The Julius House Part 13

"Then who is the woman living in Lawrenceton?"

"My great-aunt, Alicia."

"Tell me," I said intently. "Tell me what happened that day." Finally, finally, first among all the people who had wondered, I would be the one who knew. It was almost like being the only one to discover Jack the Ripper's true ident.i.ty, or getting the opportunity to be a fly on the wall on a hot, hot day in Fall River, Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1892.

"My aunt was visiting. She was staying over in Grandmother's apartment with Grandmother."

"How did she get there?"

"She came by bus. My dad picked her up in Atlanta. She had been there three days."

"How come n.o.body knew?"

"Who was to know? Who was to care? We didn't have many visitors, mostly because Mom was so sick. I didn't talk about it at school. Why would I? And Daddy had been working on the roof for three days, trying to get it finished. Going to pick her up was a pain in the b.u.t.t, an interruption, but since Mother and Grandmother wanted her to be there, he did it.

"Harley had come to visit me and to help Daddy. I said I was sick and stayed home from school. I don't think they believed me, but they knew how much I missed Harley and they were willing to give me a little slack." Her face was flinty when she said this. She was willing herself not to feel, as she'd been willing herself not to for all these years."Harley-lady, do you think he's okay? He looks awful bad; you should call an ambulance." She had asked Angel, not me.

"He's okay. He's breathing," Angel said with apparent unconcern. But I noticed she was taking his pulse when Charity looked away."Harley was up on the roof with Daddy, hammering away. It was the day the patio was going to be poured; they'd spent the morning building the form. Daddy just insisted Harley help him, and Harley didn't really mind, but he had come to see me, and he was going to have to go back home without having talked to me very much. Daddy just didn't seem to understand, it was like when we lived close to Harley and Harley would help Daddy all the time, but then we could go out on a date and be away from them. But up on the roof, Daddy starts this heavy churchy stuff, about how Harley was going to have to stop drinking and learn how to control his temper if he was going to marry me, which was what Harley and I wanted. And he reminded Harley, all this Bible stuff, about keeping his hands off me until we were married, was what it boiled down to." She sighed deeply, s.h.i.+fted to try to make herself more comfortable. "Listen, can't you get me a pillow, or something?"

Angel got a pillow from the bed and eased it under Charity's shoulders. Charity was as striking as the newspaper picture had suggested, but even stronger looking, with the large dark eyes and the jawline giving her face character.What kind of character, I was finding out.

"So," she resumed, "Harley decides that up on the roof with my dad is a good time and place to tell him we've already slept together." She rolled her eyes, the very portrait of an exasperated teenager. Silly old Harley. "My dad went nuts. He was yelling and screaming and swinging his hammer around, and said Harley had to leave and not see me anymore. Harley got scared and mad, and he swung his hammer, and it hit my dad in the head, and he died. Right up there on the roof."

I closed my eyes.

"Then Harley climbed down and told me. Mama had been over visiting with Grandmama and Alicia in the apartment, and she hadn't heard anything." Her face twisted with pain, and I felt another pang of guilt. What were we going to do with these people? But she rallied and plowed on, and I could tell she was feeling a certain degree of relief in the telling."I knew that Mama would tell. And Harley would go to jail. I'd never see him again. So I told Harley to go back up on the roof, and when Mama came back I told her to go up to the bedroom, lean out the window, Daddy and Harley had something they wanted her to see. So when she leaned out the window, Harley hit her, too." She must have read something in my face, because she said, "Mama was really sick, anyway, she was going to die."

And no traces of the murders had been found in the house, because they had actually taken place on the roof.

"What about your grandmother?" Angel said.

"Well, I knew she would tell about Mama," Charity said pettishly. "It just seemed to grow and grow. I'd always felt closer to Alicia, anyway. Me and Harley couldn't think of what to do, so I told Great-aunt Alicia what had happened. She and my grandmother had never gotten along good, and sharing that house in Metairie had just made it worse. They had hardly any money, and they didn't have many friends, and she had forged Grandmother's name before, once or twice, and not gotten caught. She said people couldn't tell old women apart anyway. What she told us to do-she thought about the money right away-she said we might as well get it and have a life, rather than going to jail, that Mama and Daddy wouldn't have wanted me to go to jail. So she called Grandmama, and told her Mama was up in her bedroom and was feeling very bad, and Grandmama hurried up those stairs, and when she was in the bedroom looking around, I sort of wrapped my arms around her and stuck her head out the window, and Harley... took care of her."

My stomach lurched.

I would just as soon not have heard more, but by then I couldn't have stopped her.

"We sat down in the kitchen and talked. Harley was kind of crazy by that time.We couldn't decide what to do with the bodies, or what to tell Mr. Engle, who was coming to pour the concrete in two hours. Then we thought . . . just leave them where they are. Harley said we should cover them with lime, that's what his dad did when the family dog died and they didn't want other animals coming in the yard to dig at the grave. And up on the roof, we'd get turkey buzzards if we didn't do it ... so he went into Atlanta and bought the lime and a gray tarp ...he had gotten some blood on his clothes so he borrowed some of my daddy's.Harley got back and fixed them up on the roof, and then he waited."Alicia had realized by then that no one knew she was there, so she could pretend to be Grandmama. And she said if I put on Mama's wig, Mr. Engel wouldn't know from a distance it wasn't Mama. And he had to see me as me, too. We'd just tell him Daddy had had to go off on an errand. So Harley drove the truck around behind the garage and hid it while Mr. Engle was there, and I went out and talked to him, and then I ran upstairs and put on Mama's Sunday wig, because she was wearing the other one." For a second the toughness cracked in Charity Julius's face and I could see the horror underneath. "And I went and rattled round in the kitchen so Mr. Engle could see me, and Alicia pretended to be Grandmama."

I had wondered all along why Hope Julius had been wearing her Sunday wig when Parnell had seen her working in her kitchen, yet it had been on the wig stand when Sally had been shown through the house the next day. And I had seen the everyday wig, its synthetic hair fluttering in the breeze on the roof."How did you vanish?" I asked.

"It was my great-aunt who realized I had to. We sat down that night and figured it out. Harley had to go home like nothing was wrong. I had washed and dried his clothes by then, and he put them back on and we just put the ones of Daddy's he'd been wearing in a garbage bag ... Harley's hairs might be on them or something. And I got in the car with him, not taking hardly anything of mine, just one change of clothes, because Alicia said it had to look like I'd just been taken without notice. I put Mama's wig back on the wig form; my hair was enough like Mama's that I didn't figure it would matter if they found one of my hairs in it. Then Harley, on his way back home, dropped me off at a bus station.I had the key to the house in Metairie. We used all the cash Mama had in her purse to buy the ticket."

"The police checked all the bus stations within a reasonable radius," I said."I wore an old pair of Mama's gla.s.ses, and I put a pillow in my front like I was pregnant," Charity said rather proudly. "That about knocked Harley over, he really laughed."

For the first time, I met Angel's eyes. She was looking as sick as I felt. I had completely lost my taste for this insider information.But she went on talking, though Harley was now stirring and moaning. She'd stayed in the Metairie house for a couple of days, eating only what was in the pantry and not going outside. On the third night, she'd slipped out of the house very late, gone to a pay phone at a convenience store a few blocks away, and called her great-aunt, asking her to get a message to Harley. Harley's parents might question a young woman calling their house. Harley could join her as soon as the investigation died down, maybe in a month, they figured."I couldn't stay in the house that long, someone would see me, I knew," Charity said. "I was going crazy."

I was willing to bet that was true: shut in a house, forced to remain invisible, with her last memories of her family closed in that house with her."So what did you do?"

"Aunt Alicia cashed one of my grandmother's checks and snuck out and mailed it to General Delivery, Metairie, and after I picked it up, I went to New Orleans and rented a room and found a job. I'd never done any of that before." She sounded rather proud. "I gave them Harley's name and Social Security number. I figured girls could be named Harley, too. And it was a real Social Security number. I had it written in my billfold. I knew everything about Harley." "And he came down when he figured it was safe?" Angel wanted to cut this true confession short. She (and Harley) were s.h.i.+fting restlessly."And got a job at the lumber place. And then we rented this cabin. And here we've been for all this time. Until you found us. Who the h.e.l.l are you two?" "I own the Julius house," I said.

"Oh, you're the one Alicia called about. The one Harley was supposed to get rid of. The one who was asking so many questions, with too much time on her hands." I could have done without Angel's c.o.c.ked eyebrow."But he said he screwed it up. And he was too scared, being back in that area where someone might recognize him, to try again. He was so mad. . . . Listen, I'll bet you don't care, but really I'm in awful pain." "Why didn't your great-aunt just sell her house and drop the phone number?" It was the last question I really wanted an answer to."She and grandmother both had to be there for a house closing; they owned it jointly. And if Alicia cut off the phone, where was she supposed to be? People did call her from time to time ... and she had to get her mail somehow. So she got the idea of renting it to that tub of lard, her cousin's daughter, so she could get some money to live on till the estate was probated . . . four months!We almost made it!"

And her confessional mood changed suddenly to hatred, all directed at me. She actually managed to heave herself at me, despite the broken knee, despite bound hands. I found myself wondering if it were true that Harley had wielded the hammer in all three murders.

"I've had a thought," Angel said, unmoved by Charity's desperation. "If the forensic anthropologist examined those bones the day after you found them, he knew that one skeleton wasn't Charity. He must have told them it was an old woman. So who are the police going to question first?" "The woman they think is Mrs. Totino."

"Right. So why hasn't she called down here to warn these two? Why didn't she tell them the bodies had been found?"

I could tell from Charity's face she was asking herself the same thing. I was regretting not calling Sally Allison. I would have known so much more. I could have called the police anonymously, if I had figured out Charity Julius was alive; I wouldn't have been so shocked by a confrontation with a woman I thought was dead these past six years. And now we wouldn't be in the strange fix we were in now.

"They've got her in custody, or they're watching her so closely she thinks they're tapping her phone calls," I said. "I bet she never called these two from her own phone anyway."

"Think Alicia will break?"

"I bet she will. Not because she's fragile, but because she'll want company, someone to blame the actual murders on. Yeah . , . once they actually question her ident.i.ty, she can't keep up the pretense that she's Melba Totino, at least not for long."

"This is going to be awfully hard to explain," Angel commented.

That was an understatement.

"I have to go to a hospital," said Harley clearly.He was badly hurt, and so was Charity, and d.a.m.ned if I knew what to do with them.

"Shelby's not gonna like it if I get arrested for a.s.sault," Angel said. I hardly thought Martin would enjoy my arrest either.

"Here's what we're gonna do," Angel told her two white-faced victims. "We're gonna leave, and we'll call the police from a pay phone." "What f.u.c.king good is that going to do us?" Harley asked."For one thing, you ungrateful moron, they'll take you to the hospital. Now, I'd like to point out that we could just leave you here to rot, or we could kill you, and I guarantee no one would miss you."

I turned away so the two killers couldn't see the shock on my face.

"We'll tell them you did this," Charity spat. "You'll do jail time." "No I won't, and I'll tell you why," Angel said calmly. "Because we're not gonna tell the police about Harley trying to kill us. And we're both alive to tell about it, and positively identify him, too. But the minute you tell the cops about us, we tell them about you. At least this way you'll only stand trial on some old charges, with no evidence left to collect or eyewitnesses." It wasn't much, but it was something, and in the end they agreed. What choice did they have? We wiped my fingerprints off the fis.h.i.+ng rod and anything else I might have touched in the closet, and Angel, I saw with some amazement, was wearing plastic gloves. I was feeling uncomfortably like a criminal myself.They didn't ask why we hadn't told the police about Harley's first attack, thank goodness.

We left the house and didn't speak to each other until after we'd stopped at the next convenience store. Angel was driving again, and she parked rather over to one side so the rental car wasn't readily visible from the clerk's counter. She got out and used the phone. I waited numbly, slumped in my seat.We negotiated the rest of the drive still in the same silence. When we were once more in our Hyatt room, light-years away from the cabin by the bayou, Angel said she was very hungry, and I realized I was, too. Wastefully, we ordered room service, and while we waited for our food, we took turns in the shower and changing clothes as though we could wash away the morning.I was depressed and tired and it was just noon. Angel, on the contrary, seemed to have a blaze of triumph about her. For her, I thought, the morning had been a vindication. She had protected my life successfully and proved her worth, her effectiveness. But that triumph was offset by watching the suffering of the nasty couple from whom she'd rescued me; she wasn't cold enough to be indifferent. When our food came, we were ravenous. "Think they'll tell?" Angel asked as we swapped bites of our desserts.

"Don't know," I said. "It's a toss-up. Let's go home."

"Good idea. I'll call the airline after I finish this cake."

Within an hour we were on our way to the airport.

Chapter Seventeen .

WE COULDN'T ESCAPE RAIN that day. It was pouring in Atlanta. Shelby had maneuvered close to the door somehow, and we loaded in our luggage and got into the car-Martin's Mercedes-with a minimum of fuss. Angel and Shelby were very glad to see each other. Shelby pa.s.sed a paper over the seat to me; I was buckled in in the back. It was a copy of today's Lawrenceton Sentinel and the headline did not pack the punch it would have this time yesterday."Autopsy Results Surprising," read the headline, an understatement if I'd ever seen one. In a low voice, Angel began telling Shelby what we had seen and done that morning. I read between the lines of the story Sally Allison had written so carefully. The forensic anthropologist, faced with what seemed a straightforward job of identification, had been surprised (and perhaps rather pleased) to find his job was more complicated than he'd thought. I would like to have seen Jack Burns's face, and Lynn's, when they found the third body was not Charity Julius.It was apparently Lynn who'd gone to Peachtree Leisure Apartments to find if the purported Mrs. Totino had any ideas about the ident.i.ty of the third corpse. Ever since the bones had been brought down from the roof, this must have been the moment the old woman had been dreading. Lynn had not allowed Duncan, the security guard, to call ahead, but Alicia must have been watching the closed-circuit TV channel and must have recognized Lynn as the police officer who'd come by before to tell her the bodies had been found. She'd opened her window and jumped.

"How much would they have realized from the murders?" Shelby asked."Huh? Oh. The purchase price of the house, the money that Mr. Julius had acc.u.mulated to start his own business, and I guess whatever money was due from life insurance policies. I suppose the company has to pay up if the missing person is declared dead. If they just could have gone four more months without the bodies being discovered, the three of them could have scattered to the four winds once the money was in their hands."

"You think she would have given Harley and Charity their share?" Angel asked as we changed highways to go northeast to Lawrenceton."I think so. She'd seen Harley in action."

"It must have been galling, to have been so strapped for money all those years-the old woman, I mean."

"Yes, for her. It may not have made much difference to Harley and Charity. They didn't kill the people they killed for money; the money was Alicia Manigault's idea, first and foremost."

A teenage romance that went wrong; the Ballad of Charity and Harley.

I wondered what the Louisiana police were making of the two.As we entered my hometown, I had a hard time believing I had questioned a seriously injured young woman as intensely as I had. I also had a hard time believing she'd hit me in the stomach hard enough to cause the deep bruise even now developing in the soft tissue around my navel.I hadn't heard from Martin in two days. I wondered how things were going for him in Guatemala. I missed him, abruptly and pa.s.sionately. Tears began to well up in my eyes, and I took off my gla.s.ses to dab at them with a Kleenex."Martin called," Shelby said out of the blue. We were turning on the road out of Lawrenceton that led to the house. "He tried your hotel room but found you'd checked out. I have to go back to the airport tonight to pick him up." "I'll let you, rather than going myself," I told him. I was too tired to face the airport more than once that day, and I would rather be warm and rested and in bed when he came home than tired and wrinkled and public at the airport.We pulled into the driveway, Shelby trying to tell me about the security systems he'd been investigating while we were gone, me not giving a d.a.m.n."Are you afraid of going in?" Angel asked. The rain was coming down in earnest as we got the bags out of the trunk. We crossed the garage to open the side door and take the covered walkway to the kitchen door. Madeleine sat regally, tail wrapped around her, by her food dish.

"No," I said, and realized it was true, "I'm not afraid of this house. There aren't any ghosts here. The people who would have become ghosts are the ones who are still alive, down in Louisiana. The people who died were too nice to be ghosts."

Now, this babble gives you some idea of my exhaustion, and the look Shelby and Angel gave me simultaneously told me I was becoming weird. But the house didn't scare me; I felt happy to be in it again. I breathed a sigh of relief when the Youngbloods left to go up to their apartment for their own reunion, after I'd refused Shelby's offer to carry my bags up to my bedroom.The light on the answering machine was blinking. I pressed the "Play" b.u.t.ton to hear my messages.

My mother: "We're back, and we had a wonderful time! The message you left saying you were going to New Orleans was kind of confusing, Aurora. Is Martin with you or not? Is this thing about the bodies upsetting you? Call me when you're home." Emily Kaye: "Roe, I'm sorry to be such a pest, but we really do need help on the Altar Guild. Please call me at home when you get back from wherever you are. Oh, by the way! Aubrey and I are engaged!"

Aubrey: "Roe, if you're upset about the discovery at your house, please call me.I want to help if I can. And I wanted you to know, first: Emily says she'll marry me."

I made a face into the reflective gla.s.s of the clock.My mother: "You know, Aurora, I really wish you had left the name of your hotel with Patty at my office. It's very aggravating not being able to get in touch with you, to make sure you're all right. My understanding from calling Martin's office is that he is not with you. So what are you doing in New Orleans?" I hoped the antique earrings would soothe her.

The other messages, in order: Sally Allison, Sally Allison, and Sally Allison.I headed up the stairs, looking at my beautiful house with pleasure, glad to be home. Later my husband would be home; we would talk; everything would be all right.

But when I entered our bedroom I had a sudden picture of a dark-haired girl seizing an elderly woman and forcibly shoving the gray head through the window so it could be stove in with a hammer.

I banished that vision firmly.

This was my house.

Charlaine Harris is the author of three previous Aurora Teagarden mysteries, Three Bedrooms, One Corpse; A Bone to Pick; and Real Murders. She is also the author of two earlier novels, Sweet and Deadly and Secret Rage. She lives with her husband and family in Magnolia, Arkansas.

Also by Charlaine Harris

Last Scene Alive

Club Dead

Living Dead in Dallas

Shakespeare's Counselor

Dead Until Dark

Shakespeare's Trollop

A Fool and His Honey

Shakespeare's Christmas

Shakespeare's Champion

Dead Over Heels

Shakespeare's Landlord

The Julius House

Three Bedrooms, One Corpse

A Bone to Pick