“She’s asleep. She’s real fond of the one about the early bird catching the worm. I’d rather have ham and eggs myself.” He reached out to take the card, but I lowered my hand. “I’ll have her take a look at it in the morning. If there’s something wrong, she can fix it up and I’ll get it back to Ruby Bee.”
“I had a call from the state police,” I said, ignoring his vague attempt to reach the recipe card. “You’ll be delighted to know they’ve located Shelley at a shelter in Farberville.”
“They have?” he said uncertainly. He swallowed several times and licked his lips until they glistened like the surface of the rhubarb goop. “That’s great, Arly. I was really worried about her. So was Lucinda, although she won’t admit it. That was the reason she left the next day to visit her sister in Hiana. I’ll tell her first thing in the morning.”
“You said something interesting when we were discussing where Shelley might have gone,” I continued. “You said Shelley wouldn’t go to Hiana because her mother was there. How would Shelley have known her mother was there?”
He shook his head and gave me a bewildered look, but I wasn’t in the mood to play Lieutenant Columbo and drag the ordeal out until the last commercial.
I held up the card once more and said, “The handwriting matches the list you wrote for me yesterday. You copied the recipe, but omitted the sugar. Lucinda wouldn’t have, since she’s made it often and is a meticulous person. Let’s return to Mr. Franklin’s ‘Little strokes fell great oaks.’ Lucinda might not have cared to be characterized as a tree, but I doubt it took little strokes to fell her. What did it take?”
His face and everything else about him sagged. “She was screaming at Shelley, spitting on her and slapping her. I couldn’t stand it any more. I told her to shut up. She started screaming at me, and I pushed her away from me. She fell, hit her head on the edge of the kitchen table.”
“I don’t think so. When we do an investigation, we’ll determine the details, but it didn’t happen in the kitchen. It happened in Shelley’s room, which is why you took Shelley to Hiana and brought back a braided rug to cover the bloodstains.”
“It was an accident,” a defiant voice said. Shelley joined her father in the doorway, dressed in a dowdy robe. Her head was covered with hair rollers and a scarf; no doubt Lottie was convinced she’d spotted Lucinda for a second at the back door. “I was the one who pushed her, but I didn’t mean for her to hit her head. Or maybe way in the back of my mind, I wanted it to happen.” Although her expression did not change, her eyes filled with tears that began to slink down her cheeks.
Buster put his arm around his daughter. “I pushed her. God knows she’s had it coming for twenty years.”
Shelley looked up at him. “ ‘The heart of the fool is in his mouth.’ ”
“ ‘But the mouth of the wise man is in his heart,’ ” he countered sadly.
“We’ll sort those out later,” I said before we got lost between quotation marks. “Where’s the body?”
Neither answered, but both of them glanced furtively over my shoulder. I studied the neat rows of tomato plants, each ringed with mulch and exuding the promise of a rich red crop later in the summer. I cast around in my mind for a suitable quote, and although my Biblical training was sparse, I found one. “ ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.’ ”
Buster managed a wry smile. “Lucinda would have appreciated it. As she was so fond of saying, ‘Waste not, want not.’ ”
Flagg leaned against the crowbar until the hasp broke and the lock dropped to the pine-needled ground. He waited, listening, but the only sounds were the faint rippling of the mountain stream a hundred yards to the west, and the distant call of an owl in the surrounding woods. It was almost four A.M.
After a long moment, Flagg kicked the lock away, put the crowbar against the wall, and edged the door open. The light from the three-quarter moon illuminated nothing more than vague shadows in the black interior. Once he had stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind him, he took a small pen-flash from the pocket of his deer hunter’s jacket and clicked it on.
He was in the rear storage room of Barney’s Oasis, a roadside tavern set into a conifer grove which was ringed by tourist cabins. It was a box-shaped, clapboard building with a slant-shingled roof and a falsely rustic facade. Flagg had seen dozens just like it in the past two weeks, and he had begun to wonder if they were all put out from some master mold.
