Buried Bones Read online

  It was a place where folks came for a cup of coffee and to pick up news while pretending to read the newspaper. While the Buddy Clubbers—the elite, white male faction of the Delta—could eat at Millie’s, it was considered inappropriate for the daughters of those men, the Daddy’s Girls, to dine there. I’d often gone there with my father, where we sat in a booth not part of any clique. I’d always thought it was because my father was a judge and that people were afraid of him. I’d learned as an adult that wasn’t necessarily the truth.

  The bell on the door jangled as I walked in. Millie was behind the counter, her apron tied around a waist still small and firm for a woman her age. She gave me a smile as she carried four heaping plates to a table of farmers who were the only patrons. It was that time between breakfast and lunch when normal people were at work, or otherwise gainfully employed. I liked to stop by the café in the in-between hours. Millie and I were developing a solid friendship.

  After she’d refilled everyone’s coffee, she put two cups down in front of me and poured for both of us. “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “Tell me about Lawrence Ambrose,” I requested, “after I get some hot biscuits.”

  She retrieved my order from the kitchen and then perched on a stool behind the counter.

  “Lawrence was a great man. I sure hated to hear he’d passed on.” She pushed a wisp of blond bangs off her forehead. “I know he was old, but it seemed to me he ought to last forever.” She made a small face. “Hell, I’m old.”

  Millie was in her fifties. Lawrence would have been long gone on his European adventures by the time she was old enough to remember him. “I was hoping you knew something about him.”

  She shook her head. “Not like you want. He dropped by to eat some after he came home to Zinnia.” She pushed her bangs back again though they weren’t close to her face. “He gave me some recipes. That short rib stew with a side of cheese grits that everyone loves—that was one of his.”

  I’d already eaten my biscuits, but the idea of the stew made my mouth water. Pavlov and Sweetie Pie came to mind. “Was Lawrence close to anyone in town, other than Madame?”

  “Who?” She looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Rosalyn Bell.” I had stepped off the path and into deep cow-poo. Millie wasn’t the kind of woman who would agree to call anyone madame, not even a ballet teacher.

  “I hope to goodness she and your psychic buddy, Madame Tomeeka, don’t get into a hair pulling over which one is the grandest.” Millie refilled the coffee cups. “At any rate, I do remember the first time Lawrence came home from Europe when one of those professors from over at Oxford had this big to-do. It was like a Lawrence Day where the town celebrated him. There was a parade with a band and baton-twirling dancers.” Her face softened into a smile as she sank into her memories.

  “The first time he came home?”

  “Yeah. I was little. I went with Aunt Bev. She was the only one in the family who read. She came over from Greenwood with copies of some of his books. Pissed her husband off.” She laughed. “Somewhere they’d gotten an elephant for Lawrence to ride. It was hot, and I remember the elephant left tracks in the asphalt at the elementary school. That’s where they’d set up for the big barbecue and party.

  “After the parade Lawrence sat on a rug under this red and white striped umbrella with his legs crossed like a sultan and wrote in the books people brought by.” Again she shook her head. “It was a day that would leave an impression on any kid.”

  “Did anything special happen?” I was more curious than hopeful that Millie could shed light on Lawrence’s past.

  “He bent down and looked right at me and said, ‘Someone should use your eyes to design a china pattern.’ I didn’t understand, but Aunt Bev told me it was a compliment.”

  “This would have been in the late fifties?” I was trying to pinpoint the time frame.

  She nodded. “I was seven or eight. I remember my dress, a powder-puff blue organza with five starched petticoats.”

  “What, exactly, was the event?”

  “Lawrence had come home, to write and bring prestige to the State of Mississippi.” She intoned the last with great dignity before her expression changed to one of lively mischief. “He didn’t stay a week. There was some big falling out with the university man. They were supposed to have a job for Lawrence, and when he went over to start teaching, none of it had actually come through. I don’t know where the fault lay, but the upshot was that Lawrence went right back to Paris, but not before he created a big stink in the newspaper. It was a scandal, but I don’t remember the details.”

  The word “motive” was flashing behind my eyelids like a neon Christmas wreath. “Would your Aunt Bev?”

  “She might. She spent a summer with Lawrence and some others up at some lake.” Millie’s blue eyes focused sharply on me. “What are you up to, Sarah Booth. Is this a new case? Something about Lawrence?”

  I didn’t show a single emotion. “As you know, my work is confidential. Even if I had something to tell you, I couldn’t.”

  She squeezed my hand. “Call Aunt Bev. She lives over in Greenwood. Call her.” She wrote the telephone number on a napkin for me. “Tell her I said I loved her.”

  I put the money for my breakfast on the counter. “Thanks, Millie.”

  “Thanks aren’t necessary, but I sure would like to know what you’re working on.”

  “I’ll tell you before I tell anyone else,” I promised.

  “Well, if you need backup.” She put one hand on a hip.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” And I would. Millie had proven herself tough and reliable when she’d been kidnapped by Veronica Garrett and Pasco Walters. I could go a lot farther and do a lot worse, as Jitty would say.

  Since I was already downtown, I stopped by the bakery, selected the largest and cheesiest Danish, and headed for the newspaper. Cece was too young to remember the scandal, but she could give me access to the newspaper files.

  Several reporters who had once ignored my very existence perked up as I walked through the room.

  “Working a case, Sarah Booth?” Garvel LaMott called out.

  “Your mama,” I said with a fake smile. I’d gone to high school with Garvel and he had been quite the successful snoop, sniffing out cigarettes in the bathroom and Wild Turkey in the book lockers. Unfortunately, he was also a tattletale. I hurried into Cece’s office—the only private one—and closed the door.

  “Sarah Booth, dahling, you look … robust.”

  “I see my tenure as your own personal Florence Nightingale did nothing to reduce your venom. Thanks instead of insults might be in order,” I said with annoyance, dropping the pastry sack on her desk. Robust was not exactly the same as calling me Peggy-porker or Little Miss Ham Hocks, but it was close enough.

  “Touchy about our weight, are we?” Cece stood up and ran her hands down her svelte hips. One advantage of having been a man was that she would never suffer from middle-age spread.

  “What is this royal plural crap? And that dah-ling.” I drawled it out. “You stole that from Lawrence.”

  She sat back down and studied me. “I didn’t steal it. He gave it to me.” A single tear dribbled out the corner of her eye and she batted it away. I noticed that for all of her perfectly applied makeup, she was still a little pale.

  I sank into a chair, ignoring the fact that it was stacked with old newspapers. “Are you really okay?”

  “It was just an anxiety attack. It’s just so awful about Lawrence,” she said, accosting another tear before it could leave track marks. “When I came back from Sweden, after the surgery, he came to see me. My own parents wouldn’t speak to me but this famous writer appeared at my door with an armful of paper whites and daffodils that he’d stolen from mean ole Mrs. Hedgepeth’s sidewalk.” She started laughing. “He took every single one of her flowers, and he made me put them in a vase in the window so she could see them.”

  We were both laughing. “You didn’t
know him before that?”

  “Of course I knew who he was. I’d read all of his books. I learned to cook with his recipes. But I’d never met him until that moment. I was shocked.” The laughter was gone and the tears were dangerously close to the surface again, but she continued.

  “When I was well, he dropped by with some net gloves and a black hat that he said Audrey Hepburn had worn in a movie. He told me they’d bring me luck and always, whenever anyone tried to hurt me, to visualize myself wearing them and to use the royal plural. And he said he wanted me to use his trademark ‘dahling’ so that it would continue after he died.”

  “You never said a word about any of this,” I accused.

  Cece spied the pastry bag on the corner of her desk. She snagged it, opened it, and peered inside. “I never had a reason to say anything. Until now. No one ever accused me of stealing a character trait. Until now.”

  “Okay, so I’m fat and bitchy. What’s your point?”

  “No point. I just like to keep you in line.”

  “Practice sex alone,” I whispered, leaning forward.

  Cece laughed, biting into the Danish with a show of her former good appetite. “So are you looking for a writing assignment or working something else?” She took another large bite of the pastry. “You can talk until I finish eating, then I have to work. Deadline at eleven.”

  It was ten-thirty, so I had to talk fast. “Do you remember any gossip about Lawrence coming home from Paris in the fifties?”

  “The time Ole Miss didn’t have the teaching job for him?”

  “That would be it.”

  “Check the files. Lawrence never said anything to me about it, but I’ve heard stories. There was something in the paper, some sort of literary feud going on. I don’t really remember.” She took the last bite. “You know where the files are. Tell Glenda that you’re looking up something for me.”

  “Thanks,” I leaned across the desk, “dahling.”

  Her eyes narrowed in calculation. “There was something about a death threat. Some dark secret, a hidden past.” Her forehead furrowed. “Let me know what you find. I’m doing a story for Sunday’s paper on Lawrence. I’ve heard rumors that some people believe Lawrence was murdered. Is this a new case, Sarah Booth?” Curiosity glinted in her eyes.

  I smiled and shrugged. Cece was crazy as a run-over dog if she thought I’d stoke those fires.

  She swallowed the last of the pastry. Her gaze dropped and I could tell she was about to cry again.

  “He seemed very fond of you,” I said, failing utterly at comfort.

  “He called last night to check on me, after you’d fallen asleep. I think he genuinely cared.”

  “What time did he call?” I asked as innocently as I could.

  Her gaze lifted in a smooth motion—radar. “You are working on a case.” Her eyebrows arched. “I can’t say exactly, but it was after midnight because he said something about it being Christmas. And I’ll tell you something else. He said the party was over, but I don’t think he was alone.”

  7

  The last time I had to go searching in the morgue of The Zinnia Dispatch I’d been lucky. My quest had taken me back into the late seventies and early eighties and the information was still in bound volumes. When I put my request before Glenda, the morgue librarian, she pointed me in the direction of the spools of microfiche. The year I sought was 1958, summer. With Millie’s hints about elephants and umbrellas it didn’t take long to discover that the Barnum and Bailey Circus was in town in June, hence the availability of an elephant in the Mississippi Delta. Although the circus was the headline news for the day, Lawrence’s arrival home was bottom of the fold, front page.

  The whiz of the printed page made me dizzy as I rolled the film through the viewer. It was a week later, June 15, 1958, that the vitriol began to spew. The first salvo was on the editorial page, where Lawrence had written a letter. It was a masterpiece of wit and whiplash. The gist was that he’d been promised a job, which upon his arrival had been withheld because of his lack of “formal” education. My favorite part of the letter went “as if the gatekeepers of the hallowed halls of learning could recognize a truly educated man. These academic pretenders give evolution a bad name. Indeed, the monkeys in the jungle are howling disclaimers of any kinship to these rogues.”

  I was laughing out loud. Dean Joseph Grace made the response for the school almost a week later, pointing out that Lawrence had led them to believe he held a degree. I read his rebuttal, hearing in my mind the pompous drone that had drilled my ear like a woodpecker at the dinner party. “When it became obvious that Lawrence was not formally educated,” Grace wrote, “the decision not to offer the position was unavoidable. The criteria for excellence in teachers at Ole Miss could not be lowered, not even for such a fine writer.”

  Right. Somewhere between the offer and Lawrence’s return to Zinnia, someone had decided to slam the door in his face. Degrees had nothing to do with it. I made a note to check the policy at Ole Miss.

  It was in the next issue of the paper that Lawrence volleyed back with a front-page interview in which he challenged the university dean to a public display of knowledge—a match—to be performed in the Zinnia High School auditorium with the whole town in attendance to judge who was the most learned man. Lawrence said that if Grace bested him, he would drop the issue and never speak of it again.

  A brilliant and sneaky gambit! I loved it.

  Grace declined, saying that it was beneath the dignity of a full professor to indulge in public displays. Yes, indeed, the trump card for cowards—a claim to dignity.

  It was almost too delicious but ultimately useless. So far there was no hint of dark secrets. The two men had obviously patched up the dispute because the dean had been a guest in Lawrence’s home. I’d observed them closely, and there had been no open animosity that I could detect.

  No sooner had I thought that than I turned to the next issue of the paper and saw the banner headline. “Author Threatened By Vile Caller.”

  There was a photograph of a very handsome Lawrence coming out of the courthouse. Though debonair, Lawrence was clearly shaken. I read the story with interest.

  Lawrence, upon his return to Zinnia, had been put up in the Sunflower Hotel, a Delta luxury establishment during the fifties. It had still been in operation when I was a little girl. My father went there in the mornings to sit in the shoeshine chair and let Old Mose buff up his shoes before he went to the courthouse. The lobby of the hotel was marble, and there were huge columns and always fresh flowers. I particularly remember the artwork, strange sculptures of men who were half beast. Centaurs and satyrs, my father had explained, reminding me that it would be rude to climb up on one and try to ride it.

  I never saw one of the rooms. By the time I got old enough to consider the benefits of a hotel room, the Sunflower had burned and been razed. But I had heard frequent stories about the elegance of the rooms with draped beds and bath towels kept in warmers. It was a place Lawrence would have enjoyed.

  This time the reporter, one Sarah Gillespe, had gone into great detail. The focus was the death threats Lawrence had been receiving, always late at night, always from a man, who threatened him with “a bullet to the brain” if he didn’t “quit humiliating the university and get out of town.”

  Ole Miss was famous for its devoted alumni, and though the formal education there had been known to knock the rough edges off more than a few graduates, no school could be expected to completely change the genetic structure of a good ole boy.

  As indicated in the story, Lawrence had taken the threats to the sheriff. The reporter went on to discuss the dispute between Lawrence and the school about the hotel bill. Lawrence refused to move to other, cheaper quarters, saying he’d been guaranteed a room at the Sunflower until his cottage at Ole Miss was available. Since there was to be no cottage, he was staying at the Sunflower until he could book passage back to Paris.

  It would seem that Lawrence had them on breach of con
tract on two counts—if he had any of the deal in writing. Which was the crucial question never asked in the story.

  There was one quote from Lawrence that stuck out. “Justice is only a word in this state. Money and power have always ruled in Mississippi, without regard to truth or right. It is a system of corrupt politics and decay.”

  It was not the eloquence that held me, but the fact that it didn’t exactly fit in with the rest of the story. I made notes, jotting down the threats. It was apparent from the story that the sheriff, John Wayne Masters, had not shown much interest in acting in Lawrence’s behalf. It was also clear that Lawrence had made the threats public as a thumb in the nose to someone.

  I read the story again. There was something not right, but half a century of passing time and a lack of knowledge of the players had blurred the issues for me.

  Why had Joseph Grace offered Lawrence a job and then reneged? What did Lawrence know that threatened Joseph Grace to the point that he would stir such a public stink? The bit about Lawrence not having a formal degree didn’t hold water. Lawrence was a renowned and respected author and artist. He would add stature to any university program. Something else was involved, and I’d been a private investigator just long enough to realize that Dean Grace wasn’t going to tell me voluntarily.

  I closed my notebook and returned the newspaper reels to their slots. As difficult as my previous case had been, this one looked as if it would be harder. Lawrence’s death was real and immediate even if the motive was buried in the past along with the bones of many of the people involved.

  Living at Dahlia House, with the family cemetery just outside the kitchen window, I had a lot of traffic with the dead. Living with Jitty, I had a lot of abuse from the dead. Bones didn’t scare me, but finding the places they were buried was a challenge.

  The good news was that I had several leads. I could drive to Oxford and talk with Dean Grace, or I could talk with Madame. Or I could find Johnny Albritton, the local telephone man. Since I wasn’t in a mood for ego or tears, I decided to find Johnny. We’d gone to school together, though he was a bit older.