finest restaurants?”
Becca laughed, she couldn’t help herself, but it soon dissolved
into a hiccup. She felt tears pool in her eyes. This was crazy. Still,
she said only, “We left him with Mrs. Ryan. He’s very fond of her.”
“Well, that’s all right, then. Rachel and Ann–she’s the dead
Mrs. McBride–well, they were best friends, now weren’t they?
And Sam dearly loves Rachel, and she him, thank God, since his
mama is dead, now isn’t she?”
“I thought that Ann McBride disappeared, that she just walked
away from her family and from Riptide.”
“So he says, but nobody believes that. What do you want, Miss
Powell? Be alert now, and concise, no more going off on tangents
or feeding me gossip. This is an official office of the law.”
“There’s a skeleton in my basement.”
For the first time in this very strange conversation, Mrs. Ella was
silent, but not for long. “This skeleton you’re telling me is in your
basement, how did it get there?”
“It fell out of the wall in the middle of a whole lot of rubble
when the wall collapsed just a while ago, probably weakened by the
big storm last night.”
“I believe I will transfer you to Edgar now. That’s Sheriff
Gaffney to you. He’s been very busy, a lot of storm damage, you
know, a lot of people demanding his time, but a skeleton can’t be
put off until tomorrow, now can it?”
“You’re right about that,” Becca said, and had an insane desire to
laugh her head off. She wiped the tears out of her eyes. She realized
she was shaking. It was the oddest thing.
A man came on the line and said, “Ella tells me you’ve got a
skeleton in the basement. This don’t happen every day. Are you
sure it’s a skeleton?”
“Yes, quite sure, although, to be honest, I’ve never seen one before,
at least lying at my feet on the basement floor.”
“I’ll be right there, then. You stay put, ma’am.”
Becca was staring down at the phone when Mrs. Ella came
back. “Edgar said I was to keep talking to you, not let you go all
hysterical. Edgar tends to get tetchy around women who are crying
and wailing and carrying on. I’m surprised that you fell apart
on him, given the way you were talking to me about this and that.”
“I appreciate that, Mrs. Ella. I’m not really hysterical, at least not
yet, but how could the sheriff have possibly known that I was wavering
on the edge? I never said a word to him.”
“Edgar just knows these things,” Mrs. Ella said comfortably.
“He’s very intuitive, now isn’t he? That’s why I’ll keep talking to
you until he gets there, Miss Powell. I’m to help you keep your wits
together.”
Becca didn’t mind a bit. For the next ten minutes, she heard
how Ann McBride disappeared between one day and the next, no
explanation at all, just as Tyler had told her. She learned that Tyler
wasn’t Sam’s father but his stepfather. Sam’s real father had just up
and disappeared from one day to the next, too. Odd, now wasn’t it,
the both of them, just up and out of here? Of course, Sam’s father
had been a rotter, whining and bitching about how hard life was,
and he didn’t want to stay here, so his leaving made some sense,
now didn’t it? But not Ann’s, no, she couldn’t have just up and left,
not without Sam.
Then Mrs. Ella began with all her pets, and there were a bunch
of them, since she was sixty-five years old. Finally, Becca heard a car
pull up.
“The sheriff just arrived, Mrs. Ella. I promise I won’t fall
apart.” She hung up the phone before Mrs. Ella could give her
own mother’s tried-and-true recipe for stretched nerves. And she
wouldn’t fall apart, either, because by Mrs. Ella’s fifth dog, a terrier
named Butch, there were no more tears in her eyes and the bubbling,
liquid laughter was long dried up.
Sheriff Gaffney had seen the Powell girl around town, but he
hadn’t met her. She looked harmless enough, he thought, remembering
how she was squeezing a cantaloupe in the produce department