed to leave for the mountains Friday afternoon. Finally, Friday morning, Nora poisoned her. When Harriet was nearly dead, she drove her to the cemetery and left her in the kudzu.”

Jake was interested enough to wiggle up on his pillows. “Why not dump her in the lake, or in the country somewhere?”

“She didn’t want it connected to her lake house, silly. Also, she needed Harriet found. Julie—or Dee, actually—couldn’t inherit the money otherwise. Nora thought that when they got back from the mountains, William would call the police to report Harriet missing, the police would tell him they’d found a body, he would identify her, and it would be over. Instead, William refused to call. No wonder Nora kept after me to look for the child. She admitted tonight she made a prank call one night when it looked like even Lou Ella couldn’t persuade William to report
Harriet missing. Nora wanted to spur me on to keep looking. I must have seemed like a godsend to her.”

“I guess you were, honey,” Glenna said sadly. “Just not the way she wanted.”

That silenced even me for a minute.

Joe Riddley picked up where I’d left off. “No matter how much Nora tries now to say it didn’t happen, if Harriet was at the lake house for several days, she’ll have left evidence all over the place.”

“Nora said the first time I met her that Harriet was never up there,” I remembered.

He gave me an approving hug. “Good remembering, Little Bit. They may want you to testify to that. The poison made Harriet very sick, too, so they’ll check Nora’s car for traces of where Harriet threw up, or threads from the clothes she was wearing when she was found.”

“But why didn’t forensics find any poison?” From the eager way she leaned forward, and her tone of voice, I could tell Glenna still hoped it wasn’t really true.

“She used a plant that’s part of the tobacco family,” I explained. “We’ve all been exposed to so much nicotine that forensics expected to find it. Even though her levels were a bit elevated, they didn’t think it odd.”

Joe Riddley shifted beside me, and I knew he was about to launch out into one of his antismoking diatribes. It was time to change the subject. “Ricky may be able to identify Nora’s voice as the woman who called him to come to Myrna’s, too,” I told Jake and Glenna.

Jake sat bolt upright and stared at Glenna in disbelief. “We’ve known this woman all our married lives! She never acted like a mass murderer before.”

“She’s not a mass murderer,” Glenna protested gently. “She’s a very troubled woman.”

“And although we’re pretty sure Nora killed Myrna, Nora hasn’t confessed to that,” I pointed out. “Last night she insisted that for years she’d assumed Myrna was
already dead. I suspect Dee was so embarrassed at having a prostitute in the family, she kept up the pretense that she died years ago. Nora certainly never expected Myrna to show up alive to inherit Harriet’s estate. But William admitted to Carter that Myrna called to ask for a job. He must have mentioned that to his mother in his daily call, and Nora would have realized at once that Myrna, not Dee, was Harriet’s legal heir. What a shock! She must have been frantic. Yet look at how quickly she planned to kill Myrna and set Ricky up as her killer. She’s very bright.”

“Don’t sound so admiring, Little Bit,” Joe Riddley warned.

“Will Dee get the money now?” Glenna asked.

I shrugged. “Eunice is Myrna’s heir, and since Myrna died after Harriet—”

“A good lawyer ought to be able to get Dee
some
of the money. It was her mother’s, after all.” I could tell by Glenna’s expression that she was wondering who she knew who might help. Then, because she was Glenna, her mind moved on to other people who would be needing help. “I really ought to call Lou Ella.” Her hand reached for the phone.

“Wait until morning,” I said quickly. “William and Dee decided not to tell her anything until then.”

“Dee?” Jake growled. “That bag of fluff? You mean to tell me she came down to the police station in the middle of the night for Nora?”

“She’s not as much fluff as Nora has made you think,” I informed him. “And she will stand by William—and he by his mother—through whatever comes.”

“Let’s be sure to call Lou Ella in the morning,” Jake told Glenna—as if she and I hadn’t already discussed it. “She’s a tough old bird, but she’s going to take this hard. Just don’t let on that Clara’s meddling had anything to do with what happend.” He settled back into his pillows.
“Now tell me one more thing, Sis. How’d Nora get the kid’s gun?”

“She admitted that before William got down to the station. She found the gun in Harriet’s drawer Tuesday, while taking clothes to make Dee think Harriet had come by the house. She took the gun up to the lake house and accused Harriet of planning to hurt William’s family. Harriet told her it was Ricky’s, that she was keeping it for him.”

“Maybe having the gun gave her the idea of setting Ricky up,” Joe Riddley added.

I nodded. “Maybe so. Anyway, what I think happened is this: she called Ricky pretending to be Myrna looking for drugs, and told him to meet her at Eunice’s. Then she went to Eunice’s, shot Myrna through Eunice’s Polar Bear pillow, waited until she saw Ricky get off the bus a couple of blocks away, called 911, and left. They think they may be able to do a voice match with the 911 tape, by the way. Nora didn’t know Myrna had called me, though, so she didn’t expect me to surprise Ricky. She thought the police would find him there.”

Jake turned around and gave his pillow a good punch-out. Then he challenged me. “Tell the truth, Sis. You didn’t really know who it was until Nora showed up tonight with her gun, did you?”

I was torn between calming him down and bragging. It came out a little of both. “Yes, Bubba, after I talked to Rachel, I was pretty sure who it was. I’d already noticed that Nora always talked about Harriet in the past tense, from the very beginning. Everybody else mixed up the past and present, which was more natural. Also, Nora told William that Harriet’s body had been found in Oakwood Cemetery, but she was in the kitchen talking to Julie when I told Dee exactly where it was found. I’d also done some thinking about how those clothes disappeared from Dee’s. What if the last batch of clothes was taken to make people think Harriet was still alive Friday, so the family
could get to the mountains and have a good alibi when the body was found? Nora certainly comes and goes in their house as she pleases.

“But Nora swore she’d been at the lake the day Harriet disappeared, and everytime I asked Julie in Nora’s presence where she was that Tuesday, she acted real nervous. Once I knew that she’d been to the lake, I thought she was afraid her grandmother had seen her there. That seemed to give Nora a perfect alibi. After I talked with Rachel, though, I realized I might be thinking backwards. What if, instead, Julie had
not
seen her grandmother’s car when she and her friends went past the lake house—even though Nora kept insisting she was there?

“That would certainly explain Julie’s strange behavior about some silver earrings, too. I knew they were Harriet’s and asked where she got them. She said her grandmother gave them to her—but she looked funny when she said it. I thought she was lying. I even wondered if she’d killed Harriet and taken them. But later I got to thinking that maybe, instead, she wondered where her grandmother got them. Nora never wears silver. From a couple of looks Julie gave Nora that morning out at Wynlakes, I think my asking about the earrings planted some serious questions in her mind.”

It’s a good thing I didn’t expect congratulations from my brother. He looked at me like he still didn’t believe I’d come to all those conclusions by myself, and growled, “I want to know one more thing. Who rammed my car?”

“With my wife in it,” Joe Riddley added. Jake waved that away.

“That’s something I don’t know,” I admitted. “Last night as we left the hotel, lightning flashed, and I realized that you don’t really see colors in lightning, you see dark and light. In that light, Nora’s hair looked as white as Ricky’s. Maybe she borrowed William’s truck to go pick up an oak tree and waited for me at the hospital. Maybe she
bailed Ricky out and hired him to scare me—although I think that’s highly unlikely. I think what probably happened is that William bailed Ricky out of jail and paid him to scare me, hoping I’d get off the case. He’s certainly never been pleased I was looking for Harriet. He said he was even tempted to identify the wrong body to make me give it up.”

“Now why would William do a thing like that?” Jake demanded.

I shrugged. “He says it was because he didn’t want me bothering his wife.”

“William was a very nice boy,” Glenna repeated what she’d said days earlier. “I suspect he’s grown up into a nice man.”

“A nice man doesn’t ram other people’s cars,” Jake informed her. He yawned. “There’s probably more to be told, Clara, but it’s time for smart people to sleep. You folks going back to the hotel, or are you going to lie down next door?”

“Like you said, it’s time to sleep.” Joe Riddley stood and pulled me up with him. “That means having room enough to stretch out. We’re going back to the hotel.”

That’s all the story, except the two best parts. Josheba woke us up at noon to say Lewis had come out of his coma. We went to see him on our way out of town, and he looked pretty perky, considering. Of course, that could be because Josheba was holding his hand. The two of them looked like cats who’ve found a whole pot of cream.

The other best part was that Joe Riddley and I were finally free to head back to Georgia.

We had a great trip, riding along singing those old gospel songs he likes so much and just enjoying being back together. We worked our way through “Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad” and were halfway through “The Great Speckled Bird” when I saw blue lights in my side mirror. Since there wasn’t any traffic on the road, neither
one of us had been paying a whole lot of attention to how fast he was going, and we’d been too busy harmonizing to notice the trooper under a viaduct.

If Joe Riddley tries to tell you he could have talked his way out of that ticket if I hadn’t butted in, don’t you believe him for a minute. Sometimes he doesn’t have the sense to know when he’s been helped.

Besides, considering what was about to happen to us back in Georgia, that speeding ticket would soon be the least of our worries…

Watch for MacLaren’s next case,
But Why Shoot the Magistrate?,
to be released by Zondervan in 1998.