Hush My Mouth

Hush My Mouth

ALSO BY
CATHY PICKENS

H
og
W
ild

D
one
G
one
W
rong

S
outhern
F
ried

A SOUTHERN FRIED MYSTERY

CATHY
PICKENS

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS
.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

HUSH MY MOUTH
. Copyright © 2008 by Cathy Pickens. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pickens, Cathy.

Hush my mouth : a southern fried mystery / Cathy Pickens.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN-13: 978-0-312-35442-8

ISBN-10: 0-312-35442-8

  1. Women lawyers—Fiction. 2. South Carolina—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3616.I27H87 2008

813'.6—dc22

2007039948

First Edition: February 2008

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

TO MY HOME STATE OF
SOUTH CAROLINA—AND FOR THE FOOD,
THE FRIENDS, AND ALL THE QUIRKY WEIRDNESS
.

AND, AS ALWAYS,
TO MY PARENTS, PAUL AND KITTY,
AND TO MY HUSBAND, BOB,
WITH MUCH LOVE
.

Many thanks again to all who helped Avery on her way: Vickie Bottoms, victim/witness advocate; Patrick Merck, evidence technician; and Rhonda Morgan, victim/witness advocate are in the trenches every day. Thanks for the work you do and for allowing me a glimpse inside. I beg forgiveness for the places where I ignored what you said so I could tell a good story.

Thanks also to John Dickinson for site scouting and for my tireless readers, Catherine Anderson, Elizabeth Dickinson, Tom Dickinson, and the members of an extraordinarily mean bunch of women: Paula Connolly, Terry Hoover, and Ann Wicker.

Avery wouldn’t get far without the teams at St. Martin’s Minotaur and the Jane Rotrosen Agency. My deepest thanks to Ruth Cavin and Toni Plummer, Meg Ruley, and Christina Hogrebe for taking me under your wings.

One’s eyes are what one is, one’s mouth what one becomes
.
—
JOHN GALSWORTHY
,
Flowering Wilderness
(1932)

Monday Morning

An eternal question: If I started sliding, would a sticky patch of roofing tar stop me from plummeting two tall stories to my death?

I inched along the steep roof with my knees bent and mentally rehearsed aiming my fanny into a quick sit should gravity threaten to draw me over the edge.

Of course, with my natural grace, a slip of the foot would grab a patch of roofing tar at just the wrong angle and send me flying over the leaf-clogged copper gutters, past the too-often-painted gingerbread eaves, and onto the patched sidewalk or wide brick steps below. No chance I’d be cushioned by the thorny holly shrubs. Nope, it would be the sidewalk. Headfirst.

I hunkered down near a badly curled shingle, willing the worn shingles underfoot to have enough grit left in them to withstand
the gravitational pull of the earth. I dabbed the stubby, stiff brush into the tar pot and stippled the goo thickly around the damaged shingle edges. Just this one last patch to do. Then I could inch my way over to the ladder, ease a foot onto the rungs, close my eyes, and climb down.

I had watched roofers amble with a relaxed, limber-legged gait, bouncing on bent knees. They made it look easy, so I’d told Melvin I’d just patch the leaks myself in the former Baldwin & Bates Funeral Home, now the combined offices of Avery Andrews, Attorney-at-Law, and Melvin Bertram Capital Ventures. In lieu of rent payments, of course. Now I understood why the two estimates I’d gotten from roofing contractors had been so outrageous.

Yet another prime illustration of something that had seemed like a good idea at the time. What had I been thinking? Okay, I’d been thinking about cash flow. Now I wished I’d also thought about life insurance and whether, from this height, a broken neck was instantly fatal or a lingering end.

I glanced over the gutter to the sidewalk below and contemplated another eternal question: Is it an immutable law of nature that unexpected company and inopportune personal moments coexist on the space-time continuum? It never fails. Company will catch you at your worst. Too early to be my new client—I hoped.

Two guys and a girl milled around on the front sidewalk. The Victorian house was an eye-catching mauve and architecturally interesting, but they had turned their backs to the house, choosing instead to take pictures of the eight-foot stone angel that stood on our front lawn.

The angel was an unusual choice for a signpost. She’d been destined for life as a grave marker until a former client had chosen to bequeath her to me.
AVERY ANDREWS, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW
was now discreetly engraved on her pedestal. She was a beautiful
piece of art, and I’d smiled at the thought of having her, with her head bowed prayerfully, hands resting against an obelisk, her wings folded, a reverential beacon in front of the former funeral home. When I’d accepted her as a gift, I’d seen her as a guardian angel. I now feared she might become a beacon light for weirdos.

’Twas the season, though—the start of summer, when all manner of folks drove up Main Street in Dacus and straight into the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the Southern Appalachian chain dips into Upstate South Carolina. I hadn’t planned to turn the front of my office into a tourist photo op, the funereal equivalent of the World’s Largest Ball of String or the Virgin Mary in a Piece of Toast Museum.

I inched over to the edge of the porch and opened my mouth to yell for Melvin to come hold the ladder when I heard his voice from the porch. “May I help you?”

The three photography bugs had the good sense to act startled when he spoke.

“Hey,” the lanky blond fellow answered. “Hope you don’t mind. We didn’t step on the grass or nothing.”

The pockets of his cargo pants and his multipocketed vest bulged with so much photography paraphernalia that it visually doubled his slight size. “There’s somebody on your roof.” He craned his neck back to stare. I didn’t wave.

Melvin stepped out from under the porch eave and glanced up in my direction. In his most dignified radio-announcer voice, he said, “My lawyer.”

The girl, waifishly thin with white-blond hair scraped back into a wispy ponytail, stared up at me, her mouth round with surprise.

I sat on my heels and carefully tied the wire handle of my tar pot to the end of a thin rope, waiting for Melvin to finish toying with the visitors.

“I’m Colin, but they call me Mumler.” The talkative guy with the stuffed pockets stepped up to shake Melvin’s hand. The girl’s brother? I stared down at the top of his head, his spiky hair the same white-blond as the girl’s and, from this angle, so thin he almost looked bald.

“We’re ghost hunters,” Colin announced with the same enthusiasm a kid might tell his parents he’d made the basketball team. “This is most interesting. We were wondering if you’d allow us to take some readings inside. We understand this used to be a mortuary, and—”

“No.” Melvin’s tone was polite but firm.

“We wouldn’t disturb anything, Mr. Andrews. We’d just take some photogr—”

“I’m not Mr. Andrews,” Melvin said, his voice still level. “This is a place of business. I’m sure you understand.”

What the kids couldn’t know was, before this was a mortuary, it had been Melvin’s family home place. I didn’t know much about Melvin’s family, but they likely weren’t the kind of people who’d hang around to haunt a house. They were Presbyterians.

Melvin took a step toward the trio, ushering them down the sidewalk. His graying sideburns and neatly pressed oxford shirt lent him a certain authority. However, the leader of the ghost-hunting threesome wasn’t gently dissuaded or spooked.

“Do you know of other likely sites that might present paranormal activity? We take measurements, try to capture phenomena on film. In fact, we’re hoping to get enough material for a TV pilot.”

“Oh, really.” Even though I couldn’t see Melvin’s face, I could tell from his tone that his mouth was crooked up in a wry grin.

“Yessir.”

“Well, in that case . . .”

For Pete’s sake, get on with it and get me down from here
. Was this the vantage point disembodied spirits had? Hovering overhead, studying the tops of our heads and listening to inane conversations? No wonder they decided to shake things up and play pranks. I was about to manifest my tar pot off the roof.

“Why don’t you try Highway 107 north of town? Toward Highlands. You’ll come to a picnic spot on your left called Moody Springs.”

Don’t drink the water
, I thought.
Nasty stuff tastes like tepid rust
.

“A couple of miles farther up the mountain, there’s a pull-off on the right. A scenic overlook, though it’s a bit overgrown now. A soaking wet hitchhiker appears out of the fog, either at the overlook or at Moody Springs, then disappears when you set him out at his stop, at the other location.”

“Wow.” Melvin’s storytelling had hooked the girl.

“They say he piloted a small plane that crashed into the mountain back in the fifties. He prefers to appear in rain and fog.”

And to somebody who was drunk or sleep-deprived.

“Wow. Thanks, man. Maybe we can get some readings.”

“Or orb activity.” The guy with the brown ponytail who’d been silent up until now spoke with reverence. He shifted from one foot to another, ready to go in search of an orb, whatever that was.

“Thanks.” The girl waved back at Melvin. Her gauzy white skirt swirled about her legs as she followed the rest of the Ghost Squad down the sidewalk.