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Neither Jackson Poole's nor Virginia Lee Mincey's death could slow down the inexorable wheels of corporate progress.

I pushed the door of the Yacht Club open. It was quiet inside. Three guys played darts at the back of the room, a few booths held scattered occupants. Four people were seated at the bar, their backs to me. Bucky was hunched over his beer, reading the Const.i.tution's sports pages.

I sat down next to him. He glanced up.

"Want a beer?"

"I've had enough, thanks," I said. "Hard day at the office?"

"Mackey signed off on Jackson Poole and Wuvvy. Both cases are closed, Virginia Lee Mincey responsible for the homicide. That's what you want to know, right?"

"I guess." Hap came over and stood in front of me. "Hey, Callahan," he said. "Whatcha having?"

"Just a gla.s.s of water," I said. He nodded, filled a gla.s.s with crushed ice from the cooler, and filled it up with water, put it in front of me, then wandered away down the bar.

"Where'd she get the hose?" I asked.

"What?" Bucky looked startled.

"The hose," I repeated. "The one she hooked up from the van's tailpipe. Wuvvy didn't have a yard. She lived in a store. Where'd the hose come from?"

Bucky drummed his fingertips on the scarred wooden bar. He shook his head and made a tsk-tsk sound. "Wuvvy had a water bed. You fill up a water bed with a hose, right?"

Maybe I wasn't so clever. "I didn't think about the water bed."

He sipped his beer, wiped away a fleck of foam from his upper lip.

"It was a suicide," he said, enunciating each word. "No doubt about it. I saw the autopsy report. No trauma to the body, nothing. Some pills in her system. Wuvvy liked her pharmaceuticals. Everybody knew that. Face it, Callahan. Wuvvy killed a guy and she knew she was going back to prison. So she hooked up that hose, fired up the van, popped in a Rolling Stones tape, and then went off to sleep. That's all there is to it. I swear. You know I wouldn't agree to closing the cases if I didn't believe that. Right?"

His dark eyes searched my face for some sign of trust.

"I guess," I said reluctantly.

Bucky swiveled around on his barstool so that he was facing the window. I turned, too.

"You see all the action next door?" he asked.

"How could I miss it?"

With his beer bottle, he gestured down the bar at Hap, who was loading a cooler with bottles of beer. "A brewpub right next door, that's gonna take some business away from the Yacht Club. Wonder how Hap feels about that?"

"Whole different kind of customer," I said. "Yuppies. They'll flock here from Virginia-Highland and Buckhead. Maybe Hap will get some spillover. You said yourself, it's a good thing for the neighborhood."

"It is," Bucky said. "Definitely."

Cheezer came in the front door then, but he didn't really come inside. Just stood there and gave me a half-wave.

"I gotta go," I told Bucky. "What happens now? To Wuvvy, I mean."

He knew what I meant.

"We couldn't find any next of kin. h.e.l.l, she killed 'em all, her husband and her stepson. We found a lawyer's business card in with all that s.h.i.t of hers. Turns out she's an old friend from Hawkinsville. She's taking care of the arrangements."

"Will there be a memorial service or something?" It was the last thing I wanted to do, go to a funeral for Wuvvy. Still, it's the Southern way.

"Don't know," Bucky said. "We released the body to a funeral home down there today. Dubberly Brothers Mortuary."

I found a pen in my purse and wrote down the name. "I could call there. Or I could call the lawyer. Ask her about a service. What's her name?"

He scratched his chin and his eyes got vacant. "h.e.l.l, I don't know. Call me at the office tomorrow, I'll see if I can find the business card."

"What about all of Wuvvy's stuff?" I asked. "That's why she called me in the first place. To see if I could get her stuff back."

"It goes in the Dumpster, I guess. That friend of hers said we should just dispose of it."

"All of it?" I couldn't believe it. "Wuvvy talked like she had some really valuable rock 'n' roll memorabilia."

Bucky snorted. "There's nothing anybody but Wuvvy would think was valuable in that s.h.i.t-unless there's some underground market for Fritz the Cat roach clips and boxes of those yellow smiley-face b.u.t.tons."

"Can I take a look?" I asked, glancing toward the door. Cheezer was leaning up against the window, playing the patient martyr.

"There's nothing there," Bucky said.

"I just want to look."

"Come by in the morning," he said finally. "I'll have the lawyer's name for you by then."

15.

I heard the chorus of snores as soon as I opened my bedroom door. Two tiny dark heads were nestled on my pillows, my favorite quilt pulled up around their noses. Miss Baby had bobby-pinned spit curls covering her head, a pink chiffon scarf tied around her coiffure. Miss Sister, always cold, had a pale blue crocheted cap pulled down around her forehead. Baby's snores were wheezy and high-pitched, Sister's deeper, like a tree frog.

I got a pillow and another quilt out of the linen closet in the hall and made myself a bed on the fold-out sofa in the den. I was a licensed private detective, intelligent, intuitive. Someday I'd have to solve the mystery of why I spend so much time sleeping on makeshift beds in my own home.

The Easterbrooks sisters apparently slept sounder than I did. By the time I woke up Friday morning, I could hear soft singing and cooking sounds coming from the kitchen.

I got dressed and went to investigate.

Baby stood on an old wooden c.o.ke crate in front of the stove, wrapped neck to ankles in one of Edna's old gingham ap.r.o.ns. She had three burners going, a black skillet full of sausage patties that sputtered and sizzled, a bubbling pot of grits, and a third skillet into which she was cracking eggs.

She dipped a spoon in the grits pot. "Over my head," she sang softly, "there's trouble in the air."

Sister stood nearby at the counter, deftly slicing cinnamon-and-sugar-dough pinwheels and patting them into place on a cookie sheet. "There must be a G.o.d somewhere," she said, joining in Baby's song. Sister was dusted with flour from fingertip to elbows, her face smudged with b.u.t.ter and cinnamon, and she patted her foot as she sang. She beamed when she saw me standing there, listening to their gospel concert.

"Good morning, sleepyhead," Sister said. "Did you ever taste my cinnamon rolls before?"

"My cinnamon rolls, you mean," Baby corrected her sharply. "I'm the one Mama gave the recipe to."

"You the one makes cinnamon rolls taste like roofing shingles," Sister said. She shook her head disapprovingly. "Baby got a real heavy hand with dough. Can't make pie crust to save her soul."

Edna did not look up from where she sat at the table, her head buried in the morning paper.

"I take it you didn't win the ten thousand dollars last night," I said, pouring myself a cup of coffee and sitting down across from her.

"No," she said, getting up and going to the refrigerator. She stood there with the door open, poking around among the milk cartons and the foil-wrapped containers of leftovers.

I helped myself to the section of the newspaper she'd abandoned.

"This is a nice surprise," I said. "If I'd known y'all were planning a pajama party last night, I'd have come home earlier."

Baby and Sister exchanged guilty looks.

"Edna invited us," Sister said. "'Cause, uh, it was so late when we got home last night, she didn't feel like going all the way over to the senior citizen high-rise."

"The girls are working this morning," Edna said, closing the refrigerator door and moving over to the pantry. I heard her rearranging cans and boxes of cereal, but could see only her polyester-clad rear end, protruding through the open pantry door. "Mrs. Draper asked for them, special."

"Okay," I said, turning rapidly through the newspaper pages. "I've got an errand to run this morning, then I'll check in with you."

She came out of the pantry with a bag of flour in one hand and a can of tomato sauce in the other. "What kind of errand?"

I looked up at her and nearly did a double take. Her right cheek was crimson, her right eye blackened and swollen, and there were long, bloodied scratches along her right cheekbone.

"What happened to you?" I asked, rushing over to get a better look.

"Nothing," she said, ducking back into the pantry. "Leave me alone. I'm fine."

I took her by the shoulder and turned her around to face me. She winced at the touch of my hand on her arm.

"You're not fine," I said, alarmed. "You're hurt. What happened, Ma?"

She tried to wriggle out of my grip. "I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and I b.u.mped into the doorway, that's all."

I let go of her arm, but turned to the girls.

"Miss Baby, Miss Sister, you better tell me what happened to Edna. I know y'all didn't spend the night because it was so late. Tell me the truth," I said sternly. "Did Edna get you all mixed up in a fistfight at the Knights of Columbus?"

Baby turned off the fire under her pots and pans and put a lid on the grits pot. "Better go on and tell her. You know the Bible says the truth shall set you free."

Sister wiped her flour-flecked hands on a dish-towel. "Your mama was robbed!" she said. "That white boy put a knife in her face and called her ugly names and liked to have slapped her into the next county."

"We seen it," Baby said. "Sitting right there in your driveway, in Edna's car. He didn't see us, though, 'cause it was so dark. He'd have seen us, we might all be dead and in our graves."

"Dear G.o.d," I whispered, setting my coffee cup down with shaky hands. "Tell me what happened."

Edna's shoulders drooped.

"All right. I'll tell you. But promise you won't get excited."

"Go over there and sit down," I said, pushing her toward the kitchen table.

She looked even worse sitting there in the full daylight by the big window that looks out onto our backyard. Now I could see that her right hand and wrist were bruised and cut, and she had bruises on her neck.

Edna twisted the worn gold wedding band on her left hand.

"I was mugged," she said finally. "Last night. He got my purse. And my winnings. I won the second game of the night. Two hundred dollars."

"Stole her good pocketbook you done give her for Mother's Day, too," Baby said. "That pretty leather one with all them zipper pockets. Took that knife and cut the strap like it was b.u.t.ter."

Edna looked like she'd done some crying last night and could break out again at any moment. "He took the St. Christopher's medal your daddy gave me right before he died." She looked up at me defiantly. "You might as well know. They got my gun, too. It was in my purse."

I looked over at Baby and Sister. "Are you girls all right? He didn't hurt you?"

"No, ma'am," Sister said. "Edna was just going to run in the house and hide that money she won before she took us home. She was just walking to the back door when that boy jumped out of the bushes and started grabbing at her."

"We scared him off," Baby said proudly. "Rolled down the windows, and me and Sister screamed some bad words at that boy. Honked the horn, too."

"Thank G.o.d they were there," Edna said. "He really could have killed me. He was crazy. Hopped up on drugs, I reckon."

Her hand wandered to her neck, to the place where she'd always worn the little gold chain that held the St. Christopher's medal. Now it was ringed with bruises.

"I guess I was thinking about how I was gonna spend that two hundred dollars, because I didn't even see this little p.i.s.sant until I was halfway to the back door. G.o.dd.a.m.n punk. Had a little old paring knife he must have stole off some other old lady. He kept jabbing it at me, telling me to give him my purse."

I reached out and touched the swollen cheek, and she flinched in pain. "Why didn't you just give him the purse?" I asked.

"It was my purse. My money. My gold medal. He didn't have any right to it," Edna said stubbornly. "Besides, he called me b.i.t.c.h. 'Hand it over, you old b.i.t.c.h,' he said. It made me mad. I jerked my purse away and tried to run. I was hollering my fool head off, thinking Mr. Byerly across the street would hear me. I forgot he's deaf as a post."

"What happened next?"

"He caught me, of course," Edna said wryly. "My running days are over. He like to have ripped my arm out of the socket yanking that purse. And when I still wouldn't let go, he slapped me, then he socked me, right in the face. I fell down then or he never would have got my purse away from me."

"That's when we started the commotion," Baby said loudly. "Wish I'd have had a gun on me."

"Thank G.o.d you didn't," I said fervently. "He could have killed all three of you. Why didn't you call the cops? Why didn't you at least tell me when I got home?"

"She wouldn't let us tell," Sister said, shaking a finger at Edna. "I tole her and tole her, we shoulda called the police. But she told me to mind my own business. Best we could do was make her let us spend the night. Me and Baby, we watched her good until you got home."

Edna looked down at her hands, which were scratched and bruised. "It's embarra.s.sing," she said in a low voice. "I felt like a fool, all b.l.o.o.d.y and boo-hooing." She bit her lip. "I wet my pants, I was so scared. After Baby and Sister ran him off, at first I was scared, then I was mad. Then I wanted to die. I felt old, Callahan. Old and helpless. Useless. Baby and Sister made me a hot toddy, then I took a bath and I got in the bed, but I didn't sleep until I heard you come in. Tell you the truth, I didn't sleep much, period, last night."

I reached for the phone. "We've got to report this to the cops. First the other night with the Peeping Tom, now this. I'm sorry, Ma. I should have seen about the burglar alarm right away. It just kinda got away from me."

Edna pulled the phone back toward her side of the oak table. "Don't call the cops."