“So the investigation never went anywhere,” Felicia said.
“The war started, and people had bigger things to worry about,” Josephine said. She pushed her chair back and stood with great effort. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I really must go to bed.” She snapped her fingers at the dogs, asleep on the carpet. “Come along, girls.”
The old woman took one faltering, wobbly step.
Gabe jumped up and offered her his arm. “May I assist you?”
She shrugged. “If you must.”
34
“Miss Brooke, Miss Brooke.” Someone was knocking on the bedroom door. She sat up in bed, awakened from a deep, dreamless sleep. She looked around the room, disoriented. Her mother was in bed beside her. Where was she? And then the knock again. She saw the wallpaper, the blurry green tangled vines and creatures, and it came to her. She was in a bedroom at Shellhaven. She reached for her phone on the nightstand and glanced at the digital time readout. 7:15 A.M.
She jumped out of bed and opened the door. Louette stood in the hallway, barefoot and wild-eyed, with a cotton bathrobe cinched loosely around her waist. Brooke stepped into the hallway and gently closed the door to keep from waking her mother.
“What’s wrong, Louette?”
“It’s Josephine. I think she’s dead. I need you to come downstairs and see about her.”
Brooke felt as though she’d just touched a live wire. “What happened?” She was already moving down the hallway toward the stairs with Louette in tow.
“I don’t know. I found her on the bathroom floor. She must have fallen. There’s blood. And she’s not moving, and she’s not breathing.”
They’d reached the door to the library-turned-bedroom, which was closed, but Brooke could already hear the dogs inside, whining and scratching at the door.
“That’s what woke me up,” Louette said as they slipped into the library, quickly closing the door behind them. “Since I been sleeping in the house, I usually get up at six, because she’s up by then, needing her medicine and such, but today when she wasn’t up, I thought that was a good sign. Maybe she was sleeping late. I went back to sleep, but then I heard Teeny and Tiny barking and carrying on, so I went to check, and that’s when I found her.”
The dogs were in a state of frenzy, barking, jumping at their heels. Brooke saw puddles of urine on the carpet. “Better grab them, Louette, before they wake up the whole house. I’ll see about Josephine.”
Louette nodded, scooping up a dog with each hand.
Brooke walked toward the bathroom door, but as she got nearer, she saw a ghostly white foot, turned at an odd angle, and then the pale, blue-veined leg belonging to the foot and then the other foot, and then, finally, Josephine Bettendorf Warrick.
There could be no doubt she was dead. The body was sprawled on the tiled floor. She was dressed in a moth-eaten gray sweater over a pale yellow cotton nightgown, her body awkwardly twisted, faceup on the tile floor, in a pool of blood.
Brooke swallowed hard, once, twice, and clenched her jaws, fighting the wave of nausea that swept over her. She knelt beside the old woman and tentatively touched the side of her neck. It was cool to the touch, and there was no sign of a pulse.
She heard the library door open and looked over her shoulder. Louette stood motionless in the doorway, a dog tucked under each arm. “I was right. She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“I’m afraid so,” Brooke said, standing and backing out of the bathroom.
“That poor old thing,” Louette said. “It’s all my fault. I never should have given her that wine last night. Not when she was taking that medicine. She hadn’t had no wine since she got sick, so she wasn’t used to it. Mixing it with those pills, that’s what killed her.”
Louette began to cry, and to her surprise, Brooke felt tears streaming down her own face. Louette set the Chihuahuas gently onto the floor, reached out, folded Brooke into her arms, and they stood like that, quietly crying. Teeny and Tiny sat on their haunches, their ears pricked up, small bodies trembling, attuned to the emotions unfolding before them.
Brooke finally pulled away and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of the man’s cotton pajama top she’d found neatly folded in the master bedroom upstairs.
“What should we do?” Louette asked, wringing her hands. “Should I go get Shug?”
“Let me think,” Brooke said, taking a deep breath. But her mind was a whirl of emotions. Panic, dread, grief, confusion. Josephine was dead. What happens next?
“Look here,” Louette said, pointing down at the top of one of the dog’s heads. “Is that blood?”
Brooke scooped up the dog and examined her head. Sure enough, there were several droplets of dried blood on the dog’s face and muzzle, but as she searched the dog’s body, she could find no obvious wounds.
“I bet I know what happened,” Louette said. “Josephine probably got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and it woke up these dogs. They followed her wherever she went. She wasn’t right last night, doped up on those pills and all that wine. Probably she tripped over Teeny, or maybe Tiny. And that’s how she fell and hit her head.”
“You’re probably right,” Brooke said. “I guess you’d better go get Shug. In the meantime, I’ll use the house phone to call the sheriff.”
“Sheriff?” Louette stiffened at the word.
“I think that’s the correct procedure,” Brooke said. “But before you fetch Shug, I think we’re going to need a big pot of coffee ready before I wake the others.”
35
“Carter County Sheriff’s Office. Is this a life-threatening emergency?” The dispatcher’s voice was calm and detached, the exact opposite of how Brooke was feeling at that moment.
“Er, no—that is, the person is already dead,” Brooke replied.
She could hear the tapping of computer keys on the other end of the line.
“Ma’am, can you tell me the manner of death?”
“She’s, uh, ninety-nine years old, and I believe she fell and hit her head.”
“Accidental, then. I see you’re calling from over there on Talisa Island?”
“That’s right.”
“Name of deceased?” More tapping.
“Josephine Bettendorf Warrick,” Brooke said.
“Ohhhhh,” the dispatcher said. “That’s so sad, and I’m very sorry to hear it. Miss Josephine did a lot of good things for this community.”
“Yes, it is a shame.”
“All right, hon. I’m gonna call Sheriff Goolsby, because he was a personal friend of Miss Josephine’s, and I’ll ask him to call you right back. Is this a good number?”
“It’s the only number,” Brooke said. “My cell doesn’t have good reception here.”
“Okay, well, you sit tight while I get ahold of the sheriff. What’s your name, hon?”
Brooke told her.
“I know you!” The dispatcher’s voice warmed. “My niece Farrah works for you. This is her aunt Jodee. Now, you being a lawyer and all, you probably already know this, but y’all just leave Miss Josephine right where she’s at. Don’t try moving her or nothing like that.”
“I promise you, nobody is going to move her body.”
After she’d hung up, Brooke took a few more sips of coffee and waited. She really wanted to call Farrah and check on Henry, but she also didn’t want to miss the sheriff’s call.
She paced around the kitchen, looking out the window for the return of Louette and Shug, trying not to think of Josephine’s lifeless body stretched out on the bathroom floor. Ten minutes later the phone rang, and she grabbed it.
“Sheriff Goolsby here. Is this Brooke Trappnell?”
“This is she.”
“Jodee tells me Miss Josephine has taken a fall and died?”
“Yes. We think she got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and perhaps tripped over one of her dogs and hit her head when she fell. There’s quite a bit of blood.”
“Don’t touch a thing,” the sheriff said sternly. “At all. Are you able to close off that bathroom?”
“Yes.”