The Five Strangers, page 22
“After he refused to answer your questions,” Rita interrupted, mapping things out, “Jasper went to my house and started working in the yard, trying to act like everything was normal. He went into denial, you might say. Taylor and I went out and dragged him inside. We managed to force it out of him that his vampire was a real, flesh-and-blood man, someone actually living with him. You should have seen Taylor, Jack. She’s a natural.”
With asperity, Jack said, “I think the point you’re trying to make is that when Jasper took himself to work that day, he left Grady alone in the house. Am I right?”
It was my theory. Ignoring these ill-timed interruptions, I cut back in:
“Grady got started as soon as he had the house to himself,” I said. “He had to erase all evidence that he’d ever been there. And when Rita and I figured out where he must be and told you about it, and you sent Brody over to grab him, you blew his cover. I think that’s why he was so mad.”
Rita was nodding along with me. “It makes sense, right Jack? Grady had sworn Jasper to secrecy, and he knew Jasper was as stubborn as a mule.”
“That he has a code of honor,” I corrected.
“And he’d be able to hold out on you for at least a little while.”
“Long enough to give him a chance to disappear. Poof! Like he’d never even been there. And with Jasper going around town telling everybody he had a vampire problem, and that Sheila had put a hex on him and was trying to kill him, people would just think it was one more figment of his imagination when he started talking about a long-lost cousin that nobody had ever seen who’d been living in his house.”
“Okay,” Jack allowed, “that all makes sense, I guess, but how does it get us any further in figuring out who killed Sheila Colson? Because the way it’s looking now, it had to be one of those two characters – either Grady Grissom, to get her off his trail, or our very own Jasper, because he thought she put a spell on him.”
“I think I’ve got a way of figuring out who killed Sheila, but I’m going to need your help.”
I gave Jack my most winsome smile. I may have even batted my eyes.
He braced himself. “Don’t tell me. Another one of those storytelling sessions of yours, where everybody . . . .” He trailed off, probably because he was remembering the positive results I’d gotten in the past with my storytelling sessions. Or maybe because he already knew he was going to do it, and he already hated it.
I waited, staring right back with my own steely gaze.
Rita was busy talking, pointing out how it couldn’t hurt, you could trust Taylor not to make things worse and I don’t know what else, but neither Jack nor I was listening. We were having an eyeball battle.
In the end, I won.
“Okay,” he said. “All right. You want to see Grady Grissom, right? Jasper too?”
“And just a couple of others.”
“Of course, a couple of others,” he muttered, lifting his gaze to the ceiling, or maybe right through it to heaven above. “All right, let’s hear it.”
I ignored his histrionics and went on. “I need Dusty July. You’ll probably find him over at Flounder Bob’s; I think he’s been sleeping there. And our new CPA, Caden Vance. He’s probably over at Rocky Sanders’s office on Locust Street.”
“The CPA?” Jack said, incredulous. “What’s he got to do with it?”
“I don’t know, it’s just a feeling.”
Before he or Rita could pursue that, I threw in my last request.
“And finally, Billy Carlson. We’re going to need him, too.”
“The lawyer?” Jack was looking less and less agreeable, but Billy was my last request, and I sat there hoping I hadn’t gone too far.
“Why do we need Billy, Taylor?” Rita asked. “He’s not a criminal lawyer. The one time he did appear in criminal court, he couldn’t even get bail for his client.”
I could see I was going to have to justify myself, so I reluctantly parted with a morsel of information.
“Sheila made a will,” I said, and I wouldn’t say another word until Jack started setting up storytime.
Chapter 40 – Chasing Ghosts
The back rooms at the Police Station are utilitarian, with the original linoleum floors, worn almost down to the tar, from the time the building had been a library. But it had a really nice conference room. A big table, comfortable chairs, even carpeting. Before we could use it for my storytelling session, Rita and I were delegated the task of removing evidence that the room was mostly used for coffee breaks.
Though already on the premises, Grady and Jasper were brought in last, from the holding cells in an area of the building where (thankfully) I had never been. When they were escorted in by Brody, who immediately left, they stood just inside the door looking at the assemblage around the table.
Besides Rita, Jack and myself, Dusty July and Caden Vance were already there. Strangely, neither Dusty nor Caden had demanded to know why they had been asked to come in, and when Jasper and his cousin had been brought in, they perked up and looked very interested. Billy wasn’t there yet; he’d been in conference with a client, and since his presence at the Police Station was merely a request and not a demand punctuated by handcuffs, we just had to wait. He promised to come, though, as soon as he could.
Unconsciously playing hostess, I thanked them all for coming, and said, “I believe you both know our friend Dusty July. Only you know him as Emerson Fogg.”
This made two pairs of eyes nearly pop out of two shaggy heads, but only Jasper said anything.
“Emerson, is that you?” Jasper turned to me, for some reason. “I only met him once, but he was a lot better looking than this guy. No offense,” he added, turning back to Dusty.
“None taken,” Dusty said, having gotten up out of his chair. He approached the two men at the door and shook hands while they continued to stare. “I may not be as pretty as I once was, but I think I’m a better man these days.”
Still studying Dusty, Grady tentatively said, “I recognize the voice. And those are the eyes. Damn, Emerson, you got old.”
“Didn’t we all?” Dusty replied good-naturedly.
“I mean . . . you got older than you should have, in that amount of time.”
“Come on, have a seat, you guys,” I told them.
They sat, Dusty back at the head of the table and Jasper next to him, which forced Grady to take the only open seat – the one next to Jack, who had positioned himself near the door. Rita and I faced the newcomers from across the table.
Grady looked at me, then at Jack Peterson, then he asked who the hell Rita was, (she introduced herself), then asked who was in charge here.
Not to be drawn, Jack merely cocked a knuckle in my direction and told him to answer the lady’s questions.
I turned to Jack then, saying, “May I ask you one first?”
He was nonplussed but tried not to show it. “Sure, go ahead,” he drawled.
“When we told you about somebody else you needed to investigate, somebody who might also be a killer, why weren’t you interested?”
He blinked. “Refresh my memory. You’ve been throwing around so many suspects.”
“I mean our fifth stranger. Chrissy Fogg, the lady who ran off with Grady.”
“Five strangers,” Rita said. “Sheila, Dusty and Caden. And then we found out about Jasper’s cousin. That’s four. Then finally, Dusty told us about his missing wife. He suspected she was in the area, too. Yeah, Jack, why didn’t you show any interest when we told you about Chrissy? I mean, her own husband thinks she’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Grady exploded. “She’s bughouse crazy. And dangerous is an understatement. Ranting and raving, foaming at the mouth –”
“That’s enough,” Dusty said deliberately.
“Oh, come on, Emerson, get real. When Chrissy wasn’t talking about killing somebody else, she was talking about killing herself.” He turned to Jack and said, “Yeah, boss, what about Chrissy? She’s the one that probably killed Sheila. Why don’t you go track her down?”
Instead of answering Grady, Jack was looking at me. “I told you I wasn’t going to waste my time chasing ghosts. I checked out the whole story of Sheila and that country band as soon as she came to town. Something about her just didn’t smell right.”
“But she’d changed her name,” I said.
“And she’d changed her face,” Rita said. “And more to the point, before she was a corpse, you didn’t have her fingerprints. How did you check her out?”
He patted the air to stop us. “Like everybody else in town, I took a disliking to her right away, and when I introduced myself to her, she was acting cagey in a way that made me want to know more. The name Sheila Colson didn’t get me any results, and before I tried facial recognition I went ahead and did things the old-fashioned way. I asked her for a business card, and she gave me one voluntarily. I ran her prints from that. Like I told you, her prints were on file because she’d committed arson in West Virginia.”
Rita sparkled with admiration. “Excellent work, Jack.”
“Just doing my job. The more I dug into her past, the more interested I got. I found out about you,” he said, looking across the table at Grady, “I found out about The Foggy Mountaineers, and most of all, I found out about Chrissy Fogg.” Putting a definite period on the story, he added, “Deceased. Like I told you, we didn’t need to spend time chasing ghosts.”
“She’s dead?” Dusty said, bewildered and saddened.
Jack seemed surprised. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”
“No. I guess I’d left home by then. I got a false lead that took me to Oklahoma, but when that petered out, I just . . . kept on going. And going. That’s when I finally hit the road. Went a little soft in the head, I guess. I’d tried so hard, and everything had gone so bad, I just couldn’t go back to the home we’d had together.”
“That’s when you stopped being Emerson Fogg and turned into Dusty July?” I asked. “You came out of the experience a different man?”
“Different, yes. And I finally found peace. It seemed natural, moving from place to place, finding all kinds of work, meeting new people. I changed.”
“You changed a lot,” Grady said.
“Not just my appearance. I changed for the better. I’m happier now than I was back in the days with the band, even when we finally got a hit. That song just made everything more complicated – all the tour dates and all the pressure for another hit, everybody wanting a piece of me – when I became Dusty, all of a sudden everything was simple. The heavy weight was lifted. The only thing was . . . Chrissy. I was still hoping to find her when Sheila called one day and told me she thought she’d found you.” He turned almost sightless eyes on Grady. “I always figured if I found you, it would be my best chance at finding Chrissy. Only I was afraid of what might happen if she found you first.”
Grady shook his head, looking defiant. “After I split from Chrissy, I heard she went back home, and you were welcome to her.”
“Did you kill her?” Dusty asked, quite calmly, as if the answer didn’t matter anymore.
It was Jack who answered. “She killed herself. In Oklahoma. That lead you had was probably good after all, but it took some time for her body to be identified, and by that time nobody could find you.”
“I see,” Dusty whispered.
Chapter 41 – Strategic Lies
The way Dusty had described his wife had made me wonder if she could already be dead, most probably a suicide, and now we knew. I checked poor Chrissy off my list and turned to the next item.
“Why did you lie to me, Jasper?” I said.
He sat up, looking unhappy that he was suddenly in the spotlight.
“Who you callin’ a liar?” he shot back. “I never lie. Maybe I’m wrong about things sometimes, but being wrong doesn’t make you a liar. You’re only a liar when you say something’s true and you know it’s not.”
“So why did you lie and give Grady an alibi for Sheila’s murder when actually, you have no idea whether or not he stayed inside all night, the night she died?”
Jasper was sitting opposite me, and he edged back as I leaned forward. But still, he was stubbornly mute.
I tried again. “You know, Jasper, there may be actual proof of what happened that night in Beloved of Old. Are you sure it won’t prove you’ve been lying?”
“What proof?”
“Never mind that. You were lying when you gave Grady an alibi, weren’t you? You don’t know whether he left the house that night or not. In fact, you have no idea where he’s been going or what he’s been doing most nights, because of the sickening nights you’ve been having ever since Sheila put a hex on you.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Grady ordered. “Stick to your guns, boy, just like we talked about.”
“And what was it you two talked about?” I asked sweetly. “You mean when you pointed out to Jasper that if he insisted you never left the house that night, it wouldn’t just give you an alibi, it would give him one too? He was terrified, and desperately wanted that alibi. And maybe he was right to be desperate. After all, the police got onto Jasper before they even knew you were around.”
Both men stared at me, but only one of them looked truly startled. The other just looked angry and muttered something about me thinking I was so smart.
“Well, Jasper,” I prodded. “If you’re going to come clean, now’s the time.”
Still, he hesitated.
“Okay,” I said taking a deep breath. “Let’s do this the hard way. You’ve been pretty stressed out lately, haven’t you? Most of the time when people are stressed out, they can’t sleep, but – what was it you said to me in Rita’s yard right after I saw you arguing with Caden? – you told me you’d been sleeping hard and waking up feeling sick every morning, couldn’t eat a thing, exhausted all the time. A man who does hard physical labor should sleep like a log at night, and I bet you always used to, right up until the time he showed up.”
“It was her, not him,” Jasper said weakly. “Sheila. She put the hex on me. That’s why I couldn’t sleep.” He turned his head and gave Grady a stunned look, saying, “Isn’t it?”
“You know it is,” Grady snarled. “Don’t let her confuse you.”
“Jasper, look at me,” I said. “Remember Ed’s first theory that you were being hag-ridden at night? He was keying off your description of how hard your nights had been, and how trashed you felt in the morning. Don’t you realize that that’s exactly the way you’d feel if you were being drugged? I’m pretty sure Grady has been slipping something into your food or drink before bedtime to make sure you don’t wake up and discover that he’s been sneaking out of the house. Do you ever check the mileage on your truck?”
He shook his head like a man in a dream. “The odometer hasn’t worked in years. But it seems like I’m having to gas up more . . . I don’t know, though –”
“And you said you were being haunted by a vampire.”
“I thought I was,” he said hoarsely. “At first, anyway.”
“But then after you knew who it was, you kept up the vampire story because it was the only way you could vent about what was going on at home, since Grady had made you swear you wouldn’t tell anybody he was living with you. Actually, I think your cousin, here, qualifies as a vampire. He was in possession all right – of you and your house. And on some nights, your truck, too.”
“You lie!” Grady shouted, and he began to stand up before Jack reached over and shoved him back into his seat.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Grady has been in charge of bartending for that nightcap you two have before you go to bed.”
“I don’t have a nightcap. But he’s been doing the cooking. It’s about the only thing he has been doing, but when I come home from work, he’s always in the kitchen tending to dinner. And I was grateful,” Jasper said, very hurt and talking to Grady now. “It felt like somebody was taking care of me for a change. I’ve always lived alone, and in a way it was nice not to have to come home to an empty house every night, to have somebody put a hot meal on the table and ask me about my day. After a while, I began to feel kind of . . . grateful.”
The betrayal was bringing a quaver into Jasper’s voice, and I felt a little choked up myself. Even loners can get lonely, sometimes.
“I wonder what would have happened if you’d ever switched plates with him while his back was turned,” I said softly, staring at Grady.
He began to move again, looking evil, but at a glance from Jack he settled down.
Jasper finally broke.
“You’re right. I got no idea where he was that night. I only know – I swear to God – I never left the house myself that night. I never hurt that woman. You’ve got to believe me!”
Grady sneered. “Don’t bother swearing anything now, cuz. You just gave up your gold-plated alibi, genius.”
Jack spoke up then, talking to me as if we were alone in the room.
“So no alibis for either one of them,” he said, “and both of them have motives. I know you’re prejudiced in Jasper’s favor, but legally, you’ve got nothing. How do I prove which one of them did it?”
Rita suddenly put an oar in, saying, “If, in fact, it was either one of them?”
I was ready for that one, but just at that moment there was a knock at the door and Billy Carlson stuck his head in.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said. Then to Jack: “You wanted to see me?”
Chapter 42 – A Voice from the Grave
I hadn’t seen Billy in a while, and he gave me a handsome smile. It was the face of my lover that really grabbed my attention, though. Michael was right behind Billy, and he was staring straight at me, looking rather stern.
Introductions were quickly made and extra chairs brought in by a very curious Brody, who seemed inclined to hang around. Jack thanked Brody for the chairs and sent him back out of the room.
