An Angel to Die For (22 page)

The phone was ringing when I got home.

“How was your visit with Rob?” my mother wanted to know.

“We put things on hold,” I said.

“Is that good or bad?”

“Depends on the way you look at it, I guess. Mom, I’m worried about Aunt Zorah.” I told her about Uncle Faris’s key and my aunt’s strange behavior.

“Poor Zorah! Dear God, all this must be tearing her apart! Your dad said they tried every way in the world to keep her from marrying Faris Haskell but she wouldn’t listen. Now just look at the trouble he’s caused.”

Just like Sonny
Gaines, I thought, but I didn’t say it. “How’s everything at Ellynwood? I’m trying my best to get down there as soon as I can.”

“That’s why I’m calling. The weather here’s been beautiful and I’d like to get Joey out more but we didn’t have room for his stroller. Would you bring it when you come? And I’m running a little short on clothes—brought mostly winter things, and I think I left my good walking shoes under my bed; I could use a couple of pairs of shorts too.”

“What about Ola?” I asked.

“I don’t think she wears shorts.” I thought I heard a little laugh here.

“I mean how is she? Holding up okay? You don’t have any turrets there for her to jump off of, do you?”

“Prentice, what a thing to say! She’s napping now, but she does seem sad, and she’s on some kind of medication. I don’t think she’s well.”

“You haven’t seen any bearded strangers around, had any weird phone calls, have you?”

“No, thank heavens! So far, so good. What about you?” my mother asked.

“Lately I haven’t had time to notice,” I said. And that was the truth.

I also hadn’t had time to check my phone messages. A part of me hoped there would be one from Rob saying
he wanted to forget what had happened—or didn’t happen—on our mountain trip and start all over again. The other part of me was relieved when there wasn’t.

Dottie had phoned to say she’d had an encouraging response to some inquiries on our exciting new project and to keep my fingers crossed. The dentist’s office called to remind my mother it was time to have her teeth cleaned, and some man I’d never heard of left a message to see if we’d be interested in leasing our property for a nursery and garden center.

I played the last message again. The man’s name was Peter Whisonant. He and his partners owned a business in Cartersville, a town about thirty miles away, and were interested in expanding to our area, he said. He sounded gruff, businesslike, and to the point, and left a number for an exchange in Cartersville. I wrote down his name and number and filed it with a bunch of other stuff in the kitchen drawer that barely shut. This would be something I might refer to Mom’s lawyer friend when he returned from his European travels.

Upstairs I found my mother’s shoes under her bed as she’d suspected, selected some of her shorts and lighter clothing for the sweltering south Georgia climate, and set them aside with Joey’s stroller. Bearded man or no bearded man, I was going to leave for Ellynwood in the morning unless something earthshaking occurred.

And what happened the next day might not have been earthshaking, but it created a heck of a quake in Liberty Bend.

I was finishing a hasty breakfast when Sheriff Bonner
called. “We need you to come down here for a few minutes if you can,” he said without the usual polite preliminaries. And of course my first thought was of Aunt Zorah.

“What’s wrong? Is it my aunt? Has she—?” I couldn’t bring myself to finish.

“No, no. It’s not that. We’re holding someone for questioning in Jasper Totherow’s death and possibly the death of the woman we found on your property. We’d like you to have a look at him, see if he looks familiar.”

Was it the bearded man? But why would anyone in Sonny Gaines’s family want to kill Jasper Totherow? As far as I knew, they didn’t even know him.

I would just have to find out when I got there. I knew the police had questioned Ralphine but had found no reason to hold her. If they seriously suspected anyone else, I hadn’t heard about it. I stuck my cereal bowl in the sink, grabbed my coffee mug, and hurried to the car, hoping that when I got to town we would know something at last. Was Jasper’s murder connected with what had happened to Uncle Faris? Was that why Aunt Zorah was behaving so strangely?

By the time I reached the sheriff’s office, I was gripping the steering wheel so tightly my fingers felt welded to it.

The suspect was being held in an adjoining building that housed the county jail, and remained in a small room for questioning. A policeman led me down a long corridor so that I could look through a window and see him.

He wasn’t anything like what I expected. The man fidgeted in his seat, examined his hands, paced to the window, then back again where he sank heavily into the chair and drummed his fingers on the table. Except for the table and two chairs, the room was bare. The man was alone. I didn’t know him.

“Anybody you recognize?” Sheriff Bonner wanted to know when I was led into his inner sanctum a few minutes later.

I shook my head. “I’ve never seen him.”

“Are you sure? He has a beard.”

“But he’s not the man I saw. Not the one who came to our house. This man’s older—much older, and fatter, and his beard’s fuller, fuzzier. Also he wears glasses. The other man didn’t.”

The sheriff leaned back in his chair. “So you’re never seen him?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“Because Suzie Wright said he looks like the guy she saw running into the woods on your property, the one wearing that purple cap.”

I shrugged. “Could be, but I never saw him. Who is he?”

“Gives his name as Fabius Hawthorne.” The sheriff smiled. “You probably know him better as Faris Haskell.”

If I had been the fainting kind, I think I would’ve passed out cold right then, but the floor looked none too clean, and I was distracted by a most annoying noise that sounded like an old dog baying.

Turned out to be an old funeral director. “I’ll swear to you I had nothing to do with that man’s death!” Maynard Griggs hollered. “This is harassment—that’s exactly what it is!”

I recognized the policeman as one of the detectives who had been at Smokerise recently. He looked a little like Peter Sellers, the actor who played Inspector Clouseau, and I halfway expected him to fall over a chair or something. Instead he led the elder Mr. Griggs into the sheriff’s office and seated him gently. I didn’t know whether to stay or go, so I stayed.

“We’re not accusing you of killing anybody, Mr. Griggs.” The sheriff spoke calmly. “We just need some information is all, and I understand you might be able to help us.”

The old man’s lip quivered. “I don’t know anything about it. I’ve a right to a lawyer. And my son Harold—where is he, anyway?”

“Harold’s on his way,” the sheriff told him, “and here’s the phone . . . or would you like us to call a lawyer for you?”

“I’ll wait till Harold gets here.” The old fellow looked up at me. “Oh, dear,” he said. “This really is a quagmire.”

Somebody brought water in a paper cup and Maynard Griggs drained it in a couple of gulps, then shook his head. “Oh, Lord, what will become of me? What’s Ernestine going to say?”

“About what, Mr. Griggs?” the sheriff prodded.

“I should’ve known no good would come of all this,
and now that fellow’s dead too. I told Faris it wouldn’t work.”

“What wouldn’t work?” Sheriff Bonner asked.

“Why, killing him, of course! He wanted to, you know. Faris did. That Jasper Totherow. Faris was all for killing him so he wouldn’t talk . . . but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t!”

The sheriff leaned across his desk and made a steeple of his fingers. “But you did know the woman we found in what was supposed to have been Faris Haskell’s coffin, didn’t you, Mr. Griggs?”

The man turned almost as white as the hair on his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do,” the sheriff said. “And we have reason to believe you put her there.”

Y
ou can’t prove that!” The elder Griggs started to rise, then thought better of it and sat down again. “I can’t believe it’s come to this.” He reached shakily for another cup of water. “And if Faris Haskell told you I had anything to do with killing Jasper Totherow, he’s lying through his teeth!”

“But you did discuss it?” the sheriff said. “You and Mr. Haskell . . . Hawthorne . . . whoever. You talked about killing Jasper Totherow. Mind telling us why?”

“He was going to tell. Threatened to let everybody know Faris wasn’t dead.”

Sheriff Bonner frowned. “And I don’t suppose you know anything about how Colette Champion got into that coffin?”

“Who?”

“I think you know who. We turned up a car rented to you from an agency over in Rome . . . seems it had some dents that hadn’t been there before. Fellow said you told him you’d hit a dog.”

“That’s right, I did. Ran right in front of me. Unavoidable.” Mr. Griggs crushed his paper cup into a microwad.

Sheriff Bonner just sat there and looked at him. He didn’t speak.

“Look, I paid these people for the damages.” Maynard Griggs tried to look away. “Is that what this is all about?”

The sheriff spoke softly. “That wasn’t animal blood we found underneath your fender, Mr. Griggs. It was human blood. O negative. Same type as Colette Champion’s.”

“Blood? But how—I don’t understand.”

“Hard to get rid of bloodstains, Mr. Griggs. Ever read
Macbeth
.? Some stains just won’t go away.” The sheriff looked at his hands. “ ‘Out, out damned spot!’ “ I was surprised he remembered the quote after what my mother had said.

Mr. Griggs examined his hands too. “It was an accident,” he said. “I never meant to kill her.”

Thornton Bonner drew in his breath. “Maybe we ought to start at the beginning—back when Faris Haskell ‘died.’ Tell me something . . . just what
was
buried in that coffin all these years?”

The older man sighed and his eyes were bleak as stagnant water. “Nothing. Just rocks. He wanted
everyone to think he died when his car went off the road at Poindexter Point. I was coroner then and I filled out a death certificate and buried a coffin full of rocks.”

“
You
were the one who dug up the grave!” I spoke without thinking and the others turned and looked at me.

“That was Jasper Totherow,” Maynard Griggs mumbled.

“But the two of you hired him to do it,” Detective “Clouseau” said, stroking his mustache. I resisted an impulse to smile. “Why?”

The old fellow blew his nose and looked behind him toward the door as if he might try to make a dash for it. “The two of us couldn’t handle it alone. We told him the family was moving the grave to another cemetery,” he said.

“So you and your friend paid Jasper to do the digging.” The sheriff played with a pencil, wove it in and out his fingers. “Then later you meant to bury Colette Champion in that same place. What happened?”

“Hell, we dropped the darn thing getting it out of the ground, and you could hear those rocks shifting about.” Mr. Griggs shook his head as if remembering. “Jasper couldn’t tackle the coffin by himself so the two of us had to help him remove it. It was freezing cold, and dark as pitch; we couldn’t half see. Had a devil of a time getting it out—and then that happened.”

“Did he know who Faris was?” Sheriff Bonner wanted to know.

“Pretended he didn’t, but he figured it out. Got more sense than we gave him credit for, I reckon.”

“Let’s get back to Colette Champion,” the sheriff said. “How did she figure in all this?”

“I don’t have to answer that.” Mr. Griggs spoke louder, but there was a tremor in his voice.

“Her blood was underneath that car and her prints were inside it. I expect to find yours there as well.” Sheriff Bonner paused. “Why did you kill her, Mr. Griggs?”

The older man shuddered. “I didn’t mean to! It was an accident. You’ve got to believe me!”

I had heard rumors of the elder Griggs’s infidelities, although looking at him today, it was hard to believe. Maynard Griggs had a wandering eye, according to Aunt Zorah, and I’d heard he’d had an affair with someone early in his marriage and paid her to have an abortion and leave town.

Apparently he had kept on paying. Things were tight back then and he was just getting started in his business. He couldn’t go to his wife’s family for hush money, Maynard Griggs explained. And at the same time, his wife Ernestine was expecting their first child.

And that was when my uncle Faris came into it, I learned. Faris Haskell gave his friend the money to pay off the woman and send her away. But it wasn’t far enough.

“I knew Faris was up to something that wasn’t right,” Mr. Griggs admitted. “Too much money all of a sudden, but I was desperate. I didn’t care where it came from!”

“Then later when Haskell needed your help to disappear, you buried an empty casket,” the detective said. “And years later it seemed the perfect hiding place for the woman you’d just killed.” He paced the length of the small room and back without even stepping into the wastebasket. “Colette Champion had no close relatives; few would notice her missing, and even if they did, who would think of looking in an old grave?”