Garden Gazebo Gallivant Page 9

  I closed my eyes and took in a breath. Opening them, I glanced in the mirror and saw that my mother had fallen over on the seat laughing.

  “You’re not going to open a safe, Miss Vivee,” I said.

  “You don’t know that for sure,” she said.

  I knew this was a bad idea.

  “Give me this stuff,” I said and gathered up the hats and flashlights. I leaned over, popped opened the glove compartment and threw them inside. “We don’t need any of those things, Miss Vivee. We’re just going over there to check out the place, make sure it’s ready for the overflow from the Maypop.”

  “No we’re not,” Miss Vivee said and frowned up.

  “That’s our cover, Miss Vivee,” my mother said. “In case anyone sees us.”

  Miss Vivee looked at me. “Is that what you meant?”

  “Yes. Frankie did give us the key-”

  “I don-”

  “Uuh. Uuh,” I held up my hand. “I already know you don’t have the key. I saw the ones you showed Micah.”

  “So you know we’re going to have to break in?”

  “I know that we’re going to have to be creative about getting in, yes.”

  Miss Vivee smiled. She turned her head, straining to look in the backseat at my mother. “Justin, your daughter’s using her noggin. Today.”

  I looked in the rearview mirror and saw my mother shaking her head still laughing.

  I drove over to Stallings Inn and the whole house was dark.

  “Maybe I should park down the street,” I said.

  “I thought we were just checking on it for the extra guests?” Miss Vivee said.

  “That’s if we get caught once we’re inside,” I said. “How can we justify that story if they see us prying a lock open?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” Miss Vivee said. “It was your idea.”

  “Where’s Mr. Hunt?” my mother asked.

  “Remember Frankie said he had camped out at the Sheriff’s office?”

  “I know,” my mother said. “But I figured that with him being sick and all, he might come home at night.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Miss Vivee said. “And we don’t know if we can trust that Seppie Love either. Frankie said he wasn’t sick. But I know how we can find out.” She reached for the door handle.

  I parked a couple houses down from Stallings Inn. We grabbed the flashlights I’d purchased at Hadley’s and walked to the house.

  Standing in front of it, I stared at it through the darkness. The front lit only by a gas light in the yard and a street light on the other side of the street. “Should I go around back and see if I can get in the kitchen window?” I asked

  “I think we should try the front door first,” Miss Vivee said. “A lot of people still don’t lock their doors.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go and see. Stay put.”

  I ran up on the porch and tried the door. It was locked. I thought about going around back, but decided to first check one of the windows that lined the porch. And, yay! I found one. Shoving it up, I put one foot in, straddling I ducked my head in and pulled my other leg through.

  “Come to the door,” I said through the opened window. “I’ll let you in.”

  Shutting the window back, I flipped on my flashlight and flashed a quick beam around the interior of the house, then over to the door. The inside floor of the door was scattered with mail. I shined a light on it – magazines, bills, an invoice – I looked at the return addresses and then noticed a couple that looked like greeting cards. Condolences for Kimmie, no doubt, but they couldn’t have been mailed. She’d just died. I guessed they probably had just been pushed through the door.

  I gingerly stepped over them as not to disturb the pile, and then thought how obvious we were being by “breaking in” through the front of the house. I opened the front door and let in my partners in crime.

  “Watch the mail,” I said. “Don’t fall.” I closed the door after they came in and shined my light up the stairs. They weren’t as ornate or sturdy looking as the Maypop’s.

  “First thing we want to find is what’s ailing Nash Hunt,” Miss Vivee said.

  “I agree,” I said. “So we’ll start upstairs,” I said. “Where the bedrooms are.” I headed up the creaky steps, but once I reached the top, I noticed Miss Vivee hadn’t followed me.

  “Miss Vivee,” I whispered as loud as I could over the banister, back downstairs. “Miss Vivee!” I looked over at my mother and then shined the light back down stairs. “What are you doing?”

  “Looking through the mail,” she said. “Might be a clue.”

  “What? Why?” I ran back down the steps. She had the mail in her hand. I took it from her and dropped it back on the floor, trying to make it look as if it fell from the chute.

  “We might find something,” she repeated.

  “I don’t think whoever killed Kimmie wrote a letter and sent it to her parents’ home.”

  “Well, what about Nash?” she said as I pushed her toward the steps. “We need to find out about him.”

  “The only way you could find out anything about him, would be to open the mail. We’re not disturbing anything. Plus, I looked at the return addresses on some of them. Nothing medical.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  Once upstairs, Miss Vivee went straight to the medicine cabinet in the first bathroom we got to. “Nothing’s here,” she said.

  “People only keep medicine in the bathroom cabinet in the movies,” I said. My mother and I was standing in the doorway.

  “They do not,” Miss Vivee wrinkled her forehead, adding more lines to the plethora of them already there. “Why would they call it a medicine chest if it wasn’t for that?”

  “Let’s try a nightstand,” I suggested. “Look for a bedroom.” We were in the middle of a burglary. We didn’t have time to argue.

  We found our way into Frankie’s bedroom, and discovered there wasn’t anything in it that belonged to Mr. Hunt.

  “You think she makes him sleep on the couch?” Miss Vivee asked. “She’s such a mean thing. Him sick and all.”

  “We don’t know for sure that he’s sick,” I said. “And maybe he’s the mean one.”

  “You’ll be married soon, you’ll see how women give grief for no good reason. Some of them are rascals, no doubt, but most of them just don’t have good sense. That’s why they act like they do. We just have to tolerate their dumbness better. That’s how you be a good wife. Ask your mother.” She pointed to my mom.

  “I’m not in this one,” she said and looked at me. “But you lived with your father and brother, you should be able to figure out that one yourself.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. I didn’t know how my mother could agree with anything Miss Vivee said.

  “How about if we keep looking?” my mother said. “Maybe this Nash Hunt had a bedroom all his own.”

  We went down the hallway, opening each, flashing a light to look around. Not one looked occupied.

  “How about downstairs?” my mother suggested. “Your house has a bedroom downstairs, maybe this one does, too.”

  “Of course it does,” Miss Vivee said. “But I still think she would stick him on the couch.”

  I lead the way down the back stairs, holding the flashlight up like a torch. We found an in-law suite off the kitchen and down a short corridor.

  “This one smells like a nest of granddaddies,” Miss Vivee said after I opened the door. “I betcha this is where he sleeps.”

  My mother laughed, but I knew just what Miss Vivee meant. The room reeked of stale cigarettes and dirty socks.

  All of us focused our beams in the room. It was sparsely furnished. A full-sized bed was in the middle of the floor, neatly made. A chest of drawers, a chair, and a nightstand with a lamp and a clock atop of it was all there was. The room was dark – the shades were drawn, an
d it was warmer than the other rooms in the house. Off the bedroom was a small bathroom.

  “In there,” Miss Vivee said. She pointed to the bathroom with the beam from her flashlight. I guess it was her medicine cabinet idea again.

  I went to the nightstand, turned on the lamp and pulled opened the small drawer. I found it full of pill bottles. I st on the side of the bed and pulled each one out one-by-one.

  The bottles were all from pharmacies located in a place called Baxley, Georgia. Most of them from Barnes Pharmacy that had an address on Main Street.

  “Miss Vivee,” I yelled over my shoulder. “Where is Baxley, Georgia?”

  “A couple hours south of here, not too far from Savannah. Why?” she said coming out from the bathroom.

  I turned around on the bed. “What were you two doing in there so long? Did you find something?”

  “Some shaving cream,” Miss Vivee said and tossed it on the bed.

  “What did you find?” my mother said. She came to sit next to me on the bed.

  “A lot of pills.” I pointed to the opened nightstand drawer.

  “Let me see,” my mother said and took the bottles from my hand. “Adriamycin,” she read the label.

  “That sounds like an antibiotic,” I said.

  “Avastin. Plantinol.” She kept reading.

  “I know that one,” Miss Vivee said. “That Plantinol. Louis took it.”

  “Bay’s father?” I asked.

  “How many other Louis’s do you know?”

  I hadn’t known him, but there was one thing I did know about him. “Bay’s father had cancer,” I said, sharing what I knew with my mother. “Maybe Mr. Hunt does too?”

  I pulled out my phone and Googled the last name my mother read out. “‘Plantinol.’” I read. “‘Brand name for the drug, Cisplatin. It is an anti-cancer medication that interferes with the growth of cancer cells and slows their growth and spread in the body. The drug is used to treat testicular, ovarian, bladder, head and neck, esophageal, small and non-small cell lung, breast, cervical, stomach and prostate cancers.’” I looked at my mother.

  “Well that narrows it down,” she said.

  I shrugged. “So, we still don’t know exactly what’s wrong with him,” I said.

  “We know he’s got cancer, and that ain’t good,” Miss Vivee said.

  “I’ll call Claire,” my mother said. “Give me your phone. I’m sure she’ll know.”

  My mother’s sister, Claire, had four degrees, including a medical one. She didn’t practice, instead she ran a research lab at the Cleveland Clinic. It didn’t take long for her to narrow down what Mr. Hunt was suffering from once my mother read all the labels in the drawer.

  “Lung cancer,” my mother announced after she ended the call with her sister. “Claire’s says she’s 99% positive. She said she would be 100% sure, but it wouldn’t be good to make such a determination without ever having seen him.”

  “Lung cancer. That’s curable nowadays,” Miss Vivee said and opened up one of the bottle of pills. “But it sure doesn’t make him ‘healthy as a horse’ like Frankie said.” She held up one of the pills. “Although this pill is big enough for a horse.” She screwed the lid back on and tossed it in the drawer.

  “I don’t think he could be ‘frisky as a fritter,’ either,” I said.

  “Ferret,” my mother said. “Frankie said he was ‘frisky as a ferret.’” She looked at me, then Miss Vivee. “Claire said with the combination of medication he’s taking, it sounds like he might be Stage IV.”

  “Oh,” Miss Vivee said and nothing else.

  “Fritter. Ferret. Whatever,” I said. “Frankie wasn’t telling the truth if Auntie Claire is right. And I believe her. Mr. Hunt is very sick.”

  Miss Vivee shook her head. “That’s gawd awful! He’s got to suffer like that and then lose his only child, all at the same time.”

  “Now that we know what ails Mr. Hunt,” I said. “Let’s see if we can find out what Miss Kimmie had been up to that may have gotten her killed.” I looked at my mother and then nodded toward the hallway. “Her bedroom must be down here, too.”

  We found two other doors down the narrow hallway, one was a bathroom, and the other was the room we were looking for.

  Opening the door to Kimmie’s room should have triggered a parting of the clouds and an angelic choral refrain. The room was beautiful and looked nothing like the rest of the house. It had sky blue walls with sheer curtains, that matched exactly, hanging ceiling to floor. Everything else was white and golden. The brass bed was shiny, and the light of the glass chandelier glinted off of it and made it gleam. A fluffy, cloud-like, comforter and pillows covered the bed which set on a soft, short shaggy rug. Everything was neatly in place, and looked more like a layout for a magazine than an actual living space.

  “Where to start?” I said standing at the door, darting a beam of light around the room, and staring in.

  “The drawers,” Miss Vivee said squeezing past me.

  “I’ll check the closet,” my mother said walking over. She swung the door open. “This is kind of creepy,” she said. “Going through a dead person’s things.”

  “Isn’t that what you do for a living?” Miss Vivee said.

  I grimaced. I certainly agreed with what my mother said. Archaeologist didn’t deal with the newly departed.

  I walked over to Kimmie’s dresser and found a small, flip photo album sitting near the edge. I slowly turned the pages and found picture after picture of Kimmie. She had been a beautiful girl. Dark, silky hair, olive-colored skin, and blue eyes the color of her walls. And to my surprise, the little book was filled with photos of Keith Collier, the man we’d seen at Seppie Love’s house half dressed. The pictures were evidence that Kimmie and Keith had been an item – the loving stares and cuddling in nearly every one – showed much more than a friendship. And Seppie Love was not in one of them. That raised questions about what September and Keith were up to now.

  “Here’s something to look through,” my mother said breaking my chain of thought. She pulled a duffle bag from the closet floor. It still had airline tags on it.

  “What you got?” Miss Vivee asked pushing the last drawer shut. “Because I didn’t find anything there.”

  “Her luggage,” my mother said. “If she’s got some kind of ancient artifact from her travels, she may have it in here.”

  “Not a very good hiding place,” Miss Vivee said. “That’d be the first place for anyone to look.”

  My mother unzipped the bag without commenting. We all leaned over and peered inside. It was full of clothes and shoes, and was packed just as neatly as her room looked.

  “Let’s see if there are any hidden compartments,” my mother said and started to run her hand around the interior when we heard footsteps.

  I flicked my flashlight off, and my mother followed suit. Miss Vivee flickered hers in my face.

  “What was that?” she asked in a normal voice.

  “Shh!” I said. I took the flashlight from her and turned it off. “Hold on.” I walked over to the window and peeked out.

  “What do you see?” Miss Vivee asked.

  “Nothing,” I said turning to them. I could only see an outline of the two, standing over the bed, my mother’s silhouette showing she was still clutching onto the bag. I walked over to the door, closed it and turned my flashlight back on. Focusing the beam toward the floor, I instructed my mother to put the bag back.

  “We need to go,” I said.

  She zipped it up, and after guiding her back to the closet, I shut off the light, slowly opened the door and taking in a breath, I peered around the corner.

  “C’mon,” I said, unsure if they could see me waving them on. Then we heard footsteps overhead. I quickly closed the door back. “Crap!”

  “They’re upstairs,” Miss Vivee said.

  “I know,” I said. “I hear them.”

  “I mean, they are upstairs,” she said again.

  “So what she means
is, we can go,” my mother said.

  “Right,” I said nodding my head. I opened the door again. “Maybe we should go out the back door.” It was more of statement than a request for approval.

  “We are the proprietors of Stallings Inn,” Miss Vivee said.

  “What?” I said in a strained whisper.

  “By proxy,” she said her voice getting louder, she stomped her foot, “maybe we should go and see who’s up there.”

  I was tempted to throw her five-foot nothing, ninety-something frame over my shoulder and carry her out, instead I gave her arm a little tug, and in a not so nice, but very firm voice said, “Let’s go.”

  But still, she didn’t seem to understand the urgency.

  “That’s Frankie’s so-called greenhouse,” Miss Vivee said once we were out back. “I want to check it out, see what she has.”

  I looked over at the crooked shack, and couldn’t believe she wanted to take time to look in it. “I don’t think that’s a greenhouse, Miss Vivee. It has all of two windows,” I whispered, but I’m sure she heard the stress in my voice. “And we have to go.”

  “Just a little peek,” she said walking toward it.

  I grabbed her arm with one hand, and put my other arm around her shoulder. “We have to go. Now!”

  ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

  “Close call,” my mother said as I pulled the car up into the driveway of the Maypop. I didn’t pull all the way in, so I could help my elderly cohorts out of the car closer to the front door.

  “I know,” I said and eyed Miss Vivee.

  “Oh good heavens,” Miss Vivee said. “I thought we were Frankie’s proxy. What happened to that alibi?”

  I must not be living right if I need an alibi . . .

  “It was just something I said, in case we got caught.”

  “Exactly,” Miss Vivee said. “So if they had of caught us, then that’s what we would have told them.”

  “And why would we tell them we were using flashlights?” I asked.

  “Flashlights were your idea,” Miss Vivee said.

  I guess she forgot she’s the one who made me buy them.

  “But who is they?” my mother asked. “Unless Renmar did rent out a room, no one should have been there.”