A Violent End at Blake Ranch Page 12

  She puts up her hand to stop me. “I appreciate the help, but I’ll take care of that on my off time.”

  “The thing is . . .” I hesitate because I don’t want to tell her I don’t really have anything for her to do. It seems inhospitable, not to mention unprofessional. I don’t want her to feel like I’m being dismissive. “I’ll level with you. Something has come up that I need to deal with right away and I don’t have time to sit down with you at the moment. What I’d like you to do is familiarize yourself with the town. Drive around. Go up to the lake and explore the back roads. Familiarize yourself. You can use one of the squad cars.”

  Her face goes blank. I don’t have a clue what she’s thinking. “I’ll use my own car, if that’s okay.”

  “If that’s what you want. Write down your mileage, so you get paid for it. Let’s meet back here at, say, two o’clock this afternoon. If you want lunch, Town Café has good food. Tell Lurleen, the waitress, to put it on my tab.”

  “Do you have a map of town?”

  I can’t help smiling. “No map. It’s a pretty small place. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble making your way back here. The railroad tracks border us on the east and the lake on the west.”

  She doesn’t smile back.

  “Let me make a call.” I call Marietta Bryant at the real estate office down the street. She says her office has a hand-drawn map. It’s with the greatest relief that I send Maria Trevino on her way. As soon as she’s out the door I wonder if I should have had Zeke or Bill Odum come in and show her around.

  Before I leave for the Blakes’ place I call Loretta and tell her there’s something I need to discuss with her. I agree to stop by her house for lunch and she says she’ll have a sandwich for me. I need to tell her about Maria Trevino and ask her to make sure Maria gets a welcome from the town.

  On the way out to the ranch, questions crowd in on me. Why did Adelaide pretend that Nonie had come straight home from Rollingwood? Did anyone actually call pretending to be from Rollingwood, or did Adelaide make that up? Most pressing of all, where has Nonie been the last ten years, and why did she come back now?

  CHAPTER 15

  When I tell Adelaide Blake that the director of Rollingwood said Nonie hadn’t lived there in ten years and demand to know why she told me that Nonie had just gotten out of the mental institution, she’s still as a stone. We’re sitting in a room I haven’t been in before, a TV room off the kitchen. It’s small and a lot more inviting than the formal living room. If I expected her to reply, I was mistaken.

  “So you knew she’d been out for several years,” I say. “Why did you lie about it?”

  She licks her lips, and when she speaks her voice is almost a whisper. “I should have told you, I realize that. I was just trying to make it less complicated.”

  “Less complicated? Telling me all that stuff about Nonie’s medication and her taking a bus here from Rollingwood? Telling Charlotte that? How was that less complicated?”

  “I know, I know. I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Why not tell the truth? Suppose you tell me the truth now? What really happened?”

  “It happened almost the way I told it. Nonie called here a week or so ago and said she wanted to come home. And she did take a bus. I didn’t make that up.”

  “You knew ten years ago that she was out and you hadn’t tried to contact her all those years?”

  “No.” She lifts her chin in defiance. “I told you why. I didn’t want anything to do with her after what she did.”

  “Then why did you let her come home now?”

  Adelaide is wringing her hands. “She said she had some things she wanted to talk to me about. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “What was it she wanted to talk to you about?”

  “I don’t know. We never got around to that. I was afraid to ask too many questions.” She fixes frightened eyes on me.

  “Afraid of what?”

  “I left her there for all those years and was afraid she was going to be mad. You don’t know what she was like. She had a way of threatening you, even when she was little.”

  “Did she threaten you?”

  Adelaide’s face is flushed. “No, I don’t mean that. I mean she . . . oh, I don’t know what I mean.”

  “You acted like she was back here to stay. Was that what she intended?”

  “She didn’t say. But you mentioned that she didn’t have many things with her, and I noticed that, too. I assumed she was here for a short time. I just wanted to get her visit over with.”

  Adelaide baffles me. My own mamma didn’t like to face reality, but I don’t think even she would have ignored the strange circumstances of Nonie’s homecoming that Adelaide seems to have shied away from.

  “Adelaide, what were you afraid of? Were you scared she was here to get revenge for you sending her off to Rollingwood? Did you think she would hurt you? Kill you?”

  “Oh, no.” She waves her hands back and forth. “Nothing like that. It’s that I didn’t want her to get all worked up. I thought if I kept things calm, she’d get around to telling me what she wanted, and then she’d be on her way.”

  “And you have no idea what that was?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “She didn’t try to blackmail you?”

  “No, of course not. How would she know anything to blackmail me about anyway? She’s been gone for twenty years.”

  I don’t believe Adelaide. She has told so many lies that I can’t imagine how she even keeps the stories straight in her own head. There’s something going on here that Adelaide will do anything to keep secret, no matter how many lies she has to tell. The question is, how am I going to uncover the secret if she continues to stonewall me?

  I stand up. “I’d like to talk to your son Billy. Is he around?”

  She tells me Billy is outside in the barn. “Although I don’t know what you think you’re going to get out of him.”

  I find Billy in the barn looking over the old tractor. He’s in a scruffy T-shirt and jeans, and sweat is beaded on his brow. He’s looking exasperated. “Why the hell did they let this thing sit here all these years?” he asks.

  “Going to be hard to get rid of,” I say.

  He grunts and focuses his glare on me. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “I want to ask you a couple of things. Did you ever go visit your sister in Rollingwood?”

  “No. Mamma said I was too young to—”

  I interrupt him. “I mean after you were out on your own.”

  “No, I didn’t.” His look is guarded. There’s something he’s not telling me. He folds his arms and leans against the tractor.

  “It turns out that she left the facility ten years ago. Were you aware of that?”

  His hesitation is so slight I might not have noticed it had I not expected it. “No.”

  “Have you talked to Nonie in the past ten years? I’d appreciate the truth.”

  He looks down the empty stretch of the barn, and I can tell he’s trying to decide whether to come clean. “Okay, yes, I did talk to Nonie, and I knew she was out.”

  “That’s progress. When was this?”

  “It’s been a while. Maybe a year after she got out.”

  “So you would have been what, twenty-one, twenty-two?”

  “That’s right. So what?”

  “How did she know where to get hold of you?”

  He cocks an eyebrow. “She saw a poster that had my name on it advertising a rodeo that was coming to town. First time I had made the big time.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Up in Denton.”

  “That’s where she was living?”

  “I didn’t ask her, because I told her straight out that I wanted nothing to do with her. I didn’t want to talk to her at all. She begged to know how Mamma was, and I told her everybody was fine, no thanks to her.”

  “Did she ask about Charlotte?”

  “I didn’t give her
a chance. I told her she had hurt the family enough, and to stay away.”

  “Why do you think she called you and not anybody else in the family?”

  “You’d have to ask her that.”

  “Did you tell anybody that you’d talked to her?”

  “I did not.” He straightens, and his look is poisonous. “What would be the point? It would hurt Mamma and stir up Charlotte. Charlotte was always talking goodie-two-shoes talk, like she wanted to bring Nonie home. It would have been a mess. I figured it was better if I didn’t bring it up that she’d gotten out.”

  “Seems like if you were worried about their safety, you would have let them know she was out.”

  For the first time he looks troubled. “I guess I didn’t see it that way. As it turned out, it didn’t matter.”

  “Something I intended to ask you, do you know anybody by the name of Susan Shelby?”

  “No. Who is she?”

  “There was a container of pills upstairs with her name on it, and your mamma said you might know who it belonged to.”

  “Never heard of her.”

  It occurs to me that maybe Nonie was using another name. Maybe she didn’t want anybody to find out about her past.

  “Is Charlotte home?” If Nonie got in touch with Billy after she got out of Rollingwood and he brushed her off, it’s within the realm of possibility that she also called Charlotte.

  “Why do you want to bother Charlotte again? She’s told you everything she knows.” Billy’s stance is aggressive. “We can’t drop everything and have a little chit-chat every time the mood strikes you.”

  “Son, you don’t seem to fully appreciate that someone was murdered right here on this property. Somebody that everybody here was acquainted with, saw every day, and had a troubled history with. I can appreciate that your feelings for Nonie were less than cordial, but it’s my job to find out who killed her and bring them to justice. I’m sorry if that’s an inconvenience, but you’re just going to have to put up with it.”

  Billy’s face has gotten redder as he listens to me, and his fists have clenched up tight. “None of us killed her. And I think you ought to leave Charlotte alone. She suffered enough.”

  “Let me put a hypothetical to you. Suppose when Charlotte called to tell you Nonie was back, you didn’t feel that Charlotte was safe with Nonie here. Suppose you sneaked down here, lured Nonie out of the house, hit her over the head, threw her body in the tank, and hightailed it back to Denton.”

  “I did no such thing. You don’t have any evidence of that.”

  “I don’t have any evidence to the contrary either. So let’s just agree that it’s a working hypothesis along with a lot of others. If you want to provide evidence of your innocence, I’ll be happy to listen to you.”

  Charlotte is so shaken by my revelation that Nonie had been out of the hospital for ten years that I have to believe she knew nothing about it. We’re in the living room, but neither of us is sitting down.

  “Where had she been all this time? And why did she decide to come home now and lie and tell us she had just gotten out?”

  “She didn’t. It was your mamma who lied to you. She knew Nonie was out all those years.”

  Her mouth falls open. “That can’t be true.”

  “Oh yes, it is. And Billy knew. It appears that you’re the only one who was kept in the dark. You and Skeeter, of course. Nonie never mentioned anything like that to you? You were with her for an entire week and she never brought it up?”

  “Never. Although . . .” She looks toward the window where the August light is streaming in and waves of dust dance in the air.

  “What?”

  “I wondered how she seemed to know so much about the world.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I assumed that someone who had been in a mental institution for twenty years would be like somebody who had been in prison for all that time. That they wouldn’t know little things, like . . . I don’t know, how to dress. Her clothes seemed in style. She seemed comfortable in the world.” She walks to the window. Her voice trails away. Suddenly she wheels back toward me. “I know something that seemed odd. I was going to the grocery store and asked her if there was anything she particularly liked. She asked me to bring her a particular brand of cookies—LU raspberry cookies. At the time I thought it was strange that she knew about that kind of cookies. Would they have an expensive brand like that in a mental hospital? But I rationalized it by thinking if someone is in a really costly facility, maybe they were provided with high-quality food items.” She shrugs.

  “Anything else?”

  “I thought it was odd that she could navigate the bus schedule from Dallas to Bobtail and manage to get a ride to the house. I wondered why she had gotten a ride instead of calling us from the bus station. It seemed to me that she would be terrified.”

  “But you didn’t ask her about any of those things?”

  “There are several things I wish I had asked her,” she mutters.

  I tell her about the man who called to tell me he and his wife had given Nonie a ride. “The man told me that Nonie made some hints as if she were going to blackmail someone. She never mentioned anything like that to you?”

  She shakes her head. “Why would she tell that to a perfect stranger and not to us?”

  “My question exactly. I wondered if maybe she told your mamma more than she told you. Or, if you are being entirely honest with me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I had a talk with Les Moffitt. He told me that the family considered calling a lawyer before you called me after you found Nonie’s body. And yet you pretended to me that you didn’t realize Nonie had been murdered. How am I supposed to trust anything any of you say?”

  She runs her hands over the top of her head. “Look, I admit it. We screwed up. Okay. I didn’t know what to do. Les thought we ought to call a lawyer, but I thought if we hadn’t done anything, we didn’t need that.”

  “But you thought maybe your father had done it.”

  “No! I didn’t think so. That was . . .”

  “Adelaide.”

  She sighs. “Do you blame her? He’s really hard to deal with. She’s at her wits’ end.”

  “Then why not put him in a facility?”

  “You’re going to have to ask her that.”

  “I have something more to ask you. Did you ever feel afraid of Nonie?”

  She struggles to find words “It was awkward at times. But I wasn’t afraid of her. Mostly we kept out of each other’s way. She didn’t want to be around Trey, and . . .” She plays with the string of pearls at her throat. “Quite frankly, after what she did to me, I didn’t much want her around him, either.”

  “Did she ever apologize for what she did?”

  “Ha! In that way, she hadn’t changed one bit—Nonie was never one to apologize for anything.”

  I ask Charlotte for permission to go upstairs and get the bottle of pills from the bathroom Nonie used when she was here, and she agrees readily.

  On my way back to headquarters I get a call from Zeke Dibble. “Samuel, there’s a woman here claiming to be a new officer. I . . .”

  My heart sinks. I assumed that since Bill Odum knew about Maria Trevino, Zeke did, too.

  “Zeke, I apologize. I got some information about the Blake case that I had to follow up on this morning and completely forgot to call you. Is she there now?”

  “Yeah. Said you told her to drive all over town and she did and wants to know what she should do now.”

  “Tell her I said she can have the afternoon off to go find a place to live. When she comes in tomorrow morning, I’ll have a plan worked out.”

  CHAPTER 16

  “I’m glad you called. I’ve got some things to talk to you about,” Loretta says. She has a determined gleam in her eye that makes me uneasy.

  “Okay. Shoot.” She has a place set for me in her kitchen and has made me a chicken salad sandwich. She makes the best chicken salad
in the world, so I’m eager to get to it.

  “No, you go first,” she says. “You called me.”

  I tell her about Maria Trevino showing up and me not being ready for it.

  She chuckles and gives me a knowing look.

  “What are you so smug about?” I say.

  “I wonder what she’s going to report back. That she walked into that office and it looks like cavemen live there?”

  “It’s not that bad. Just a little messy.”

  “Samuel, have you ever taken one look around what you so grandly call headquarters? When is the last time you had somebody come in and clean?”

  Uh-oh. We’re on that one again. A few months back, Loretta announced that I needed a cleaning lady. I gave in and hired the woman. Two weeks later she quit, telling Loretta she couldn’t work for a single man because I couldn’t give her any instructions about the way I wanted things done. Loretta was pretty sure I had treated the woman badly, but I swore I hadn’t. “I’d have to say it’s been a while,” I say.

  She snorts. “Never is more like it. And I’ll bet before you know it, all three of you men will expect her to be tidying up around there. That poor woman is going to wonder whether she was hired to be a police officer or to be a maid.”

  She’s echoing what Ellen Forester said. “Since when did you get to be such a feminist?”

  Her chin juts out. “I’m not one of those feminists. But I know how men act.”

  “What should I do?”

  “You could get Zeke Dibble to clean up. I’ll bet he’s handy with a broom. I imagine his wife sees to that.” She gives a gleeful chuckle.

  “All right. I’ll figure something out, but the woman officer is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. She doesn’t seem all that friendly, and I want to be sure the town ladies don’t take against her.”

  Her look is hard. “You mean because she’s Mexican? We have plenty of Mexicans in town and nobody thinks much of it.”

  “I mean because she’s a lady cop.”

  “You do get some ideas. If you watched a little more TV, you’d find out that half the programs are about lady police officers, so we’re all used to it.”