Bury the Hatchet in Dead Mule Swamp (15 page)

“Where is this phone now?”
Tracy asked.

“I have no idea. She
probably lost that one too. I can’t tell you how many phones that
girl has lost. Ask her.”

Tracy continued to look at
Mavis, but her next question was directed at me, “Ana, you’ve been
listening to Mrs. Fanning for quite a few minutes now. Is this the
woman who called you?”

The voice on the phone had
been harsh. The tones I was listening to this morning were tense
but melodious, cultured. I had seen Mavis Fanning around town a few
times, but had never been face to face with her. Despite her
height, and ostentatious manner, I wasn’t about to be intimidated.
I stood up and raised my eyes to hers.

Chapter 21

“Where did you grow up,
Mrs. Fanning?” I asked. From the corner of my eye I could see Tracy
blink slowly in reaction to the unexpected question.

Mavis shot back, “I don’t
see how that’s any of your business, but if you must know, Indiana.
Not my favorite state by any stretch of the imagination, but we
can’t help our roots, can we? Is this a get-to-know-you exercise?
Where did
you
grow
up?”

“I’m from Chicago, born and
bred there. Possibly you can tell by my shifted vowels, a and o in
particular. It’s how Cherry Hill folks figured out right away I was
from that city.”

“So?” Mavis
demanded.

“I used to teach
literature. One side aspect of that is studying dialects, how to
hear them, how and when to try to write them. The person who spoke
to me on the phone was angry. A person’s natural speech patterns
usually come out when emotions run high.”

“I can imagine that if
someone was threatening you, they might be angry, but is there a
point to this fascinating topic?” The dripping sarcasm was
gathering into a river of animosity.

“The person who called me
definitely had an Appalachian twang and patterns of sentence
structure. That would be true of some places in
Indiana.”

“I doubt that,” Mavis
said.

“Oh, it’s real enough. Well
documented in speech studies. The caller’s voice was rough, but
that could have been a deliberate attempt to disguise the sound. I
can’t say for sure that you were the person who called me, but I’m
not going to tell Chief Jarvi it wasn’t you.”

Tracy nodded. “That’s fair
enough. I also need to ask you if you were on Cherry Street Friday
morning."

"Probably," Mavis shot
back. I walk the dog every day. Our route often includes Cherry. So
what?"

Tracy sighed, "We do need
to track down that phone. Could you call your daughter, Mrs.
Fanning?”

“It’s Monday morning. She’s
probably in class or asleep. And I have an appointment. Can’t it
wait?”

“One call shouldn’t take
long,” Tracy continued. “Let’s try to clear this up.”

“Oh, all right,” Mavis said
with a slight movement that was almost a petulant
flounce.

She’d been holding her
smart phone all the while we talked, and she quickly poked the
black glass once. Claire must have been on her speed dial. She
poked it again, and the sound of a ringing phone came over the
speaker. If Mavis were trying to hide something or give Claire some
sort of signal as to what to say, it wasn’t going to be easy with
all of us listening.

The phone rang a number of
times. I forgot to count because I was busy watching Mavis’ face,
but she exhibited no emotion except irritation. I thought the call
was going to go to voice mail, but at last a sleepy voice came from
the phone.

“Yeah, Moms? Wha d’ya
want?” Despite the electronic buzz and echo, it was obviously a
young girl. “Moms” seemed to prove it was Claire.

“Honey, wake up. There is a
policewoman here who has a question for you.”

“Police? Moms, what’s
happening?” Claire sounded wide awake now.

Mavis’ tone changed to
flippant. “Oh, there’s some mix-up about that old disposable phone
we bought for you when you first went to the
university.”

“Oh. What about
it?”

“Do you know what happened
to it, honey?”

It didn’t seem to me that
there was going to be any opportunity for the policewoman to ask
any question. Mavis was dominating the conversation.

Claire’s voice came from
the metallic black box. Mavis gripped the edges, and held it up so
we could all hear the answer. Her long manicured nails shone with
pearly polish. She seemed perfectly confident that Claire wasn’t
going to say something that would be problematic.

“Let me think. That was a
long time ago. Two phones ago, maybe. I loaned it to Paulo Marino
for a while. He’s that guy Jessica was dating, the one from Italy
whose major is chemistry. He’s so divine, but Jessica dumped him
for Bill somebody. He was always telling her what things were made
of and reading lists of ingredients out loud. She said the names
sounded gross, even with an Italian accent.”

Mavis interrupted. “The
phone, honey, the phone.”

“I’m telling you. That’s
why Jessica got the phone back from Paulo, and I know she had it
for a while, because I kept asking her about it, and she kept
forgetting to give it to me, and I thought maybe she gave it to
someone else. But I think she did eventually.”

“Did what?”

“Give it back. Gees, Moms.
Pay attention.”

Mavis rolled her eyes and
looked at me. I might have been the enemy in one respect, but
mothers of students always empathize with others of their
kind.

Tracy interjected a
question. “Claire, this is Tracy Jarvis, Chief of Police here in
Cherry Hill. That phone was used to place a threatening call.
Please try hard to remember if your friend returned it.”

“Wow, the police really are
there? I’ll bet Moms is mad as a hornet. She’s so
uptight.”

Mavis cut in. “You’re on
speaker, Claire.”

“Oh. Sorry Moms. But you
are. OK, the phone. Well, I wanted it back to loan to Kerri to make
calls for the sorority Christmas party. That was such a blast. We
invited a whole bunch of people anonymously, that’s why we needed
the disposable phone, so Jessica must have given it back, and then
when they showed up we let them in the door based on their answers
to ten questions. At least that’s what we told them, but really
anyone who was wearing something blue got in. Some people snuck in
the windows anyway, and we all had too much to drink
and...”

“Claire! Can you focus on
the phone for a minute?” Mavis was getting annoyed.

“I am. That’s when I found
it, when we cleaned up the mess the next day. It was under the
couch cushions, and it showed up when we rolled Margo Thompson off
onto the floor. She’s fat, and not so pretty when she’s sleeping
off a drunk. The phone just bounced onto her boobs and sat there,
you know, in between.” Claire paused and giggled. The mental image
was admittedly funny.

“Miss Fanning, do you know
where the phone is now?” Tracy wasn’t giggling.

“Sure. Why didn’t you say
so? It’s in my underwear drawer.”

“Would you go check,
please?” Tracy asked, but it was more of a command than a
request.

We could hear bare feet
hitting a floor and a few quick steps, then the squeak of wood
against wood and some scratching noises. The drawer thumped shut
and there were more squeaks, thumps and rustlings.

At a distance from Claire’s
phone we faintly heard, “It’s not here, Moms. I don’t know where it
is. I’m sure that’s where I put it.”

“All right, honey. Thanks
for looking.” Mavis was about to poke the phone and break the
connection.

Tracy held up her hand as
at a traffic stop. “This is Chief Jarvi, again. Is that phone still
activated? Who would have put minutes on it?”

“It was working last
December. A couple of us chipped in to add time. All it takes is a
little cash.”

“Please keep looking and
thinking about where that phone might be. It’s very important,”
Tracy said.

“That’s where it was, last
time I saw it. Honest.”

“When was that?” Tracy
asked.

“Maybe a few months ago. I
don’t know, really.”

Tracy continued, “Who has
access to your room? Do you have a roommate?”

“There are six of us who
share an apartment. We all have friends and boyfriends, and
parties. This is college, you know?”

Tracy sighed again. “Thank
you for your time, Miss Fanning. If you have any other ideas of
where that phone might be, please contact me. Just call the Cherry
Hill police.”

“OK by me. I better get
ready for class. I didn’t realize what time it is.”

“Goodbye, honey. Your
father and I might come see you at Thanksgiving.” Mavis waited for
a response, but the connection had already been broken. A brief
expression of annoyance crossed her face, but she covered it well
as she set the phone down on an end table. “See, I told you she’d
probably lost it.”

“Have you put more time on
that phone lately?”

“Of course not. I don’t
have it,” Mavis snapped.

Tracy turned to me and
shrugged her shoulders. “I guess there’s nothing more for us to
learn here, right now,” she said.

Mavis motioned us toward
the door. “It would be good if we could wrap this up. I’m going to
be late for an appointment.” She no longer sounded so belligerent,
but still acted as if we, and our questions, were of no
consequence.

The appointment explained
why she was dressed up, but it must have been something important
for her to be wearing such a classy outfit, unless she was one of
those people who always overdressed. I could believe that was a
possibility.

As we left, Tracy asked
Mavis what Claire was studying.

“Her major is Human
Resource Management,” Mavis told us with a touch of pride. “She’s
very good with people, but she’ll need a secretary to keep her from
losing every pen or piece of paper she touches.”

Chapter 22

I wasn’t sure I was looking
forward to spending time with Cora on Tuesday. She had seemed
interested in the plan to reenact the Judge’s murder, but would she
be willing to attend a busy social event, planned by the man she
seemed to hate most in the world? I expected she’d be at least a
little bit crabby.

Nevertheless, at nine in
the morning I turned the Jeep into Brown Trout Lane and pulled to a
stop beneath a maple whose yellow leaves were beginning to fall
gently into Cora’s yard, and floated on the smooth surface of the
Pottawatomi River. The little brown frame house, with a porch that
faced the curve of the river, seemed snuggled into a comforter of
golden trees. Although the fall color had not yet reached its peak,
it was obvious that cooler weather was here, and we had an awful
lot to accomplish to make this Harvest Ball a reality.
Invitations
, I
thought,
is Jerry going to just put
something in the paper and make posters, or is he going to try to
do something personal? Would there be snob value in sending some
private notes? Maybe he could raise some money to renovate the
building by offering tickets with perks- a special tour or early
wine tasting, or something.

Before I had time to
contemplate whether this was important, Cora opened the door of her
pole barn museum, and beckoned eagerly to me.

As I slipped out of my
jacket and placed it on the back of a chair in the small office,
she asked, “What were you doing just sitting in your car? Gathering
wool? I’m so excited! I can’t believe people really want to learn
something about our most famous local crime.”

“I’m not exactly sure that
the general population requested...”

But Cora was off and
running with enthusiasm. “Come see what I dug out. Actually it
wasn’t difficult. Because this story was so important, I had
carefully labeled these items and knew right where they
were.”

This explanation was
superfluous. Cora carefully labeled and documented every single box
of items that came into her possession, as fast as she could. This
obsession was why I was now spending time each week entering a
record of every artifact, news article, and knick-knack into a
database that could be cross-referenced with locations and people
and families and dates. Cora was a senior citizen, but she was no
techno-phobe. She’d designed the data base herself.

The diminutive woman’s face
was rosy. The light blue blouse and faded denim overalls she wore
highlighted her pink coloring. Wisps of white hair escaped from the
braids she had wound tightly around her head. It looked like she’d
been working hard already this morning. What was it my mother had
said? “Men sweat, but women glow.” Cora certainly was
glowing.

“What all have you got?” I
asked.

“Well. Hmm. What haven’t I
got?” she questioned coyly. I could see the young, teasing Cora
behind the white hair and wrinkles.

I laughed. “Let’s see your
loot.”