answered.
“Hello, is this Diane Fallon?” said a breathy female voice.
“Who is calling?” said Diane.
“This is Christine McEarnest. Roy and Ozella Barre are my parents. I was wondering if me and my brothers could come talk to you?”
Chapter 23
Christine McEarnest wore clothes well. She was slim, with a well-balanced body. She was wearing a shirtdress of chocolate brown polished silk, a wide dark belt, dark hose, and brown platform sandals. Her ensemble looked new. The men with her were less dressy. Her husband, Brian, wore Dockers with a khaki shirt. Her brother, Spence Barre, had on jeans and a denim shirt over a white tee. All three sat on the couch in Diane’s meeting room at the museum, looking solemn. Christine had red-rimmed eyes. Spence kept looking at his watch. Diane sat opposite them in one of the stuffed chairs. They had declined the drinks she offered them. Christine twisted an embroidered cotton handkerchief in her hand.
“I don’t know why Roy Jr.’s late. It isn’t like him,” she said.
This got a derisive grunt from her husband. Christine gave him a sharp look.
“Roy Jr. knows how important this is,” she said. “It was his idea.”
Christine had introduced all of them by explaining what they each did for a living-obviously an important thing to her, a sign that they had left the mountain hollow and made something of themselves. Christine managed a dress shop in Reston, Virginia. Her husband, Brian, worked for the U.S. Geological Survey as a computer technician. Her brother Spence was a medical technician in Knoxville, Tennessee, and her brother Roy Jr. owned an art gallery in Helen, Georgia. They had all done well and Christine wanted Diane to know it, to know that they and, more important, their parents mattered.
She hadn’t needed to convince Diane and certainly didn’t need to justify their existence to her. The truth that people mattered was written in Diane’s DNA.
“We need to get started,” said Brian McEarnest, glancing at his own watch. “We can’t waste Dr. Fallon’s time like this. Roy Jr. will be here when he gets here.”
“I know,” said Christine. “I was just hoping he would be here. I thought he would get here before us. Helen isn’t that far away.”
“You know Roy Jr.,” said Spence. “He gets all absorbed in a painting and time just stands still for him. He’s unaware that it’s ticking by for the rest of us.”
Christine and Spence looked like their mother-brown-blond hair, blue eyes, chubby cheeks. The last time Diane saw Ozella Barre alive, she was standing on her steps waving good-bye as Diane drove off. She was smiling; she looked cheerful. Diane imagined that under normal conditions, her children had their mother’s and father’s cheerful dispositions. Now they both sat looking like the world was ending.
“We don’t mean to waste your time,” Christine said to Diane. “We would like you to look into our parents’ deaths. Roy Jr. told us you are the one who discovered them.”
“He was a little unclear about why you were there,” said Spence. “Wasn’t it real early in the morning or something?”
Diane could imagine that it would be unclear. She doubted if the authorities in Rendell County had given them the whole story.
“Let me start by telling you about that evening,” said Diane. She hoped the events of the previous evening would give them the context they lacked about how Diane entered their parents’ home in the dead of night after they were in bed. She gave them a clear, brief description, from the time she first arrived at the Barre home to pick up the artifacts, to the time she was at their house again, and found them dead.
The three of them sat openmouthed-much like everyone else had when they heard the story. Brian was the first to speak when she finished.
“Slick Massey? Wasn’t that the guy in high school you used to tell me about?” he asked Christine.
“That’s him. He was always a strange no-account, but this is weird even for him,” she said. “Who was the skeleton?”
“I don’t know,” said Diane. “We know she was an older woman with some disabilities, but we don’t have enough information at this time to make an identification.”
“What is the sheriff doing about it? Nothing, I’ll bet,” said Spence.
“Massey and his girlfriend got rid of the bones. The expert the sheriff consulted. .”
“Don’t tell me,” said Christine. “They’re saying the bones belonged to some animal.”
“They are saying the bones are too old to deal with,” said Diane. “Do you know a Dr. Linden?”
“Oh, yes,” said Christine. “He was our doctor for years. He’s a sweetie. You’re not saying he’s the expert? He was in practice when we were little. I thought he’d retired.”
“The sheriff called him in to consult about the bones and to do the autopsies. . ”
“Autopsies?” said Spence, leaning forward. “He was our family doctor, a GP, for chrissake. No wonder Roy Jr. was concerned.”
“As I understand it, he had experience in the army,” said Diane.
Spence issued a derisive hiss. “When? World War One?” he said. “Why is Leland Conrad getting him to do the autopsies and not a real medical examiner? Are they in short supply in Georgia all of a sudden?”
“No, no shortage,” said Diane. “I recommended an excellent medical examiner. But it seems there are very few people Sheriff Conrad trusts.”
“Those people. .” said Christine. She wrung her handkerchief some more. “That’s why we’re here.” She spread out her skirt with her hands. “The folks of Rendell County are good people,” she began the way people did when they were about to tell you just the opposite. “It’s just those Golgotha Baptists. As kids we called them Gothic Baptists. They were that strange-not like the rest of us Baptists at all. I don’t know why they even called themselves Baptists; they were so different from the other churches. Certainly nothing like First Baptist. We don’t mean to trash their church. There’s some good people there, but. .”
“It’s Leland Conrad and the rest of the deacons who got themselves elected to public office,” said Spence. “If they had been content to practice their religion by themselves, instead of trying. .” He threw up his hands, stood up, and walked over to Diane’s refrigerator. “I’ll take that drink, if you don’t mind. Anyone else?” They shook their heads. He opened the door and helped himself to a Coke.
“Look,” said Brian. “We’re just beating about the bush. What we came here for was to ask you to investigate Mr. and Mrs. Barre’s murders. The sheriff just isn’t up to it. You know, with all the forensic shows on TV, everybody in the country knows how to work a crime scene-everybody except the sheriff, apparently. His ‘ignorant and proud of it’ attitude is fine in his personal life, but it has no place in criminal justice. Me and my wife, and Spence here, and their brother, Roy Jr., are very worried that the killer won’t be caught. And now we hear there’s been another murder just like my in-laws’. Can you help us?”
“There are some things I can do,” said Diane. “But I can’t interfere in an ongoing investigation, no matter what I think of the investigation so far. You need to know too that I’ve been forbidden to set foot in Rendell County.”
“What?” said Christine. “By who? The sheriff?”
“Yes,” said Diane.
“Why?” asked Brian. “Can he do that?”
“Because he doesn’t want to be shown up for the ass he is,” said Spence. “Isn’t it obvious?” He took another long swallow of his drink and paced the room.
“What do you need?” asked Brian.
“The autopsy reports, for starters,” said Diane. “The Watsons’ too.”
“I know Kate Watson, their daughter,” said Christine. “She doesn’t like the sheriff any more than we do. Can we ask for the autopsy reports?”
Diane nodded. “If the sheriff balks, you can get a lawyer, or you can ask your parents’ insurance company to request the report.”
