Private Investigations

“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.”