Killer Market

“Well, now, I don’t think anything just yet. Both of ’em told me that Mr. Austin went back to Ms. Babcock’s for a book he’d left there and that they talked a few minutes and then he went home and she went to bed.”

“Tell the truth and shame the devil,” whispered the preacher.

“But what if they only ran out for doughnuts or to pick up a carton of milk?” argued the pragmatist.

“Then they should have told him, not lied. Look at the mess you got yourself in by not telling the whole truth the first time around,” said the preacher. “You going to do it again? That’s wrong.”

“And stupid,” said the pragmatist.

Okay, maybe it was stupid, but it didn’t feel wrong. I simply couldn’t bring myself to tell Detective Underwood that I’d seen Dixie and Pell returning in his van early yesterday morning. If they hadn’t taken me in Thursday night, I might have had to sleep on the street. How could I repay their hospitality by ratting on them?

“I really don’t have a clue as to what time it was,” I said truthfully. “It could have been ten minutes, it could have been two hours for all I know. Was anything missing from the house?”

“Mrs. Ragsdale says the cleaning lady was there on Thursday after Nolan and the little girl left for High Point. Everything was tidy when she and her husband got there last night. She can’t tell if anything’s gone.”

When you play cards with a bunch of older brothers, you learn to keep a poker face real quick if you don’t want to keep losing your allowance as soon as you get it, so I doubt if Underwood saw any change of expression other than polite interest.

But if Dixie and Pell had gone to Chan’s house and if anything had been taken, I had a feeling that I knew what it was.

16

« ^ » “The pieces of mechanism used to measure time, and kept in motion by gravity through the medium of weights, or by the elastic force of a spring, are called time pieces, or clocks..”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872

I drove back to Dixie’s house with as much ambivalence about facing her as I’d had about facing Underwood earlier.

Golden-bell forsythias and borders of bright tulips marched along the residential streets. Each yard seemed massed in red, pink and white azaleas and dogwoods spread their graceful branches of white blossoms everywhere I turned.

The blue-sky morning was so beautiful that I was filled with a sudden longing for Kidd. It was a day made for horseback riding or canoeing or for just taking a rambling walk through a spring landscape of newly leafed maples, oaks and flowering Judas trees. Not that Kidd was even in North Carolina this weekend, having gone down to the Georgia sea islands for something to do with sea turtles, but it was pleasant to daydream about alternatives to furniture and murder.

Evidently, the Ragsdales felt the same way, for when I got back to the cul-de-sac off Johnson Street, they were there to pick up Lynnette for the day.

“Try to guess who/ is going to the zoo?” she chanted as I walked up.

“What a great idea,” I said, half wishing the Ragsdales were friends who would invite me along.

Our state zoo is state of the art, the first natural-habitat zoo in the country, with restraints on human visitors but few visible ones on the wild animals. Located in Asheboro, at the northern tip of the Uwharrie National Forest, the zoo sits very close to the geographical center of the state, which means that it’s only about a half hour or so southeast of High Point.

“Say hello/ to the buffalo,” I told Lynnette as she and Shirley Jane, who seemed like a nice kid, buckled up in the backseat.

“But don’t say boo/ to the kangaroo,” Dixie called from the doorway.

The car pulled slowly away from the curb and we heard the girls’ alternating giggles as they tried to stump each other:

“Grizzly bear?”

“Please don’t stare. Antelope?”

“You’re a dope!”

It was just as well I hadn’t been invited, I decided. Not even the zoo was worth thirty minutes of nonstop nonsense rhymes by a pair of wound-up monkeys.

Inside Dixie’s kitchen—surprisingly plain-vanilla, I realized now, with nothing but purple floor tiles to break the monotony of white cabinets and fixtures—Pell Austin was loading her dishwasher with dirty dishes from the late brunch they had just eaten.

“Did you eat?”

He held out a box of Krispy-Kreme doughnuts, the most delicately delicious doughnuts in the whole world. They’re made fresh at least twice a day and when you bite into one so hot that the glaze hasn’t yet set, you think you’ve died and gone to heaven.

“Just coffee and a banana from Dixie’s fruit bowl,” I said, and yielded to temptation. Even cold, a Krispy-Kreme doughnut is like eating yeasty ambrosia.