A Slaying in Savannah (3 page)

“Thank you.”

Seth cleared his throat. I offered him another cookie, and asked, “You were just saying you can’t always tell if someone is drunk without looking into something. What is that?”

“Their eyes,” he replied. “It’s called alcohol gaze nystagmus.”

“AGN for short,” Mort added.

“And what exactly is that?”

“Alcohol depresses the central nervous system and affects fine-motor coordination, including the movement of the eyes,” Seth said. “If you have someone look forward and then gaze to the side, you can see a kind of jerky movement of the eye if they’re intoxicated, rather than the smooth control they’d have without alcohol in their system. The change is like the difference between a ball rolling over smooth paper versus sandpaper. You can see the lack of control.”

“It’s been used as a field sobriety test for the police to check drivers,” Mort said, “but the courts don’t always accept it as evidence. That’s why additional tests are usually required.”

“Like the Breathalyzer or walking a straight line?” I asked.

“Exactly.”

“And standing on one foot,” Seth added, “although I don’t think I could do that anymore anyway. My balance is not what it used to be.” He patted his stomach. “And your cookies are no help.”

“I put out a bowl of apples,” I reminded him. “It was you who requested the cookies.”

“Can’t resist your butter cookies. They’re every bit as good as the ones at Sassi’s Bakery.”

“A high compliment indeed,” I said. “Would you like me to wrap up a few for you to take home?”

“Seeing as you’re going to be away, and not baking anytime soon, I wouldn’t be averse to having a stash to put in the cookie jar.”

Mort grabbed a cookie from the plate. “Saving you a few calories, Doc,” he said, smiling at Seth’s scowl. “I’m outta here. Have a good trip, Mrs. F. Good night, Doc.”

“And good riddance,” Seth said, but he winked at me.

I wrapped the remaining cookies in aluminum foil. “Just parcel them out slowly so you don’t go into withdrawal until I can bake a new batch.”

“I’ll make them last, but if you stay away too long, I may have to break down and buy some at the bakery.”

When he’d gone, I straightened up in the kitchen, made myself a cup of herbal tea, and settled in my favorite chair in the living room. I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge, but this trip to Savannah had me at sixes and sevens. Seth was right; I’m a writer, not a private eye. I’d never before been officially asked to solve a murder, although I’d ended up doing just that on too many occasions. Those were flukes, examples of my being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and with the wrong people in many instances.

Was this a foolish errand to satisfy the whim of a woman who wasn’t even around to see the final result? Was I being used to punish her relatives? They certainly would not want to cooperate with someone who could cost them a potential inheritance. Why did Tillie jeopardize an important social program that she had worked so hard to establish? I would be a very unhappy person if I ended up depriving the literacy program of its donation.

I sighed, and hoped I was up to the task. I would soon find out.

I was leaving for Georgia in the morning.

Chapter Two

The shops in the Savannah airport were decorated for Saint Patrick’s Day. Cardboard shamrocks hung on strings from the ceiling in the newsstand. A table in the front of a bookstore was piled with works by Irish authors. A young woman serving coffee had dyed her hair green. (I assumed it was in honor of the occasion.) And everywhere I looked, windows were festooned with green ribbons. Of course! I’d forgotten that Savannah has the second-largest Saint Patrick’s Day celebration in the country, trailing only New York, a tribute to the thousands of Irish who’d helped found and develop the city. Good timing for this lady with Irish roots.

I pulled my rolling suitcase across the floor of the glass-roofed atrium that linked the gates to the rest of the terminal, and stepped onto the escalator leading to baggage claim and ground transportation. I always try to pack lightly whenever I travel, and since Tillie’s attorney had informed me I was to stay in her house, I assumed I would have access to a laundry during my visit.

At the base of the escalator, a group of people, some in chauffeur uniforms, held up hand-lettered signs with the names of arriving passengers. I searched the little forest of white cardboards and smiled at the young woman who waved my name on a sheet of lined paper. She was in her late teens or early twenties, dressed in blue jeans with high heels and a bomber jacket edged in lace; she looked as if she could have stepped out of the pages of
Cosmopolitan
magazine. She jumped forward and grabbed the handle of my suitcase.

“Welcome to Savannah, Mrs. Fletcher,” she said. “I told my mama I’d have no trouble finding you. You look just like the picture on your books.”

“Well, that’s nice to hear,” I said, laughing, “considering that’s a picture of me.”

She giggled. “I guess that didn’t make much sense, did it?”

“It made all the sense in the world.”

“Is this all the luggage you have, Mrs. Fletcher?”

“That’s it.”

“Great! Then just follow me. I had to put the car in the parking garage. You get a ticket if you leave it outside, even for just a few minutes. I can’t afford another ticket and I only have a few dollars in my pocket.” Her final words were barely audible as she strode off in front of me toward the door.

“You have an advantage over me,” I said, hurrying to catch up with her. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

“Oh, sorry about that, ma’am,” she said, twisting around to face me without breaking her stride. “I’m Melanie Goodall. My mama is Miss Tillie’s housekeeper—or rather
was,
seeing as Miss Tillie has passed on. Mr. Richardson sent me to carry you home. Know him?”

“Only over the telephone,” I replied. “He had said he would be picking me up himself if he had the time.”

“He did? Mr. Richardson drive? Then this is your lucky day, Mrs. Fletcher. That man must be a hundred and two—and half blind to boot. I wouldn’t trust him behind the wheel of a baby carriage. He drives so slow, the turtles pass him. You’re much better off with me.”

Once outside, Melanie held up her hand to stop the traffic and jogged across the roadway toward the garage with me in hot pursuit. I was glad I try to keep myself in relatively good shape, or I could easily have lost her in the crowd. Given her single-minded goal of reaching the car in record time, I had visions of being left behind at the airport while my luggage made the trip into town. Mr. Richardson’s reportedly slower pace was looking favorable to me.

“Here we are,” Melanie said as she reached a blue Honda that had been parked halfway into an adjacent spot. “I’m not usually so greedy with parking spaces,” she said as she lifted the trunk and deposited my bag inside, “but I was afraid I’d miss you. Front seat or back?”

“I’d prefer to sit next to you,” I said, “if you don’t mind.”

“Fine with me. I usually drive with the window cracked. Let me know if it’s too airish.”

As we exited the airport, I was relieved to see that Melanie’s highway driving did not mimic her sprint to the parking garage. We chatted easily on the way into town. She was the only daughter of Emanuela Love and Andrew Goodall, who had married late in life. While Mrs. Goodall had been Tillie’s housekeeper for forty years, and had a room of her own off the kitchen for the times it was needed, she had also maintained her own home farther uptown, which she’d shared with her husband until his death and, until recently, with Melanie, who was a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design, known locally as SCAD.

“Mama nearly took a fit when I told her I was moving into a place near the school with my girlfriend, LaTisha,” Melanie said, “but we were workin’ all hours and it was just too far to go uptown after.”

“What are you studying?” I asked.

“Historic preservation.”

“You’re certainly in the right place for it,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am. You don’t find too many colleges with that major, but Savannah has a really big historic district. And our college has renovated a mess of buildings downtown. We get hands-on experience, which is good. I think I’d get bored pretty fast if everything I learn came only from books.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “You’ve worked on some of the renovations?”

“Not really. Not yet, anyways. But Miss Tillie was lettin’ me research the history of Mortelaine House. That made Mama happy, cooled her down a tad about my living elsewhere. When I was snooping around Miss Tillie’s house looking for some history, it meant Mama could keep an eye on me while she was doing her job. Mama is pretty protective of me. Don’t get me wrong. I know she’s that way ’cause she loves me.”

“A doting, loving mother,” I offered.

“She sure is.” She abruptly shifted verbal gears. “It’s a great old house, even has a couple of ghosts.” Melanie glanced over to see my reaction. “ ’Course, I’ve never seen one, and believe me, I’ve tried. Tish and I stayed up till three in the morning one night, goin’ from room to room trying to raise a soul. Nothing. Not even a cold breeze. Thank goodness for that. I would have been scared to death if I’d actually seen one.”

“So how do you know the house has ghosts?”

“Has to have, an old house like that where somebody—Mr. Jones—was murdered, especially since no one has ever found his killer. I expect Mama has seen the ghosts, but she won’t talk about it—leastwise to me—but Miss Tillie, she swore up and down she saw them. She once said to me, ‘There’s Mr. Jones over to the fireplace.’ He was her
betrothed
—that’s what she called him—till he got shot. Died in the upstairs hall. I looked real hard, but I didn’t see anything. I like that word, ‘betrothed.’ Sounds like something from Shakespeare, doesn’t it? What does it mean exactly? D’you know?”

“It means she was engaged to marry him,” I said.

“That’s what I thought.” She was quiet for a rare moment. Anyone who believes in the stereotype that Southerners move and speak slowly hasn’t met Melanie Goodall. “It’s really sad that she never got to marry him,” she continued, “but it’s pretty awful if he’s haunting her. That’s just plain scary.”

“Well, maybe now that she’s gone, too, he’ll stop haunting the house,” I said to her, not adding,
if he was ever really there
.

Melanie sighed. “ ’Course, you always had to take everything Miss Tillie said with a very large grain of salt. She was a mite loopy. Not all there, if you take my point. Meaning no disrespect. Don’t get me wrong. I loved her to death. Oops! That doesn’t sound right either.”

“I knew what you meant,” I said, trying not to laugh.

“She was always very good to me. But she was like a dotty old grandmama, talking to herself and seeing things. Even Miss O’Neill said so. And she was her best friend.”

“That would be Charmelle O’Neill?”

“Yes, ma’am. You know her?”

“It’s been many years since I’ve been to Savannah,” I said, “but I did meet her when I was here.”

 
My first encounter with Charmelle O’Neill had been brief but memorable.

It was the afternoon before the opening of the new literacy center, which was actually just a room in a multipurpose building, but its official designation had been long in coming. The U.S. Department of Health had extended a grant for screening hospital patients to determine if they were able to read and follow the doctors’ directions. Those deemed to need extra help were to be directed to our center, where evening classes would be given by volunteers trained in elementary education. Plans were to move people into special computer programs once they’d mastered the basics, so our clients would become proficient in two areas at the same time—reading and using a computer. It was an ambitious program, one of which we were very proud.

Tillie and I were setting up refreshments in the classroom. While the hospital would provide our first customers, we hoped to draw from a wider population and had invited the press to see our new quarters in the hope they would get the word out across the city. Over my objections, Tillie had insisted that I be her “celebrity spokesperson.”

“Would you put the teapot over there, Jessica?” Tillie said, pointing to a scarred wooden table we’d pushed against the wall. “The cups and saucers are in the box on the floor. I don’t want anyone spilling tea on my nice tablecloth.” She arranged a dozen small plates of tea cakes, and lined up forks and linen napkins on the embroidered blue tablecloth, smoothing its surface with hands gnarled by arthritis. “This was such a good idea of yours, Jessica.”

“It’s always been my experience that if you feed the press, they’re in a better frame of mind to hear and disseminate your message,” I said, lifting the saucers from the box. “Of course, I think they probably would have been just as happy with cookies served on paper plates.”

“Maybe so, but I wouldn’t be,” she said, grinning at me. “I have my reputation as a hostess to maintain.” She looked at her watch. “The mayor and the reporters will be here in ten minutes. I told Charmelle to come at three to help us set up. That woman is always late.”

“I think we’re in good shape,” I said, looking over the computer stations lined against one wall. My publisher, Vaughan Buckley, had twisted a few arms at a big computer company, and five brand-new machines, complete with the appropriate software, had been donated to our center. Computers were not as common back then as they are today, but their growing popularity in businesses promised to spread to homes across America. We were excited to be using the latest technology to give our students their training.

“You could have waited for me,” came a wail from the door.

Charmelle O’Neill must have been a beauty in her youth. She was tall and spare, and posed in the doorway as if waiting to be admired. Even as age had begun to claim her, she fought to maintain her looks with careful application of bright pink lipstick and rouge to her powdered face. She was dressed meticulously in a soft green suit, a pink cashmere sweater, and a silk scarf pinned to her shoulder with a gold brooch. I smiled in greeting as she smoothed down a stray hair and tucked it into her chignon with perfectly manicured fingers.