“Ducks,” she said.
Raney smiled up at her. “Yes. It’s a pretty day to be outside, isn’t it, Miss Elizabeth? The sky’s so blue. It matches your shawl. That’s a pretty shawl.”
The old woman glanced down sharply. “Do I know you? Who are you?”
“That’s my daughter,” Farmer said quickly. “Raney. Remember? I introduced you to her before.”
Miss Elizabeth didn’t reply. Her attention wandered out across the grounds, and in a few minutes her eyelids fluttered and closed.
Raney waited for several minutes before she spoke. “I still don’t understand why you brought me here,” she said softly.
“I wanted you to meet her before we talked,” Farmer said. “We’ll sit a few more minutes and then we’ll go.”
“Okay. I really don’t like it here much.” She flashed him a small smile. “I’d rather be back in Wayside.”
“Wayside?” Miss Elizabeth’s eyes were open, blinking. “Wayside is mine. I live there.”
“We live there, too,” the sheriff told her. “My daughter and me.”
“I don’t know you,” she accused him, her voice rising.
Farmer reached out to take one of her twisted old hands. “No, but you knew some of my family,” he said soothingly. “A long time ago. The Dodds. They used to live on your place. Berniece worked in the kitchen and—”
A tremor shook the shawls. Miss Elizabeth’s gaze sharpened and focused on him. She flung his hand away. “Berniece Dodd? I know Berniece. I know that Callie, too, but she’s dead because I killed her. Good riddance, if you ask me.”
Neither Farmer moved. The sheriff heard Raney’s quick intake of breath but he dared not risk a glance at her. Miss Elizabeth was staring directly at him.
“Why’d you do that, Miss Elizabeth?” he asked carefully.
“That girl tried to steal Wesley,” she said petulantly. She was looking at him, but she was gone somewhere all alone. “Comes to me, the little snip, and says they love each other, she and Wesley. They’re going to go away and get married, not a thing I can do about it. Tells me they’ve been meeting secretly all the time he courted me. Sassed me when I said I’d see her dead first. Out back, late one night. I was sitting on the porch steps, too hot to sleep, and she comes waltzing by, says she’s just left Wesley. So I picked up that big iron poker hanging there and smacked her with it, smacked her until she stopped moving.”
She stopped. Farmer didn’t move. Then slowly, Miss Elizabeth began to smile.
“Now I’d just seen all that new dirt dug up in the fruit cellar a few days before. Papa caught a man named Murphy stealing and he said he ran Murphy off. He said he’d been digging in the fruit cellar because there were moles down there and he was burying poison. Well, I thought I knew better. Papa said people who steal from you ought to be killed, so I thought he probably killed Murphy and buried him down cellar. That’s why I took Callie there, where the ground was already soft. I dug almost all night to get her deep enough so she wouldn’t smell. Thought she could steal Wesley from me, what an idea.”
The old woman stopped again, but still neither Raney nor her father dared move. Gradually, the old woman’s face softened.
“Poor Wesley. I told him I sent Callie packing so he’d see no more of her. He cried, Wesley did, said he was sorry, he’d lost his head, but that I was the one he truly loved and wanted to marry. So I forgave him.” Somewhere deep in the folds of shawl a small rusty cackling rose. “I used to think about it sometimes when he was working in Papa’s toolshed. He didn’t know he was walking on Callie.” Quick tears welled in her eyes. “My poor Wesley. Taken before his time, but it was me he loved to the end, not Callie. It was me.”
This time when she paused she did not continue. Her gaze went out across the pond and into another time.
Farmer reached for Raney and she wasn’t too old to let him put his arms around her. Together, they walked to the bank of the little pond.
“Are you okay?” he asked her.
“I guess so,” was the faint answer. “I never expected that, did you?”
“Not in a minute, or I never would have brought you here,” he said fiercely. “Honey, I’m sorry. I wanted you to see how she was before I told you what I suspected.”
“Was that it? What you suspected?”
“Yeah, but I only had guesses. See, I found out that Callie told her sister, Great-grandma Berniece, about her and Wesley, but it was a secret. Then when Callie supposedly took off, Berniece was afraid to say anything. She thought Miss Elizabeth had found out and done something to her but she couldn’t prove it. All she knew was that Callie wouldn’t just go away without telling her.”
Raney glanced back at the old woman sitting quietly in her chair. “They were all awful people, weren’t they? Vern and Elizabeth, even Wesley. He never loved Elizabeth, he loved Callie.” She managed a small grin. “So I was right, after all. It did have to do with a doomed romance.”
Farmer hugged her. “Yes, I guess it did.”
“What are you going to do now?”
This was the conversation he had been waiting for, but he’d come to it from a different direction than planned.
“You have to help me decide that, Raney. See, there were two murders out there at the King ranch and now we know who did them. But everyone’s gone except Miss Elizabeth, and look how she is. Raney, this has been a secret in my family for three generations. And I don’t know how we’d track this man Murphy down. I guess I’m wondering what good it would do to get this out in the open now. How will it help anyone? You understand what I’m saying?”
She thought about it for a long while. “I think I do,” she said finally. “We still don’t have any proof. Just Miss Elizabeth’s word, and she probably won’t remember it again tomorrow. And you couldn’t very well send her to prison, could you?” She glanced up at him. “Maybe someday we can tell, after she’s gone.”
He nodded down at her. “Maybe.”
She managed a faint grin. “And maybe not. Callie was ours, after all, and now we know what happened to her. It’s really nobody else’s business, is it?”
“My feeling exactly,” her father said. “It’d just stir things up. Raney Farmer, you’re going to be okay.”
“But you know what?” she said. “I got hungry watching her scarf up that ice cream. You think we could stop on the way home and get some of our own?”
“Not a bad idea. I’ll even buy.”
A sound from the wheelchair behind them. Miss Elizabeth was beckoning.
“You there!” she called in her scratchy voice. “You come over here and take me back to the house. I’ve got things to do. My Wesley will be wanting his supper.”
Games of Chance
by Clark Howard
© 1997 by Clark Howard
“Clark Howard’s concerns are for the outcast, the minority, the prisoner,” writes Ed Hoch in St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers. “He has a deep interest in convicts and ex-convicts, a theme that runs through his writing.” That’s why the splendidly developed upper-class hero of this new Howard story is a departure. But Mr. Howard has us rooting for him all the way.
The man standing before a floor-to-ceiling window of an eighty-first-floor apartment in the Prudential Tower was lean, almost handsome, but at the moment wearing an expression that was worn, weary. It was almost dawn in Chicago, a wet, misty April morning. As he looked out over Lake Michigan, watching the day’s first light break grayly on the black expanse of water, his eyes reflected perplexity. A single thought plagued him.