“No, and I know my sister wouldn’t have done it, shot him in the arm like that. If Patsy aimed to shoot someone, she’d hit him dead-on in a killing spot like my daddy taught us. She wouldn’t have had to waste a second bullet.”
The trooper bobbed his head a little proudly, understandingly, like he’d been taught the same.
He stood. “If you can think of anything else, anything at all, please call Post Seven and ask for me.” He handed Flannery a card, turned toward the door, and stopped. “Oh, there’s one more thing: The examiner needs to make sure each family receives, uh, everything.”
“When can we bury her?”
“The coroner is set to release the remains as early as Monday. You can call the funeral home and have them picked up from the examiner’s office. Let me just make sure I have everything. Can you tell me exactly what Patsy was wearing that night?” He opened the pad, waiting.
“An ankle-length lemon chiffon dress and cream-colored Mary Janes,” Mama called down from the stairs behind them.
“Mama.” Flannery whipped around. “You need to relax some before you fall flat on your tail.”
Mama waved away Flannery’s concern and slowly descended. She rested a shaky hand on the trooper’s arm. “She was so beautiful, Trooper, in her grandmother’s pearls. Did you find them, Trooper? Did you find my family’s pearls?”
Trooper Green flipped back through the pages of his notebook, studying. “No, ma’am,” he said, stumped. “None listed here. They combed every inch of the car, and all around in the water where the car rested down by Johnson’s boat dock, Mrs. Butler. There were only her shoes and a compact mirror, I’m afraid.” He looked through the pages again and checked to be sure. “No, ma’am. Nothing’s here.”
“But she had on the pearls I gave her.” Mama hurried over to an end table in the parlor, and plucked up an old photograph of her mother wearing the pearls. “Here.” She shoved the frame into the trooper’s face. “They’re right here on Mama. Same as they were on Patsy. They have to find them,” Mama insisted, looking at Flannery, her old eyes crinkled and filling fast. “I want to hold them and remember my baby just the way she was on her last night with me. Smiling like that, looking dazzling for her dance in her grandmother’s pearls. We have to find them, Flannery. You saw them on her, didn’t you?”
Flannery could only nod, the truth swollen in her throat.
CHAPTER 25
To have lost so much and so fast before the old electric daisy clock in the kitchen could strike ten that morning was more than her mama could bear. That her daughter was dead was insufferable; that she could possibly find another part of her, hopeful.
“Take me there,” Mama begged after the trooper left. “Flannery, take me to the Kentucky so that I can at least search for them. Have the one last bit of her happiness to remind me how she was the last time I held her. Take me to Johnson’s boat dock. I have to find the pearls. For the sake of—”
“No, Mama. You need to try and rest some—”
“I’ll rest when I have all of her. I can’t have my beautiful baby back, but maybe I can have at least that much. What that wicked Kentucky robbed me of, and is still thieving from me.”
Flannery called the doctor to the house. He gave Mama a newer sedative, more powerful, he promised, telling Flannery to make sure they both took it easy.
Flannery went to the hall closet and rummaged through boxes of bullets on the shelf. She found an old carton of .38s pushed toward the back. She looked inside. They were the same size as the one she’d found on Ebenezer back then. And the same kind of bullet that fit into Hollis’s old snub nose.
She rattled the box, and a sickening feeling had her reeling, left her weak and reaching for the doorjamb.
Rubbing her brow, she felt an early truth sink in. “I loved her, too,” Hollis said. Had he been jealous of Danny all along? Loved Patsy more than Danny? “Never stopped,” he admitted.
She tapped the box of bullets, remembering Honey Bee’s gun they’d fit into.
Flannery took another kind of inventory—about Hollis, Patsy’s buried underwear, and the odd bullet she found prom night—and the more she thought about it all and that day back then, the more she worried that Hollis had done something bad, awful, maybe even as dreadful as shooting his own brother. Those brothers must have fought over Patsy.
More awful, Hollis’s snub nose had to be the gun that discharged, the only gun shot—Honey Bee’s gun that the old Henry sheriff had taken for hush, the one he’d passed to his son—and the pistol that had, in an unknown way, done Patsy and Danny in.
The older brother had been packing that night. What Hollis had done, she could only surmise. But what he was hiding was big, and they both knew it.
Exhausted, feeling a headache coming on, Flannery shoved the bullets back on the shelf and went up to her room to lie down. A minute later, sleep grabbed hold.
It was nearly three in the afternoon when Flannery awoke. She hadn’t slept that soundly since she got here, and she yawned and stretched, feeling somewhat better. Then just as quick plucked through her worries again, letting them scrape at her.
Padding down the hall to check in on Mama in the master bedroom, Flannery had an uneasy feeling, a foreboding. Mama was gone.
Calling out for her, Flannery hurried downstairs to the kitchen. But Mama wasn’t anywhere. When Flannery looked outside, she saw that her mama’s old Buick was gone too.
“Dammit.” She cursed herself for not keeping a better eye on Mama and not hiding the car keys. Where could she have gone? Flannery’s heart sank as she called up Mama’s last words. “Take me to the Kentucky.”
Surely she’d just gone to town on errands. Maybe picking up some groceries at Spanks, or something she needed from Chubby’s drugstore. But the doc had promised Flannery, her mama’s medicine was newer, powerful. Mama could hurt herself, or someone else, lit like that, driving those twisted roads out there.
Flannery called the sheriff’s office. Hollis answered, all business. And she was too, the urgency too great. She asked him to send someone to Johnson’s boat dock to look for her mama, then pulled on her sneakers and hurried out the door herself.
Flannery drove to town first. Hurrying into Chubby’s, she looked around the drugstore and in the soda fountain area. The place was full of old-timers drinking coffee, chatting at the lunch counter. It got quiet when they saw her. She walked past two boys playing a pinball machine and over to two men seated at the end of the counter, asking if they had seen Mrs. Butler.
“No, ma’am,” one fella said. “I hope Jean’s okay. Sure sorry about all her troubles. Yours too.”
Flannery looked closely at the man and remembered Smitty Donner was the old hardware store owner. “Thank you, Mr. Donner.”
Mr. Donner nodded. “Never seen such a mess of trouble. Poor Jean, having her daughter murdered like that.”
Flannery winced. “Mr. Donner, Patsy wasn’t murdered.”
“Well, her beau was, and that’s close enough. And folks ain’t talked of nothing else since, worrying who might’ve done it. Lord, there ain’t been a murder here”—he scratched his chin, trying to recall—“well, since Leelum Shrivers shot that hobo for stealing his pig near ’bout thirty years ago.”
Mr. Donner goosed his jaw and looked around at the counter and tables shrewdly like the murderer might be in the store, sitting at this very counter.
The other folks lined up on stools beside him murmured agreement, shifting their eyes Flannery’s way, crackling their red-vinyl seats, stretching for a peek.
“You shouldn’t carry tales,” Flannery chided Mr. Donner, and shot a scolding eye to the others.
A woman poked her head up, leaned out from the end, and called, “Oh, hush, Smitty, you know the sheriff done said his brother probably shot himself.”
“Yeah,” another said. “I remember when Danny got it for squirrel hunting, and his pa always fussed about him shooting up barns. ’Member that, Smitty?”
Mr. Donner grunted over his afternoon coffee.