“Darla, has there been any word from the searchers?” Coleman asked.
“Nothing. No sign of her, alive or dead.” She turned away from us to hide her raw emotions. “One of the police officers said we should know something later today.”
I didn’t know how anyone could predict when a body would rise from the depths of a river—if the body was even still in this vicinity and hadn’t been swept downstream—but if it gave Darla some comfort, who was I to open my yap otherwise? “Which officer said that?” I asked.
“Officer Goode,” Darla said absently.
I exchanged a glance with Tinkie. Our local police officer was Johnny-on-the-spot wherever we went. It was time to speak with Coleman about using his badge to check into Jerry Goode.
23
We took our costumes to our rooms and agreed to meet in the parlor to run through the story of Robin Hood that we were presenting. We had a little time to perfect it, and then we’d set out to the list of houses Darla provided. These were wealthy people we could count on for a significant donation toward our worthy goal. I hadn’t anticipated doing a fundraiser, but now that I was involved, I was eager to get after it. Animal shelters were always in need of food, veterinary care, money for spay/neuter surgeries, and a million other things that made living in a cage while waiting to be picked tolerable.
After one run-through of my part in the play, I was comfortable enough to abandon the merry crew and step outside on the terrace for a moment of reflection. The image of Jerry Goode driving away from Clarissa’s house nagged at me in an unpleasant way. Goode’s role in this whole mess concerned me—a lot more than I’d let on to Tinkie. He was a key figure in so many aspects of what was happening in Columbus. He was investigating the woman who’d hired Colton Horn—without any success, I might add. He was investigating the dumping of the cement into the car and Bart Crenshaw’s tumble down the stairs—also without any arrests. It was almost as if he were stalling the investigations rather than looking for the guilty parties. Now he was also in charge of discovering what had happened to Kathleen. If she had been knocked off the boat, this was a murder investigation that he might be deliberately obstructing.
There was a rustle in the lower branches of some thick shrubs surrounding the patio. I froze. The plants formed what was almost a solid wall around the outdoor area, which included a pool, a tiki hut and bar, and a pool house. The rustling came again, as if some creature crept along the ground. It could be a possum, a raccoon, or a dog, or it could be something more dangerous.
I edged closer to the shrubs and tried looking into them, but they were so thick and lush I couldn’t really see past them. I held very still and waited. Farther to my right, the rustling came again.
The creepy sensation that someone was spying on me crept down my back. I hadn’t brought a light or even my cell phone, and dusk had fallen. Night was quickly coming down. The B and B was on a bluff with a stair-like walkway that clung to the side of the cliff and zigged and zagged down to the river, where the Tenn-Tom Queen was tied at the dock.
By rights, no one should be anywhere near Darla’s backyard, which probably meant it was a wild animal I was hearing. Still, the creepy sensation persisted, until I realized it was also possible Jitty had returned to have more fun messing with me. “Jitty?” I waited. “Jitty, if you’re trying to scare me, I’m going to do something awful.” As I looked toward the river, there was only darkness except for the beautiful stars beginning to blink awake.
The sound came again. I moved along the hedge, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever was rummaging in the leaves. In the night, though, I couldn’t see anything. All the creepy stories about hauntings and ghosts that I loved to read about came back to me, and I thought of Kathleen, returning one last time to visit her friend Darla. Except the place Kathleen had fallen into the river was several miles south of here.
I was so deep in thought that when a Texas twang came right behind me, I almost jumped out of my skin.
“Sin doesn’t just happen.”
I whipped around to confront a very young Sissy Spacek, all wide-eyed and cautious. As a fan of horror movies, I recognized her from Carrie. That movie had scared ten years off my life and became a classic trope-setter for future horror movies.
“I don’t want to talk about sin with you.” Even though I knew this was Jitty pretending to be Sissy pretending to be Carrie, I didn’t want any part of this conversation. When dealing with someone with telekinesis, one didn’t take any chances. As if to prove my point, the cocktail I’d been sipping—a very tasty old-fashioned that Harold had made—flew across the patio table and into Sissy’s outstretched hand.
“Good idea. Have a drink,” I said.
“Are you a fanatic about sin?” she asked, her face so pale her freckles seemed electric.
“Nope, not me. I have no quarrel with sin.” The plot of the movie came back to me clearly. Carrie had been abused by her crazy Bible-thumping mother. Then she was abused by the popular girls in high school. Then she lost her mind and burned the school gym down, stabbed her mother in a reimagined crucifixion, and finally burned her own house to the ground, with herself and her mother inside. She was dead, dead, dead. Until that one hand came out of the grave to grab her high school friend, the only survivor of the fire.
Whew! Just remembering all of that had my heart pumping and my feet itching to make a run for
