Behind Every Door Page 2

  “When did you see her last?” Hick asked.

  “Why yesterday morning we ate breakfast together right here in this room, same as every day. We had our coffee and she read the paper.”

  “Did you see her leave the house?”

  “No. But she always went for a walk in the morning before she went to the school building. She left every day at the same time, about 6:30 in the morning. When she didn’t come back after her walk I just reckoned she went straight to school, she’s been known to do that.” She paused. “She can’t seem to stop going to that place. I don’t think there’s any real work left for her to do, but every day, same as clockwork, she gets up, eats breakfast, and goes there. I says to her, ‘Miss Gladys, what can you possibly find to do at that school? It’s been closed up for a year. Why don’t you just stay home one day?’ But it was like she just couldn’t stay home, like she had to go there.”

  “And when she didn’t come home last night?”

  Miss Audie shrugged. “I didn’t think much of it. At first. I reckoned your mama come by and asked her to dinner. People was always trying to pull Gladys out of that school building and back into the world.” She sniffed loudly. “I just went on up to bed at about eight o’clock. To be truthful I was a little put out that she didn’t come home for dinner ’cause we had talked about what we was having just that morning.” She sniffled and her mouth turned down into a pained line. “I never dreamed anything might’ve happened to her. I didn’t even know she wasn’t here until the morning.” A tear spilled into her lap and she dabbed at her eyes with her hankie.

  Adam leaned forward. “Can you think of any reason why Gladys would be up at the drainage ditch?”

  “The drainage ditch?” she asked, her voice a low whisper as if she didn’t want anyone else to hear. “Which one?”

  “Number nine,” Adam said.

  “Nine?” Audie repeated. “How on earth would she get there? Why, it’s a good five miles from here.”

  “You don’t remember seeing or hearing a car?” Hick asked.

  “No, and Gladys couldn’t abide by ’em. She don’t like automobiles one bit. I can’t believe she would get into somebody’s car.”

  “Well, she got out there somehow,” Adam said, “and I’m pretty sure she didn’t walk.”

  “Gladys in a car …” she muttered to herself in disbelief.

  “Can we see her room?” Hick asked.

  With a deep sigh, Miss Audie pushed herself up from her chair and looked around expectantly, as if Gladys might come down the hall any moment with a fresh cup of coffee. Then another sob broke free and she shook herself and said, “I’ll take you.”

  The three climbed the dusty stairs to a small landing where a table festooned with several dead and dying house-plants sat in front of the dormer. Hick and Adam exchanged glances. Clearly Miss Audie’s housekeeping had suffered of late. The old woman hesitated in front of the door to the left of the front window. “I never go in here,” she said. “I always prided myself that my renters had their privacy.” She opened the door to the small space Gladys had called her own. It was a decent sized room that contained a single bed, dresser, chifferobe, desk and chair, and it was neat and tidy, a stark contrast to the shabbiness outside the door.

  “Thank you,” Adam said. “If we need anything, we’ll call.”

  Miss Audie nodded and went back downstairs, her tread slow and heavy on each step.

  The two men took in the room. “What are we even looking for?” Adam asked.

  “I’m hoping we’ll know when we find it.” Hick picked up Gladys’s purse from the bed. “Look at this.” He peered into the purse, dumped the contents on the bed, and then opened the wallet. “Funny she didn’t take this with her. Looks like everything is still here.”

  “What the hell would Gladys have to steal anyway? We all know she didn’t work at the school for the money.”

  Gladys’s room reminded Hick of her office. Meticulous. Nothing out of place. “No sign of a struggle.” Hick walked to the window and pulled aside the curtain. In spite of the tree branches that shrouded the house, he could see the driveway and had a clear view of the street in front of the house.

  Adam opened the desk, an antique drop-front secretary with a variety of small drawers and cubby holes. He opened a cigar box and shuffled through a stack of papers. “These all appear to be letters from students.” He shook his head. “Damn shame. Everyone loved her.”

  “Not everyone,” Hick corrected. He opened the chifferobe that contained Gladys’s clothes, clothes that were tailored, and, Hick supposed, elegant in a way, but that had remained unchanged since the days of Hick’s youth. At the bottom were several neat stacks of Cherokee Crossing High School yearbooks. The school had been Gladys’s family, the only one she could claim. “We’ll have to go through ’em. Maybe there’s something in there.”

  Hick then opened the top drawer of Gladys’s dresser and timidly pawed through the delicates. They were all folded one like the other, placed neatly in the drawer. There were no messages from scorned lovers, no angry letters. The room was like Gladys herself, unassuming and ordinary. It was not the kind of place tragedy visited and Hick got the feeling that the room itself was perplexed as to why two men were in there poking around. As they continued looking, the phone rang downstairs and they heard Miss Audie’s voice rise and fall with a whimper

  Hick was searching another dresser drawer when a tap sounded at the door. It creaked open and Miss Audie peered inside. “Sheriff, that was Doc Prescott. He asked if you could stop by the undertakers and take some clothes for Gladys’s buryin’ tomorrow.” She began to sniff and looked into Hick’s face. “Do you think I oughta go on down there … just to see her?”

  Hick crossed the room and patted Miss Audie’s shoulder. “No, Miss Audie. Ain’t no call for you to go down there and see her. I wish I could un-see her.”

  Miss Audie stared as realization swept over her. “Poor Gladys,” she moaned.

  “Can you pick something … that would be appropriate?” Hick asked.

  “Doc says it won’t matter much. The coffin lid’s gonna have to stay closed.” Miss Audie shook her head and said with resolution, “Still, Gladys would want to be decent.” She moved toward the chifferobe and opened the door. “I reckon this is the nicest thing she has,” she said pulling out a simple black dress that Hick had seen Gladys wear many times. “She’s worn it to functions for years.” Glancing at her own abundant figure she added, “She hardly seemed to change.”

  Hick knew what Miss Audie meant. When Gladys arrived in town she couldn’t have been much more than twenty years old. When Hick was a child and first became aware of Gladys, she was barely thirty and yet she seemed ancient as if life had already wearied her. It wasn’t as much that she hadn’t aged as that she had simply always been old.

  “I think that will be perfect,” Adam said taking the dress from Audie who scrunched her face so as not to tear up again.

  Audie stared at the dress in Adam’s hand. “I never thought I’d bury Gladys. I always expected I’d go first.” She pulled out her handkerchief. “But I don’t reckon there’s any way of really knowing who’s gonna do the buryin’.”

  “No, ma’am,” Hick agreed. “I don’t guess there is.”

  After leaving the dress with the undertaker, Hick made a detour to Doc Prescott’s place where he found Jake sitting on his front porch swing. Like usual, the aroma of Doc’s cigar greeted Hick as he climbed the steps.

  “Did you find anything?” Doc put a foot down and stopped the porch swing. Hick lit a cigarette and took a seat beside the older man. He took a long drag and exhaled a great cloud of smoke as Doc pushed off and set the swing going again.

  “Her room was spotless. We still have more to go through, but Miss Audie seemed taxed, and we needed to get the dress over to McDaniel’s for the funeral. We’ll finish tomorrow. What about you? Did you find anything?”

  “No broken fingernails, no scratches, no def
ensive wounds. I can tell you there was no struggle at all.”

  “Strange,” Hick said, deep in thought.

  Jake inhaled and then reached over the porch rail to tap ash into the bushes, “By the way, how’s Maggie?”

  Hick laughed. “Tired as hell. Jimmy keeps her up all night, and she’s so afraid he’ll wake me that she just walks the floors with him. I told her to get some rest, but … well, you know Mag.”

  They both looked toward the horizon as thunder rumbled and the sky darkened in the distance. A breeze picked up and rustled through the trees, but still the smoke hung in the air as if unwilling to move on.

  “Yes, I know Maggie,” Jake said with a smile. “And you know her nature. She’ll work herself to death if you don’t watch it. You have to help her as much as you can. Her delivery was rough … it’ll take her some time to recover.”

  “I know, I—”

  “Hick, don’t let this town and this job take you away from what’s important. I know how you felt about Gladys. We all loved her. I know you have to find out who did this, and I don’t doubt you will. But be careful.”

  Hick turned toward Doc. “What do you mean be careful?”

  Jake exhaled a smoke ring and watched it dance and twirl before him in the soupy air. “You have a way of takin’ everything to heart … you always have. When you have a puzzle in front of you, it’s like you can’t see anything else. You almost killed yourself two summers ago workin’ on the Thompson case.” The doctor watched as the storm clouds rose and billowed. Finally, he took another drag, the red end of the cigar glowing in the ever approaching darkness. “Just remember, there was a sheriff in Cherokee Crossing long before you were born, and there will be a sheriff after you’re gone. Maggie needs you now. Don’t lose sight of what’s important.”

  A cool gust of wind was followed by thunder rolling long and heavy across the flat delta plain. Large drops of rain began to polka-dot the sandy driveway. “I best get home before this picks up,” Hick said rising from the swing. “It looks like it’s gonna be another gully washer.” He looked at Jake and saw the concern in his old friend’s eyes. “I understand what you’re sayin’, Doc, I really do. But I gotta find this guy.”

  “I know,” Jake answered. “And you will. Gladys may not have had family, per se, and she didn’t deserve to be dumped out by a ditch. I know you’ll find out what happened, and you need to. But I worry. That’s my job. You know I told your daddy I’d watch over you, and I plan to keep doing just that. I want you to promise to take care that you don’t let this one eat you alive the way the last one did.”

  Hick flicked his cigarette into the yard. “I won’t, Doc. At least I’ll try not to.”

  Jake sighed and stood up. “That’s all I can ask.”

  3

  As so often happens after a storm, the next morning dawned bright. The small scudding clouds that remained scurried briskly across the sky and birds sang happily from their perches. The pressing humidity had evaporated overnight leaving air that was freshened and cool in its place. Smells of lilac, rain, and coffee greeted Hick as he stepped into the kitchen where Maggie sat at the table feeding the baby from a bottle.

  “Are you sure you want to go?” Hick asked, reaching into the cabinet and pulling down a coffee cup. Even with her olive skin he could see dark circles ringed her eyes.

  “Hickory, you couldn’t keep me away from this funeral,” she said with a note of surprise. “Why would you ask such a thing?”

  “I heard you walking the baby last night, and I know you didn’t get much sleep.” He poured a cup of coffee and leaned against the counter. In reality, he had been awake, staring at the ceiling when Jimmy had begun to whimper.

  Maggie had crept from bed, and he’d watched her shadowy form pick up the baby. He told himself it was the heat that made sleep difficult, pretending the images of Gladys’s face and the smell of death weren’t there with him in the room, causing his heart to pound painfully and sweat to soak the sheet beneath him.

  “I haven’t slept much in months,” she reminded him. “That’s nothing new, and it would be disrespectful not to go. I loved Gladys.” She sat the bottle on the kitchen table and put the baby on his stomach across her knee gently patting his back. After a quick burp she picked him back up and cradled him. She ran a finger across Jimmy’s plump cheek and looked up at Hick. “I think he’s starting to look like you.”

  To Hick he looked like every other baby, but he wasn’t about to say that to Maggie. Instead, he crossed the room and put his hand on her shoulder and peered down into the boy’s face. Hick loved his son, but he could never shake the feeling that the child was an intruder. Diapers hung in the yard and the never-ending chores of washing clothes, boiling bottles, and mixing formula exhausted Maggie. Hick’s schedule was so erratic that lately the two of them seemed to move in different worlds.

  “How ’bout I bring you home after the service and you skip going to the cemetery?” Hick offered, taking a sip of coffee. “The ground is wet and it’ll save your nylons from all the burrs. You could come home and take a nap.”

  Maggie considered. “It is awful damp out there for the baby.”

  She would never stay home for her own sake, but Hick quickly took up the idea that the damp would be bad for the baby. “Jimmy’s just now putting on weight. We shouldn’t take any chances.”

  Maggie’s pregnancy had been difficult. So difficult that she’d gone home to her mother’s for four months before the delivery. By the time Hick had been allowed to see his wife, everything was neat and wrapped up and she presented the baby to him like some sort of Christmas gift … a tiny bundle wrapped in blue. But her smile couldn’t hide the pallor of her skin. There had been blood, lots of blood. And Jimmy had been small and sickly. After five months he was only now beginning to put on weight, and instead of making life easier, his appetite had grown more voracious and his demands more insistent. There was no rest in sight for Maggie.

  She seemed to consider his words and he added, “If you would do this for me, I could get Pam to take Mom home. Adam and I have some work to do anyway. What do you think?”

  Hick knew she was thinking it over by the furrow between her eyebrows. Finally, she agreed, “You’re right. The last thing we need is for Jimmy to take cold again. Doc says he’s really starting to thrive.”

  “And you promise to take a nap?”

  She laughed. “Yes, if it’ll make you feel better.”

  “It will,” He kissed the top of her head, swallowed the last of his coffee, and put the cup in the sink. “I’ll wait outside,” he said and went out to the porch, lit a cigarette, and pretended his hands weren’t shaking. He closed his eyes, took a long draw from his cigarette, and exhaled a ragged breath. His thoughts were running wild and he smelled death even in the clear spring air. “Stop this,” he muttered to himself. “Stop this right now.”

  Gladys Kestrel’s funeral was a hurried affair because she had lain in the ditch for at least a day. With no family, the citizens of Cherokee Crossing banded together quickly and raised money for a coffin and cemetery plot. Ted Wheeler, Gladys’s pastor, was to officiate at the service.

  Hick paused in the doorway of the Methodist Church and scanned the waiting crowd. His mother and Miss Audie Briggs—the closest thing to family Gladys had known in Cherokee Crossing—were seated in the front row. Maggie and the baby were already with Adam and Pam in the second row. He drew in a breath, clenched and unclenched his fists, and started up the aisle. The eulogy was to be delivered by the last principal of Cherokee Crossing High School, the man who had taken Hick’s father’s place, and the pews were full of former students and teachers. Most of the students had moved on, leaving Cherokee Crossing behind them, and Hick shook his head at the thought that Gladys’s funeral was an unfortunate reunion.

  The Reverend Ted Wheeler rose to the podium and the sanctuary fell silent. Wheeler was an old-fashioned lawgiver, a man who spoke with the authority of having been to the mountainto
p, of having looked evil in the eye and survived, and his flock hung on his every word. The folks in Cherokee Crossing held him in awe, and his congregation wondered how they had had the great luck to attract and then keep such a man. Tall with thin, dark hair, large glasses, and a grim visage, it was impossible to divorce his imposing presence from the great tragedy of his life, of having his only child, seventeen-year-old Susie Wheeler, murdered in the backwoods of Jenny Slough some fourteen years back. Abner Delaney, Eben and Jed’s father, had been charged with the murder and duly executed. Back then, murder seemed a rare and curious thing in Cherokee Crossing. But not anymore.

  The Reverend stood at the podium, his piercing eyes searching into the very soul of each individual present. The quiet made some in his audience squirm. Finally, he spoke. “In His word, the Lord proclaims, ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.’ This town has experienced bloodshed, again. And this town must demand an accounting for that blood. Gladys Kestrel deserved to live to a ripe old age and to be loved and respected by all who knew her. She did not deserve to die, and she certainly did not deserve to have her body dumped at the levee to be torn and mauled by dogs.” He paused and looked down at the closed casket to let that reality sink in.

  “But this was not to be. There is an element in this town, an element that is not like us. They do not respect human life the way we do. They are animals. They live off the land, but they don’t work it. They expect to be cared for and to do as they please. And when they don’t get what they think they deserve, they take it! They take with violence like the animals they are, like the dogs that mauled Gladys, and they have no remorse for the pain and suffering they leave behind.”

  Hick shuffled in his seat. The reverend’s words were not consoling. They did not comfort. They incited. He could hear whispers behind him and the room seemed to swell with a quiet clamor. “What is he doing?” Hick muttered.