A Body in the Bargain: A Kate & Kylie Mystery Page 8

  The next time I looked she was at the dessert table and starting up an animated conversation with Daniel O’Reilly, laughing and tossing her striped hair.

  I got up and walked around the park to take a few more pictures. When I came back, Josh offered me a ride home, but I told him that I had one with the Carsons. He said, “Well, your house is right on my way home.”

  I smiled and said, “Well, thanks, but I need to help Kylie get everything to the car.”

  On the way home, William said, “I think Mr. Josh likes Aunt Kate,” and Mark giggled and added, “He kept looking at her when she wasn’t looking at him.”

  “And he wanted to drive her home,” William said.

  “We’re friends, and he’s paying me to do some work,” I told them firmly. “I took some pictures for his newspaper tonight, and I’m going to write some stories for the paper.”

  “Are you going to write about the old lady in the sofa?” Mark asked. “Everybody would read that.”

  “She’s going to write lots of different things,” Kylie cut in. “You know Aunt Kate is a very good writer.”

  “And,” she said, keeping the subject changed, “Aunt Kate is learning to be a very good bargain hunter. We’re going out to the yard sales again in the morning.”

  The next morning was Saturday, and I was up early. I sat on the back steps with my coffee wondering if Sheena QOTJ had invited Daniel O’Reilly over to her child-free apartment for a nightcap. They had still been talking when we left.

  I had started out with the impression that it was Josh Miller she was interested in, but maybe she was that way with all reasonably good looking single men.

  And, of course, I thought, Daniel was closer to her age.

  I finished my coffee and decided to get my photos downloaded and send the ones from the fish fry to Josh’s work e-mail.

  Several of them, including the one with Daniel O’Reilly and the Mayor, were quite good. I wrote Josh a brief e-mail , attaching them. It struck me that we hadn’t discussed payment for photographs.

  Kylie pulled up and honked at a little after eight.

  “You are not going to believe this!” she said when I got into the truck with her.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Flip Tarver is in big trouble ,” she said. “He broke into Miss Merkle’s house late last night. One of the neighbors saw somebody moving around with a flashlight inside and called 911. They went over to Flip’s house, and took him down to the police department, so he must have taken something.”

  “How’d you hear this?” I asked.

  “Well , you remember Jackson, Buddy’s brother?”

  “Of course I remember Jackson.”

  “So, Jackson was out riding around to get their baby to sleep, and he had his police scanner on. He heard the whole thing. He even heard Brenda Breaker say something like ‘He’s got some of her clothes right here on his sofa,’ but then they switched over to using cell phones the way they do sometimes when they don’t want people listening in.”

  She stopped at the corner and handed me the most recent copy of The Register.

  “Look at the classified page for me and get me the address of that one that says Big Multi-Family Sale.”

  It was hard for me to concentrate on the sale when we got there.

  I kept thinking of that odd conversation Flip Tarver was having, and that he seemed to be complaining that he hadn’t been allowed in his sister’s house, but he was going to hear from her lawyer.

  Why would he break in? Surely, Daniel would have let him go in to get something for his sister’s funeral. Wasn’t the house likely to be his, anyway?

  “Earth to Kate!” Kylie said. “I see a dinette set.”

  “I don’t need a dinette set,” I said.

  “It’s cute,” she said, “Sort of retro, and it has all four chairs. And if you get it, we can turn that wooden table we bought last Saturday into a coffee table. It would be perfect! Big and solid, and we could cut it down to just the right height.”

  “You mean cut the legs down?” I asked, frowning and trying to envision it.

  “You like the coffee table in our family room?” she asked.

  “Well, yes,” I said, and I really did. It was big and sturdy. It served as a second place to eat or a place for the boys to play board games.

  “Well, it’s cut down from a full sized wooden table I found and refinished,” she said. “Buddy cut the legs down with his power saw, and then he took the sander to them so they wouldn’t scratch the floor and I refinished it.”

  “But I like the wooden table in the kitchen,” I said.

  “Just come look,” she said, and I did. It was chrome with a shiny red top.

  “I like the coffee table idea,” I said. “But I don’t like this dinette set and don’t go telling me to look at the bones because I see its bones. It looks like something out of an old advertisement in Good Housekeeping.”

  “That’s kind of why it’s good,” she said, with a sigh, “It’s retro. And it’s got four good chairs, and the whole thing is $75. I saw one online for $400.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said firmly. “It’s not me. Let’s look for another table to cut down.”

  I turned out to be so right.

  At the very next sale, an elderly man and his wife were selling a sturdy golden oak pedestal table. It was round. I got down on the ground and looked at it from underneath.

  “Ha! See the bones!” I said triumphantly. “And it’s walnut. Now, why can’t your brilliant husband take the stand off and cut it down about five or six inches and put it back together, and we can refinish it.”

  “It doesn’t need refinishing,” Kylie said. “Just some good wax and a buffing, but let’s call Buddy first and make sure he can do it.”

  I thought the likelihood of Buddy Carson saying he couldn’t do something that involved a power saw was very slight, but he came out with the twins and got under the table and said it would be a snap.

  I paid $50 for it, and Buddy and the boys put it into his truck. Well, Buddy put it into the truck, and the boys scrambled around trying to help.

  He said, “Next time you see it, it will be a coffee table,” and they drove off.

  Then I discovered that the old couple also had a bunch of bad art in great old picture frames, and I took those off their hands, knowing I could make much more on any painting of mine that was already framed.

  I didn’t think about Flip Tarver again until we were almost home and my cellphone buzzed.

  “Hey, Kate,” Josh Miller said. “I just heard that Meredith Merkle’s brother got arrested last night. How about getting a story on that?”

  I said, “I’ll see if I can reach Chief O’Reilly.”

  “Just go down there and find out what Tarver’s charged with,” he said. “Tell them you want the incident report on the arrest of Flip Tarver.”

  “You know,” I said to Kylie after I was off the phone and had told her what Josh wanted. “I don’t think I’m cut out for news reporting. I really don’t want to write anything that would make somebody mad or hurt their feelings, and I enjoyed talking to Flip Tarver the other day.”

  “Yeah, he’s fun in a way,” Kylie said. “Sure has a lot more personality than his sister did.”

  “But look at the good side,” she said as we got out to haul the picture frames into my house. “This gives you an excuse to see Daniel if you’re not interested in Josh.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, “Didn’t you notice last night that he was spending all that time with Sheena Queen of the Jungle?”

  “Ha!” she said, “So you saw what I meant about her. Well, the only reason she was doing that was because Josh Miller was sitting with you. It’s Josh she’s interested in, and Josh sure had his eyes on you.”

  “Josh is too young for her,” I said, la
ughing. “He’s even too young for me. He’s a big kid. Hey, look, I’ve got a package. I’ll bet it’s the drawer pulls for my chest of drawers.”

  It was, and we went inside and put them in. It looked great. I was feeling triumphant.

  Then she said, “Those jeans are pretty good, but wear that lace top and put on some makeup.”

  I made a face at her, and she left laughing.

  I decided on the lace top, which wasn’t at all a Sheena QOTJ kind of thing in case you’re wondering. Just kind of pretty and feminine. Then I got one of the little narrow notebooks Josh had given me, and my camera.

  Not that I was planning to take any pictures, but it looked sort of professional.

  Daniel O’Reilly was in his office, and he looked tired.

  “He was charged with breaking-and-entering,” he said, after offering me a seat. “But I think we’re going to drop the charges. Probably by the time the paper comes out there won’t be a story. Can I just explain this without your taking notes? I think you’ll see what I mean. It’s not news.”

  I put my notebook into my shoulder bag, and Daniel talked.

  “As far as we can tell, all he took was this dress for his sister to wear in her casket. And he didn’t really break in. He had a back door key all along. He said he couldn’t sleep, and he got all upset about the whole thing. Apparently, his sister’s lawyer told him that she hadn’t left him anything and that he didn’t have permission to enter the house. Then the guy at the funeral home called him about something for his sister to wear, and he didn’t want it all over town that he wasn’t supposed to be in the house. He went over there and got something for her to wear. Of course, tiptoeing around with a flashlight is a good way to look like a thief, and he did go past the crime tape that’s still up, but he had the dress right there lying across his sofa. If he took anything else, we sure can’t tell.”

  I nodded again.

  “And the way I see it, having it in the paper would be more punishment than any judge would hand down,” Daniel said. “He just got all emotional and did something stupid.”

  “What color dress?” I asked.

  “Gray, I think,” he said. “Why does it matter?”

  “I just wondered,” I said, getting up. I was thinking that Flip Tarver probably picked the ugliest dress his sister owned. “So he’s not in jail?”

  “No. We let him go in time to open his shop,” Daniel said. “Did Josh send you over here?”

  “Yes,” I said with a slight smile.

  “You know,” Daniel said. “What you’re going to find if you’re the crime reporter is that some of what we do isn’t really news. It’s just people doing dumb things.”

  “I’m glad it wasn’t anything serious,” I said, “I got him to wire some flowers for me yesterday morning, and he seemed like a nice man.”

  Daniel got up from behind his desk, which I assumed was to let me know my time with him was up.

  But then he walked out with me, and said, “Have you had lunch yet?”

  I hadn’t. We wound up getting into our separate cars and meeting at the Chicken Coop.

  I had chicken salad, and he had a fried chicken sandwich. We talked a little about books. I told him about the table that Buddy was going to turn into a coffee table, and about deciding I didn’t want a second-hand sofa under any circumstances and shopping at Ferguson’s instead.

  “Yeah, I guess finding that body that way might make a brand new one seem more appealing,” he said with a smile, and I nodded in agreement.

  When we got up to leave, he brought up my step-cousins from Lulaville again and said I could still file charges.

  He said, “Now that was a whole lot more serious than Flip Tarver getting a dress out of his sister’s house.”

  I said, “Yes, but Kylie would hate it if I got that stuff back because then we’d be done going to yard sales.”

  He insisted on paying. I insisted on leaving the tip. It was a friendly lunch.

  Of course, Kylie called me a couple of hours later and said, “Mom heard that you had lunch with Daniel O’Reilly at the Chicken Coop.”

  That’s River Valley.

  I said, “Yes, Kylie, we had a friendly lunch. It was lunchtime.”

  “What about Flip Tarver?” she asked. “I hear his shop was open the usual hours, and he was there.”

  “No big deal,” I said. “They let him go. He was just getting something for her to be buried in.”

  “Do you really believe that was all there was to it?” she asked.

  “Yes, I do. It made sense,” I said, “But it’s all kind of sad, and I’m not putting it in the paper.”

  “I know it’s not any of my business,” she said, “But did Daniel ask you out?”

  “If you mean on a date, no, he didn’t,” I said. “I really think he just wants to be friends. You know we had a pretty long talk at my house that day he came over with the statement for me to sign.”

  “You didn’t tell me that! You just acted like he dropped by for you to sign that statement,” she said.

  “And you can see why,” I said, laughing, “because you’re going to make something out of nothing.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “And by the way, Buddy says he’s going to bring that table over to your place tomorrow afternoon.”

  Chapter 11

  Later that afternoon, I heard the sound of a power mower. A teenaged boy was cutting Sally Turbo’s grass, so I went across to introduce myself and ask him how much he would charge to mow mine.

  He turned out to be Jabari Hill, sports writer for The Register and grandson of Mayor Rosa May Hill. He said he had been planning to come and talk with me. For a high school student, he seemed to be a good businessman. He even had business cards in his wallet.

  “I used to mow it for the lady who lived there before, “ he said. “It’s fifteen dollars for the whole yard, but she always raked up the grass herself.”

  I said, “That sounds good. I’ve got a rake, and I need the exercise.”

  He smiled and said, “That’s exactly what the lady said who lived there before.”

  I was about to tell him that she was my grandmother when Sally came out to talk, and he got back to work.

  “How’s it going?” she yelled over the sound of the mower. “I keep seeing you and Kylie hauling stuff in.”

  “Fine,” I said, trusting she could read my lips.

  “How about y’all finding old Miss Merkle’s body,” she shouted. “That would have scared me to death.”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding. I knew that if I said anything in the least interesting, Sally would be quoting me all over town.

  “Of course, she scared me to death when she was living,” Sally yelled, ending the sentence just as Jabari switched off the mower and started pulling it down her driveway to her back yard.

  Her voice went down to normal. She stopped to light a cigarette.

  “That new police chief needs to get on the job,” she said after taking a long drag. “People want to see him catch whoever did it.”

  I said, “They’re working on it.”

  “There are plenty of people who think David Dabney did it,” Sally went on. “They think that girl is lying to keep him from going to prison, or maybe she was in on it with him.”

  “I guess people are going to talk,” I said, trying not look too interested.”

  “Of course, some other people think maybe the old lady’s half-brother, Flip Tarver, did it so he’d get her house. He could have been framing David Dabney by leaving the body there. He would have known the Dabneys had it in for her. Everybody knew that.”

  I just raised an eyebrow as if that were news to me.

  “I think David did it, though,” she said.

  “But why?” I asked, finally unable to resist. “I mean killing somebody and hiding the
m on your own property is a big risk to take just because you got a bad grade five or six years ago.”

  “Drugs,” she said as if it were obvious. “People get crazy on some drugs. I’ll tell you one thing. Whether it was David or Flip Tarver, old Chief Waterfield would have had them caught and locked up by now. That man didn’t fool around. I know this O’Reilly guy is a friend of yours, and he thinks he’s smart, but he doesn’t know the town the way Chief Waterfield did.”

  I didn’t argue with her about his being a friend of mine, but I might have frowned.

  Sally grinned said, “I heard you two were had lunch at the Chicken Coop earlier. I’ve got connections, you know.”

  I smiled and said, “Isn’t their chicken salad wonderful.”

  But my curiosity was getting the best of me. I was beginning to see that Sally Turbo probably did have connections, and they were different from Kylie’s or Darlene’s or Aunt Verily’s.”

  “I don’t know David Dabney at all,” I said, “But Miss Merkle failed a lot of students.”

  “Yeah, including me,” Sally said with a wry smile. “But his folks pitched a big fit about her giving him that F when that was the only thing keeping him from graduating. I heard they went to the Board of Ed and tried to get her fired, but it turned out she was retiring at the end of the next school year anyway. I know some of you smart kids who were going to college thought she was a good teacher, but…”

  “No,” I said, without thinking. “I didn’t think she was a good teacher at all.”

  She looked surprised but then went on.

  “Well, anyway, Dave Dabney’s on the city council, and he thinks he’s a hotshot, and Doris Dabney had big plans for David to go to college. David hasn’t done anything but mess up since then. They might blame it on Miss Merkle or that car wreck he was in, but…”

  She stopped and lit a cigarette.

  I waited, looking interested.

  “Well, he can’t keep a job,” she said. “His daddy’s pulled some strings, but the way I heard it, David doesn’t show up, and he runs with this crowd, well, I’ve heard more, but I’m not going to say. I think maybe he took one of those drugs that make people crazy. The thing is I can see him doing it. Lots of people can. Of course, I can see that girl standing up for him if she knew he didn’t do it or maybe she knows he did, but she’s in love with him. What I can’t see is her hanging around with him and his crowd in the first place or why he would have been fooling around with her.”