Hiding Gladys (A Cleo Cooper Mystery) (12 page)

“I’m not exactly sure but I would think she went wherever the ambulance took Robert Earle. I do know she dropped my car at the Morning Glory and took a cab from there.”

“Well, we were both right to be concerned about what might become of Gladys Walton at the hands of her own children. The Wrightsville Beach police found a clincher piece of evidence.”

“What was that?”

“The Power of Attorney you’ve been telling me about. It was folded in half and stuffed in Robert Earle’s waistband under his shirt, all ready for Gladys’s signature.”

“Well,” I said. “That’s that, then.” I felt something, but I don’t think it was relief.

“It is for me. Especially when you combine it with the gun we found in his room, the one that killed Irene. Plus, his actions since you started testing his mother’s property and his motive … well, it makes a very solid case that he killed his aunt. For all we know, if Gladys had refused to sign his Power of Attorney, he might have killed her too. It’s not like he didn’t try already.”

Gun? He never told me about the gun. That was pretty incriminating. “Can you tell me exactly where you found the gun in his room?”

“I don’t guess it matters now, since for all intents and purposes, the case will be closed. We found it in his sock drawer.”

“Oh. One other thing, Sheriff. Does Robert Earle smoke cigarillos?”

“I don’t know. Why do you ask? Wait—did
you
find cigarillo butts somewhere?” the sheriff asked, annoyed.

“Actually, uh, I did come across them, near the well where Irene’s body was dumped. Does that make you wonder if someone else was involved? If I still should be worried?”

“No. We know about it. I’d say it’s probably a totally unrelated matter. Probably one of the farm workers, a migrant just passing through. I don’t think you or Gladys have anything to worry about anymore.”

“Thanks, Sheriff,” I said and clicked off. It had occurred to me to mention the cigarillos on Shirley’s front seat, but I didn’t. Maybe I would, after my project was safely under wraps.

First thing in the morning, I’d find Gladys. Then I’d feel better.

NINETEEN

Looking for Gladys in
her own home seemed the logical place to start. A simple telephone call to the house would have been easier, but I knew I’d get a runaround if Shirley answered. Maybe I’d get lucky and Gladys would be alone, the dutiful daughter wouldn’t be there.

The first thing I noticed Friday morning when I pulled up in the driveway was the absence of a wreath on her door. Funeral wreaths are a big tradition in the South, especially in small towns and rural areas that receive weekly instead of daily papers. Ivan Thorpe’s pickup was parked behind Shirley’s white Lexus, and Gladys’s car was in its usual spot. Well, it was early yet for neighbors to stop by. I lowered all my car windows to half-mast for Tulip, got out, and went up the porch stairs.

Shirley opened the door to my knock, and waved me in without saying a word. She was still in her Victoria’s Secret pajamas. (Again, my superior powers of deduction, combined with the huge VS on the front of the soft gray jersey set, let me know the brand name in a snap.)

“Hi,” she said glumly.

“Hi.”

“I’m making coffee. Want some?”

“Sure.”

I sat at the table where I’d spent many mornings chatting with Gladys and now watched her daughter as she busied herself with the mindless task. After what I felt was a polite interval, I said, “Sorry about Robert Earle … I think he had a lot of issues … ”

Shirley didn’t answer, just kept spooning grounds into the filter on the coffee maker. I didn’t think she was going to say anything. Then, with no warning, she turned on me so abruptly that she hit the filter tray, sending a spray of hazelnut grounds across the counter. “This is all your fault! My brother’s dead because of you!”

I decided to drop any attempt at ceremony.

“
Me? He was trying to kill me when he fell, Shirley. I interrupted him as he was lying in wait for your mother so he could make her sign your damn Power of Attorney. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Don’t you feel any responsibility here?”

“Of course not. It was you who drove us to do what we did. We had to make sure our mother didn’t cheat us. You just wait. I’m going to talk some more to those detectives in Wrightsville, and when I do, I’ll convince them that you should be charged with murder.”

“Good luck with that!” I said, not feeling in the least as confident as I sounded.

“Yeah, Shirley’s right,” said Ivan, who had creepily materialized in the kitchen. “An investigation will prove that you got rid of Robert Earle because he could prove that you were taking advantage of Gladys.”

I stood up from the table. “I’m not discussing this any further. Actually, I’m here to see your mom. Where is she?”

Shirley gave me a glare that would have flash-frozen a fried turkey and said, “You know full well she’s not here.”

Now it was my turn to act outraged. “Not here? Cut the crap.”

“You cut the crap,” Ivan shot back. “You’re the one who’s known all along where she is. Not us.” Then, directing his words to Shirley, he pointed at me and said, “Don’t let her tell you she doesn’t know where your mom is because she does. She’s got her hidden somewhere and she’s playing dumb to confuse us.”

Suddenly Shirley’s emotional state changed again. This time to vulnerable and scared.

“Hush, Ivan,” Shirley pleaded. “I don’t know what to think. Anyway, this isn’t the time. My brother is dead and I don’t know what to do. What kind of arrangements to make. I don’t know how to do any of this stuff. I need my mother to take care of everything. Like she always has.” She dropped her head in her hands and began to cry.

Ivan softened. “Now, now, baby. Don’t you worry. I’m here to help you. I’ll always be here, unlike your crazy mother. You never could count on her. You know that.”

Good grief. I’d seen this type of manipulation before. Bad guy sweeps rich, naive girl off her feet, gains her trust, takes her money. Granted, most of my experience with such a scenario was from late-night movies, but I could spot a pro when I saw one.

Then an alarm bell went off in the part of my brain that spots trouble. The faint but unmistakable sweet smell enveloping Ivan triggered it.

Cigarillos.

You know how it is in the early morning when fog lifts from a pasture at the edge of some woods, and you can start to make out the individual trees? Well, that was how I felt watching Ivan hold Shirley. The mist had lifted to reveal what was actually there. He was up to something, and it wasn’t just sweet talk.

Shirley’s crying got a little softer. I was just turning to leave when she said, “Today should be one of the happiest of my life. I should be sharing my new marriage with Mom. Instead I’m dealing with death.”

Better to deal with it than experience it, I was thinking before her words sunk in. “What? New marriage?”

Her face brightened briefly. “Ivan and I got married yesterday afternoon at the courthouse. Now he can help me all the time. Apparently, I need it.” Then Shirley’s face collapsed again and she blubbered, “Can you imagine? All my wedding anniversaries will also be the anniversary of my brother’s death.”

I’d be willing to bet ruining all his sister’s future anniversaries wasn’t a goal Robert Earle had ever set himself.

“Now, baby,” Ivan said with a fierce glance in my direction, “you’re just overwhelmed right now—through no fault of your own. But I’m here and I’ll make it all better.”

“I’ll let myself out,” I said, readying myself to leave. If his gaze had been real steel daggers, I wouldn’t have made it out the door.

TWENTY

Parking in my usual
spot in the dappled shade at the edge of the woods, I felt more relief to be finishing a job than I had ever felt in my career. Today was the last day of initial testing for this project, the light at the end of the tunnel was getting brighter and it seemed now that maybe that light wasn’t a train barreling down on me after all. Maybe. My head already ached from my encounter with the newlyweds, Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe. Rubbing my temple I opened the door for Tulip. She crossed the hay field and disappeared into the woods as I followed at a more sedate pace.

As soon as I stepped under the green canopy of pines and hardwoods, the faraway, reassuring throb of two diesel engines at my site acted like balm to my ragged nerve endings.

I had so many questions, and they all seemed to go back to that first day when someone had watched me at the well where I found Irene’s body—someone who knew it was there.

Someone smoking cigarillos.

It worked to my advantage that the sheriff believed Robert Earle to be Irene’s killer; no danger of him shutting down my site for my protection. But was it Robert Earle?

I was no detective and the sheriff didn’t need me to solve—or in this case, upset—his case for Irene Mizzell’s murder. On the other hand, it would be a handy bit of information to know if the real killer was still out there. Especially if his motive was ultimately to gain control of my granite rock deposit.

I had a theory. True, it was all jumbled up right now, but I only needed to untangle it.

Admittedly, some parts of my theory required a rubber imagination and several very big
ifs
. The first big one—if Ivan were to marry Shirley—had now been realized. That led quite naturally to the second: what if something happened to Gladys? Like she turned up dead or committed or in a retirement home? If Shirley convinced her to sign a Power of Attorney, then Ivan would be in a perfect position to take control of everything since he was obviously well on his way to controlling Shirley.

If only I knew what really had happened to Irene. It seemed I should begin with the premise she’d been shot by mistake by someone who thought she was Gladys. She’d been targeted from behind in Gladys’s kitchen in the early evening while the kids were eating out. Yet Robert Earle could have doubled back and shot Irene, believing her to be his mom. He wouldn’t have known about Gladys’s trip since her whole purpose was to get away from him and Shirley.

However, I’d never seen any evidence that he smoked cigarillos and I knew Ivan did. Ivan also struck me as the more logical choice because he’d been in town that day. He’d even told me he’d seen Gladys and Irene together around noon.

No matter how I looked at it, I kept coming back to the fact that with Robert Earle dead, Gladys committed or without power over her affairs, and Shirley completely under his sway, Ivan could conceivably control all the family money.

Okay, there was the matter of the gun found in Robert Earle’s sock drawer. But Ivan had continual access to the house and could easily have planted it there. In my mind, the plan the Walton darlings had hatched to take over their mother’s affairs probably started out to do only that. But once Ivan entered the picture, it turned into a scheme to take control of everything.

All he had to do was encourage two spoiled brats to get a little more gung-ho in going after what they wanted. That made sense. More sense than a son trying to kill his mother.

Of course, no theory is perfect.

For instance, there was still a big unanswered question: if Ivan had sent Robert Earle to Seahaven—while he and Shirley were conveniently getting hitched—how did he know where Gladys was?

I didn’t have a chance to come up with an answer because Tulip shot out of the woods behind me and ran to the clearing ahead, where she greeted Wink with an excited bark. “Hey, purdy girl,” said Wink as he pulled Tulip’s silky ears and patted her muscular sides.

“Wink,” I said, “what’s happening?”

He handed me a hard hat and said, “I’m about to knock heads is what’s happening.” He glared at the sheepish drill crew. Mule and Stick ducked their heads and watched the mud oozing up from the core hole. The last core was being brought into the light of day for the first time since it had cooled from a molten mass some one thousand million years ago.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to spell it out to those boys: don’t leave your truck unlocked.”

“Unlocked?”

I glared at Mule and Stick through squinted lids, then, realizing they wouldn’t be able to detect my full scowl behind my sunglasses, lifted them so they could get the full effect.

“Tool box is locked, man!” Mule yelled over the thrumming, grinding sounds of the diesel. “And Wink has all the data and cores locked in his truck.”

“Yeah!” Stick shouted.

“Don’t matter, you idiots!” Wink shouted back. “Long as each of you got a spare key to my truck hidden in your glove box, someone could find it if they really wanted to.”

“Now that’s really paranoid, man. Maybe you need to see a shrink,” Mule shouted back at Wink. Then he shook his head and turned his attention back to his drilling.

“When did you notice this?”

“This morning’s the first time. I just checked his as I walked by it over yonder,” Wink said, indicating Mule’s truck. “I asked him when was the last time he thought to lock it up and he says, ‘Out here in the woods, man?’ ”

“So they probably haven’t locked up since we’ve been on this job?”

“Probably not.”

“What about the other team?”

Wink shook his head in the negative.

I gave a Marge Simpson growl.

“No harm’s done,” Wink said. “Nothing’s missing. But you never know. We already had trouble with that guy—what’s his name … Robert Earle?”

“
Was
his name. He’s now the late Robert Earle,” I corrected. “Start hauling out those last few boxes of cores. While I log them, I’ll bring you up to date on the continuing drama with the Walton clan.”

After I told Wink the news, we both fell into a troubled silence as we worked. I sat on the tailgate while Wink cracked open box after box of cores in the order in which they’d come from the ground.

I didn’t know about him, but I did some of my best thinking while immersed in a mindless task. Logging cores of granite was fairly rote because the mineralogy changed very little throughout the deposit. Using standard geologic shorthand, my granite was a granite gneiss, or Ggn, and had widely spaced joints filled with milky quartz, or Qz. With each box containing nine feet of core, and most of the cores taken to a depth of at least one hundred feet, well, you see the need for the geologic shorthand.

The morning ground into a hot muggy afternoon. I kept logging, on and on, swatting mosquitoes and mopping sweat. The throbbing and grinding of the drill literally vibrated the bed of the pickup. Diesel fumes enveloped me, disturbed only when a rare breeze stirred the humid air. I was in heaven.

Lunchtime came. Wink, the four drillers, and I had our last lunch together as a team then trooped back through the woods to wrap up the job.

Wink and I fell back into our routine, him cracking open the boxes, me entering them on the log sheet, making notations about weathering, jointing, and any other distinguishing characteristics, when suddenly I stopped dead, mid-log.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“What’s the matter?” Wink demanded. “You okay?”

I blinked, turned to him. “I just thought of something and I sure hope it’s not true.”

“What?”

“Remember I told you Robert Earle tried to make me believe he had another company—one out of Charlotte operating under I.T.N.F. TestCo Group—that offered him an option better than the one I gave Gladys?”

“Yeah. But you said he didn’t have a Power of Attorney signed by Gladys, so it wasn’t worth squat.”

“Yes, but it would result in a huge legal battle and we all know court cases are a crapshoot at best.”

“True … ” Wink paused. “Dang girl, you’re pale as a sheet. Let me get you some water … ”

I held up my hand. “I’ll be okay. Hear me out … ” I paused and took a deep breath. “Wink? What if I-T-N-F stands for Ivan Thorpe and Nash Finley?”

Wink gave me an uncomprehending look.

I tried to explain. “Just like V-S stands for Victoria’s Secret, and G-g-n stands for granite gneiss.”

“I know what an acronym is, and I know who Nash Finley is. Know he’s slicker than a puppy’s peter and twice as nasty, but who’s Ivan Thorpe?”

“Wait. Back the trolley up,” I said. “Why did you say Nash is slick and nasty? How do you know him?”

Wink shrugged. “I’ve worked a few crews for companies where’s he’s been the geologist. Guy has no respect for drill crews, looks down his nose at everyone. Plus, I’ve heard more than one rumor of his jumping claims or at least taking credit for work done by other geologists.”

Obviously I must have looked pretty astonished because Wink added quickly, “Of course, they were just rumors … you never know … ”

My thoughts went racing but I couldn’t concentrate because Wink asked, insistently, “So who’s Ivan Thorpe?”

“Shirley Walton’s new husband.”

He nodded. “Yup. A man in that position could cause a lot of trouble.”

“Yeah. He’s also a pilot,” I added dismally. “The same pilot who first flew me over Gladys’s property when I was prospecting.”

Wink’s jaw clenched. “That ain’t good.”

“No. But I’ve got to keep my feet on the ground here. I can’t go getting all weird and thinking I see bogymen behind every tree. I-T-N-F … hell, those letters could stand for anything—Intercontinental Testing for … Nonprofit Foundations … or, well, anything. Point is, we just don’t know.”

Wink leaned against the tailgate, crossed his arms over his chest and studied the ground. I began to pace. Just then the diesel engine sputtered.

Stick had shut down the drill. Mule walked over to us, dropped a box of core at our feet and said with satisfaction, “That’s the last three feet of the last core hole on this job.”

“Good enough,” Wink told him. “Y’all get the casing pulled and stacked. By that time the boys at the creek’ll be up this way and we can all head back to Raleigh.”

“Okay, Wink. Miss Cleo,” Mule said tipping his hard hat to me as he returned to the rig.

“A pleasure as always, Mule. Look forward to working with you guys again real soon.” I felt my cell vibrate in my pocket and checked it.

“Speak of the devil,” I said to Wink, “and up he pops. Let me see what he wants.”