with two battered metal desks and a pair of fairly new four-drawer metal file cabinets. There were also a couple of phones, one on each desk, an IBM Wheelwriter and a personal computer. A swinging door led from the dining room/office into the kitchen, where Haynes found a paring knife with a sharp blade.
He hurried back to the staircase closet. The tape had been removed from the woman’s mouth and she now sat leaning against the closet wall, her feet still bound, her hands still behind her back. She stared up at Haynes and whispered, “My God.”
Erika McCorkle said, “Mr. Haynes, may I present your former stepmother, Letitia Melon. Letty, this is Steady’s son, Granville.”
Chapter 16
Although no great beauty, Letty Melon was a noticeably pretty woman in her early forties with short dark hair, eyes of such a deep blue that they verged on violet and the legatee of a Virginia drawl that she used to announce her immediate needs.
Her most pressing need, she said, was to pee. After that she would need a drink. “There’s got to be a bottle around here someplace,” she said. “If you all can’t find any in the kitchen, look behind the books in the front room where he used to keep his emergency ration.”
By the time she rejoined Haynes and Erika McCorkle in the kitchen, they had found a bottle of Scotch whisky in the bookshelves behind Shirer’s
Letty Melon sat down at the pine kitchen table, reached for the bottle of Scotch and poured a measure into a glass. She drank it off in two swallows, sighed appreciatively, removed a package of Camels from her old flight jacket and lit one with a gold Zippo that Haynes knew to be a collector’s item worth at least a thousand dollars. She inhaled deeply, blew the smoke out and said, “There were two of them.”
Haynes nodded.
“They had sacks over their heads with eyeholes in them.”
“Cloth or paper?”
“Paper. Brown paper. Grocery sacks.”
“Which grocery?”
“Safeway.”
Erika placed two cups of coffee on the table and said, “There’s sugar but no milk or cream.”
“I’ll just sweeten mine with a drop of this,” Letty Melon said and poured a taste of whisky into her cup. After sipping the Scotch and coffee, she said, “I knew they were here the moment I stepped through the door.”
“How?” Haynes said.
“The place was warm. As warm as it is now. That meant somebody’d turned on the heat. So I did what you did. I called to see who was home. When nobody answered, I went from the living room into the dining room that looks like some kind of office now, and then on through the swinging door into the kitchen. And here they were. I started to yell, but one of them grabbed me and the other slapped that tape across my mouth. Then they taped my hands and feet and locked me into that little old stairway closet and, damn, I got mad.”
Erika McCorkle sat down at the table with a cup of coffee. She offered the sugar bowl to Haynes, who put a spoonful of sugar into his cup, stirred it slowly and said, “What time was this?”
“A little after eight.”
“You didn’t see a car?” Haynes said.
“There wasn’t any unless it was in the barn where Steady keeps that old Cadillac of his.”
“Was the front door locked?”
“It was locked.”
“But you had a key?”
“Of course I had a key.”
“They say anything?”
“Not a word.”
“Were they tall, short, fat, skinny, what?”
“Tall.”
“How were they dressed—other than the sacks?”
“Jeans. Running shoes. Down jackets, one brown, one blue. And gloves. They both wore gloves.”
“What kind?”
“Driving gloves. You know the kind that’re half leather and half knitted with open backs just below the fingers?”
Haynes nodded. “Did you hear them leave?”
“No.”
“Where do you live?”
