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  Trevor, afraid someone would summon the elevator from above, stepped awkwardly over Dan and went far enough inside to rest his back against the door to keep it from closing while he punched in 911. It was while he waited for the operator to answer that he got his first good look at the dead woman’s face. The light was dim and the face was bright with cosmetics, but she seemed familiar. He bent closer to get a better look.

  It was Robin Parker.

  An ambulance arrived and whisked Dan and Kaye both to the hospital. The sheriff came with flashing lights. The parking lot filled with motel guests and curiosity seekers. The only person Trevor remembered later was Wylie Quarles, standing over at one edge of the crowd.

  Trevor felt queasy, but he stayed to answer questions as best as he could. After a while, he told the sheriff, “Look, I’m worried about Bradley. He’s gone to Cricket Yarbrough’s to spend the night and I want to be the one to tell him what’s happened. He liked Robin, and after losing his mother, I don’t want him to hear this from anybody but me.”

  The sheriff suspected Trevor needed Bradley more than Bradley needed his grandfather, but he nodded. “I think we’ve got all we need from you. I’m terribly sorry you had to find her.”

  Trevor’s chest heaved with a sigh that made his beard tremble. “Me, too.” He stumbled off toward his car.

  The sheriff, not being a family man, didn’t think about Robin’s girls until past eleven, after he’d set in motion interviews with motel guests and staff, interviews with the Poynters at the hospital, and a detailed investigation of the crime scene. Only when one of his deputies asked, “Does she have any family we ought to notify?” did Sheriff Gibbons remember those girls.

  He was in the process of going through her purse at the time, so he took her keys and asked a deputy to accompany him.

  “That oversight will haunt me all my life,” he would tell me later.

  Trevor, too, would be sorry he hadn’t given the two little girls a thought.

  Robin lived in a small ranch house not far from Trevor’s, far back from the road and built on a hill that sloped from front to back. The lot was surrounded on three sides by woods, and the nearest neighbors were quite some distance away. “Isolated for a single woman,” the deputy remarked.

  “But probably cheap,” the sheriff pointed out.

  The blinds were all down, but the house glowed with lights in several rooms. They went to the door and knocked loudly. Nobody came.

  “It’s the sheriff. Open up!”

  The only sounds were a barking dog in the distance and the sound of an animal—perhaps a possum or a deer—working its way through the woods behind the house.

  Buster knocked and called again. He hoped Robin had left so many lights on because she knew she’d be coming home late, and had taken her children to stay with a friend as Trevor had—although that would mean more work to locate them.

  He was sticking Robin’s key in her lock when he heard a high little voice. “How do we know you’re really the sheriff?”

  “Look out the window. You’ll see I have on my uniform.”

  He heard a scraping sound inside. The porch light came on. A thin white face peered through a gap in the venetian blinds. “It’s him,” she said. They heard a lock turn, then the knob. The door opened a crack.

  The smaller sister stood inside the door, peering out at them. “Can I go home with you?” she asked Buster.

  “Anna Emily, you know you are not supposed to ask that!” Exasperation oozed from every word as the older sister jerked the door wide open.

  The two girls looked up at the sheriff and his deputy. Their hair was tousled and they wore flannel nightgowns. Both had tear tracks down their cheeks.

  “Can you tell me your names?” the sheriff asked.

  The big one took a breath of self-importance. “I am Natalie and this is Anna Emily. I am five and she is three.”

  “Who is here with you?” He squatted down to their eye level to ease their necks.

  Anna Emily snuffled and reached for his hand. “Uncle Billy was supposed to come, but he never did. Can I go home with you?”

  Natalie pushed her away and took charge of the explaining. “Uncle Billy probably got lost. Mama said he’d be here right after she left, but he didn’t come. But Daddy angel protected us and we slept in Mama’s bed.”

  “Maybe Mama’s in my bed.” Anna Emily turned toward the hall.

  Buster reached out to stop her. “Your mother has had an accident.” He spoke as gently as he knew how.

  “Is she hurted?” Anna Emily demanded.

  “Is she dead?” asked Natalie, her blue eyes anxious.

  Buster nodded at Natalie. “I’m afraid so, honey.”

  Natalie’s lower lip began to quiver. Tears filled her eyes. “She’s not ever coming back? Just like Bradley’s mommy?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Are we norphans?”

  Anna Emily stepped up and repeated, “Can I go home with you?”

  The older sister huffed. “Anna Emily, you know Mama said…” She stopped and looked at the sheriff with five-year-old shrewdness. “Are you funning us? ’Cause if you aren’t, you better find Uncle Billy and find him quick. He’s the only living kin we got. That’s what Mama says.”

  “Do you know his last name?”

  She put one hand on her hip. “I told you: Billy. His first name is Uncle and his last name is Billy.”

  “Is he Billy Parker?”

  She looked uncertain, then shrugged.

  The deputy spoke behind Buster. “Maybe she’ll have his name written down somewhere.”

  The sheriff nodded, and addressed the children again. “We’re going to look around here, trying to find your Uncle Billy’s phone number. Do you know where your mother might have written it down?”

  They shook their heads in unison.

  Buster called the Division of Family and Children Services and asked them to pick the girls up. While they waited, he and the deputy searched the house. They found no address book, no telephone lists, and no numbers written inside the phone book. In fact, except for a few recent bills, Robin had no papers at all—no correspondence, no journals or diaries, not even a grocery list. She seemed to pay her bills in cash, for they did not find a checkbook. But they found no money, either. Finding Billy seemed impossible without a last name.

  A DFCS worker arrived and took the girls to Ridd and Martha, who had agreed to take in foster kids that late at night. Buster went back to the scene of the crime.

  The deputy to whom he had handed Robin’s purse had news for him. “We found this.” It was a scrawled note on the back of an envelope addressed to Captain Grady Handley in Augusta.

  Robin?

  Saw a fox today that I’d like to talk about. Staying in room 307 at the motel. Give me a call. I’ll be there after supper.

  Grady Handley

  “Have you checked out his room?”

  “Yessir. He registered for the whole weekend, but he’s not there now and his bed has not been slept in.”

  The sheriff frowned down at the note. “Then maybe we’d better find out who and where he is.”

  18

  Joe Riddley and I heard nothing about the murder until Saturday morning. We’d scarcely opened up when the sheriff dropped by the office. We were in the middle of a friendly but heated bicker about how much we ought to invest in perennials for the spring market, so I was glad to stop and welcome him. That would give Joe Riddley time to decide I was right.

  Sheriff Gibbons sank wearily into our wing chair, dropped his hat on the floor, and rubbed his hands to warm them. “Not much warmer today than yesterday.”

  Lulu scooted across the floor on her belly so he could scratch behind her ears.

  Bo flew down from the curtain rod and perched on his shoulder to give his ear a friendly nip. The sheriff flapped one hand. “Go away, bird.”

  “Not to worry.” Bo flew once around the office and resumed his perch.

&nbs
p; We swiveled our chairs to face the wing chair.

  “You didn’t come over here to discuss the weather,” I remarked.

  “And you look like something the cat dragged in and took back out,” Joe Riddley added with what passes for tact between men who have been friends for sixty years. “Didn’t you sleep good last night?”

  “Didn’t sleep at all, but it’s on my to-do list.” The sheriff let out a deep breath that he seemed to have been holding for a very long time. “You got any coffee?”

  I fetched his usual mug—one with dancing penguins on it that Walker had brought back from Las Vegas—and while I was at it, poured out two more. Fighting with Joe Riddley uses up a lot of energy.

  I waited until the sheriff had taken a restorative sip before I asked, “Why were you up all night?”

  Joe Riddley spoke before he could answer. “Was it about whatever was going on over at the motel? I saw your lights in the parking lot on our way home from dinner. Little Bit was dozing, having consumed half the dessert buffet, but I saw you had every cruiser in the county there. Later, I had to pull over to let an ambulance pass.”

  I could have smacked him. “You never said a word to me about seeing the sheriff at the motel or pulling over for an ambulance.”

  The sheriff took another fortifying sip before he enlightened us. “Robin Parker got murdered. Somebody broke her neck. Trevor and two of the folks from the taxidermists’ convention found her, around nine.”

  “Poor Trevor!”

  That popped out before I thought. I was also sorry for Robin and her girls, of course, but Trevor was the one I knew best. “He’s only begun to deal with Starr’s death, and now this. It’s enough to get his guardian angel fired.” I took a gulp of coffee and scalded my tongue. “Ow!”

  The sheriff grunted. “Trevor finding her was only one bad part of a terrible situation.”

  “What happened to the children?” Joe Riddley inquired.

  “That was another bad part.”

  I suspected what he wasn’t saying. “Were you the one who had to tell them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That must have been rough.”

  “About the roughest thing I ever had to face. I don’t like bringing that kind of news to anybody, but to two girls! Then I had to call social services to come get them. They were home all by themselves. Can you believe it?”

  “Not hardly. Robin was always very protective of those kids. I can’t imagine her going off and leaving them alone.”

  “Well, they were. Said they were sleeping in their mother’s bed. I think they had cried themselves to sleep. The older one, who can talk the ear off corn, said their uncle was supposed to come, but he never showed up.”

  We shared a few moments of silence while we contemplated children being left alone in a house at night. I still had a hard time believing Robin would have done that.

  The sheriff spoke first. “I wish I could have found a name and address for the uncle, so they could have gone to him. I hate to think of those kids stuck in a foster home. But they didn’t know his last name.”

  “We met him over at Trevor’s after Starr was killed. What was his name?” I searched my mental Rolodex, but came up blank. “Do you remember, Joe Riddley? Robin introduced us.”

  “I don’t remember that. Are you sure?”

  Buster and I exchanged a look. Joe Riddley’s memory had been erratic ever since he got shot. I hurried to take our minds off that. “Robin was in the store one day and mentioned to Evelyn that her brother lived down near Tennille. Maybe Trevor would know.”

  The sheriff shook his head. “Trevor claims he never heard of the man. Says Robin didn’t list a next of kin on her employment forms, and told him she was an orphan with no living relatives. That’s partly why he hired her, because he felt sorry for her.”

  “Besides the fact that she’s a darned good taxidermist,” I added, “but it’s weird she didn’t mention her brother.”

  “I’d sure like to locate him, for the kids’ sake.”

  We seemed to have exhausted that subject, so I asked, “Do you know what she was doing at the motel?”

  “Meeting somebody, we presume. We found a note in her pocketbook from a man saying he was staying in room three-oh-seven and wanted to talk with her about a fox. We’re still looking for him. His bed wasn’t slept in last night.”

  “Was she killed in his room?”

  “No, she was killed where she was found, in the elevator. Like I said, Trevor and a couple from the convention discovered her. The couple had to be taken to emergency. He was the one who reached Robin first, and when he found out she was dead, he had a mild heart attack.” The sheriff shifted in his chair in a way that made me suspect he wasn’t telling us everything he knew about the man. “When he crumpled, his wife fainted, so Trevor called for help. He stayed to talk with us after they were taken to the hospital, but he was pretty shaken up, too.”

  “I can imagine. I think Robin was becoming like a daughter to him.” I took another exploratory sip of coffee and found it was finally cool enough to drink.

  Joe Riddley gave a derisive snort. “Daughter, my foot. She was a beautiful woman.”

  I stared at him. “Beautiful? She was plainer than dishwater.”

  “She had good bones and a good figure under those loose clothes she wore. She’d have been a looker if she’d fixed herself up a little.”

  You live with a man for over forty years and know him for nearly sixty, so you think you know exactly how he thinks. Then he comes out with something like that.

  Buster chuckled at the look on my face. “She was a looker, last night. She was all dolled up in a mink coat—”

  “Mink?” I was flabbergasted. Surely he had that wrong.

  “The real McCoy, or so I understand. Under it she had on a sexy red dress, high heels, makeup, the whole shebang. I think somebody mentioned she had even curled her hair.

  And you’re right, old buddy, she was something else. Even Trevor didn’t recognize her at first.”

  I cradled my mug to my chest. Except for my tingling tongue, I felt chilled. “That’s weird. I don’t recall ever seeing Robin in anything except jeans or a denim skirt. And that’s not how a woman would dress to go discuss the sale of a fox.”

  Seeing their faces, I explained about the man at the taxidermy convention.

  “Well, that’s what she had on,” Buster insisted. “We searched the place looking for her brother’s contact information and hoping to find some clue to what had happened, and you’re right that what she mostly had in her bedroom were jeans and T-shirts, but she had several fancy outfits, too. Her bedroom looked like a tornado had hit, or like she had tried on everything in her closet getting ready for a hot date. My hunch is that whoever he was got drunk and tried to get fresh, she pushed him away, and he reacted more violently than he intended. Maybe somebody will come in later today and confess.”

  I was still baffled. “A hot date isn’t what I’d expect of Robin—any more than leaving her children alone. Are you positive it was her?”

  Joe Riddley leaned over and grabbed my wrist. “Stay out of this. You hear me?”

  Buster picked up his hat and stood. “You two can fight that out in private. I gotta get back to the office and fill out some paperwork. I just wanted to put you in the loop—and get some coffee. Sometime when you’re down at the detention center, Judge, teach them how to make it, will you?”

  He knew that would get my goat. I glared. “Not in your lifetime. I have the dignity of my office to preserve. Now, would you tell this old codger to let go of me?”

  Joe Riddley dropped my wrist, but warned, “If you get Little Bit het up about this case, Sheriff, I’m gonna give her to you on permanent loan.”

  The sheriff settled his hat on his head. “Let’s not get carried away now.”

  Joe Riddley reached for his cap as well. “I need to run down to the nursery. I’ll walk you out.”

  At the door, the sheriff turned and
gave me the look that always reminded me of a mournful bloodhound. “That littlest girl nearly broke my heart. She begged to go home with me. Can you believe that? Scared the socks off me. I thought I was gonna have me a daughter for a minute there.”

  “She’d beg to go home with anybody. Don’t take it personally.”

  “Oh, shucks. I thought she found me cute.”

  19

  For years it had been our custom to eat with Ridd’s family on Saturday nights. When we lived in the big house, they came to us. We’d eat supper and swim in the summer, and we’d play dominoes or a board game during cooler months. Walker’s family was invited, but seldom availed themselves of the invitation. Once Martha and Ridd moved to the big house and we moved into town, we reversed the process and Joe Riddley and I went down to eat with them. It wasn’t fancy—hamburgers on the grill or a big pot of soup with sandwiches—but it kept us in touch, as busy as we all usually were.

  That Saturday night it was too cold for Cricket to be playing outside like he often was when we arrived. Instead he was entertaining Bradley Knight and Robin’s two girls in the kitchen. Natalie was paler than usual, her thin face pinched. Anna Emily walked around behind Martha holding on to the tail of her apron. As soon as she saw me, she let go of Martha and came over to cling to my pants. She peered up at me with those big chocolate eyes and asked the predictable question: “Can I come live with you?”

  Natalie spoke sharply to her. “We have to live with Cricket now, because our mama has gone to heaven.” She turned to me, her lower lip quivering. “I told them and told them to call Uncle Billy, but they don’t know where he is, and I don’t know how to find him, so we’re gonna stay here until they can, but as soon as he comes, we’ll go stay with him.” She managed to say all that without pausing for breath. She took one quick gasp, as if afraid somebody else might get a word in, and added, “We were by ourselves, but Daddy angel kept us safe.”