Poison Branches Read online

  “So, as I was saying, I figured the call would be another one of the regulars, or maybe the Friday night stuff starting early. I hadn’t even gotten ‘Logan County Police Department’ out of my mouth yet when Will starts in talking a mile a minute. I had to ask him to start over and slow down. He takes this big breath and blows it out right into the mouthpiece. Then he says, ‘This is Will, Will Parker’ and he is, like, panting, you know? It scared me because I thought he was having a heart attack or something, so I asked if he needed the ambulance. He said, ‘No, no. I’m not calling for me, Em, I’m calling ‘cause I found a body! I found a body, Em! In the old burial ground. Oh, dear God. It was Amy Barrow. I thought it was rags, or clothes that someone threw out there. You gotta get someone out there. She’s layin’ there in the grass. She…Emily she’s been killed. And her car is there all wrecked up on the wall, wrecked on both ends of the car. Someone hit her and left. Somebody did something.”

  Emily looked around the table at the attentive group. Her brows lifted and she nodded slowly. “So, I told him to just hold on the line while I got someone. I radioed out for anyone out by the west end of town for a possible 187, that’s a possible murder. Joe Harper responded, said he was out that way not too far off and would check it out. I told Will to just sit tight, that I might have to call him back. And I told him not to go shooting his mouth off about it just yet since we didn’t know the situation. He sounded disappointed, but said he would.”

  Camo said, “It didn’t take long for it to start getting around. He must have told someone pretty quick.”

  “Yeah, it wasn’t but another 20 minutes before I had to call him back and tell him Joe said to keep zippered up about the details for right now. In the meantime, he probably told someone he found a body, but I don’t think he let slip any of the detail information. I haven’t heard it repeated anyway.”

  The man in the suit asked, “When do you think they’ll make some kind of statement, or put it on the news?

  “I don’t know. I would imagine they’re out there now. You know, the police and coroner and stuff. I guess we’ll find out soon enough, they can’t keep it secret.”

  “Why do you think someone might have wanted to kill her?” asked Perri. The group looked at her. “Oh, I’m Perri Seamore, by the way, and this is Nina Watkins. We are in town doing some research, genealogy research, and we were over in the Clerk’s office when the news started to spread. We heard about it there.”

  “Oh, I see. I’m Emily Keeling, I work at the dispatch, and this is my husband, Ed.” Emily then indicated each person at the table, “This is Lacy, she works over at the Country Village Market, Jack works at the highway department, and Peter is a paralegal at an office here downtown.”

  Perri and Nina smiled in turn to each as the introductions were made; Lacy and Jack nodded to her and Peter reached across the table to extend his hand to shake theirs.

  Lacy narrowed her small eyes, “So why are you so interested in Amy Barrow? You haven’t even been here before.”

  “I’m here to do some research…” Perri began

  “What kind of research?” barked Lacy.

  Perri glanced around the table. Emily grimaced at Lacy’s sharp tone and Peter was fumbling with his coaster. “I’ve been working on my family tree. I want to file for membership in the DAR which requires documentation for every generation. I got to the point where I needed to try to find that documentation to fill in some blanks and for proof.” Perri paused. “Two and three generations back, my father’s family lived here. That’s why I’m here. Nina came with me so we could make it into a fun weekend, get away from the daily grind. We both work as nurses back home. We’re from Vailsburg, IN. And as for your first question, I’m interested in this because part of my research here is going to several cemeteries to find my family’s headstones if I can. If someone is going around knocking off people in cemeteries, I would like to know.”

  Lacy sullenly mumbled, “Oh,” and looked at Jack, who looked away. Lacy frowned even more, her lips extending out into a pout.

  Perri asked again, “Does anyone have any idea why someone would want to kill Amy Barrow? Cora, over at the Clerk’s office, told us that she may have been in that cemetery to visit the grave of a friend who died recently, someone named Patricia?”

  Peter shook his head, “Oh yeah. Patricia Blackwell. She died a couple weeks ago and was buried out there. She doesn’t have any family around here anymore and the city buried her in a plot in the old cemetery. Amy must have been out there to visit the grave; that’s the field Will said he found the body in, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” answered Emily.

  Nina asked, “What happened to Patricia that she died at such a young age, had she been ill?”

  “Not as such, not lately. I mean…” Peter hesitated. “Patricia was ill off and on. She was an alcoholic who stayed sober for periods of time but would fall off the wagon and go on a weeks’ long bender. Then she’d be sick and trying to recover for a long time, sometimes she had to be hospitalized. At first, she’d be okay in the hospital but as she got to feeling better, she’d start raising hell with the staff. She had a lot of issues.”

  Lacy added, “Yeah, you never knew with her whether she was going to be friendly and talk your arm off or turn on you like a mad dog. She pretty much ran through all her friends and she didn’t have any family left around here. They all moved away a long time ago or died off. Her Mom died a few years ago. Patricia caused a big stink after her Mom’s death because she thought she would be inheriting her Mom’s house and everything in it, which wasn’t much.”

  “That’s how I came to know her, or know of her anyway,” said Peter. “Apparently, she wasn’t on good terms with her mother, hadn’t been for years, and they didn’t talk much. After her mother died and the burial was over, Patricia started moving in to her mother’s house. I’m not clear on all the early details, but shortly after she moved in, she woke up to find a couple of auction house appraisers in the living room. She ran them off, called the police, but it turned out that the property had to be sold to pay unsettled debts that her mother had left. An auction sign went up in the yard and Patricia had to be forcibly removed.”

  “It got pretty ugly,” said Emily. “I know I took at least a half a dozen calls from neighbors and the auction company people about her breaking in or raising hell when they were there.”

  “She just couldn’t understand or accept that the sale of the house was the only way to settle the outstanding debts her mother left. She kept going on about how they’d all be sorry, that she was going to show them. They knew she had taken some stuff out of the house, and at first they tried to get it back. That’s how I came to know about the situation, because they came to the lawyer that I work for to get the legal paperwork done to keep her out of the house. In the end, they realized she probably had only taken stuff they couldn’t sell and no one would want anyway, so they dropped it, the house and everything in it sold. The new owner emptied it. After that, Patricia realized there was nothing she could do and that was the end of it.”

  “Amy was about the only person left who had anything to do with Patricia?” Nods all around. “And you say that Amy had been back on speaking terms with Patricia lately?”

  “Yes. I saw them together about a month ago, at the library,” added Peter.

  “At the library?” asked Jack in a tone of disbelief.

  “Yes, it seems out of character for Patricia, doesn’t it? I’m not sure what it was about, but Amy did mention to me once…well, I had asked her if she wanted to go to dinner with me that night. It was almost 5 o’clock and she was here dropping off some paperwork, so I asked her. She told me she would have but she had agreed to help Patricia that night in some kind of search she was doing, something she had to look up at the library.” In answer to the inquiring looks, Peter continued, “I was more focused on her turning me down and thinking about asking another time than I was on listening to the rest of the explanation an
d that’s all I remember.”

  “That’s interesting though. Two friends who hadn’t talked for years, then something comes up that was important enough to Patricia for her to ask Amy for help.” Perri thought for a moment, “Could it have been something concerning Patricia trying to get ownership of the house that had been her mother’s, even though it had been sold several years before?”

  Peter replied, “It could have been, Patricia didn’t have a good grasp of things like that, but I doubt it. That water passed under the bridge a long time ago and she hadn’t made a fuss about it since. I don’t know why she would have started it up again.”

  No one spoke for a few moments, Nina piped up, “As far as the murder, or possible murder, goes, I take it this type of thing does not happen often around here.”

  “Not at all. There’s the occasional shooting in a robbery or drug deal, but for someone to be murdered for some unknown reason, I don’t remember that happening.” offered Jack.

  Perri ventured, “I wonder how long it will be before they release some information.”

  “I would think they’d have to make a statement tonight, or at least in the morning. Everyone already knows something happened” said Lacy, finishing off her drink.

  Jack nodded, “They sure do. I saw all the emergency vehicles in the cemetery on my way back into town.” He looked at Perri and Nina, “We’ve been repainting lines out on highway 68, going west. At quitting time today, I went by my house to clean up before coming back into town because I had paint all over me. On the way, I drove right past the cemetery and the place was taped off. I pulled over by where Joe Harper was putting up some horses in front of the entrance and asked him what was going on. Kind of hard for him to say ‘nothing’ and leave it at that I guess, so he said they didn’t know what happened yet, couldn’t talk about it. I could see a wrecked car from where I was parked and asked if somebody smashed their car up in there. He just said that yes there was a car accident, but that he had to go. And off he went. I didn’t know until I got back into town that there was a body and that it was Amy Barrow.”

  “Did any of you here know Amy?” Perri asked.

  Jack again, “I knew her a little, through work. She worked in the Planning Commission office and I usually was the one to go over there for permits and things. She was always nice to me, but I didn’t know her outside of work.”

  “Me too, I knew her a little through work. The lawyer I work for sometimes prepared some legal documents for the office and she’d come over to get them or deliver them after they were signed.”

  “Hmm. It doesn’t sound, so far, like anyone knows of any obvious reason someone would want to kill Amy Barrow. Any ideas? Did she have trouble with anybody lately, a stalker, or someone she had a disagreement with?” Perri asked.

  The five people in the group looked at each other and all shook their heads, then down the table, lost in thought.

  “I am very sorry about your loss, even if she was only an acquaintance and you didn’t know her very well. I hope this mystery gets solved, especially for her family,” said Nina.

  Perri looked around, stood up, and said, “It looks like our food has arrived. Thanks for letting us sit in, nice to meet you all.” Perri and Nina went back to their table after thank-you’s and goodbyes were said.

  As Perri returned her chair to their own table, she casually glanced up at the bartender, who smiled right at her. After returning a quick smile, she sat in her chair, back to the bar, “Wow, this looks great, I’m starving,” she said as the plate of sizzling battered fish was set down in front of her. “Yours looks pretty good too. You gonna be able to fit your mouth around that tenderloin?”

  Nina looked down at her plate. The tenderloin dwarfed the bread and made it look like a miniature bun sitting in the middle. “On my gosh! This looks awesome” she almost squealed as she slathered ketchup over the crispy plate-sized tenderloin.

  “Been a while since you’ve been out to eat?” Perri snickered.

  “Your darned right it has been! I haven’t seen something like this in months” shot back Nina.

  The next few minutes were punctuated only by the sounds of crunching and indecipherable noises of enjoyment. Once they had slowed down between bites, Perri said, “So tomorrow we should head over toward 68 to see what’s going on at the cemetery. We may not get in, but I want to try.”

  “Ok. Surely they’ll have the wreck removed before dark tonight, we probably won’t be able to see anything” said Nina thoughtfully.

  “No, probably not. But maybe if there are some people standing around, we can talk to them and find out more about it.”

  “Wurmp uh ty.”

  “Uh, what?” asked Perri.

  Nina held up one forefinger, chewed, took a sip of her water, and swallowed. “Worth a try.”

  “Alright then. When we finish up here, we’ll get back to the room and I’ll locate the cemetery on the map. We’ll plan on going there first. Let’s get up and get going early. I can’t wait. This is an interesting mystery, because I don’t have enough mysteries to solve, right?”

  “That’s for sure, but at least this one is in the same century as us.”

  Chapter 10

  Perri and Nina woke up to the insistent cawing of crows. It sounded like they were right outside the window. Perri sat up and stood up, misjudging the height of the bed, which was several inches higher than her own, and stumbled halfway to the doorway before she caught her balance. Nina stirred, “What’s going on?”

  “That’s me trying to be quiet and not wake you up yet as I went to have a look out the window. You’re welcome.” Perri walked to the window and pulled back the heavy jacquard drapes, “Do you hear the crows?”

  “Yeah, I hear them. It’s kind of nice though.”

  Perri squinted in the morning light after the darkness of the room. “There are several of them in a tree in the garden. Looks like Alice is putting some food out for them. They must be wanting their breakfast.” She watched for a few moments. “I’ve heard that if you keep chickens, having crows around will help keep the hawks away from your chickens.”

  Nina sat up, “Are you planning on getting some chickens to keep?”

  “No. Just a handy-dandy piece of trivia for you in case you ever get too much time on your hands with that cute little handful of yours.”

  “Which one do you mean, Aaron or Tom?”

  “Point taken.”

  Nina yawned and stretched, “After that supper last night I shouldn’t want breakfast, but I’m ready for it.”

  “Me too. If you don’t mind, since I already showered last night, I’ll run in the bathroom and get dressed quickly, and get my stuff together while you get ready, if that’s ok?”

  “Sure, that works for me.” I’m moving a bit slow this morning anyway.

  Perri picked up her clothes that she’d laid out the night before along with her facial soap and bath poof and headed into the bathroom. She hung her robe on the iron hook shaped like a swan on the back of the door, got a towel off the rack, and prepared to wash her face.

  The most outstanding feature in the bathroom, and the first thing she had noticed yesterday when they arrived, was the claw foot tub. She’d nearly needed a stool to get into the tub, just like the bed. The round sink bowl was in the center of a very wide oval porcelain pedestal with two formed soap dishes near the taps and plenty of room for other toiletries on each side. The taps were x-shaped white porcelain with Hot and Cold in black letters, and in the center was a short metal rod with a knob on the end that said Waste. Perri turned on the hot tap and let it run long enough to turn warm. While waiting, she turned and pushed the Waste knob, and the drain popped up and down. “Huh, I’ve never seen one of these.” The water ran hot so she turned on the cold to get the right mix.

  The porcelain toilet bowl and seat were separate from the tank, which was wooden and located up near the ceiling. There was a long chain to pull to flush it. “Fancy.” The bowl had a raised lea
f pattern around the base, next to the floor. “I could get used to this,” she thought to herself.

  Freshly scrubbed and dressed in jeans and a cotton t-shirt, her straight, shoulder length brown hair brushed, Perri went back into the bedroom, where Nina was just ending a call to Tom. “Everyone survive the night intact without you?”

  “Barely. Aaron fell and conked his noggin on one of the drawer handles in the bedroom. That child can find more ways to smash his head, eyes, and nose against some unlikely targets. It takes talent. He inherited that from Tom.” Nina hopped off the bed and headed into the bathroom, sauntering and waving one arm in the air. “I’ll be out after my luxuriant bath, Seamore. See that my meal is prepared, I’ll be going in soon.”

  Perri exaggeratedly rolled her eyes, “Yes Mi’lady. You’ve been binge-watching Downton Abbey, haven’t you?” She could hear the shower begin as she opened Google Maps to locate Whippoorwill Cemetery. It was only a few miles west of town, right off Interstate 68. She opened an app on her phone to plug in the location, not to navigate there, but to add it to favorites. She liked to keep a record of where she’d been in case she needed to return, or found something interesting while she was there and wanted to reference it later.

  Nina and Perri found their way to the dining room, between the front parlor and the kitchen. Alice came in from the kitchen in an apron with flour spattered across the front and dough stuck to her hands. “Morning all! How did you sleep?”

  “Very well, thanks.”

  “Like a log.”

  “I’ve got the sideboard over there ready for you; there are plates at the far end. I’ve got scrambled eggs, bacon, and waffles in the warmers, just put them in there about 10 minutes ago, and there’s fresh fruit in the bowl, and syrups, cheese, and preserves for the scones, which I just took out of the oven. Coffee and juice is on the table, help yourself. Be right back.”