Deadly Homecoming at Rosemont Read online

  The alley hauntingly drew my attention in the last few days. I walked its length slowly and observantly, absorbing the atmosphere, noticing the flaws, breathing in the character, awed by the age, becoming comfortable with a new spirit taking up residence in the old body, and waiting for inspiration. If that was too much, just an inkling of an idea would be nice, something I could nurture and grow to viable size.

  My fear has always been that I’d accept an assignment, then, without warning, my creative juices would simply cease to sizzle.

  But when it was right, the flash of insight was powerful enough to give life. It was a force that came up out of my stomach, surged recklessly through my heart, curled my fingers over the keyboard, and with unblinking passion, leaped onto the screen.

  Hammer knew that was not happening.

  I signed out the photographs strewn around my office from the newspaper’s archives. Downloaded color images were stored on my laptop. A yellow notepad of my scratchings lay on the desk corner, each page looking like a roadmap—at this point, leading to nowhere.

  Not wanting anyone to think I was indifferent to tidiness, I began collecting the old black-and-whites. The oldest depicted the last decade of the eighteen-hundreds. There were several of the old train station throughout its lifetime and photo after photo of businesses. Sadly, none existed today. I love these peeks at the past and was lingering over the details again when Lucy hung up the phone. Dropping the stack on my desk, I retraced my steps to the reception area.

  “Who’s K.C. talking to?” I asked.

  “Chief Montague. And good morning to you,” the ten-year employee added in mild reproach.

  “I’m not surprised.” I ignored her scolding on civil pleasantries. Morning for me started a long time ago.

  The expression on her face changed to a quizzical one. “Why? I thought the chief called about this Winding Trail thing. Have you already heard about that?”

  Before I could answer, the phone rang again. I was left to ponder Lucy’s questions and wonder about the thing on Winding Trail. Was that another crime? Had we risen to three?

  Lucy lowered her copper-framed glasses from the top of her blonde head to her nose and began adding notes to a steno pad. She held the conversation with a man named Burl Wilde. She asked for his address and phone number. He lived on Winding Trail. After she hung up, she gave me a thumbnail sketch of the situation. The matter basically amounted to a car accident on wet streets. Wilde’s neighbor drove his pickup into a tree. The sound of the crash woke the sleeping neighborhood. The incident became complicated by a streetlight that chose to burn out in last night’s storm. The driver was left to navigate a section of Winding Trail in pitch dark.

  “The residents out there started calling first thing. K.C. asked me to get it all down. So what’s up? Why are you late getting here?” She seemed quite cheery while I knew disastrous events took place all around the town. “I can’t believe K.C. hasn’t been asking where you’ve been.”

  We both looked his way. He raised his eyes to meet mine through the glass, his forehead creased deeply, his ready smile noticeably absent.

  “Oh, I think he knows.”

  “But you were with Clay. He didn’t stand you up again?”

  “My meeting with Clay took a little longer than expected.”

  She tossed me a suspicious look. “I want more than that, Wrenn Grayson. Something’s wrong. You don’t get upset over meetings with Clay that run long.”

  “I do when we find a dead body.”

  She gasped. “Oh my god. You’re making that up.”

  Lucy spends too much time with children under seven. Scottie, her oldest, was six years and four months old. He told me that just last week, so I felt it was still fairly accurate.

  Just then, K.C. waved me in.

  “Don’t leave me hanging,” she pleaded. “I need more than this. After all, I’m the glue that keeps this office turning.”

  She does that. She mixed metaphors.

  With the promise to give her a full report later, I swung through his door, words poised on my lips, but the town’s mayor of fourteen years cut me off before the door met the jamb. He would face his fifty-sixth birthday in the fall. He was not a tall man, about five-eight and chubby. Portly, really. K.C. likes to eat. His monk’s ring was a solid russet, coarse and thick. A series of chins billowed out above the collar of his snowy white shirt and conservative tie.

  “I just got the whole story from Monty. There’s something you should know,” he said.

  With an ominous sense of dread, I crossed the room and seated myself in one of the two chairs facing his executive desk. The wood was a warm mahogany, brass hardware on his side, raised panels on mine.

  “Elmore called Monty from the scene with a preliminary report. Clay’s being considered a person-of-interest in the investigation.”

  “A person-of-interest. That’s crazy! You’re not going to just let this happen? You can’t.” K.C. and I have always been blessed with frank conversations. In other words, he tolerates my lip, and I try not to step over the line. It was a delicate balance we achieved in six years of working together.

  “Wrenn, there is procedure involved here. You nor I can change the circumstances.”

  “Then you’re admitting it’s all circumstantial against Clay,” I said, twisting his words.

  He gave me a slow, frustrated shake of his head. “Let me tell you what Monty said, and you be the judge.” He tipped his hand my direction. His tone said it was the judgmental position I wanted anyway. “Clay has admitted to no alibi for the time of the murder.”

  “Which was when?”

  “Estimate is midnight to three.” Next, he stated facts I could not dispute. “Clay is the only one with a key, and the doors were locked when you got there. Then there’s the gun on the premises. It’ll have to be tested.”

  “If Clay used that gun—and he didn’t—he would never have left it there to be found.”

  “It’s procedure, Wrenn. It’ll be tested,” he said. “Finally, Elmore believes it was a crime of passion. This is based on your tentative identification of the victim as Trey Rosemont and that he’d want his family’s homestead—his birthright, if you will—back from Clay, and that Clay would go the distance to keep it.”

  Those words dampened my fight. “Elmore got all that from me. I said it before I thought. But I didn’t mean murder. Clay would never murder anyone. Yes, he loves that house, and he would never want to lose it. But he wouldn’t kill to keep it. You know that. Can’t you do something? Monty’s letting Elmore convict Clay.”

  “Calm down. We have a justice system. One cop can’t convict anyone.”

  “Calling him a person-of-interest is one step short of saying he murdered the guy.”

  “Step back and let Monty handle it.”

  Arguing with my guilt more than K.C., I murmured, “But I set Clay up.”

  “Not intentionally.”

  “Elmore got me rattled, and then all of a sudden, I was giving Clay a motive. This is my fault,” I said, leaning forward, my fingertips poking my chest.

  “No, it’s not. Just let Monty and Homicide have some time with it.”

  My comeback was drowned out by the ring of the telephone. He picked up, calling the county budget commissioner by name. I tuned out the one-sided conversation, having tired of the annual budget cycle a few hours after it started.

  My eyes ran the length of the mayor’s office with its twelve-foot ceilings and a span of three draped windows. I tried to accept how Elmore had correctly predicted that our mayor would not insert himself into the investigation. To extend that thought, the room’s color scheme was politically neutral: a steely blue, light wheat, and dusty gold. The carpet ran from his office through the connecting door into mine, which tied me, unwillingly, to this game of politics. “Step back” were the words of counsel I rushed in to hear. They told me where K.C. would be: following this from a distance.

  I was drawn back to the phone
conversation when K.C. spoke my name.

  “Wrenn will take it from here. Email her the new figures.” Replacing the handset in its cradle, he explained, “New property tax numbers.”

  I nodded. They were expected.

  “What you need is the comfort of routine.”

  I rolled my eyes. I knew what was coming.

  “You haven’t taken the pulse of the theater today,” he said, eyeing me. “I love that phrase. I give it a ninety.” This was a reference to his red-velvet-cake scale. Red velvet cake was K.C.’s favorite dessert, and it topped his personal measuring scale at one-hundred percent. K.C. compared all things with his temptation for the three rich, crimson layers frosted with its two-sticks-of-butter icing. He ranked his “pulse of the theater” phrase at the ninetieth percentile. Have I said K.C. likes to eat?

  “I’ve been playing nursemaid to Barton Reed for months, K.C.”

  “Not nursemaid. Liaison.”

  “As long as I’m doing the job, I’m going to call it what it is.”

  “You wrote the story on the Baxter Opera House. It caught his eye, and that’s why he’s here, directing our play.”

  In a few weeks, Havens would be treated to the Baxter’s grand re-opening after a ten-year hiatus. Barton Reed, a credentialed playwright and director, came to town and pitched his idea to celebrate the theater’s impending rebirth with a summer production of his own play, Three Yodeling Spinsters.

  “Don’t give me the accolades. He’s here because you saw a great political move to adopt his suggestion as your own before any of your fellow council members thought of it. And I asked you, K.C., and you said it was okay if I wrote articles for the paper.”

  “It is okay with me if you write your historical stuff for the newspaper.”

  “Then why does this feel like punishment?”

  “It’s not punishment. I gave you my blessing. I even agreed to let you write in your office here, if need be.”

  “To be at your beck and call,” I argued.

  He produced a contagious smile. “I am important, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, you are.” I couldn’t suppress a grin.

  “But still, it gets me all aquiver politically to get in bed with the newspaper.”

  “It’s not you. It’s me. And this is a great opportunity. I’ve always wanted to write.”

  “And your Baxter story was top drawer.” With a tip of his head toward the connecting doorway, he said, “I saw you nearly trashed your office getting started on Piedmont Alley last night.”

  I merely nodded. I didn’t want to admit that the start already left me mired in sludge.

  “Hammer still calling you Graystone?”

  “Of course. I think he actually knows the difference, but doesn’t care. I’m a rookie he doesn’t want to coddle. He’s made that perfectly clear.”

  “Pay your dues is all I can say,” he advised idly, then returned to the play. “Have you come up with a promotional gimmick for Barton yet?”

  I snorted.

  At the eleventh hour, Barton Reed caught the mayor in the parking lot and announced that he left the last page of the program blank for an advertiser who would receive great exposure in exchange for financing the program’s design and printing. K.C. immediately handed the PR stunt off to me.

  “The well seems dry.” I sighed. “All the businesses with available funds have already anted up in some way for Spinsters.” Recently, I used an abbreviation of the play’s title.

  K.C. tipped back in his swivel chair. “The town was certainly fortunate to get funding from the state’s Preservation Alliance before it went belly up with the budget crisis. And the Chamber of Commerce deserves the credit for all the national attention the renovation received, which, then, dovetailed very nicely into your Baxter piece.” Dropping his feet to the floor, he said, “Hey, call down to the Chamber. Put your head together with someone and come up with a partner to work with Barton.”

  “I did. They’ll call me back if they get a nibble.”

  “I know.” He snapped his fingers. “How about a drawing on opening night? Winner receives a free exorcism.”

  Not wanting to encourage him, I pressed my lips together, but a laugh burst through rather quickly.

  “It’s ten-thirty,” Lucy announced, sticking her head in the office. “How about some coffee?”

  When her words sunk in, my eyes shot to K.C., who was glancing up from his desk clock. “What happened to Hellfire?” I wondered. “He’s late.”

  “Don’t know,” Lucy said. “Funny, isn’t it?”

  I pushed myself out of the chair and went to stand at the window. I craned my neck, but without a telescoping gadget with mirrors, it was impossible to see the sidewalk on this side of the street. I looked for the tattered old preacher K.C. and I had taken to calling Hellfire Harry. Like clockwork, his sermons began promptly at ten. With his booming voice, he predicted vast quantities of death, doom, and generalized destruction. He was the downtown’s newest resident. For well over a week, workers took their morning coffee breaks and got their souls cleansed at the same time.

  “Monty didn’t mention it. Maybe he had him dropped off at the county line,” K.C. said easily. “Hell, he might’ve even popped for a bus ticket.”

  Lucy cast him a scornful look. “He’s just a homeless old preacher. It would’ve been nice if he fed the poor guy a hot meal before kicking him out the back door.”

  Leaning against the windowsill, I stayed safely out of range of this: Lucy lobbing salvos, K.C. digging himself deeper.

  “I didn’t say that’s what happened,” K.C. explained. His chair groaned as he shifted to one side to search in his pants pocket. “I’m just saying Monty received some calls about Harry.”

  “Mayor Tallmadge,” Lucy pressed, her eyes narrowing, “you weren’t one of those callers, were you?”

  He flattened the folds on a ten-dollar bill. “Hey, don’t look at me. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech. I’m in favor of all that.”

  “Then you won’t mind if I make some calls and get to the bottom of this.”

  “Knock yourself out. But I’m not your guy.”

  With his arms raised in innocent appeal, I snapped his coffee money from his fingers, then followed a grumbling Lucy out the door.

  “Make mine a large,” he called.

  Small Towns, God Love ’Em

  Lucy and I took the short hallway from the council offices to the elevator, went down one floor, then clip-clopped along the waxed corridor to the front entrance. Along the way, she careened with me from one dismal crime scene to the other. In addition to Hellfire Harry’s cause, soft-hearted Lucy vowed to take up Clayton Addison’s mistreatment as well.

  Casting a shadow on the building’s sharply etched 1896 cornerstone, I handed her K.C.’s money. I decided to perform my nursing duties at the theater first, then go for coffee. She headed south toward Piedmont Café, and I turned north, to trod up Gatling, passing the municipal parking lot behind City Hall.

  With Clay on my mind, I made another decision and called him. His phone rang repeatedly in my ear. I left a message, expressed my concern, and, for the umpteenth time since his retirement, begged him to carry his phone. He had it with him earlier at the house. That was progress. But where was it now? Most likely abandoned again on his pickup’s front seat, where apparently Clay was not.

  Stowing my phone, I looked up to the three-story Whitney Building. It holds down one corner of Gatling and Kinsman and was the backdrop for Hellfire Harry’s outdoor church, sitting where the choir loft and baptismal font should be. In my mind’s eye, I could see the tall, reedy man with his shaggy beard, black suit, and flat-brimmed black hat hunched over the molded-plastic newspaper stand he used as a pulpit. His Bible lay there, open on the flattop stanchion, his hands stretched heavenward while he dispensed judgment upon the citizens of Havens.

  Hellfire faded into oblivion when I remembered Penny Skillings would still be at the theater. Gideon and I socialized w
ith Penny and her husband Max. She was a gifted landscape artist. Combine that with a healthy dose of civic pride and, of course, she volunteered to paint scenery backdrops for the play.

  From the crosswalk, I gazed upon the Baxter, trying to imagine all the glitz and glitter that accompanied the opera house’s grand opening in the late, late eighteen-hundreds. Experts describe the architecture as Baroque, lightly applied, while fully embracing the characteristic of curved rather than straight lines. Three sets of double doors under arched, deep-set doorways greeted the old-time theater-goers.

  I stepped into the theater’s lobby. On opening night, the lobby would be lit by eight antique chandeliers. The décor was a toned-down red and gold, tasteful, and still pristine in appearance since the theater’s facelift. All lobby operations—concession stand, ticket counter, cloak room—were recessed into the walls. My steps across the deep-piled carpeting were soundless. All was quiet until my ringing cell phone echoed throughout the cavernous entry room.

  I pulled it out of my pocket. The caller was my contact at the Chamber. The conversation was a short one. Apparently all around town, budgets were tight for the Friends of the Baxter. These business owners already donated all they could to the project, I was told. I explained that Barton said a promotion in the program would mean more people coming in the door. This brought agreement and the blunt retort that a promotion was an expense someone had to front. I was designated the person to pass the bad news to Barton. I braced myself for that and disconnected.

  The auditorium door opened easily. Inside, the auditorium held seating for eight hundred, making use of the main floor, balcony, and box seats nestled in the walls. The room was divided by a center and two side aisles. The design of this area lacked straight lines as well. The front edge of the stage bowed out while rows of conjoined seating duplicated the effect.