TheCart Before the Corpse (16 page)

Neither of us had heard Peggy come back. She stood in the doorway with her hand braced against the jamb and her face the pearl gray Sherlock’s gums had been when we brought him in. “Why?” she whispered.

Hank wrapped his arms around her. I stood and shoved her into the chair I’d just vacated. She grabbed my hand. “It’s the same person who killed Hiram,” she said. “He’s after you now, Merry.”

“Us,” I said grimly.

She shivered and hunched her shoulders.

“Don’t go off half-cocked until I find out what’s in the thing,” Hank said. “Could be the worst that happened would be you spent the night in the bathroom throwing up. Or in the emergency room having your stomachs pumped out.”

“We have to call Amos,” Peggy said.

“I can’t do much until tomorrow morning,” Hank said, and eased his hip onto the edge of the examining table. The kindly vet was gone and in his place was a concerned man.

“If it had been left there for any length of time, one of the neighborhood dogs could have gotten into it,” Peggy said. She turned to me. “We don’t pay that much attention to leash laws. A small dog or roaming cat that ate much of it might have died.”

“Then there’s the squirrels, the raccoons, the possums . . . Whoever left it didn’t give a damn who got hurt.” Hank reached for the phone on the wall. ”I’m calling Amos’s cell phone.”

First Hank talked to Amos, then he handed the phone to Peggy, who explained as much as she knew. When she hung up, she said, “Merry, he’ll meet us at home in fifteen minutes to pick up the rest of the stuff and the container it came in.” She turned to Hank and hugged him. “I know I can trust you to look after Sherlock.”

“We’ll check his liver function in the morning. Casey will call you with an update. With luck you can pick him up after lunch.” He walked us to our truck, turning off the clinic lights as he went. “Nice to meet you, Merry, although not like this.”

“Nice to meet you too,” I said over my shoulder. “I hope I don’t need you until we do regular shots at the barn in a couple of months.” I’d already decided to continue using him for Hiram’s horses, assuming I hadn’t sent them all home by that time. Hank had proved how conscientious he was with small animals, and Hiram had trusted him with the horses. I would too.

“I hope I don’t see you either until then, although I could use the money.” He grinned. He was a very handsome man. Amazing how many male veterinarians are good looking. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on that. They do studies on much dumber things.

The night was chill, but clear. “Thanks for coming in,” Peggy said.

“No problem.”

As I was getting in the truck, I had an idea. “Hank, do you think your wife might be interested in a driving lesson?”

Peggy had mentioned that his wife, Casey, had been an athlete until she was left a paraplegic.

He glanced at Peggy, then back at me. I guess to see whether Peggy had told me. “She’s in a wheelchair most of the time.”

“I know,” I said. “Lots of people in wheelchairs drive carriages. Several companies design and build carriages and carts specifically for paralyzed drivers. Think she’d like to try it? You’d have to help us get her in.”

“I’ll ask her, but yeah, I think she might like that a lot.”

On our way home, Peggy leaned her head back against the seat. “That was sweet of you.”

“He deserved it.”

“Sherlock could have died.”

“What about
us
? We could be lying on matching gurneys on our way to the hospital.”

“Or the morgue,” Peggy said in a very small voice.

“What have I gotten you into?”

“You have it backwards. I don’t know what I stirred up, but somebody assumed Hiram’s death would be called an accident. They are not happy the police called it murder.”

“Now that he’s gone, they want to get rid of
me
. I wish to heaven I knew why.”

*

We hadn’t expected to answer that question so fast. The small window pane beside the lock in Peggy’s back door lay in shards on the kitchen floor. The door was slightly open, the chain was unhooked and the lock open.

“The cats!” Peggy said. “Dashiell! Marple! Watson!” She waved her hand. “Get the cat treats out of the cabinet beside the sink. If they’re still inside they’ll come for treats.” She bent to look at the broken glass.

“Any blood on the glass?” I asked and handed her the treats.

“None visible. If I touch anything Amos will kill me. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” She gave me a handful of treats and started toward the dining room. I headed for the library.

I stopped dead on the threshold. The room was a bigger mess than my apartment, first, because Peggy had more books, magazines, and papers than Hiram, and second, because whoever broke in had smashed both Peggy’s and Hiram’s laptop computers. I’d locked mine out of sight under the seat of my truck after Sunday night, so it was safe for the moment.

“Oh, my sweet Lord,” Peggy whispered. “Why not simply take the computers? Why smash them?”

“Check the other rooms. The TVs in here and in the kitchen haven’t been touched. How about your jewelry?”

Peggy came back in after five minutes. “More paper strewn around, but nothing taken that I can see.” She collapsed into her big chair. “This is simply insane. What are these lunatics after?”

Dashiell materialized from behind her chair and landed on her shoulder. We both jumped, then Peggy handed him a treat. A moment later two small heads peeped out from under the sofa. “Watson, Marple,” she crooned. They jumped into her lap. She gave them treats as well. “Thank God.”

Ten minutes later Amos arrived. He sat Peggy and me down at the kitchen table with all three cats on our laps while he went over the house. “Your computers insured?” he asked when he finally joined us.

“Mine’s on a rider to my home owner’s insurance,” Peggy said and looked at me.

“No idea, but I doubt it,” I said.

“Are we agreed that somebody was probably searching for something?” he asked. “The books on the lower shelves were dumped, but not on the upper ones.” He looked at me. “Somebody about your height,” he said. “Couldn’t reach the top shelves without the library ladder and didn’t take the time to get it.”

“We have alibis, Amos, unless you think we had a high old time doing this together before we took Sherlock to Hank’s.”

“Now, Peggy, don’t get your back up. That was an observation, not an accusation.”

“What about fingerprints?” Peggy asked.

“Not much chance, although I’ve dusted the back door. I’ll take both of yours to rule them out, but I doubt it’ll do any good. Most thieves wear gloves.”

“Why not steal the laptops?” Peggy said. “Why break them?”

“Pure-D nastiness. You’d be surprised. You’re lucky they didn’t hurt the other cats.”

Just what Peggy needed to hear. She was already on the verge of hysterics.

“What about the tuna casserole?” I asked. “That was meant for us, not Sherlock.”

“Won’t know ‘til we find out what’s in it, will we?” Amos asked. I’m sure he was generally a calming influence, but I wasn’t in the mood to be calmed. He turned to Peggy. “Anything that might have that kind of effect growing this early in the poison garden?”

“I beg your pardon?” I turned to stare at her.

“Amos Royden, you know darned well I tore it out a couple of years ago after my granddaughter figured out how to climb the gate.” She ran her hands through her hair. She looked exhausted and her eyes were swollen. “All I have now are wild flowers.”

“Some of which are pretty poisonous themselves,” Amos said.

“Lots of plants are poisonous,” Peggy said. “But I promise you I didn’t do this.”

“Nobody’s saying you did.” He put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “But you have a better knowledge of vegetable poisons than most people around here, so put your mind to it and see what you come up with. In the meantime, I’m taking the rest of the tuna with me. If Hank doesn’t come up with what’s in it by noon, I’ll FedEx it to the GBI lab in Atlanta.”

The cats disappeared when he opened his fingerprint kit. Probably didn’t like the smell. While we washed the ink goop off at the kitchen sink, he checked the kitchen door. “Got any plywood you can put over this broken pane?” he asked. “Mighty thoughtful intruder. Broke only one pane, reached in, unhooked the chain and the lock. I take it the deadbolt wasn’t locked?”

Peggy raised her wet hands, palms out. “I know, I know, but I never can find the key, so I only ever use the latch.”

“Well, find the key, keep it on your key chain, and from now on, use the dad-blasted deadbolt. Give me a roll of aluminum foil and a stapler. Think you can find that in all this mess?”

She made a rude gesture, but dug out a small stapler from the junk drawer in her kitchen. Amos made a pad of foil and stapled it over the empty pane in Peggy’s window. “Not what I’d call secure, but it’ll keep the cold air out and the cats in.”

We thanked him and watched him drive away without lights and siren.

“Thank heaven,” Peggy said. “One squawk from his siren or flashing blue light and we’d have the entire neighborhood down here to find out what happened.”

“I should move out tomorrow,” I said as I dumped the shards into the trashcan under the sink.

She rounded on me. “Oh, no you don’t! You’re not going anywhere, young lady. This was already personal. Now I’m well and truly angry. Nobody hurts my cats and gets away with it.” She glared at me, then her eyes widened. “These people kill human beings, and here I am worrying about cats.”

“That’s why
I
should . . . ”

“We have no idea which of us is the actual target. When they couldn’t locate what they wanted in Hiram’s apartment, they sent that tuna casserole to make us so sick we’d go to the hospital so the house would be empty and they could search.”

“We don’t know that,” I said as I swept the broken glass from the laptop screens into the dustpan.

“So two sets of people hate us? I don’t
think
so.” She sank into a kitchen chair. “Leave it. Leave it all until tomorrow. I am flat worn out.” I wanted to soak in a hot tub and sleep. Despite everything, I was also hungry. Peggy knew who had sent the ham and turkey, so I took a couple of sandwiches down to the apartment with me and devoured them in front of something mindless on TV.

I had a bazillion more phone calls to return, emails to answer, and lists to make, but they could wait until tomorrow. Mostly I needed time to mourn. So far I’d been too busy. I suspect that’s the point of the logistical nightmare entailed in funerals.

My mother warned me when Gram died that the death of a parent means the death of possibility. All the words we thought we had time to say will go unsaid. All the family stories that should have been passed down will be lost forever like the recipe for Gram’s ambrosia.

Grief felt strange when Hiram and I hadn’t seen one another for so many years and had only begun to reconnect in the last few months, but his death left an unexpectedly big hole in my life. I had been a daddy’s girl until I was seventeen.

He had been a wanderer since Mom divorced him, and I had become rootless after my divorce. He had finally rooted himself in Mossy Creek and asked me to be part of his world again.

No one else shared our memories. Who did we have except one another?

I cried big, gulping, sobbing, gut-wrenching, agonized, empty wails of loss and longing for the way we thought our lives would turn out.

Eventually I gulped and hiccupped into silence and curled into a fetal position on the couch.

I could accept his death by accident or disease, even if I resented it. But someone who was theoretically a human being had cut my father down. Had he been frightened? Known he was dying? Cried out for pity or help? Had he been tortured?

Nobody had the right to kill to solve a problem. The moment that human agency crushed the life out of Hiram, it had ceased to be human, had become something truly ‘other’. It should be easily recognizable, wear a ‘C’ for ‘Criminal’ on its forehead. But the ‘C’ was in the soul and didn’t show on the outside. Could I unmask the person who had committed the one crime that could not be expiated?

And had my impending visit been a catalyst? Without realizing it, had I somehow caused my father’s death?

Chapter 19

Late Tuesday afternoon

Geoff

Ideally, Geoff should have had a team of three or four forensic techs to work the barn and the surrounding area, but then ideally he should have done this search while the body was still
in situ
.

He set his kit beside him, pulled on his gloves, turned on his flashlight, and began to walk the grid. He knew about the blood where Lackland’s head had lain, but no one had discovered the weapon that caused the crack in his skull. Actually, no one had looked.

After a step-by-step search of the dirt floor, Geoff turned off the overhead lights and clicked on his Lumalight. Luminol spray was not only toxic, but expensive, so he wanted to narrow down the possible murder weapons before he used it. He slipped a painter’s mask over his mouth and nose. If he’d been spraying extensively in an enclosed space, he’d have used a respirator, although most CSIs were pretty casual. In this large open space, however, he figured the small mask was sufficient.

None of the hand or power tools carefully laid out on the workbench and hung on pegs above it showed blood. Lackland was meticulous about his tools. They were all clean, polished, and in their proper places. A newly polished murder weapon wouldn’t show up under ordinary light. Using the Lumalight, he checked for specks of blood where handles joined heads.

Nothing. So that he could tell a jury that he had checked personally, he sprayed the wheel from the vis-à-vis.

Blood from the thin cut across Lackland’s throat stained the rim and seeped down two of the wooden spokes. The circle of blood in the dirt under where his head had lain was larger.

So what had the killer used to incapacitate Lackland? Had he brought his murder weapon and taken it away? Had he come planning to kill Lackland?

The medical examiner’s report said the weapon was wooden and longish. Flecks of black paint were embedded in the scalp. Possibly something like a baseball bat.