Okay, maybe it was stupid, but it didn’t feel wrong. I simply couldn’t bring myself to tell Detective Underwood that I’d seen Dixie and Pell returning in his van early yesterday morning. If they hadn’t taken me in Thursday night, I might have had to sleep on the street. How could I repay their hospitality by ratting on them?
“I really don’t have a clue as to what time it was,” I said truthfully. “It could have been ten minutes, it could have been two hours for all I know. Was anything missing from the house?”
“Mrs. Ragsdale says the cleaning lady was there on Thursday after Nolan and the little girl left for High Point. Everything was tidy when she and her husband got there last night. She can’t tell if anything’s gone.”
When you play cards with a bunch of older brothers, you learn to keep a poker face real quick if you don’t want to keep losing your allowance as soon as you get it, so I doubt if Underwood saw any change of expression other than polite interest.
But if Dixie and Pell had gone to Chan’s house and if anything had been taken, I had a feeling that I knew what it was.
16
« ^ » “The pieces of mechanism used to measure time, and kept in motion by gravity through the medium of weights, or by the elastic force of a spring, are called time pieces, or clocks..”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872
I drove back to Dixie’s house with as much ambivalence about facing her as I’d had about facing Underwood earlier.
Golden-bell forsythias and borders of bright tulips marched along the residential streets. Each yard seemed massed in red, pink and white azaleas and dogwoods spread their graceful branches of white blossoms everywhere I turned.
The blue-sky morning was so beautiful that I was filled with a sudden longing for Kidd. It was a day made for horseback riding or canoeing or for just taking a rambling walk through a spring landscape of newly leafed maples, oaks and flowering Judas trees. Not that Kidd was even in North Carolina this weekend, having gone down to the Georgia sea islands for something to do with sea turtles, but it was pleasant to daydream about alternatives to furniture and murder.
Evidently, the Ragsdales felt the same way, for when I got back to the cul-de-sac off Johnson Street, they were there to pick up Lynnette for the day.
“Try to guess who/ is going to the zoo?” she chanted as I walked up.
“What a great idea,” I said, half wishing the Ragsdales were friends who would invite me along.
Our state zoo is state of the art, the first natural-habitat zoo in the country, with restraints on human visitors but few visible ones on the wild animals. Located in Asheboro, at the northern tip of the Uwharrie National Forest, the zoo sits very close to the geographical center of the state, which means that it’s only about a half hour or so southeast of High Point.
“Say hello/ to the buffalo,” I told Lynnette as she and Shirley Jane, who seemed like a nice kid, buckled up in the backseat.
“But don’t say boo/ to the kangaroo,” Dixie called from the doorway.
The car pulled slowly away from the curb and we heard the girls’ alternating giggles as they tried to stump each other:
“Grizzly bear?”
“Please don’t stare. Antelope?”
“You’re a dope!”
It was just as well I hadn’t been invited, I decided. Not even the zoo was worth thirty minutes of nonstop nonsense rhymes by a pair of wound-up monkeys.
Inside Dixie’s kitchen—surprisingly plain-vanilla, I realized now, with nothing but purple floor tiles to break the monotony of white cabinets and fixtures—Pell Austin was loading her dishwasher with dirty dishes from the late brunch they had just eaten.
“Did you eat?”
He held out a box of Krispy-Kreme doughnuts, the most delicately delicious doughnuts in the whole world. They’re made fresh at least twice a day and when you bite into one so hot that the glaze hasn’t yet set, you think you’ve died and gone to heaven.
“Just coffee and a banana from Dixie’s fruit bowl,” I said, and yielded to temptation. Even cold, a Krispy-Kreme doughnut is like eating yeasty ambrosia.
“I heard they opened a shop in Manhattan last year,” Pell said, as he poured coffee for me in a mug sprigged with violets. “Maybe we ought to buy stock in it.”
He and Dixie both seemed more relaxed this morning and in better spirits.
“Did you work it out with your sister-in-law about Lynnette?” I asked.
“For the moment,” Dixie said. “Thanks for speaking up last night. I’ve agreed to let her act as Chan’s executor and she’s agreed not to try to take Lynnette before the end of school. We’re both going to speak to an attorney. I just wish you could advise me.”
“I did,” I grinned. “I told you to get a lawyer.”
“So how’d it go with David?” she asked casually. Her back was to me as she wiped down the stove.
“Fine.”
“He decide your teenage fling with Chan wasn’t relevant after all?”
She rinsed out the dishcloth, hung it to dry beneath the sink, and sat down at the white table with a tall amethyst glass of water. At least her glassware had color.
I shrugged. “Who knows? Lucky for me, he’s still looking at alternatives. Did your sister-in-law tell you that someone was over at Chan’s house Thursday night? Or rather sometime before dawn yesterday morning?”
“Chan’s been known to lend his key to out-of-town friends looking for a little privacy,” said Dixie, a little too quickly. “Millie knows that.”
“But she told Detective Underwood that nothing was out of place and nothing seems to be missing.”
Pell closed the dishwasher, turned it on, then came and joined us at the table. “Maybe they changed their minds before they got to the bedroom.”
“He made a point of asking me if you two went out again after I went to bed.”
They looked at me mutely.
“I told him the truth,” I said to Pell. “That I knew you came back over here—”
“—to get a book I’d left,” he interjected. “I told him that myself.”
“—and that I woke up when you returned but that I didn’t look at the clock and I couldn’t begin to guess what time it was.”
I could see them visibly relax.
“Well,” said Dixie.
She started to rise, but I motioned for her to stay.
“I did not tell him that what woke me up was Pell’s van lights when you two drove in.”
Instant tension.
“You knew that Chan’s will named his sister as Lynnette’s guardian, so you drove over there, rifled his lockbox and took the will, right? Please tell me you didn’t destroy it?”
“Actually,” Pell began hesitantly.
“No, Pell!” said Dixie. Her tip-tilted eyes flashed brown sparks.
I held up my hand. “On second thought, forget about it. I don’t want to know. In fact, I don’t want to hear a word about anything that happened after I went to bed over at Pell’s. I’m an officer of the court. As far as I’m concerned, you drove out for orange juice and were back in ten minutes.”
Dixie started to speak, but I shook my head. “I mean it, Dixie. Don’t tell me, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Me, too,” Pell said softly.
“Don’t thank me too soon. If I knew for a fact what time it was when you drove into the alley, I’d tell Underwood in a New York minute. And I’d still tell him if I thought either of you had anything to do with Chan’s death.”
“I didn’t,” Dixie told me solemnly. “Neither of us did. I swear it, Deborah.”
“Where were you Thursday night when Chan came downstairs?”
“After I finally got off the phone with Mr. Sherrin? It was around nine-thirty. I locked up, stuck a note on the door to tell you I’d be back at ten and then ran up the street to talk to Mary Ellen Hiatt, my opposite number at SHFA. We’re going to join forces with some other retail associations to lobby against lifting restrictions on selling furniture on military bases. I had just got back and was asking the guard if he’d seen you when you came charging out of the elevator.”