Authors: Lorena McCourtney
“She quit both school and job to go up to Missouri?”
“I guess so. I don’t remember exactly what she said, something about this being a temporary but high-paying job up there, I think.”
High pay, I was quite certain, was not Debbie’s motive for going to work at Bottom-Buck Barney’s. But why Barney’s, if Ray’s death had occurred at Thrif-Tee Wrecking?
The woman handed Ray’s picture back. She looked at her watch again. “I’m really sorry to rush off, but I have a doctor’s appointment in forty-five minutes.”
“I was hoping we could look around Debbie’s apartment together and figure out what’s going on here. Why she was using a different name.”
The woman hesitated, but I didn’t know if she was concerned about the time or the legalities and ethics of going into the apartment.
“I’d like to find out who her next of kin is,” I added. “Would you happen to know?”
“No. I don’t usually ask for that information from prospective tenants. Maybe I should.”
“So far, her body is still in the morgue because they haven’t the name of a next of kin to claim it.”
Her knuckles touched her lips. “The morgue!” she repeated, obviously horrified. She looked at her watch again. “Perhaps if you come back later . . .”
Now it was my turn to consult a watch. “I was hoping to get started home as early as possible. I hate to be on the road after dark.”
“Oh, I know. I do too. But I can’t skip this doctor’s appointment.” She touched her midsection, hand moving from her stomach area up under the right side of her ribs. “I’ve been hurting all over in here, sometimes really sharp pains up under my ribs, and they’re thinking it may be my gallbladder.”
“If it’s gallbladder trouble, you don’t want to let it go, that’s for sure. I kept letting mine go, always telling myself, well, maybe it’ll quit hurting by tomorrow. It’s so difficult having to go to the hospital when you’re alone.”
“Oh yes. I don’t have anyone to collect rents or take care of Mitzi or anything.” The dog wagged a stub of tail, apparently at mention of her name.
“And getting tangled up with Medicare is always such a hassle,” I added.
“Tell me about it. I went round and round with them when I had thyroid trouble. And the price of prescriptions these days!”
“Exactly. You feel like you’re swallowing gold nuggets. But then I wound up being hauled off to the hospital in an ambulance for gallbladder surgery. So don’t let it go,” I repeated.
“Where did you hurt?” she asked, and for five minutes we exchanged information about gallbladder pains and Medicare hassles and surgery. She’d known some woman whose gallbladder surgery had left her with an eight-inch scar and all kinds of complications, but I told her about my much simpler laparoscopic surgery, with just tiny incisions.
She looked relieved. Finally, with another glance at her watch, she said, “I do have to go, but it probably wouldn’t hurt if I unlock Debbie’s door, and you just have a look around . . . ?”
The suggestion ended on an upswing, as if seeking my opinion on the propriety of this. On a strictly legal basis, I doubted this was a proper course of action for a landlady. But I also knew I wasn’t here to rip off Debbie’s belongings, and maybe I could find out who her next of kin was. Along with some clue that would lead to her killer.
“I’ll stay until you get back from the doctor’s. And I’ll keep the door locked so no one else can get in. By the way, I’m Ivy Malone.” I held out my hand.
“Letitia Stone.”
We shook hands and smiled at each other. She handed me the keys. “I hate to think of Debbie lying in some awful morgue,” she said. “She must have family somewhere.”
“I’ll see what I can find.”
Locating a next of kin to claim Debbie’s body from the morgue was important to Letitia, as it was to me. But I knew it was a different connection that was truly at work here.
We were two of a kind, two little old ladies with gallbladder trouble, a bond not to be taken lightly.
When she got back I meant to ask her if she sometimes felt invisible too.
A light layer of dust covered every surface, including the TV screen, and the air smelled like something left over from another decade, but otherwise the apartment was scrupulously neat. Pillows plumped on the sofa, beauty and exercise magazines, all several months old, neatly stacked on the coffee table. Kitchen counter and appliances spotless, refrigerator empty.
A framed photo stood on the top shelf of a bookcase. Ray Etheridge and Debbie/Kendra in happier times, blond teenagers smiling with the carefree exuberance of youth and good health. I had to swallow, hard, as I thought about the last time I’d seen her. Bloodless and dead in the morgue.
The bedroom was equally neat. I pulled a dress out of the closet, beige linen, conservative hemline, with a matching jacket. Skirts, some with hemlines short but not minuscule, others calf-length. Pants, mostly dark. Bright T-shirts and blouses. A dressy black dress, low-cut but not immodest. Walking-length shorts, jeans. On the floor below were jogging shoes, black pumps, and scuffed sandals.
Not the kind of clothes Debbie had worn when she was living as Kendra Alexander and working for Bottom-Buck Barney’s. Why the change in wardrobe? I saw only one likely answer. Man bait. A man she thought would go for the type of woman who dressed in flashy, revealing clothes, flaunting maximum sex appeal.
But what man? And why? I turned and stared at another item in the bedroom. A computer. Did it hold answers? Possibly. But they were as inaccessible to me as if they were locked in a burglar-proof safe. I didn’t know how to turn the computer on, much less extract information from it.
A situation I vowed to remedy. I might not be able to get interested in the intricacies of quilting, but I could get interested in computing. I’d talk to Haley about courses at the community college. I could find out what surfing the Net was all about!
Which was no help at this point, however.
But even with a computer, maybe Debbie had kept something on paper. Where? There wasn’t much storage space in the small apartment. I looked under the bed. Dust bunnies and fuzzy slippers.
I went back to the closet. Cardboard boxes on the top shelf! I got a chair from the dinette set, stood on it, got hold of a box . . .
Which was twice as heavy as I expected and immediately crashed to the floor. My aging body followed, along with the clothes I plunged through as I went down. And there I was, a clothes hanger tangled in my hair, a high heel jammed into my armpit, and papers flying everywhere. With Dix’s voice in my ear.
See, I told you to stay out of this.
Shut up, Dix,
I retorted grumpily.
It’s no big deal.
I untangled myself, ascertained that nothing was broken, and, sitting on the floor, started going through the scattered contents of the box.
There were Christmas and birthday cards she’d saved. A long-dead corsage. A graduation program showing that Debbie had been salutatorian of her high school graduating class. A program from a play in which she’d had the lead, no doubt good experience for her later role at Bottom-Buck Barney’s. Ribbons she’d won in college swimming events. A couple of photo albums, which interested me but which I didn’t feel I had time to peruse. A guest book and memorial folder from a funeral. A double funeral for her parents, I saw with a pang.
Oh, Kendra
—a part of me clung to the name by which I’d known her—
how sad
. This was her memory box, I realized with a rough catch in my throat.
Memories that ended with a body in a river. And the man who’d dumped her there still running free.
I kept out one item when I put everything back in the box. It was a birthday card signed “With love from Aunt Chris.” So somewhere there was a next of kin. I’d show it to Letitia when she returned.
I was more careful with the next box and managed to get it to the floor outside the closet without catastrophe. The box was actually labeled Important Papers. Bank statements, receipts, warranties for a CD player and television, letters from a lawyer about estate and insurance matters, college records, some from a college here that I’d never heard of, some from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. All informational but not helpful for my purposes.
In the third box, however, which was wooden rather than cardboard—pay dirt. This was brother Ray’s box. Maybe one he’d left with her for safekeeping? Within minutes, I found the answer to one question, how Debbie had assumed Kendra’s identity so accurately. Ray and Kendra had filled out an application to rent an apartment together in Jonesboro. Apparently they’d never submitted it . . . maybe second thoughts on how Kendra’s parents would react to their living together? Or perhaps her illness had intervened. The crucial information was all there: Kendra’s birth date. Kendra’s Social Security number.
By now I was pretty sure why Debbie had borrowed a name. She was looking for the truth about her brother’s death, and she didn’t want the Etheridge name to expose her relationship to him.
Papers about Ray’s college records were also in the box. Payment records on the Mustang. And something else—a packet of a half dozen letters wrapped in a rubber band.
The envelopes, with Ray’s name in the corner, were addressed to Debbie in Fayetteville. Apparently, after his death, she’d dropped out of college there and come here to Little Rock. I studied the Missouri postmarks. The last one was dated October 19 of last year, four days before Ray’s “accident.” I went back to the letter with the earliest postmark and slid the two handwritten pages out of the envelope.
Then I stopped, halted by a squeamish feeling that I was invading Debbie’s privacy. Her brother Ray’s too. And another feeling that, for all I knew, I was committing some ghastly crime here. Should I be turning the letters, untouched, over to the local police or Detective Harmon in Missouri?
I listened for Dix’s voice in my ear. Nothing.
What I could see was Detective Harmon’s exasperation if he looked at the letters and found Ray writing mundane missives asking for a loan until payday or griping about the weather.
My legs were beginning to stiffen. I stood up to stretch them and unfolded the letter. It looked well-worn, as if Debbie had read it many times.
And I was reading it before I’d come to a decision about the ethics of the situation. By then, of course, it was too late. I couldn’t stop reading any more than I could stop halfway down in a fall from a ten-story building.
The letter appeared to continue a conversation that had started elsewhere, perhaps in a phone call or earlier letters that Debbie hadn’t saved.
“Yes,”
it said, apparently in response to nagging by Debbie,
“I’ll probably go back to college sooner or later. But not yet
.
And I’ll never be able to go back to State, not without Kendra.”
Then small talk about his paranoid landlord, a temporary job as a telephone solicitor
(“My ear has blisters from having the phone slammed down on it so many times”)
, and a microwave disaster with an egg. The attempt at upbeat humor sounded forced. Ray’s real feelings came out in the next paragraph.
I know no one ever said life is fair. I remember Dad being a stickler for honesty and dependability, all that do-gooder, do-unto-others stuff. But don’t you ever get the feeling, what’s the point? Mom and Dad live good, upright lives. Pillars of the community. They die in a freak accident that traps them in a burning house. Kendra is the sweetest, most caring and wonderful person in the world. So what happens? Her life ends at twenty with a disease that many people survive. I’m beginning to think you may as well grab whatever you can, because there’s sure no payoff for the nose-to-the-grindstone, white-knight kind of life.
The letter ended by saying that he’d run into a guy he knew from back home, someone he thought could help him get a job at the “car outfit” where the friend worked.
I dropped to the edge of the bed with a shiver of dismay. If Magnolia were here, she’d mutter that the letter had bad vibes. Ray was headed for trouble.
I had no idea what Debbie wrote in response to that letter, or if she perhaps talked to him on the phone rather than writing. But in the next letter, after some small talk about a new apartment and some movies he’d seen, Ray sounded defensive.
I know you don’t like Danny, you think he’s leading me “astray,” and I should run back to college and be a happy camper. But I like the job. Who knows? Maybe my life’s calling is to be a mechanic, not a college-educated engineer. To tell the truth, without Kendra it just doesn’t seem to matter much. But there’s something funny going on here. I know Benny in the office figures we grease monkeys are too dumb to figure it out, but when you’re changing numbers it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out something peculiar is going on. And I’m pretty sure what it is. I suppose at one time it would have bothered me, but now it doesn’t seem so bad. So a few people get ripped off. They don’t really lose anything. Their insurance covers it. It’s a pretty clever scheme, actually.
I was troubled by Ray’s air of admiration for something that wasn’t on the up-and-up. The letter didn’t mention Thrif-Tee Wrecking, but I had no doubt that Thrif-Tee was where the Danny of whom Debbie didn’t approve had gotten Ray a job.
The next letter was ordinary stuff. A move to a different apartment. Some car races he and Danny had been to. A reference to a friend’s accident that Debbie had apparently written or talked to him about, and congratulations on her good grades. A comment that,
“One of these days I’ve got to get a computer so we can get on email. This writing letters by hand is killing me. So you better appreciate it!”
But there was a troubling last paragraph: