TheCart Before the Corpse Read online

  I had the feeling I’d be expected to eat even if I’d stopped at a fast food joint twenty minutes earlier and scarfed up double cheeseburgers, and that she wanted to talk. So did I, but not necessarily tonight. My stomach rumbled. I was hungry. My peanut butter crackers had worn off a while back.

  I followed her into an entrance foyer. Not much furniture, but the Oriental rug on the floor looked like a valuable antique. So did the one that covered the floor of the living room, the one I could glimpse in the dining room, and finally, the one in what I assumed was the library, since every wall held floor-to-ceiling bookcases stuffed with books. Even at a glance I could tell the books weren’t fancy by-the-yard editions, but well-worn paperbacks and hard covers. I could see the brightly colored spines of mysteries and detective stories. One of the larger books read Murderers, Inc.

  “Hope you don’t mind eating in the kitchen,” she said. “I don’t use the dining room except at Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

  I felt something warm around my feet and looked down to see a gigantic tabby cat the color of butter, oozing figure eights around my ankles. When I reached down to scratch his head, he rolled over on his back and offered a rotund belly. As I raised my head, I saw a big gray tabby on top of a leather recliner by the fireplace, while a small black cat crouched on the windowsill and a gray cat sat neatly curled on a cushion on the hearth. They all watched me intently. I wondered how many others were lurking out of sight.

  “Just the four,” Peggy said.

  I was startled.

  “I’m not reading your mind. People always wonder.”

  “I like cats.”

  “I’m glad. They own the place and generously allow me to have company if it’s willing to pet them. The one making amorous overtures to your paddock boots is Sherlock. He’s dumb but sweet. The old guy on the chair is Dashiell. He runs the joint. That’s Marple on the windowsill and Watson on the hearth.”

  “Do they actually detect?”

  “You’d be surprised. Now, what would you like to drink? Beer? Wine? Bourbon?”

  “Actually, I’d prefer iced tea.”

  “Sweet or unsweet?”

  “Unsweet with lemon and artificial sweetener if you have it. These hips do not require sugar to spread.”

  “Woman after my own heart. Sit.”

  The kitchen cabinets had been redone at some time, but retained a dark patina. The appliances, however, were brand new steel jobs.

  In less than five minutes we were drinking iced tea and eating thick home cured ham and extra sharp cheddar sandwiches while the cats regarded us solemnly from the archway into the library.

  “I’m so sorry about Hiram. He’s only been living here eight months, but I was fond of him,” she said.

  “I’m sure he was fond of you too. When that sheriff finally got hold of me, he said he’d tell me the details tomorrow when I see him, but he did say you’d found him and that it was a freak accident.”

  She set her iced tea glass down so fast it splashed on the butcher-block table. “That man is an idiot. I found him all right. But it was no accident, freak or otherwise. I’m afraid, my dear, your father was murdered, and very nastily, too.”

  Chapter 4

  Sunday evening

  Merry

  Ooookay. People I know don’t get murdered. Certainly not my father. He could drive anybody up the wall, but not to the extent that they’d kill him.

  “I’m not crazy,” Peggy Caldwell said. “I do not have Alzheimer’s. I saw what I saw and know what I know. Somebody killed your father, Merry. The sheriff doesn’t want to deal with it because this county is supposed to be an All-American, crime-free, real-life Mayberry, at least in the press releases and the political speeches. That’s the way the governor likes it. Ham Bigelow. From one of this county’s founding families. Born and raised in the county seat. He still keeps a home in Bigelow, and a lot of his relatives live there.”

  “My father was killed in a break-in? Burglary gone bad?” That, at least, was feasible.

  “Not at all. Not in the way you mean.”

  “An addict looking for something to sell?”

  As a horse show manager and horse trainer I’m not unfamiliar with drugs. In some rural communities, cooking shake-and-bake crystal meth is easier, cheaper, and nets more profit than moonshine. Of course, it’s also a whole bunch more dangerous to cook, but I guess if you’re hooked on the stuff and can’t get an honest job, you’ll risk it.

  There’s also cocaine, marijuana, and crystal meth in the horse show world. The drug of choice generally follows the socio-economic level of the user. The rich and their progeny use cocaine and smoke pot. The grooms and stable hands tend toward crack and crystal meth. Of course the real drug of choice, at least in the south, is good ole demon bourbon.

  “I doubt even a hard-core addict would have thought to find drugs in Hiram’s barn,” Peggy said.

  “So . . . his . . . body wasn’t in his apartment downstairs?” It stabbed me in the gut to say it that way.

  “I found him on the floor of his workshop out at the farm.”

  “He must have had a heart attack or a stroke.”

  She took a deep breath. “You’re too tired to deal with what I’m trying to tell you, tonight. I’ll show you downstairs and let you get some sleep.”

  “I’m not going to sleep until I know what this is about. Please, just tell me all of it and get it over with.”

  “If you’re sure.” She took another deep breath. “I have to tell you a little about the farm so you’ll understand why I went out there. When you drive up to Hiram’s place, you’ll see that the gravel road up from the main road twists around enough hairpins to put up pin curls on a giantess. When it’s mucky, even a careful driver can slide off the hillside and roll up in a ball at the bottom of the hollow. Friday night we had a frog-strangler of a storm with tornado and flash flood watches. Bad winds and rain all night long.”

  “Hiram said he owns . . . owned . . . ” I hesitated, my throat working.

  “It’s all right to speak of him in any tense that makes you comfortable,” Peggy said gently.

  “He said he had some woods and thirty acres of flat pasture, with room for a driven dressage arena that’s eighty meters by forty.”

  “That’s right. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been to Cade’s Cove, up in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, but Hiram’s farm was a smaller version. You wind up about three quarters of a mile of twisty gravel road clinging to the side of the hill, then suddenly at the top it opens up into a small plateau. Open pasture with woods around the edges. Like a giant hand squashed it down. The people who owned it before raised cattle and sheep.”

  I nodded.

  “I wasn’t surprised when Hiram didn’t come home Friday night. Nobody in his right mind would drive down that road in the dark in a driving rainstorm. I assumed he’d bedded down in his workshop or the stable. I didn’t worry when I couldn’t get him on his cell either. Reception’s iffy up there in bad weather. But after the rain cleared out on Saturday morning, I expected him home for breakfast, even if he still couldn’t call me. We were planning to drive to Bigelow to hit some estate sales and antique shops. When he didn’t come by ten, I got worried and drove up there. When you’re our age, you learn to check on your friends when you don’t hear from them regularly.”

  She sniffed and turned her head away. Interesting that she’d said she was expecting him ‘home.’ My father had a way with women. I wondered if he’d had his way with Peggy. “I found him in his workshop,” she repeated.

  Chapter 5

  Sunday evening

  Merry

  “When Hiram first bought the place, the only structures still standing were a decrepit old house trailer not fit to live in, sitting across the pasture from the main road, and a big old barn that needed cleaning out, shoring up, and some paint, but was still structurally sound.” Peggy lifted her shoulders. “We build stout barns in this part of the world.”

>   “He turned it into his stable?”

  Peggy shook her head. “Actually, as soon as possible he built a nice new stable behind it, and fixed up that old barn to use for storage and a workshop for the carriages.”

  I nodded. Hiram could fix anything on a carriage or harness that rusted or broke or rotted, and loved doing it. Most fathers teach their children to hunt or fish. Mine taught me to hammer brass tacks into leather upholstery. I felt my eyes tear and coughed, but Peggy saw what was happening and laid her hand over mine.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather do this tomorrow morning?”

  I shook my head. “I need to know.”

  Peggy nodded. “As long as you’re certain. You must be completely worn out.”

  “Better worn out than worried sick.”

  “Very well. The old barn is impossible to light properly, but Hiram put in a bank of fluorescents over his work bench against the right wall and suspended another bunch of fluorescents down the center over the area he used to work on the carriages. He always had two or three in various states of repair, and whatever he was working on at the time in the center where he could see what he was doing.”

  I wanted to scream, Get on with it!

  “He had one of those great big fancy carriages under the lights you know, the kind they use in downtown carriage rides in Atlanta or to carry the bride and groom after the ceremony?”

  I nodded. “A vis-à-vis.”

  “That’s it! That’s what Hiram called it. Because the people sit face to face. ”

  Come on, lady.

  “It was leaning over on its left side, like a car that falls off the jack when you’re trying to change a tire?” She looked at me to see if I understood. I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists under the table, but simply nodded.

  “I called out to Hiram, and when he didn’t answer, I got the strangest feeling.” She looked away from me and brought her fist up to her mouth. “I knew. I just knew. That’s when I saw him.” She took a deep breath and met my eyes. “I wasn’t far wrong about the car and the jack. He was on the left side of the carriage by the front wheel. It’s nearly as tall as I am and forged of iron and steel. Weighs a ton. Looked as if he’d been trying to worry the wheel off the axle and the jack had come loose just as the wheel fell right across his throat and cut it.”

  I was afraid that ham sandwich Peggy had fed me was going to come back up, so I took a big swig of iced tea and gulped. Peggy didn’t notice. I suspected she was seeing that scene over again in her mind. Her eyes were full of unshed tears. I was way beyond tears and into plain numb.

  “I dropped onto my knees beside him and tried to move that blasted wheel, but I couldn’t budge it. I shoved and shoved and . . . even though I knew it didn’t matter anyway. His face . . . ” She raised her eyes. “My Ben died of a heart attack out in the garden. I found him too. I knew then just like I did with Hiram. I’ve always hated it when people say somebody’s gone. But that’s what it’s like, you know? The spirit, the person that was there inside that body is just . . . ” she spread her hands. “Gone.”

  “I understand,” I said, voice breaking.

  “Cell phone reception was back up to normal outside the barn by then,” Peggy continued. “Nine-one-one promised to send a state trooper right away. In this part of the county that means half an hour easy. I told them the ambulance could take its time, but they probably didn’t believe me. I went back in to sit with Hiram while I waited.” She glanced away as though embarrassed to look me in the eye. “I’m afraid I called the blasted man everything except a child of God for getting himself killed in a stupid accident that way. He was strong and healthy and had plenty of good years ahead of him. Then I saw I was kneeling in a pool of blood still seeping into the dirt floor from under his head.”

  I nearly collapsed. Peggy Caldwell had now gone to the far side of ‘Way Too Much Information.’ Trying to steady my dizzy brain, I went to a very polite mental tearoom and found myself thinking, bizarrely, Poor woman. Must have been terrible for her.

  Peggy looked me straight in the eyes. “That’s when I knew he’d been murdered.”

  Chapter 6

  Sunday evening

  Merry

  “It was just a stupid accident,” I told her. “You said yourself the jack had slipped out from under the carriage and the wheel had fallen across his neck. Of course there was blood.” My father’s blood. I prayed he’d been unconscious from the moment the wheel fell, hadn’t struggled against that terrible pressure against his throat. I dropped my face in my hands.

  “But it wasn’t, don’t you see?” Peggy said. “There was blood from the wound in his throat, but not a great deal. It hadn’t severed any veins or arteries. There shouldn’t have been blood from under his head too.”

  “He hit his head when he fell back, obviously.”

  Again she shook her head. “That floor’s packed dirt. He didn’t fall far, and there was nothing sharp to cause bleeding.” She reached for my hands and held them so hard I gasped. “That’s not all. His body was all wrong.”

  I was definitely coming to the conclusion that she was a whack job.

  “Stand up, Merry.” I stood. Best to humor her. “Now, kneel down beside the table the way you would if you were trying to remove a tire.”

  I hoped she wasn’t planning to bean me over the head or push the table over on me while I was down there, but I did as she asked.

  “Lean over against the edge of the table. Where does it hit you?”

  I could prop my chin on the edge. As I did I noticed four cats sitting side by side in the doorway watching intently as though they understood every word we said.

  Without warning, she shoved my shoulder. “Hey!” I toppled backwards onto my butt with my legs folded under me. She reached down to pull me to my feet.

  “Sorry, but I had to show you. Are you all right?”

  I rubbed my rear end. “Uh-huh.” I backed up a couple of steps.

  “Have some more tea.” She poured my glass full and shoved the lemon dish to me. She turned in her chair, picked up a stack of papers from the kitchen counter, shuffled through them and handed one to me. “I’m sorry to show you this, Merry. It’s Hiram. Don’t look at the face. Look at the position of his body.”

  Of course I looked at his face. He didn’t look dead to me. He looked like my father, stretched full length on the dirt and not quite asleep. The wheel didn’t look like an instrument of death either. “What am I supposed to be seeing?” I asked. I touched his face as though I expected it to be warm.

  “When you fell over just now, what happened to your legs?”

  “I didn’t fall over, you pushed me over, and they folded up under my butt, of course.”

  “So why didn’t his?”

  I stared at the photo. He lay on his back, full-length, arms at his side, legs straight with his toes within an inch of the axle where it dug into the dirt. “I don’t know. Maybe he was standing up when the wheel fell off.”

  She made a sound in her throat. “If he’d been standing up and conscious, he’d have jumped out of the way. If he’d been kneeling the way you were, he’d have been holding the spokes of the wheel to lift it off and his knees would have folded under him when he fell backwards. If he’d fallen the way you did, that wheel was tall enough to land across his forehead, not his throat.”

  “You’re saying someone laid him out,” I said. I could feel my heart racing. I did not want to believe this woman, this stranger. An accident I could handle. Barely. A murder? No way.

  “I’m saying someone came up behind him and hit him on the back of his head, which bled the way scalp wounds do, then laid him out on the floor and dropped that wheel on his throat to make it look like an accident.”

  “What do the police say?” I stared down at the photo on the table in front of me. “And how did you get this picture?” She handed me the stack of photos from her lap. “I always carry my digital camera with me in the car. I’m a bird watcher of so
rts, and occasionally I see a new bird. Nobody ever believes me, so I’ve learned to carry my camera for proof. I did have thirty minutes to wait before the state police showed up, so I had time to fill the water trough and to take pictures of every bit of that scene. I watch CSI. I know how to photograph a crime scene.”

  “Weren’t the police upset?”

  The big yellow cat landed splat on top of the table in the center of the photos and sent them sliding in all directions. “Sherlock! Bad cat!” Peggy shoved him off and reached down to pick them up. “Actually, I didn’t tell Chief Royden I took the pictures."

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Why? I didn’t touch a thing, and it’s not as though I plan to post the photos on Facebook, for pity’s sake! I was afraid Amos wouldn’t take me seriously about the murder and mess up the crime scene. And the next thing I knew, here came a state patrol trooper. Word had gotten down to the county seat—Bigelow—and the county sheriff called in the state. That rookie trooper they sent treated me like a total idiot and wanted me to call my daughter Marilee to come get me. Said I might go into shock driving down the hill. As if. He said Hiram’s death was either an accident or a terrible way to commit suicide. And our own Chief Royden gave me a metaphorical pat on the head and told me to let the state handle the investigation, since it’s out of the Mossy Creek city limits.”

  “Suicide?” I yelped. “Hiram was too darned pig-headed to commit suicide, not when I was coming to see him after all these years.”

  “Well, according to that child from the state police, it was either suicide or a terrible accident because the governor won’t admit the people in his home county occasionally kill each other. As if it looks bad on his personal law-and-order record.”