We heard a car approach and turn into our gravel drive. “That will be Gusta,” I said. She flinched. I stood to answer the door. In passing her, I gave her open purse a swift kick. It turned over, and among the things that tumbled out was a rubber stamp. Terri grabbed for it, but I kicked it out of her reach and got it first. When I pressed it hard on my white countertop, red words sprang to life:
Pay to the account of Augusta Wainwright.
The account number’s last three digits were the same as my phone number.
She jumped from her chair and ran through the house. I heard the front door slam behind her as Gusta tapped on the back door glass. Otis was with her, pushing Meriwether in Pooh’s wheelchair.
“What’s going on?” Gusta came in shedding a gray all-weather coat and a gray silk scarf misted with rain. “It’s raining again, and Meriwether showed up with Otis a few minutes ago and said you wanted us down here for something. Is that Alice’s car outside?”
Hearing a motor start, I said, “It was. She just left.”
“That girl has been jumpy all day. Worried about that dive, I think. She was jittery as a Mexican jumping bean while she was entering my checks in the computer, then she asked if she could go for a drive. I haven’t seen her since.”
“Let’s go in the living room.” I took the wheelchair from Otis and pushed Meriwether ahead of her grandmother. I turned on enough lamps to make it pleasant without being bright. Otis waited in the kitchen.
“Can I get you some tea?” I asked the women.
They didn’t want tea, they wanted ice water, but that took as long as I had hoped it would. I was just picking up the tray to carry it in when I heard more tires on gravel. Quickly I printed a piece of paper from my telephone pad with Gusta’s stamp, pocketed the paper, and opened the back door.
Jed’s BMW pulled in under our light. He climbed out, opened the passenger door, and grasped Terri by one wrist. Maynard climbed out and grabbed the other. “We got her, per instructions,” he called. The woman wriggled like an eel, but together the two men persuaded her up the walk and into the kitchen.
“We’re in the living room,” I told them. “Otis, you come, too.” I slid both heavy pocket doors closed so Joe Riddley couldn’t hear. Otis took a seat in the dimmest corner. When we were all seated, Terri on the couch between the two men, I turned to Gusta. “I want to talk to you about Teresa Civilis.”
“Who’s that?” Gusta snapped.
“This is Teresa Civilis. She’s Alice Fulton’s younger sister, and she’s been working for you. This afternoon she lured me to Meriwether’s warehouse, hit me with a blunt instrument—probably diving weights—and left me there.” I turned and pointed. “See the bump?”
“That’s awful,” Meriwether exclaimed. “Did you really hit her, Alice?” Her dark brows drew together, puzzled. “And how did you get in my warehouse?”
“She’s Terri,” I reminded her. “I suspect you sent her over there on an errand sometime, and she got keys made.”
“I sent her to open up one day when I had a meeting,” Meriwether admitted faintly.
“She
looks
like
Alice
.” Gusta peered at the girl on the couch. “What’s happened to Alice?”
“Alice drowned,” I told her bluntly. “Before you ever saw her. Teresa, her sister, took her identification and buried Alice as herself. They looked a bit alike.”
Gusta glowered from Terri to me. “What makes you think she isn’t Alice?”
“For one thing, Alice was looking forward to her first dive. This woman spoke knowledgeably about diving equipment this morning and has some kind of diving card. She knows how to use computers and business procedures, which she learned when she got a business degree. Alice never finished her first year of community college. She likes to party when she gets out of town. Oh, there were a lot of clues, if we’d been looking for them.”
“Alice wasn’t murdered, was she?” Gusta drew slightly away from Terri.
“No!” Terri’s one breathed word was a cry of pain. Maynard put a quick hand of sympathy over hers, but she snatched hers away.
“Alice’s death wasn’t intentional,” I granted. “But what followed was. She intentionally came here as Alice Fulton to work for you.”
Terri’s breaths were short and shallow. One finger twirled a piece of hair.
“You can’t take somebody else’s identify for long.
Somebody
was sure to recognize her.” Meriwether always had a fine brain. “Besides, what difference does it make who she really is by now, when Nana so obviously adores her? Yes, you do,” she said, answering the quick jerk of Gusta’s head. “She does an enormous amount of work for you, and does it well. She’s put all your addresses into the computer, and all your properties, so you don’t have to keep that tedious ledger every month—”
I touched her. “That tedious ledger is one reason we are here. Gusta, do you have your checkbook with you? Would you get it out?”
Gusta grudgingly allowed that she did, and pulled it from her pocketbook.
“Is this your account number?” I handed her the stamped paper from my pocket.
As Gusta compared the two, Terri held her breath. Gusta gave a perplexed grunt. “No. No, it’s not. And I don’t have but one bank account, so why does this stamp say, ‘Deposit to the account of Augusta Wainwright’?”
“Did you get her purse?” I asked. Maynard held it out. Terri made a grab for it, but he pulled it away. “Look inside,” I instructed, “and see if there’s a checkbook. Then compare these two numbers.” I handed him the stamped paper.
“They’re the same,” he announced. When Terri looked at me, it was a good thing looks weren’t fire. I would be charcoal.
“I never agreed to open an account with her,” Gusta objected.
“You didn’t have to,” I told her. “All Terri had to do was get a signature card from her own bank, sign your name on it, and take it back. That gave you permission to write checks and deposit funds to her account.”
“I don’t have checks to her account.” Gusta still didn’t understand.
“Of course not. But once your name was on the account, nobody would be surprised when you deposited money into it. All she had to do was make a second deposit stamp with your name and her account number on it. I suspect we’ll find she’s already deposited a number of your checks.”
Gusta’s eyes bored into me like gray drill bits. “You said that rubber stamp was a good idea.”
“It was. It saved you endorsing all those checks. But we didn’t either one expect Terri to have two stamps made.”
“I told you I didn’t want a stranger handling my money,” Gusta snapped at Meriwether.
In his corner, Otis raised a hand in protest. “You got no cause to fuss at the judge and Meriwether ’cause you didn’t take care of your own business.”
Gusta whirled toward him, madder than a rattler in a bucket, but she wasn’t the only one in that room who was mad. Before she could speak, Terri lashed out, eyes blazing. “With all the money you’ve got, you’d never have missed it. I wasn’t going to bleed you dry.” She looked around the room in amazement. “Do you know how much rent she collects every single month? Nearly sixty-five thousand dollars! Would she miss a few thousand a month?”
“It wasn’t your money.” Otis spoke again from his corner, in a gentle tone of reason.
Terri poured her rage over him. “You ought to understand, if anybody does. What have you ever had? What have I ever had? Daddy died in a crazy accident. Mama could have sued and lived comfortable, but she wouldn’t. Instead, she worked herself to death and we had
nothing.
How much work did she”—she pointed to Gusta—“ever do for all that money? Tell me that!”
“Now, now,” Otis remonstrated, patting the air with his thin old hands.
She gave him a furious look. “Somebody owes me!”
Otis spoke again, real soft. “You ain’t mad at Miss Gusta, child, you’re mad at God. You think God oughta arranged your life a mite fairer. Now I ain’t sayin’ you haven’t had a hard row to hoe. You have. But we each got our own row, and if you don’t like yours, tell the Boss. Don’t take it out on Miss Gusta, here. I ain’t sayin’ she’s perfect. She ain’t.” Gusta gasped, but Otis went placidly on, “But she never did you a speck of harm. It ain’t right for you to take your mad out on her. That’s one of the devil’s favorite little games. He loves it when we pick and tear at one another. Doesn’t make
us
feel any better—in fact, we usually feel a whole lot worse. But we sure feel justified.” He rubbed his old gray head like he was getting all that wisdom out of a genie’s lamp. “And when we feel justified hurting somebody else? Umm-umm. We’re dancing with the devil, for sure.” He gave his head one more rub, then let his hand stroke the back of his neck and drop to his lap. “Who you’re really mad at is God, so go ahead and tell Him. God can take it. God can even make hard things bearable.” He bent his head and his lips moved silently.
As Terri looked at the floor, she looked a lot more like the Alice I used to know and like.
Jed cleared his throat. “Thank you, Otis. Now let’s—”
Gusta stood and glared at Terri. “I hope they put you underneath the jail. Come, Meriwether.” She stomped toward the door on her cane. I will always find that hard to forgive. The child could have done with a little charity. But I understood, too. Gusta had let herself get fond of a criminal. It was not just Terri whom Gusta would not forgive. It was also herself.
Jed called her back. “Miss Gusta? We’re not quite finished. Would you come back for just a minute, please?”
Her tall old frame wavered. Gusta wasn’t accustomed to changing her mind. At last she gave a curt nod. “Might as well, since we’re here.” She stomped back to her seat.
Jed looked around the room and finished with his eyes on Terri. “Mac called me this evening and asked me three questions. First, she asked where my uncle Hiram worked in Atlanta.” Terri grew very still. “I could answer that. He did maintenance for an apartment complex. She asked if Teresa Civilis lived in that complex, and if she knew Hiram. I verified tonight, by a call to the manager, that Teresa Civilis did live there until her death, and that Hiram fixed her sink and spoke with her often. Apparently there are several people who can testify he knew her and she knew him—at least to speak to. When he found her apartment empty one morning, he was told she had died and her family had come for her things. But Hiram didn’t believe it. He called me and told me aliens had taken her away.”
Meriwether’s voice was soft and sad. “Poor Hiram and his aliens.”
Jed nodded. “Hiram was so worried about aliens in Atlanta that he came home to Hopemore, where he thought he’d be safer.”
I picked up the story. “But one of the first people he saw, the Friday after he got back, was Teresa Civilis, at the wheel of Gusta’s car. I was with him at the time and heard him exclaim, ‘Ms. Civilis!’ ” Terri shifted uneasily in her chair. “I didn’t know what he meant, at the time, so I ignored him.” I didn’t see any point in telling them what I thought he’d said.
Gusta leaned forward on her cane and contributed her bit. “He came by one Friday night while we were eating and insisted that Florine call Alice—Terri, whoever she is—from the table.” I wasn’t surprised she remembered. For Gusta, leaving the table during a meal ranks on her Poor Taste list right up there with wearing white shoes after Labor Day. “You came back and said he had you mixed up with somebody else. Florine said she gave him a glass of water afterwards, and he was talking wild about people from Mars.”
Jed nodded. “He called me that same evening and said an alien was walking around Hopemore in somebody else’s skin. He said as a lawyer, I could get the proof we’d need.” Jed apparently remembered then that he
was
a lawyer, not supposed to commit himself to anything, because he added, “He was not, however, more specific than that.”
I picked up the story tentatively. “You already had a gun you’d found on Gusta’s closet shelf—” This was the part where we were waltzing on roller skates and anything could happen.
Gusta huffed, appalled. “Are you saying Alice used my gun to shoot Hiram?”
Darren slid open one door in time to hear. “You’re crazy,
vieja
! Alice hasn’t shot anybody.” I didn’t know Spanish, but the word was pepper on his tongue.
Terri’s scorn was so thick she could have poured it on pancakes. “They don’t have a shred of evidence. Just because I knew that filthy old man doesn’t prove I killed him.”
She was absolutely right, of course. Nevertheless, I plunged on, hoping—what? That she would confess? “We have the gun. I found it in Joe Riddley’s boot and gave it to the sheriff. And your prints are on my closet door.”
Darren’s eyes blazed, and blisterning words poured over me like lava. “Half the county left
huellas
on that door! Why should Alice kill that old man? That’s ridiculous!” He waved both hands in the air and spun from one of us to the other, blasting each with his fury.
Jed reached one arm across Alive to restrain him, and Darren whirled toward him. “Don’t you touch her! It’s a frame-up, that’s what it is. Because we are outsiders. But we didn’t do this murder! Neither of us!” He whipped back to me. “Where is your compassion? How could you think such a thing about Alice, who’s had the worst life you ever imagined? How could you?
Cosmo se atreve?
” He was loud, he was incoherent, he was magnificent.