“Bethany, please.” This was the last thing she wanted, to upset Bethany in any way, to foster more bad feelings.
“No. My being here has become entirely too problematic.”
“As you wish, Bethany,” said Theodosia. She waited until Bethany pulled the door closed behind her, then sat down in her chair and sighed. What in her wildest dreams had told her she could possibly solve Hughes Barron’s murder? She had followed her leads and hunches and ended up...nowhere. If anything, there were more unanswered questions, more strange twists and turns. Now some mysterious object had been found at Hughes Barron’s condominium, something the police had run tests on and found smatters of Bethany’s fingerprints!
Theodosia pulled her desk drawer open and hoisted out the Charleston phone directory. As the book thudded on top of her desk, she quickly flipped through the front pages. Just past the directory assistance and long-distance calling pages, she found the number she wanted. The Charleston Police Department.
She dialed the number nervously, knowing this was a long shot.
“Cletus Aubrey, please,” she told the central operator when she came on the line.
“Which department?” asked the disinterested voice.
“Computer records,” said Theodosia.
“You don’t have that extension?” The operator seemed vexed.
“Sorry, I don’t,” said Theodosia, feeling silly for apologizing to an operator whose job it was to look up numbers.
Cletus Aubrey was a childhood friend. He had grown up in the low-country on a farm down the road from the Browning plantation. As children, she and Cletus had spent many summer days together, romping through the woods, wading in streams, and tying pieces of string around chicken necks and trolling creek bottoms to catch crabs. Interested in law enforcement early on, Cletus had received encouragement from her father, Macalester Browning. And when Cletus graduated from high school, he went on to a two-year law enforcement program, then joined the Charleston Police Department.
“Mornin’, Cletus Aubrey.”
“Cletus? It’s Theodosia. Theodosia Browning.”
She heard a sharp intake of breath and then rich, warm laughter.
“As I live and die, I don’t believe it. How
“Cletus, exactly when did I become Miss Browning?”
“When you stopped running through the swamp barefoot and started running a tea shop. Listen, girl, it
“Very well.”
“Still treating her feathered friends with all manner of seed and millet?”
“She’s extended her generosity to woodchucks, raccoons, and opossum, too.”
Cletus Aubrey chuckled again. “The good things in life never change. Theo,
“Cletus, I have a favor to ask.”
“Ask away.”
“You used to work in the property room, am I correct?”
“For three years. Before I went to night school and turned into a computer nut.”
“How big a deal would it be to snoop around in there?”
“No big deal at all if I had a general idea what I was on the lookout for.”
“Let’s just call it a mysterious object found in the home of a Mr. Hughes Barron.”
“Uh-oh, the old mysterious object search. Yeah, I can probably pull that off. What was the name again? Barron?”
“Yes. B-A-R-R-O-N.”
“The first name is Hughes?”
“That’s it,” said Theodosia
“One of the guys who works in property owes me twenty bucks from a bet he lost on last week’s Citadel game. I’ll harass him and have a look around. Kill two birds with one stone.”
“Cletus, you’re a gem.” “That’s what I keep telling my wife, only she’s not buyin’ it.”
Theodosia was deep in conversation with one of the sales reps at Frank & Fuller, a tea wholesaler in Montclair, New Jersey, when the other phone line lit up. It was Cletus calling back.
“You ain’t gonna like this, Miss Browning,” he began.
“What was it, Cletus?”
“Some tea thingamajig.”
“Describe it to me,” said Theodosia.
“Silver, lots of little holes.”
“A tea infuser.”
“You sell those?” asked Cletus.
“By the bushel,” Theodosia said with a sigh.
Chapter 47
The last six months of sales receipts were laid out on Theodosia’s desk. Haley had tried to stack them, month by month, in some semblance of order, but there were so many of the flimsy paper receipts they kept sliding around and sorting into their own piles.
“This is everything?” asked Theodosia. In an effort to gain some control and a slight appearance of tidiness, she had pinned her hair up in a bun, much to Haley’s delight.
“You look like a character out of a William Faulkner novel,” Haley quipped. “All you need are Drayton’s reading glasses perched on the end of your nose.”
Theodosia ignored her. “These are all the sales receipts, correct?”
“Should be, unless you want me to pull computer records, too.” Haley sobered up. “We don’t need to do that, do we? I think it would just duplicate efforts.”
“If the two of us go through these, we should be able to sort out sales receipts on everyone who purchased a tea infuser.”
Because the Indigo Tea Shop maintained a customer database for the purpose of sending out newsletters and direct mail, customer names and addresses were almost always entered on sales receipts.
Haley looked skeptical. “Which kind? Spoon infusers, mesh ones with handles, tea ball infusers?”
“All of them,” declared Theodosia. “You take these three stacks, I’ll take the others.”
“What about infuser socks?” asked Haley.
“Anything having to do with tea infusers means infuser socks, too.”
“Okay, okay. I’m just double-checking. I’m worried about Bethany, too.” Haley bent diligently over her stacks of papers.
“You’re sure Bethany didn’t fill in here before six months ago?” asked Theodosia. She was concerned about the window of time they were checking.
Haley squinted thoughtfully. “Before last May? No, I don’t think so.”
Two hours later, they had sifted through all the receipts and found, amazingly, that the Indigo Tea Shop had sold almost fifty tea infusers in the last six months.
“Now we’ve got to try to rule some people out,” said Theodosia, overwhelmed at the sheer number of receipts just for tea infusers.
“Such as?” said Haley.
“Tourists, for one thing. People who stopped by for a cup of tea and made a few extra purchases.”
“Okay, I get it,” said Haley. “Let me go through these fifty then. See what I can do.”
