Private Investigations. Jean Barrett
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“Not a clue.”
“What about Laura’s car? It must have been parked somewhere near the old plantation house. If Glenn followed her out to Resurrection, why didn’t he see it, know that she must still be there? Did you ask him about that?”
“Of course I asked him. He said it was there, that the police had found it parked out of sight behind this tangle of shrubbery. But since Glenn had no reason to suppose she might have hidden it or to check out the cemetery either, he assumed she wasn’t there, after all, and he left.”
“In an agitated state. Why, if he never saw her?”
“He was upset about their marriage,” Christy explained. “He’d been upset for some time. He’d counted on having it out with her about their problems and was angry that she wasn’t available.”
“Seems a funny thing to do, going out there like that on the chance she’d be there. Why not wait until she got home to talk to her about it?”
“It was one of those spur of the moment things. An I’ve-had-it-and-I’m-going-to-settle-it-right-now emotion. We’ve all had them.”
“Yeah, but a couple of hikers didn’t see us tearing away from the scene and a teenager out hunting rabbits the next morning didn’t find our wife with her head bashed in.” Aware of Christy glaring at him, Dallas offered a quick, “Hey, I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, trying to look at all the angles. I’m not condemning the guy. I know that his marriage was in trouble. Monica told me that.”
“I hope she also told you that her sister had gotten very strange these past few months. Glenn said Laura had become withdrawn and wouldn’t talk about it. Something was going on with her and I’m thinking it could have been another man, that she was meeting him at Resurrection, which would explain why she was out there so much and didn’t come home some nights.”
“That would be a handy solution. Laura cheating on ol’ Glenn and her secret lover doing her in.” Dallas shook his head. “Except it doesn’t work. And not because Laura Hollister wasn’t the type to have an affair. She just wouldn’t have been troubled about it.”
“How do you know what type she was? Oh, Monica, I suppose. And would you please stop crowding me?”
Christy had grown increasingly aware of his disarming closeness. He was pressed so tightly against her that she could feel the heat of his solid body, smell the scent of his soap. His nearness was making her slightly woozy.
“Can’t help it. In case you haven’t noticed, these seats aren’t exactly generous.”
“Do you have to have your arm there?” It was draped along the back of the seat, not exactly around her but close enough to be threateningly cozy. She was beginning to realize the trolley hadn’t been a safe choice.
“Nowhere else to put it,” he said with an innocence she was learning not to trust. “And it’s not about sex. It’s about money.”
“Huh?”
He chuckled. “Pay attention. The Hollister marriage. Money was the problem there. Laura liked to spend it, particularly on jewelry, and her husband earned a teacher’s salary. Monica said they argued about that all the time.”
“But there should have been plenty. Glenn told me that, though Monica controlled the sisters’ inheritance, she doled out a generous monthly allowance to Laura.”
“Not enough to suit Laura. Monica said her sister asked to have that allowance increased and was furious when she turned her down.”
Dallas fell silent again. There was a faraway look on his face that Christy wondered about. Why did she have the persistent feeling he had some personal stake in this case, something he was unwilling to reveal to her?
“Hello,” she prompted him.
“Sorry. You were saying?”
“Actually, I was hoping you would be saying it. You spent as much time with Monica as I spent with Glenn, but nearly everything we’ve got so far has come from Glenn. Didn’t you get anything useful from her that could provide us with a strong lead?”
“Well, now that’s interesting,” he said with an exasperating casualness, “because it’s just possible I did.”
“Do I get to hear it?” she asked him impatiently.
“Would I hold out on a partner?”
Yes, if it suited you, Christy thought, but she didn’t say it.
“It seems,” Dallas went on with that same nonchalance, “that the police investigators went and turned up something curious in this little clearing behind the family cemetery where Laura’s body was found. They questioned Monica about it. Wanted to know if she knew anything about her property having been used as a setting for voodoo practices.”
“Voodoo! You mean the kind people don’t kid about? The sick stuff?”
“Could be.”
“And you’re just now mentioning this? What exactly did they find?”
“Evidence that there may have been midnight ceremonies, the sacrifice of small animals. Monica was shocked.”
Christy suddenly remembered the chicken feathers blown up against the iron fence enclosing the cemetery and how she had ignored them, which didn’t make her happy about her detecting skills.
There was something else she remembered—that small bunch of dried plant material she’d been reaching for in the attic when the swallows had startled her. She told Dallas about it.
“So that’s how you ended up down in that hole doing a trapeze act from a gas pipe. What happened to the stuff?”
“It crumbled to bits as I grabbed at it, and since by then I had, uh, a few other things to occupy me, I forgot about it. But it occurs to me now it could have been a voodoo charm. That means,” she said excitedly, “Laura might have been involved with some kind of cult. And that could explain why she went out so often to Resurrection and didn’t come home some nights. It could also explain her death.”
“It could,” Dallas agreed, “but since she died in the afternoon around the same time as her husband’s visit out there, the police aren’t ready to connect her murder with any late-night rituals.”
“But we have to be serious about that possibility,” Christy insisted.
“Right. Let’s go.”
He came abruptly to his feet, moving out into the aisle as the trolley slowed for one of its stops. Christy followed him as he headed for the exit.
“Where to?”
“Back to our cars.”
“And then?”
He didn’t reply. He was too busy making a path for them through a party of chattering tourists trying to board the trolley as they were leaving it. By the time she caught up with him, he had reached another trolley headed in the opposite direction.
“Lots of questions to be answered, grits,” he said as he hustled her aboard the car. “Yeah, I know. Don’t call you that. Look, don’t think of it as food. Think of it as all the courage I admire in you.”
Christy let that one pass. For now, anyway. “And just where are you taking us to get them answered?” she demanded again as she sank into one of the seats.
“Someplace that’s going to fascinate you,” he promised as he settled beside her. “Either that or scare you to death.”
Chapter Three
Christy had always believed she knew the city and its environs so well that she could qualify as a New Orleans cab driver. That was before Dallas McFarland took her into a neighborhood so alien to her