Junebug’s questions-and now Junebug might be the killer’s latest victim.
Mark ambled along beside me, quietly, until we got to the cafeteria. I offered to buy him breakfast; he got a glass of orange juice and an enormous muffin, studded with blueberries. He kept glancing toward the cafeteria entrance as he ate.
I watched him munch down the muffin and drain the glass of orange juice. “You’re handling all this well, Mark.”
“Yeah?” he asked. “I guess. I’m worried about Mom.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did she love Dad or not?”
I’d expected a discussion about Junebug. Trey was still tender territory. “That’s a hard question.” I rubbed my chin. “It’s probably safe to say that she loved him-the him that she married-but she didn’t love what he did. She didn’t love the man that left her and left you.”
He was silent, and emboldened by exhaustion, I went on: “Your father was a very good man in many ways. He was my closest friend growing up. But he left you, and your mother, and the rest of us, without a word or a reason. That’s cowardly, Mark, and I never understood it because I didn’t think your father was a coward.”
He looked up at me with ink-dark eyes, bloodshot with fatigue. For the first time in a long while I looked at Mark’s face. He stood on the verge of manhood now, the peachy sheen of whiskers starting along the jawline, his Adam’s apple becoming more prominent in his thin throat, his voice vaulting through fee gymnastics of change, and the first light in his eyes that perhaps he knew a vast and frightening world lay waiting.
He tore off a chunk of muffin and rolled it into a doughy ball between his fingers. “I think I know who killed Dad,” he said.
I found my voice after a brief search. “Excuse me? Who?”
“Well, Scott told me he overheard something his mama and her uncle Dwight were saying. She’d been talking about how she hadn’t wanted to come back to live in Mirabeau.”
“Well, I would think not, what with all of Trey’s family here and-”
“Listen again, Uncle Jordy. She said come back to Mirabeau. She’d been here before.”
“Her uncle’s from here, Mark,” I explained patiently. “I’m sure she visited here before.”
“Yeah, she did,” Mark said. “She said that she didn’t want to be here because of Ed Dickensheets.”
“Ed? Good Lord, what does he have to do with it? And why didn’t you say something before?”
Mark shuffled his feet under the table, avoiding my stare. “Me and Scott don’t got no proof, and Ed’s a friend of yours and a friend of Mom’s. I don’t think he could kill anybody. But Scott sure thinks he did.”
I breathed deep. “Did Scott say what had gone on between his mom and Ed?”
Mark shook his head. “But I bet he was her boyfriend. She looks like she might have been pretty once.”
I tried to jog down memory lane. I’d thought Nola Kinnard’s face was familiar for the most fleeting of instants when she’d introduced herself in the library. “I sure don’t remember Ed dating a girl named Nola.”
“Maybe it was when you were at Rice. Did he go off to school?”
“He stayed here and took some courses over at Bavary Junior College,” I said slowly. “Then he went to St. Edward’s over in Austin, but he got thrown out. He partied too much and his grades bottomed out. So he came back and started working at KBAV.” I looked at Mark again, the earnestness in his face. This was clutching at shadows.
“Mark, this is ridiculous. I’ve known Ed Dickensheets my whole life and he wouldn’t ever kill a soul, much less your father. Besides, Ed wouldn’t have a motive.” Right, I told myself. Happily married to a bossy Elvis impersonator and her Colonel Parker mother. Wanda and Ivalou were a potent combination to set a man straying to an old girlfriend. Why hadn’t Ed mentioned to me that he knew Nola Kinnard?
Mark’s jaw set. “All’s I’m saying is what Scott said. He thinks Ed killed Dad.” He shook his dark head. “Scott hasn’t thought it out, though. I mean, if he thinks Ed killed Dad to be with Nola, it hasn’t occurred to him that Nola could have killed Dad to be with Ed.”
I did not get to see Junebug. The doctors didn’t want many visitors, and I wasn’t about to try to usurp Barbara Moncrief or my sister. I left a message for Sister that I was headed home and left.
I took Mark home, turned him over to Clo, and ordered him to bed for some badly needed sleep. Tomorrow was his father’s funeral, and he’d need his strength. I sorely ached for a nap myself, but I knew rest would be elusive.
Stopping by the Sit-a-Spell, I ate with Candace. The breakfast bachelor-and-widower crowd was sparse; she’d get much more business at lunch. Smudges darkened the skin beneath her pretty eyes. She didn’t mention my breakdown last night and I was grateful. She’d already eaten and she sipped coffee while I wolfed down a cheese omelette, hash browns, grits, and toast smeared with plum preserves.
I slurped coffee and made a face. “Good Lord. Flavored coffee? I don’t think Mirabeau’s quite ready for that.”
“It’s hazelnut and they’ll develop a taste for it.” I could see Candace was still on her diversify-the-cuisine crusade. If Sister didn’t get back to work at the cafe soon, it’d be the Sit-a-Spell Sushi Bar (or bait shop, depending on your opinion of raw fish as an entree).
“Candace, you are not going to get a fellow in a fishing cap to quaff down hazelnut coffee.”
“Oh, really? What’s that on your head, ace?”
I removed my Mirabeau Bees baseball cap with a smile. We were bantering like it was a normal morning. I tried to remind myself it was only seventy-two hours since I’d sat in this same booth, watching Wanda do her Elvis impersonation in the street while poor Ed hung their pitiable sign. It seemed a decade ago.
Candace surprised me with a kiss on my forehead and I updated her on Junebug’s condition. She frowned. “The shootings are all anyone in the cafe’s been talking about.”
“Speaking of gossip…” Quietly, I told her of Mark’s suspicions of Ed Dickensheets.
“Oh, that’s crazy,” she said. “Ed’s devoted to that wife of his. I don’t see what he sees in Wanda, but if he’s willing to keep that witch Ivalou as a mother-in-law, it must be love. And even if Ed killed Trey, why would he kill Clevey? Maybe we’re dealing with two killers.”
I shook my head. “That occurred to me, but then how do you explain what Scott overheard-the heated discussion between Clevey and Trey? There was something going on between those two, and now they’re both dead. You can’t dismiss what Scott heard and the message written in Trey’s blood.”
“So how do you explain Junebug’s shooting?”
“He’s been investigating Clevey’s death while Franklin Bedloe investigates Trey’s death. Maybe Junebug got too close-found some information the killer didn’t want him to have. The killer decided to eliminate him.”
Candace ran a hand through her thick mane of hair. “Now what?”
“Franklin’ll find out who the hell’s behind this and lock him up forever. Junebug’ll get better. We’ll bury Clevey and Trey and try to get on with our lives.” I poured milk in my too fancy coffee and watched the white cloudy swirl. “And then maybe you and I can take a nice, long trip far away from all this. I’m worn-out and I want to be alone with you.”
Her smile was tender and sly. “Get me alone and you will be worn-out, that’s a promise. Maybe the Bahamas?”
“Out of my wallet’s league. What about Galveston?”
“We’ll talk. I could foot a trip to the Bahamas.”
Candace had money aplenty from her family, but I didn’t want her doling out cash for us. Foolish male pride, I suppose, but no one ever accused me of lacking that particular virtue. “We’ll talk,” I said, smiling at her. Galveston wasn’t at all bad. I’d just convince her of that.
I got to the library and savored the quiet of a Monday morning. Since we’re open Saturdays, we’re closed Mondays. I like when it’s just the books and me. I headed for the back issues of The Mirabeau Mirror. We haven’t gone to microfilm yet (although I have repeatedly begged the city council for the money), and so the chronicle of life in Mirabeau still exists in paper form. I decided to start my search in August, two decades back.
The Mirror comes out once a week, but I remembered they’d done a special edition in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Althea. I started with that yellowing issue. Three dead in Corpus Christi, one dead in Victoria, two dead in Mirabeau, one dead in La Grange: all due to twisters or flash flooding, those merciless twin bridesmaids of hurricanes. Althea had cut a brutal swath up from the defenseless Gulf coast through the river lands between Houston and Austin.
