A Bloodhound to Die for (25 page)

“How about question everybody again. Force them to help us. Look under every rock and twig if we have to—”

Hank stood up, then stalked to my office door. “I need a break,” he snapped. He meant, I knew, from me—not from the work.

I slumped back in my chair, closed my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger. And that, I thought, was how it would be if we got married. We’d work as a team, sure, but fighting whenever our strong wills clashed. Which would be often.

I opened my eyes and went back to staring at the
map of the Lane property, contemplating how to best break in to their house in the next twenty-four hours.

The telephone rang. I grabbed it.

And there was that soft, insidious voice again.

But after a few seconds, it registered that it wasn’t Jimmy Joe. This was a female. And in my shock at thinking it was Jimmy Joe, I’d missed what she was saying.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you repeat that please?”

A long silence, then an even longer sigh. “Pay attention this time. My name is Mary Sloan. I’m Mona Estelle Lane’s sister. And I think I have something you want. But you have to come by yourself to get it.”

  
28
“Operation Recover Bobby Lee: The Setup”

M
ary Sloan was Mona Estelle Lane’s sister, a thirty-something, twice-divorced woman who, unlike all the other Lane relatives Little Bemis had tracked down for me, did not live out in the countryside near the Okefenokee. She lived in one of the tiny apartments in a small brick twelve-unit building on the edge of Balsa City.

Little Bemis had, of course, identified her and how she fit into the Lane family. Even knowing she was Mona’s sister, I’d called her some time in the past twenty-four hours, hoping that she might at least want to convince her sister to be cooperative so that Mona could plead to a lesser charge.

When I’d suggested that idea to Mary, she’d had just two words for me: “Screw you.” Then she’d hung up
on me. At least her dismissal of my plea and me had been succinct. Most of Jimmy Joe’s other relatives had opted for much lengthier descriptions of why I was unworthy of their aid.

But now I found myself standing outside Mary’s apartment building, staring at the depressing little structure, wondering what I’d possibly let myself in for. On the off chance that she really did have a scent item for me, I had the necessary oversize sealable plastic baggie to collect the item and protect it.

On the more likely chance that this was just a setup of some kind, Jimmy Joe and a posse of Lanes ready, willing, and able to beat the crap out of me, I just had my wits. I hadn’t told anyone where I was going—I’d just gotten in my truck and driven away from my compound as soon as I’d gotten off the telephone with Mary.

Yes, I knew this was risky—even stupid.

But Mary had made it clear that she wanted to see me alone. And I was willing to take the risks—any risks—required to find Bobby Lee.

I stepped into the building. The heavy door slammed shut behind me. Despite the fact that it was early afternoon, the entryway was dim. It had a faintly musty odor but was swept clean. There were three rows of metal mailboxes, four per row. Mary had told me that her apartment was number 9, on the third floor. I looked at mailbox 9. Unlike the others, it wasn’t labeled with the owner’s name. Perhaps the mailman
had memorized the fact that all of Mary Sloan’s mail went into box 9. Or perhaps Mary had sent me on a wild-goose chase.

I climbed one flight of stairs, to the second level, and had to stop and rest for a moment. Normally, climbing stairs wouldn’t have tired me, but I was still weak from the poisoning.

I climbed the next flight, went to the door labeled with a single “9,” and knocked.

No answer.

I knocked again.

I heard movement inside and waited, deciding to count to fifty before knocking again. I had gotten to thirty-seven when the door swung open.

My heart lurched. Facing me with an amused grin on her face was a clone of Mona. There were a few fine-tuned differences, but that just made the nearly perfect resemblance eerier. Mary’s features, though, were accentuated with subtly applied makeup. Same upswept grayish-brown hair, but captured in a smooth French twist instead of an untidy bun. Also wearing a dress, but Mary’s was a flawlessly tailored black knit, accessorized with a single strand of pearls.

The woman grinned at my stunned expression. “I guess your research didn’t turn up the fact that Mona and I are twins. Identical twins.” She stepped back, pulling the door more widely open, giving me plenty of room to enter her apartment. “Come on in.”

I went in, and engaged her in the usual Southern
hospitality conversation. Why, yes, I’ll have a seat. The offer of sweet tea is so kind of you, but I’m afraid I must pass. The traditional Southern response would be a delighted Why, thank you, I’d love a glass of sweet tea, exclaimed as if such an offer was so rare as to be a surprise. In this case, I was taking a decidedly non-Southern route by declining the offer. Given that her twin sister had poisoned me two days before, precaution trumped tradition.

When we were both settled—Mary on a couch, myself on a chair that was catty-corner to her—I took the chance to glance quickly around. The furniture was elegant, a beautiful mahogany that was upholstered in rose-patterned chintz. The walls were lined with bookshelves that were filled with books. On a coffee table of carved mahogany was a crystal vase filled with three long-stemmed pink roses—real ones. And to the right of the vase lay the latest issue of
Martha Stewart Living
. The magazine was open to an article on collecting pepper mills; several lines of the article had been highlighted by a yellow marker that lay in the center of the magazine.

Mary caught me looking around the room. “Not the taste or decor you’d expect from a Lane descendant?”

I looked at her. “To tell you the truth, no. But then, I didn’t expect that any Lane would help me out. In fact, the last time we talked, you had only two words for me: ‘Screw you.’ So I’d like to get to the point. Why did you invite me here?”

Mary laughed. “I like a woman who gets to the point.”

And I liked the fact that she’d called me on judging her—but I wasn’t here to exchange compliments. I wanted to know if she had any way to help me find Bobby Lee. If not, I wasn’t going to waste my time with her. I looked at her and mentally picked up my counting at thirty-eight, giving her to one hundred to start talking.

I’d barely broken forty when she sighed. “Go ahead and take a good look around,” Mary said. “I guess you could say I’m the real rebel of the Lane family, never mind that the ballad was written about Jimmy Joe.” She gave a low, bitter chuckle and looked into her glass of tea, swirling the drink around, staring in the glass as if it held answers to long-held questions. I realized that she wasn’t drinking just sweet tea and I wondered how often she stared into a glass of bourbon with those questions.

“I left home when I was twenty by getting married to my first husband, a man considerably older than me, and moving to Baton Rouge. He had a job there in sales—pretty impressive position, as far as my family was concerned, and I should have just been happy with being married to someone who was successful. But I wanted to try my own wings. I started taking college courses as I could afford them and eventually broke up with my husband—he thought I was trying to outgrow my place as his stay-at-home helpmate. And, of course, I was.”

I shifted restlessly. What did Mary’s personal history have to do with my getting Bobby Lee back? Possibly nothing. Possibly everything. I knew, though, that if I interrupted I’d never find out.

Mary went on. “We got divorced, I got a little money and a waitressing job and managed to get by while I worked on my college degree in English. After graduation, I started teaching at a high school. That’s where I met Matt Sloan. My second husband—and the real love of my life.” She smiled sadly. “I surely loved that man. He was a teacher too. Math.” She gave another chuckle. “People used to tease us that we were at opposite ends of the academic spectrum, so how could things work out between us? Matt had a joke, that opposite academic disciplines attract to make a whole new field of endeavor—chemistry.” She sighed. “We had some good years, Matt and I.”

She took a long drink, stared again into the glass. “Then things started falling apart. There were cutbacks at the school. First I lost my job. Then I got a call from Mona—our mama was sick and she needed me to come back and help take care of her. I said I would, but just for a few weeks. Those weeks turned into months. Still, Matt and I wrote love letters to each other and called when we could. We were still doing fine.

“Then Matt lost his job too. He came here to stay with Mona and me at our mama’s house. A job came up at the high school for a math teacher. He took it. I found a good job too, managing a day care center. We
went to estate sales and bought lovely things that we both adored.” She made a wide, sweeping gesture that took in the whole apartment. “We even talked about buying a house in town. You see, we thought our luck was changing again. And it was—for the worse. Once we were settled in here, we started spending more time with my family. And some of the folks who thought I was too uppity to begin with started pulling Matt aside and telling him stories about how wild I was as a teenager. Sexually wild. Smoking dope. Things like that. The stories had some truth to them—I admitted that to Matt—but they were also greatly exaggerated. Matt said he didn’t care. We even laughed over people talking about ancient history as if I was the first teen to rebel.

“But the truth is, deep down it set Matt up to believe that I was capable of almost anything. I’ll never forget the day our relationship changed. It was at my mother’s funeral, of all places. And Netty Lane pulled him aside—I saw them talking at the wake afterward—and I’m sure it was she who told him the lie. I’ll never forget him staring at me, horrified, and her pointing at me. The next day he told me he was leaving me because he’d learned that I’d had an affair while I’d been here alone, away from him. I couldn’t get him to admit that Netty Lane was the one who’d told him—and of course she denied it too. But because of that, he left me.”

If Matt had truly loved and trusted Mary, he’d have believed her, I thought—and then it struck me that I
loved Hank but was all too quick to assume the worst when a female had answered his phone. And then I realized that Mary’s situation was much like Sara Kirkland’s had been. Sara had suffered from people gossiping about her husband’s alleged affair; Mary had suffered from gossip about her behavior. I thought too of Netty’s screaming obscenities at me when she realized I wasn’t going to marry her son, calling me a whore and other similar names. Maybe that was how she saw any woman who refused to go along with what she and so many of her kinfolk saw as the only right and proper role for a woman.

I didn’t point any of this out to Mary. I didn’t see how these thoughts—however clarifying they were for me—could help her. Such observations would probably only make her feel worse. And of course I was eager for her to cut to the chase and tell me how she was going to help me find Bobby Lee.

But I didn’t want to be too pushy and risk putting her off. “I’m sorry to hear that all of this has happened to you,” I said. “I’m sure it’s been a painful experience.”

Mary nodded and stared into her glass.

“Why have you stayed here?” I asked softly.

She just shrugged. “I keep meaning to leave—maybe go back to Baton Rouge. I liked it there. Or start over in New Orleans or Atlanta. But I just can’t seem to find the energy, somehow. Making it from day to day is hard enough.” She sighed. “Matt’s been gone for over a year now.”

She was depressed, I thought. That’s why she was letting herself stay stuck here instead of moving on and starting over.

Mary looked up at me and smiled, her eyes bright with wetness. “I’m sure you want to know what this has to do with you. Well, I hadn’t spoken to Netty since Matt left. And I never thought I would. I got to thinking about what happened to you. There are some good people in the Lane family. But there are also plenty of them, like Netty, who’ll do anything to manipulate things to fit their will, no matter who it hurts. I guess I saw an opportunity to get back at Netty—and even at Mona, who’s been taunting me ever since Matt left that I wasn’t woman enough to hold him.

“So yesterday evening, I went to call on Aunt Netty and Uncle Obediah. Told them I wanted to put bad times behind us.”

I lifted my eyebrows at that. “And they believed you?”

“Of course,” she said. “What I was telling them fit what they want to believe. They’ve always been like that, making up fantasies, then getting enraged when other people point out that actual reality doesn’t always match their perception of it.”

I thought about how Jimmy Joe had just made up our “love” for one another and had created his own version of me based on a few press clippings. I could see now, from what Mary was saying, where Jimmy Joe had gotten that trait. And what she said certainly matched my experience with the Lanes insisting that I
must be wrong when I said I didn’t want to marry Jimmy Joe, followed by Netty’s hostile explosion when she realized I really didn’t.