A Candidate for Murder (12 page)

After a couple of tries I got through to Allie, and I blurted out, “I was terrible last night. I’m sorry, Allie.”

“Hey, it’s okay,” she said. “We were all scared. I was never so scared in my whole life.”

We were interrupted by a clattering noise. “Allie?” I asked.

There was more banging and bumping before she answered. “Sorry,” she said. “I dropped the phone.”

I smiled to myself. It was comforting that Allie was still the same. “Why don’t you come over?” I asked. “Or should we go to a movie?”

“Ohhhh, I can’t,” Allie wailed. “My aunt and her family are going to be here for dinner, and I have to help watch her little kids. The two-year-old—Timmy—you’d never guess all the stuff he can get into. Last time they were here he started fooling with my parents’
clock radio and got everything so mixed up you wouldn’t believe it, and …”

Allie rattled on. I kept telling myself that she had a perfectly good reason for not being able to come over, and I shouldn’t take it so personally, but I was glad when Allie finally interrupted herself with a groan. “They’re here,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”

I held the phone in my lap and tried to use mental telepathy. Call me, Justin! Call me right this minute!

It didn’t work.

Delia had come over, as had Robert, a lawyer, and Dad’s campaign managers, and a few other people I’d never met. They shut themselves up with Dad in his office, and that was the last Mom and I saw of him for over two hours. Every now and then the phone would ring, but Dad would answer it.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, munching on what was left of my frozen marshmallow cookies and reading the Sunday comics when Dad came into the kitchen to get a drink of water. I could see the exhaustion in his face.

“The telephone calls are about me, aren’t they?” I asked him.

He put down his glass and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Honey,” he said, “there are a lot of busybodies in this world. We aren’t going to pay any attention to them.”

“But they won’t vote for you.”

“We’ve worked out a statement to give to the media. It will explain everything.”

“You’ve been working on it an awfully long time.”

“That’s not all we’ve been doing. There are many aspects to a political campaign.” He stretched and rolled his head, trying to ease the tension in his neck. “And to investigations. We’ve got a private investigator looking for Cragmore’s former superintendent, but so far there’s no trace of him.”

Mom came into the kitchen and smiled when she saw Dad. “Oh, good,” she said. “Have they gone?”

His answering smile was wry. “Unfortunately, there’s still work to do.”

“Would they like coffee?”

“Thanks, but Velma sent a pot of coffee in about half an hour ago.”

“Maybe I should feed them. What do you think? Sandwiches?”

“No,” Dad said firmly as he walked across the kitchen. “Let them get good and hungry, and maybe they’ll leave.”

I laughed, and he looked at me with surprise. “That’s not a joke,” he said. “I mean it.”

Dad paused at the door and glanced back at Mom. “Laura,” he said, “they told me I appeared stiff on camera, that I needed to … ‘loosen up and lighten up.’ That’s the way they put it.” He looked embarrassed, and his voice dropped as he said, “Do you think I seem stiff? Do I make a bad appearance?”

Mom ran to Dad, gave him a quick hug, and said, “Of course not, Charles! Don’t listen to them.”

“They’re paid to be my advisers.”

“I don’t care. Don’t try to change your personality to please them. Be yourself.”

“They pointed out that many people base their vote strictly on how the candidate comes across on television.”

“You come across as a man with intelligence and dignity and honor,” Mom insisted, “and my opinion counts, too.”

“Thanks,” Dad said. He gave her a grateful smile and left the room.

I went upstairs. Maybe I should call Justin and try to make up. Maybe Justin had been trying to call me and couldn’t get through. Yes. That had to be it.

As I opened my bedroom door I stopped. Something didn’t feel right.

One set of the pale blue curtains that edged the windows hung neatly, but at the far window they’d been drawn together, covering the window. I hadn’t left them like that. Someone had been in my room.

I held my breath and looked and listened.

Someone was still there!

I
n the mirror that hung over the chest of drawers I could see the door to the walk-in closet. It was open just a crack, and as I waited I thought I saw it move.

I didn’t even bother to shut the bedroom door. I just tore down the stairs, yelling at the top of my lungs. I made so much noise that if anyone had tried to follow me I couldn’t have heard him.

Everyone in the house came running, and while I tried to explain what had scared me, Dexter broke from the group and took the stairs three at a time.

“We should call the police,” Mom said.

But Delia shook her head. “Do we want more bad press? Cary said she didn’t see anyone. Just because the curtains were out of place …”

Velma interrupted her. “I didn’t touch those curtains.”

Delia ignored her and asked, “Why don’t we wait and see what Dexter finds?”

Dad and a couple of others had already started up the stairs by the time Dexter leaned over the upper railing
and beckoned to Dad. “No one’s in the house now,” Dexter said, and the way he emphasized
now
showed us that he thought someone really had been in my room.

Mom and I looked at each other. I could tell she was as frightened as I was. She and I ran upstairs, the stragglers following.

As we entered my bedroom I caught a glimpse of Dexter tucking something under his white coat, behind his back. He moved so quickly I couldn’t tell what it was, but I thought it looked like a gun. What would Dexter be doing with a gun?

Dexter pointed to the far window. He had pulled the curtains wide, and we could see that the window was open. “I’m pretty sure that someone was in this room,” he said. “It looks as though he made a quick getaway when Cary began yelling.”

Dad poked his head out the window and drew back inside. “He could have climbed up the oak,” he said. “I didn’t realize the branches came so close to this window.” He checked the other window, which was locked, and faced me. “Cary,” he said, “if you want a window open, it would be safer to open this one.”

“I didn’t open either of them,” I said. In Dallas we go from air-conditioning to heat to air-conditioning, and there are very few days on which we open windows.

“The glass was cut,” Dexter said. He pointed to the top of the sash where there was a neat round hole, about four inches across, directly under the lock.

“Why didn’t the security system …?” Mom began.
She interrupted herself. “Oh, of course. We only turn it on at night.”

“We’ll inform the police,” Dad said, “and when they’ve examined everything, we’ll get a glazier to come and repair that window.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Mom said. “It’s daylight, and we have a house filled with people.”

Dexter glanced toward Dad, then looked away as though he couldn’t meet Dad’s eyes. He walked over to where Mom and I were standing and said, “All day either Mr. Amberson or I answered the door. We knew everyone who came into the house.”

“There was the man from the gas company,” Velma said, “but he didn’t ask to go inside the house.”

We all looked at her. “This is Sunday. No one from the gas company would be reading meters on a Sunday,” Mom said.

“Oh, he wasn’t readin’ meters,” Velma said. “He said there was a gas leak somewhere in the neighborhood, and I wasn’t to pay no mind to him. He’d just be checkin’ around outside.”

Velma didn’t have to read our faces. She realized what had happened and groaned. “He was the one who broke in, wasn’t he?”

My heart began beating hard again, and I was so scared it was hard to get the question out. “What if the man comes back?”

Dad put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. “Cary, none of us knows why he was here,” Dad said. “It was probably a burglary attempt, and
because of that tree against the house, your room was the most accessible.”

We all searched to see if anything upstairs had been taken, but nothing was missing.

Dad took charge, leading us downstairs, and in just a few minutes the police arrived. A lab crew went upstairs with the detective—Jim Slater again—but in a short while he came down to the kitchen and talked to Velma. Then he sat on the sofa in the den across from Mom, Dad, and me. He was a large man, and the notepad he opened was almost lost in his hand.

I was curious. “What did Velma say about the man she talked to?”

“She wasn’t too specific. She was more aware of the uniform than the person wearing it,” Sergeant Slater answered. “She did say she thought he had brown hair, was tall and broad-shouldered, and was probably in his late twenties or early thirties. She agreed to come to headquarters tomorrow morning and go through mug shots.”

Sergeant Slater asked a few basic questions, and I answered them.

“In case this break-in was because of you, Cary, you must tell the detective everything. Tell him about the phone calls,” Mom said, so I did, and when we got through the questions which he asked about Nora—most of which I didn’t have answers for—I told him about Ben Cragmore and the man with the scratchy voice, and what I could remember hearing.

“And you said they were talking about someone named Bill?”

“I think that was the name.”

Dad spoke up. “Could it have been Bill Fletcher?”

“They didn’t say his last name.”

Dad turned to the detective. “I thought of Bill Fletcher because he’s on the committee that awards the highway contracts.”

“Bill’s a pretty common name.” Sergeant Slater heaved himself to his feet and said, “We’ll check into everything. The person in your house was probably just someone looking for things he could sell to buy drugs. But we won’t take any chances. The publicity your family is getting could attract some strange types, so we’ll put a watch on your house for a few days.”

As Mom and Dad walked with Sergeant Slater to the front door I could hear them talking in low undertones. Things they didn’t want to frighten me with, I supposed.

It was only after the detective had left and I was thinking over everything that had happened that I remembered seeing Dexter tuck something under his jacket behind his back. I still thought it might have been a gun.

I managed to get Dad aside, which wasn’t easy, and told him what I thought.

Dad just said, “Yes, Dexter has a gun. More than one, I understand. He works out at a sharpshooter range each week.”

“A sharpshooter range? Why?”

“Why not?”

“Okay. But our house isn’t a sharpshooter range,” I
said. “Why would Dexter be carrying a gun around here?”

“He was planning to go to the range this evening, and perhaps he was getting his guns ready,” Dad said. “I wouldn’t be concerned about it, Cary.”

“All right,” I answered, but I really wasn’t satisfied. I was still just a little bit suspicious of Dexter.

Justin didn’t call, and I missed him more and more, so after dinner I called him. Justin’s mother answered and said only that she’d call him to the phone. She didn’t mention what had happened after the dance, but I could feel my face burning, and I had to swallow a couple of times before I could answer Justin when he said hello.

“I thought maybe you’d tried to call and kept getting the busy signal,” I babbled. I was miserable because I was talking too loudly and saying stupid things, but there was no way to start over.

“I didn’t try to call you,” Justin said, and I felt even worse.

“O-oh,” I stammered and wished I could think of what to say next.

“I’m kind of busy right now,” Justin said.

Why was he being so mean? I wasn’t the only one who’d said unkind things last night. “Okay,” I said. “If that’s the way you want it.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

I took a deep breath and attempted to sound calm. “I just called to apologize again, Justin. I’m sorry I was rude to everybody last night.”

“It’s okay,” he mumbled. “Apology accepted.”

There was silence for a few minutes while my temper began to rise. Finally I said, “That’s it?”

“Well, sure. What am I supposed to say?”

“I wasn’t the only one who was rude. How about what you said to me?”

“I wasn’t being rude. I was just telling you the truth.”

“You hurt my feelings.”

“I can’t help that.”

I was so hurt I wanted to cry, but I tried to stay cool and explain. “Look, Justin, this has been very hard on me.”

“On
all
of us, Cary,” he said quickly.

“All right, then. On all of us. I hoped you’d understand. I hoped you’d want to make up.”

For just an instant his voice softened. “We don’t have to make up. Everything’s okay, Cary.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Do you want to come over?”

The edge crept back into his voice. “Tonight? I’m sorry, Cary. I can’t. I left my homework to the last minute.”

“I’ve still got some stuff to do for English. We could do our homework together.”

“We’ve tried that. It doesn’t always get done.”

I gulped and said, “I miss you, Justin.”

“Yeah,” he said, and I could hear the embarrassment in his voice. “Well, look, I’ll see you at school tomorrow. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said and slowly hung up the phone, so miserable I felt sick to my stomach.

Somehow I was able to finish my homework, and somehow I was able to make it through school the next day, in spite of the political cartoon that appeared in one of the morning newspapers. It showed Dad, again with a crown on his head, looking pompous as he was giving a speech. In a balloon coming out of his mouth were the words, “We need to emphasize the
quality
of education.” Behind Dad was a girl who was supposed to be me, dressed like trash and leaning against a long low car that was more like the Batmobile than Justin’s car.