“I don’t think I’ve seen Shelley around town in a while. Did she go with her mother?”
“Not hardly,” he said with a brittle laugh. “Shelley took off a couple of weeks ago. I keep thinking we’ll get a call from her, but we haven’t had so much as a postcard.”
“Took off?”
He shrugged, but he didn’t sound at all casual as he said, “Ran away is more like it, I suppose. She and Lucinda had an argument, and the next morning there was a note on the kitchen table. According to Lucinda, the acorn can’t stray far from the oak, but she may be wrong this time.”
I glanced at the sampler behind me and did a bit of calculation. “Shelley’s a minor. Have you notified the police in the nearby towns and the state police?”
“I wanted to, but Lucinda kept saying good riddance to bad rubbish. She was real upset with Shelley for coming home late one night and called her a slut and a lot of other nasty names. She’s always been real stern with Shelley, even when she was nothing but a little girl in pigtails. When Lucinda wasn’t whipping her, she was making her sit in a corner in her room and embroider quotations from the Bible. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Lucinda say—” He broke off and covered his face with his hands.
It was not a challenge to complete his sentence: Spare the rod and spoil the child. I barely knew Lucinda Skaggs, but I was increasingly aware of how much I disliked her. She seemed to live from cliche to cliche, and I suspected she would have some piercing ones for yours truly.
I waited until Buster wiped his eyes and attempted to smile. “I’ll call the state police and alert them about Shelley. While you make a list of the names and addresses of your family and friends, I need to look through her things to see if I can find any leads. Also, we’ll need a recent photograph.”
Buster nodded and took me to Shelley’s bedroom. It was as stark as the living room, with dreary beige walls, a matching bedspread, a bare lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling, and only the basic pieces of furniture. A brush and comb were aligned on the dresser. The drawers contained a meager amount of folded underthings, sweaters, and T-shirts. In the closet, skirts and blouses were separated and hung neatly; had it been plausible, I was sure they would have been alphabetized. There were no boxes on the shelf, no notebooks or diaries in the drawers, no letters hidden under the mattress. The only splash of color came from a braided rug on the hardwood floor. The room, I concluded, could have passed inspection in a convent. Handily.
I paused to see which pithy statements Lucinda had chosen for her daughter’s walls. “Pride goeth before a fall.” “Honor thy father and thy mother.” “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Not quite as lighthearted as posters and pinups of movie stars, I thought as I returned to the living room.
Buster gave me a photograph of a teenaged girl, her smile as starched as her white blouse. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that there were faint creases at the corners of her eyes, which regarded the camera with contemptuous appraisal. I was not surprised that she wore no makeup or jewelry.
I put the photograph in my shirt pocket. “I’ll return this to you as soon as possible.”
“Here are a few addresses of relatives,” he said as he handed me a piece of paper, “but I’ve already spoken to them and they promised to let me know if Shelley shows up.”
I skimmed the list. “What about Shelley’s aunt in Hiana?”
“She wouldn’t set foot in that place, not with her mother being there.” He looked down for a moment. “The telephone was disconnected, but I’ll run up there this evening and fetch Lucinda. It’s getting too quiet around here with both of them gone.”
I promised to let him know what the police had to say, although I doubted it would amount to much. As I drove away, it occurred to me I’d exchanged a pseudo-missing person for a real one. The reverse would have been more palatable. And Ruby Bee’s scalloped potatoes would have been more palatable than the can of soup I planned to have for dinner, but I wasn’t quite prepared to deal with the thumbscrews served alongside them.
“Guess we got all excited over nothing,” Ruby Bee said with a sigh. “Lucinda came home last night, and sent Buster by first thing this morning with the recipe.” She squinted at the index card. “This won Lucinda a blue ribbon at the county fair last fall. As soon as I get a chance, I’m going to try it.”
Estelle pensively chewed a pretzel. “What did Arly have to say about her little visit yesterday?”
“I haven’t laid eyes on her,” Ruby Bee admitted, wondering if she could get decent rhubarb at the supermarket across the road. “But now that Lucinda’s back, I guess it was nothing but a wild goose chase. Of course, we only have Buster’s word that she really is back.”
“Lottie said she caught a glimpse of her at six fifteen, putting out the garbage by the back door like she always does. She thought Lucinda looked thin, but I suppose all that bother with her sister must be worrisome.”
Ruby Bee put down the recipe, propped her elbows on the bar, and tugged on her chin. “I still don’t know why Buster lied about that. It doesn’t make a whisker of sense, him saying Lucinda was in Hiana with her sister.”
“He was addled,” Estelle said firmly.
This time Ruby Bee did not resort to wiping the counter. Instead, she picked up the card, studied it with a deepening frown, and then, in a peculiar voice, said, “I don’t know, Estelle. I just don’t know.”
I figured I had two options. I could park up by the skeletal remains of Purtle’s Esso Station and nab speeders, or I could sit in the PD and swat flies. Both required physical exertion, and I was taking a nap when Ruby Bee and Estelle stormed through the door.
Ruby Bee banged down a small bowl on my desk. “I told you so.”
In that she told me some fool thing every hour, I wasn’t sure how to field this one. “Told me what?” I finally said.
“I told you that Lucinda Skaggs didn’t visit her sister in Hiana. Just taste this.”
“And don’t be all day about it,” Estelle added. “This is an emergency.”
I leaned forward and studied the goopy red contents of the bowl, then shook my head. “Sorry, ladies, I never taste anything that could be a living organism. A primeval one, to be sure, but perhaps in the midst of some sort of evolutionary breakthrough.”
Ruby Bee put her hands on her hips. “Taste it.”
“Oh, all right, but it better be good.” Trying not to wince, I put my fingers in the goop, plucked out a bite-sized lump, and conveyed it to my mouth without dribbling on my shirt. I regretted it immediately. My lips were sucked into my mouth, and the interior of my cheeks converged on my retreating tongue. Only decorum prevented me from spitting it out. “Yuck! This is awful!”
“No, it’s not,” Ruby Bee said, “or it’s not supposed to be, anyway. It’s Lucinda Skaggs’s spiced rhubarb conserve, and it won a blue ribbon at the county fair last year.”
I washed out my mouth with lukewarm coffee. “If it did, there was a good deal of bribery. This is absolutely awful. Maybe you didn’t follow the recipe correctly, because this nasty stuff could turn someone’s face inside out.”
Estelle flapped an index card at me. “Are you saying Ruby Bee doesn’t know how to follow a recipe, Miss Cordan Blue? There’s not much to it — you slice your orange and your lemon, add your water, your vinegar, and your rhubarb, put in a little bag with gingerroot, cinnamon candies, mace, and cloves, and simmer until it gets nice and thick.” She paused so dramatically that I realized I was holding my breath. “Your raisins are optional.”