Frankly My Dear, I'm Dead Page 7

  “Me? What in the world are you talkin’ about?” I demanded of Farraday as we reached the door of Edmond Ralston’s office.

  Farraday opened the door. “Let’s just all go inside and talk about it, shall we?”

  The room was more crowded this time with me, Augusta and Amelia, Lieutenant Farraday, and the three deputies in it. In fact, Farraday sent two of the deputies back to the ballroom, saying, “I think Perkins and I can handle this all right.”

  He went behind one of the desks and sat down this time, so I had the girls take the two chairs in front of the desks. I stood between them, my left hand on Amelia’s shoulder, my right on Augusta’s. Perkins, the deputy who had remained behind, leaned against the closed door.

  “All right now,” Farraday began as he took a couple of folded sheets of paper from inside his coat. As he unfolded them I saw that they had been torn from notebooks like the one he carried. “These are the statements the young ladies made to Perkins and Renfro. I’d like for them to look them over and see if there’s anything they’d like to change or add.” He stood up and started to hand the papers to the girls, then stopped and looked a little sheepish. “I don’t, ah, know which one of you ladies is which…”

  “I’m Amelia,” Augusta said. Even scared like she was, she couldn’t resist trying to stir things up.

  “No, she’s not,” Amelia said. “I am.”

  “Girls, this isn’t the right time for this,” I said. “Lieutenant Farraday, this is Augusta”—I pointed—“and that’s Amelia.”

  “I don’t see how you tell ’em apart. No offense, ladies,” Farraday added as he handed over the written statements.

  Amelia and Augusta nearly always dressed differently, but their physical features were so similar that it was difficult for most people to tell them apart. Augusta had a tiny mole near the right corner of her mouth, but it was hard to see if you didn’t know it was there. Amelia’s eyes were a little more gray than blue, but it was only a slight difference. Once you got to know them, though, the easiest way to tell them apart was their personalities. Augusta had always been the tomboy of the two when they were little, and even though she had lost that quality as she grew older, she was still the more daring. More of a hell-raiser, I guess you’d say. She gets that from my side of the family.

  Farraday continued, “Later on, these notes will be typed up into formal statements, and you’ll be asked to sign them. So it’s a good idea to be sure that they’re complete and correct.”

  Augusta thrust her paper toward him. “That’s what I told the deputy. I don’t have anything else to add.”

  “This looks correct, too,” Amelia said. “Other than some spelling and grammatical errors I can correct for you if you’d like.”

  Farraday shook his head. “No, that’s all right, but thank you.”

  I put out my hand. “Can I see those?”

  He put them on the desk behind him. “No, I’d rather you didn’t right now, Ms. Dickinson. But I can tell you what they say, and if I get anything wrong, your nieces are right here to correct me.” He smiled. “As I’m sure they will.”

  Augusta made a noise in her throat, as if to say, Darn right we will, buster.

  Instead of going behind the desks to sit down again, Farraday leaned back and propped a hip against one of them. He said, “Earlier today, when the bus carrying the tour group arrived, everyone split up into three different bunches.”

  I nodded. “That’s right. I was there, remember?”

  “Of course you were. But you didn’t go with any of the groups, did you?”

  “Well…no, not really. I sort of wandered around, keeping an eye on things and making sure that all the tours were going all right. I guess I spent most of my time in the house.”

  “You didn’t go to the stables with Steven Kelley and his group.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “No. And at the time, I didn’t know he was Steven Kelley. He was just the actor playing Rhett Butler. Doing a Clark Gable impersonation, actually.”

  “And a pretty good one, too,” Farraday commented. “With that fake mustache, he actually looked quite a bit like Gable.”

  I hadn’t known the mustache was fake and didn’t see what that had to do with anything. When I said as much, Farraday agreed with me.

  “You’re right, Ms. Dickinson, that’s not important. The reason we’re here is because while the group of tourists with Steven Kelley was touring the stables, Kelley managed to get your nieces alone and suggested to them that they both have sex with him—at the same time.”

  I was so shocked by his blunt statement that all I could do for a moment was stare at him, speechless. Then my mouth started working again, and I yelled, “What!”

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you like that—”

  “The hell you are! You did it that way just to see how I’d react!” I glared at him. “Satisfied?” Then I turned to Augusta and Amelia, who didn’t seem to want to look at me. “Is this true?”

  “It’s true that he asked us,” Augusta said.

  “Well, actually, he implied it more so than actually came right out and asked us,” Amelia said.

  “But we didn’t do it.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I mean, he was like twenty-five or thirty years old. Ooh.”

  If there had been a chair handy, I would have sat down. My knees felt weak, and the room was trying to spin. “Did he touch you?”

  “No,” Amelia said. “I would have screamed.”

  Augusta said, “I would’ve kicked him right in the—”

  I held up a hand to stop her. “That’s enough.”

  She smiled. “Right there in the stable, that’s what I was going to say.”

  I still felt a little dizzy. I said, “I may be sorry I asked this, but what exactly did he do?”

  The girls looked at Farraday, who shrugged as if telling them to go ahead.

  “He asked us…” Amelia began, but then she stopped and blushed.

  Augusta didn’t have any trouble carrying on with the story. “He wanted to know how experienced we were. He said that if we hooked up with a guy together it would be a lot of fun. Then he offered to show us.”

  “Where the heck was this? And where was everybody else when it was going on?”

  “In a little room behind the tack room in the stables. Everybody else was looking at the horses. There’s a little racetrack down there, and the grooms were working out some of the horses.”

  “What in the world were you doing in there alone with him?”

  “He said there were some things stored in there that he needed for the tour, and he asked us to help him bring them out. Of course, that was a lie.”

  “What did you do when he…when he said those awful things?” I saw Farraday watching the girls closely, and I supposed he was interested in their answers because he wanted to know if they would match what had been told to the deputies earlier.

  “We told him we weren’t interested,” Amelia said.

  “I called him a perv,” Augusta said.

  “Then he begged us not to tell anyone what had happened,” Amelia said.

  “We told him we wouldn’t, and then we got out of there,” Augusta said.

  I could only stare at them and sigh. “Why didn’t you tell me? Or Luke?”

  “We promised we wouldn’t,” Amelia said.

  “And it’s not the first time a guy ever hit on us like that,” Augusta said. She nodded knowingly. “Things have probably changed since your day, Aunt Delilah, but there are a lot of horny high school boys today, not to mention sleazy older guys. And look at us. We’re twins. We’re hot. What do you think is going to happen?”

  I looked over at the wall of the office and wondered how it would feel to pound my head against it. Then I glanced at Lieutenant Farraday and saw that he at least had the decency to look a little embarrassed.

  “It hasn’t been that long since my day,” I said, “and things haven’t changed all
that much. But you should have told somebody.”

  Augusta shrugged. “He’s dead now, so we figured we didn’t have to worry about keeping the promise we made to him.”

  “He was really rather pathetic, actually,” Amelia said. “Like it was a compulsion of some sort that he couldn’t help.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I think he might have been a sex addict.”

  Farraday cleared his throat, and the girls looked at him. “All right, ladies. I know talking about that wasn’t pleasant for you…”

  Augusta gave her no-big-deal shrug. Farraday continued, “But what I need to know now is whether or not you told anyone about Kelley’s actions before my deputies questioned you.”

  “Who would we have told?” Amelia asked.

  Farraday nodded toward me. “What about your aunt? She’s the one taking care of you this summer, isn’t she?”

  “We can take care of ourselves,” Augusta said. “Besides, like we just said, we promised the guy we wouldn’t tell anybody.”

  I was starting to get the idea, and I thought I understood why Farraday had made that comment earlier about how I might need a lawyer. I said to him, “You think I killed Kelley because I found out about him propositioning my nieces?”

  Augusta and Amelia both looked around sharply at me, and Augusta said, “Uh-uh! That’s crazy!”

  “Aunt Delilah would never kill anybody,” Amelia said. “Anyway, she didn’t know about what Mr. Kelley said to us in the stable. We’ve explained over and over that we didn’t tell her.”

  “And I’m sure you wouldn’t lie to protect your aunt,” Farraday said.

  But he didn’t sound convinced of that at all.

  I took a deep breath, uncertain just how much trouble I was really in here. Farraday sure looked and sounded like he considered me a legitimate suspect in the murder, but maybe that was just his way, I told myself. Maybe he just wanted me to go ahead and clear myself so he could concentrate his deductive efforts elsewhere.

  “You saw how I reacted when I heard about what happened to the girls, Lieutenant,” I said. “Unlike some of the folks on this plantation, I’m not an actor. That was genuine surprise. This was the first I’d heard of the incident with Kelley.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “Well, nobody was with me all the time during the day, so I suppose not, but I’m telling you I didn’t know about it, and the girls have confirmed that.”

  “Their testimony could be biased.”

  “I was in the ballroom when Kelley was killed. There were people all around.”

  “And is there anyone who can swear that you never left the ballroom during the evening, even for a few minutes?”

  I thought about it for a second and realized that there wasn’t. In fact, the size of the crowd sort of worked against me. I had been circulating, making sure everything was going all right, and I don’t suppose there was anyone who could swear that I was in there the whole time. With that many people around, I could have slipped out and back in without being noticed.

  I could see how Farraday could make a case against me. But it would be purely circumstantial. There couldn’t be any physical evidence against me, for the simple reason that I hadn’t killed Steven Kelley. And with the girls and me all testifying that I hadn’t known about the incident at the stables, I wouldn’t have had any motive for wanting to murder him.

  I looked at Farraday and shook my head. “No one can swear I didn’t leave the ballroom, Lieutenant, but even so, you don’t have a case. You’d have to prove that I knew about what happened and that I did slip out of the ballroom, and you can’t prove either of those things because they didn’t happen.”

  “That’s telling him, Aunt Delilah,” Augusta said.

  I wasn’t through, though. “If you ask me,” I went on, “you ought to find out if Kelley’s wife knew he was the sort of man to make indecent advances to teenage girls.”

  “His wife?” Amelia said. “He was married?”

  “Double ooh,” Augusta said.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be looking into that,” Farraday said. “I think we’re done here.”

  “That’s it?” I said. “You’re not going to arrest me?”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, did you?” he asked, his face and voice bland.

  My eyes narrowed. “This whole thing was just a test to see what I’d do when I heard about what Kelley said to my nieces. You knew I didn’t kill him, but you had to be sure.”

  He didn’t admit to anything. “Thank you for your cooperation. The three of you can go back to the ballroom.”

  I couldn’t let it go. “Are you convinced now?”

  A little flare of anger appeared briefly in his eyes before he banished it. “To tell you the truth, Ms. Dickinson,” he said, “I’m not convinced of anything right now…except that this is probably going to be a long night for all of us.”

  CHAPTER 11

  So I wasn’t completely out of the woods yet, I thought as Deputy Perkins escorted Augusta, Amelia, and me back to the ballroom. I didn’t believe that Farraday seriously considered me a suspect in Steven Kelley’s murder, but he hadn’t ruled me out completely, either.

  And I was willing to bet that he still considered the girls to be suspects, too, no matter how remote the possibility. They came closer than I did to having legitimate alibis, because they had been busy dancing most of the evening. It was true what Augusta had said: the fact that they were good-looking twins meant that they drew a lot of attention. I supposed that was sometimes a good thing, like when it meant that there were witnesses to swear that you couldn’t have committed a murder.

  Luke must have been watching the door, waiting for us to come back, because he showed up as soon as we entered the ballroom. His face wore an anxious expression. “Thank God,” he said.

  “Did you think they hauled us off to the slammer?” Augusta asked him.

  “I didn’t know what was going on. I’m just glad to see that you’re all okay.”

  “That detective practically accused Aunt Delilah of murder,” Amelia said, sounding properly outraged.

  “What?” Luke stared at me. “Miz D, a murderer? That’s just crazy! She couldn’t hurt anybody.”

  I said, “I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Luke. If anything else goes wrong with this tour, I might start to feelin’ like killin’ somebody.”

  “Yeah, but you’d never do it. You’re harmless. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. I never heard a sillier idea in all my life.”

  “That’s enough, Luke.”

  “Why, they might as well accuse me of murdering that guy. That’s how far fetched it is. Why did the detective think you’d want to kill that actor, anyway?”

  Augusta answered before I could. “Because he hit on Amelia and me. At the same time.”

  Luke’s eyes widened, and his nostrils flared like those of an angry bull. “He what?”

  “It’s a sordid story,” Amelia said. “Do we have to tell it again?”

  “Darn right you have to tell it!” Luke said. “Why, if I’d known about this, I would have—”

  “What?” I broke in. “Punched him out?”

  “I might have. And he’d’ve had it comin’.”

  “Or would you have been so upset you might have stabbed him?”

  Luke stared at me. “Miz D! How can you think such a thing?”

  “Not me, you big goof. But that’s what Lieutenant Farraday would be asking you if he heard you carryin’ on like that. Now just settle down, and I’ll tell you what happened.”

  “We’re gonna go mingle,” Augusta said. “I don’t want to listen to all this again.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” I told her. “I don’t want any more wandering around tonight. Go over there and sit down.” I pointed to a couple of chairs next to the wall nearby.

  “Just sit? That’s boring.”

  “I think we’ve had enough excitement for one night. I could use a little boredom.”

  The girls g
rumbled about it, but that was nothing new. They nearly always grumbled about whatever I told them to do. They went to the chairs and sat down. I knew I’d have to keep an eye on them, though, if I wanted them to stay put.

  While I was doing that, I told Luke what had happened, both in the stables that morning and in the office as Farraday interrogated the three of us a few minutes earlier.

  “I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t know about it,” Luke admitted when I was finished. “If I had, I don’t know what I might have done.”

  From behind him, Lt. Farraday said, “That’s interesting, Mr. Edwards.”

  I hadn’t seen him come up. As Luke and I turned toward him, I said, “Don’t tell me you suspect Luke now? He was here in the ballroom all evening, just like me.”

  Farraday looked steadily at him. “Is that true, son?”

  I punched my son-in-law on the arm. “Tell him, Luke.”

  Instead, Luke grimaced and said, “Welllll…”

  “You were in here,” I insisted. “I saw you.”

  “Not…exactly…the whole time, Miz D. I had to step out for a little while…”

  “But for a good reason, right?” I prodded. “And somebody must’ve seen you.”

  Luke didn’t say anything.

  Farraday filled the silence, though, by saying, “Why don’t you come with me, Mr. Edwards? We need to talk.”

  I grabbed the sleeve of Luke’s coat. “You don’t need to drag him off to your interrogation chamber. He didn’t know about what happened with Kelley and the girls, either. We just told him, and he was just as shocked to hear about it as I was.”

  “Actually, Ms. Dickinson, I wasn’t planning to ask him about that…not that I need your advice on how to conduct a murder investigation.”

  “Well, then, how could Luke possibly have anything to do with it?” I demanded.

  Quietly, Farraday said, “I thought maybe Mr. Edwards would like to tell me about Lauren Holcomb.”

  At that moment, Luke turned paler than I had ever seen him in the time I’d known him. He looked shaken, too, even more so than when we’d gone out into the garden and seen Steven Kelley’s body. In fact, he looked more scared and pale than he had the day he married Melissa, and I’d thought then that he was fixing to faint as he watched her father walk her up the aisle of the church.