Overdue for Murder (Pecan Bayou) (18 page)

"I'll take care of him," my father said. "You go talk to Peter Markham and that woman he was running around with."

"The romance writer?"

"Oh, right. I guess that's fitting. I'll ask Maggie if she can go ask around at the library to see if there might be anyone there who was angry with Martha."

"Okay. I can talk to Pattie, too. I wanted to thank her for doing such a nice job on the cake."

My dad and aunt were doing it again. They were fishing me out of another mess. I might have my share of troubles, but I knew in that moment I was truly blessed with these two. "Thank you. Thank you for always being there."

"Betsy," my dad answered, "you stop this. You're not going anywhere." As I plopped a baseball hat on Zach's head, the steady reassurance of my father's voice seemed to soothe me. We could do this.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

After watching Zach drop balls for an eternal two-hour practice at the local park, we were back home again. I was between the proverbial rock and a hard place. My son's father was sitting at the Pecan Bayou jail. This was the man he had dreamed of meeting for years on end. Should I tell him about his recent appearance, or should I stay quiet about it for as long as I can? I was deciding on the latter when Zach came into the room freshly bathed and wearing pajamas.

"Mom, why are you staring out the window? Is there somebody out there?" Zach put his hands on the windowsill and leaned on the glass, smudging it with his nose. He smelled like strawberry bubble bath.

"Uh, no. There's no one out there."

"Then what are you looking at?"

Here it was, my opening for, "Oh, by the way, I ran into your father today." I fluffed his hair with my hand. "Nothing. Just day dreaming."

"You're too old to daydream, Mom. I thought it was only kids in school who did that."

"Speaking of school, is your homework finished?"

Zach's shoulders slumped. "Aw, mom."

"Get to it, buddy. Time's a-wastin'."

Zach turned around and slunk back into the den, where he had a crumpled math paper still waiting for him on the coffee table. As he walked away I could see his similarities to Barry. He had the same dark hair, the same pale blue eyes, and sometimes I would see Barry in the way he would move his hands when he was telling a story. Those were the times when I once again saw the guy I had fallen in love with so many years ago. That man was dead to me now, replaced with the balding, bearded man who sat in my father's jail.

I had been trying to organize my notes on old columns all afternoon. I was due to return for another try at my on-camera NUTV appearance in only a week, and I was feeling plenty nervous about it. How would I demonstrate some of the stuff that I wrote about in my column? I couldn't exactly fix a sink or repaint a house. I had a database full of helpful hints, but the thought of sharing them with someone through a television camera was pretty scary. Maybe I would watch the home and garden channel and see how they did it.

I heard a faint tapping at the door and looked up. At first I thought it was Rocky returning to tell me someone else had been murdered and darn it if there wasn't another note with my name on it. I saw familiar pale blue eyes peering through the screen door.

"Betsy! I'm home ..." Barry's voice said, a la Jack Nicholson in "The Shining."

"What are you doing here?"

"What do you care? Where's my boy?"

"I'm calling the police, right now."

He came barreling through the door. "Zachary? Where are you, boy? Your pappa is home."

It was my worst nightmare come true. I was no longer in control of what Zach would know about Barry.

"Mom?" Zach came back out of the den but then stepped back when he saw the bearded man at the door.

"Zach, go back into the den."

"Mom, are you okay?" He looked at the man in the doorway and started to shrink back.

"It's me Zach. It's your dad."

Zach's eyes opened wide as he realized he was looking at his own father. "Dad?"

"That's right, son. I'm home." Barry put his arms out for Zach to run into them. To Zach, though, he was still a stranger. He looked to me for guidance. I walked over and held his hand tightly.

"Zach, this is your dad, but you should know he is supposed to be in the jail right now."

"With Grandpa? Is he a policeman like Grandpa?"

"No, he's not a policeman. He ... "

"Shut up!" Barry yelled.

"Don't yell at my mom!" Zach yelled back. His eyes widened in confusion.

I pushed Zach behind me. My hands shook as I punched in 911 on my phone. The evening dispatcher, Manny Gomez ,answered. "Manny, this is Betsy. Barry is here."

"They're already on the way. They lost him when they took him to Benny's for supper."

I couldn't believe they had taken Barry out of jail to go get barbecue. Life in small-town Texas.

"Listen, son. I've been out working while I've been away. I've been working for you. I'm getting married again, and we'll have a room just for you. We need to get to know each other, son."

"Get out of here!" I yelled.

Barry walked toward us, and I picked up the broom in the corner of the kitchen. "I said get out!" I yelled, holding the broom out as a weapon.

"What are you going to do, sweep me to death? Oh, and by the way, I heard all about your little troubles in the library. Doesn't look too good for you, sweetie, if the judge has to decide custody for Zach between a con man father or a murdering mother...I think I win."

I pushed at him with the broom. He took hold of it with his hand and threw it behind him. "Now give me my son, dammit." He reached out and backhanded me. A sudden pain hit my jaw. I fell against the refrigerator and hit the floor. Zach screamed and ran to the front the door of the house. He was trying desperately to open the chain lock on the door, but his little fingers couldn't make it work. He was screaming as his fingers failed around the metal chain.

"Time to go home, son."

I grabbed my cast-iron frying pan from the wall and ran after him. My arm swooped through the air. The weight of the pan felt like it would pull out my limb at the elbow, but I connected and knocked Barry in the back of the head. He stumbled to the ground.

"That's for leaving us, you jerk," I said, standing over him. George Beckman came running in behind me and grabbed Barry by the arms. Barry was holding his head as the blood seeped between his fingers.

"You hit me, you sniveling bitch. Where did you get that from? Yeah, well you weren't worth staying for. You and your idiot son."

Zach ran to my arms, crying and saying my name over and over again.

George started walking Barry to the door. "We'll get you to the emergency room. Miss Betsy has quite a wild swing there when she needs it."

Oh great, wait until Chief Wilson heard about this. I had just done what I was accused of doing at the library, except Barry lived through it. I'm sure the comparison would be drawn between the two crimes.

"Why did that have to be my daddy, Mom? Why? He wasn't nice at all, and he hit you."

"It's okay, baby. It's okay."

Zach held me tight in his little arms. "Don't let him get me, Mom. Don't let him take me."

*****

Later as I soaked in a hot tub, I thought at least now they had some real charges against Barry. Breaking and entering, attempted abduction of a child and whatever else my dad would think of. Before my bath I sat with Zach until he fell asleep, his homework untouched. I tried to sort out all that had happened over the last couple of weeks. This all started with that darn crocodile cake. Sometimes you just have to come to the conclusion that baking leads nowhere but trouble. The smell of the lavender bath salts drifted through the air as I scrunched down in the tub, letting the warmth of the water seep through me.

Why did someone want to kill Vanessa? Everybody disliked the woman, that was true, but someone must have truly hated her to go that far. Maybe it was some random serial killer who had crept into the library to check the newest Curious George books. No, that wasn't it.

Okay, whoever killed her had to get past the library staff and into the partitioned-off children's section that was closed for painting. I knew that the painters left sometime in the afternoon, so they had to have come in after that. People came in for the meeting at 6:30, so the murder had to have occurred in that time frame. Who was available during that time? Probably everyone who came to the meeting that night. Even the dead Martha Hoffman was around. Of course, even though Martha was dead, that didn't mean she didn't kill Vanessa and then was killed herself by the random serial killer.

I took a deep breath from the steam rising up off the water. There were too many what-ifs in this murder. What if it was Edith out of jealousy? What if it was Damien because of her rejection of him? What if I can't figure it out and end up going to jail for a crime I didn't commit?

I was about to put my head under the water when my cell phone rang. I jumped out of the tub and grabbed a towel.

"Betsy?"

"Hi, Leo."

"Did I disturb you?"

"No, just taking a bath."

"Oh, uh you want me to call back?"

"No. Listen, I'm probably going to have to postpone our weekend for a few weeks."

"Really, that's good to know," he said. "We are about to open hurricane season here, and it looks like this is going to be a busy one. We already have one system in the Gulf, although it's too early for it to really turn into something at this point. We will be charting away on this one, though. Pretty exciting stuff. What's going on with you?"

"Oh, not much," I lied. "I just needed to put off our weekend because I'm still dealing with all of the fallout with finding Vanessa Markham dead."

"Oh yeah, what's happening now?"

I decided to tell him the latest. Better he know now I'd been accused of two murders than later when he visits me in the women's prison.

"Betsy, explain to me just how it is you get yourself so embroiled in these messes?"

"I didn't get myself into this on purpose, you know." This was starting to get me a little angry. Like I would purposely get myself accused of murder?

"I didn't mean it that way. I'm sorry, it's just that ... "

"I know. Oh, and one other thing. Barry showed up, and I knocked him in the head with a frying pan." Silence on the other end.

"Did you ... kill him?

"No, it seems when I really do try to kill someone, I'm not so good at it," I said. "He was trying to take Zach from me. I couldn't let that happen."

"Is there anything I can do to help?"

"I guess just taking a rain check right now is the best you can do."

"Absolutely – and remember that means we are going to have our weekend just as soon as you dodge that murder charge, and, um, possible assault charge."

"And you dodge that hurricane."

"At least we're not boring people," he said

"I wish we were," I replied. "At least we'd be together."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I drove over to Andersonville the next morning, resolved to get to the bottom of all of this. Rocky had called to see if he could interview me as a person of interest for the Pecan Bayou Gazette. I told him by the time our weekly paper comes out, the police would have somebody else for a suspect. Rocky laughed, but deep down I wondered if he believed me. At least he now had Edith's address given to him by Peter so he could send over his last paycheck.

The temperature was rising just a little bit from the week before. Sometimes I felt like the heat creeping in degree by degree was just our way of paying the rent for the incredible springs we were blessed with. In South Texas, spring starts in mid-February and lasts all the way until May. I rolled down my windows, smelling the sweet nectar of the spring flowers, and turned up the radio. I hated to slow down as I neared the fairgrounds on the edge of Andersonville. This town was a little bit bigger than Pecan Bayou, sporting four stoplights instead of our two.

They also had a bigger paper. The Andersonville Register had already hired Peter to cover sports and whatever else they needed him for. It was located on the main street, so I decided to start there and then try to talk to Edith. She wasn't exactly my biggest fan, and me showing up to talk to Peter would undoubtedly make her jealous all over again.

The Andersonville Register was situated in a large gray stucco building on a corner across from the town supermarket. Peter's car, a red Camaro, was parked out front.

"Betsy?" I heard my name as I entered the front office of the Register. I turned, and Peter was sitting behind his desk, much the same as I had seen him day after day in the offices of the Gazette. He had been leaning back, balancing on the back two legs of his chair, chewing on the edges of a pencil. He looked much better than he had at our last meeting, now clean-shaven, showered and looking like the GQ model he should have been.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, getting up from his chair to extend his hand and then returning to it as I pulled up my own chair.