The air was getting chillier, inside and out. I punched the heater button obsessively until the digital numbers read 80.
“Dickie said that Caroline paid off the family and local police to let it go. He assured me that whatever happened to the little girl was likely an accident. Claims the details are fuzzy because he was drunk all the time back then. That Caroline took off and didn’t contact him-or Wyatt, as far as he knew-for almost twenty years. She did agree in the divorce decree to pay for their son’s boarding school. After juvie.”
“All that would encourage a little resentment in a kid, even if he wasn’t evil,” I pointed out. “And especially if he was. I’d draw ugly pictures, too.”
“We’ll see,” Mike said noncommittally. “There are only two official incident reports on Wyatt before the little girl disappeared. Swiping some cigarettes from the Shell station. And an illegal road race ten miles out of town.”
“So you think Dickie is telling the truth?”
Mike shrugged. “I don’t know. He admits to drinking whiskey from his own still since puberty. That would fry a few brain cells. He credits his refrigerator full of Tab, grape Nehi, and blue Gatorade for his alcoholic recovery.”
I used a comb to slowly rip through my hair, tangled by the wind into stubborn knots on the ride down the mountain. “They never found the little girl? The one who went missing?”
“No.” Mike eased on the brakes as a car whipped in front of us.
“I’ve been wondering whether Billie learned anything else about Misty.”
Just throwing it out there. We were both connecting a few crazy dots. Mike glanced over, unsure, like he didn’t want to tell me something.
“I sent a couple of cops there for a drive-by yesterday. Misty’s not answering her phone or door. A neighbor saw her dragging a few boxes to her car. We’re working on getting a search warrant.
One judge is on vacation, the other likes to see blood dripping out the windows before authorizing a search.” He tapped the heat back down to 73. “I didn’t tell you I was planning on a search because you seem attached to Misty. I didn’t want you to warn her.” He glanced at me sharply. “I still don’t.”
He had every reason to worry about this.
He seemed relieved that I had nothing to say. I simply nodded.
I wanted him to search.
We learned within the first five minutes of meeting Caroline’s sister why they looked absolutely nothing alike.
The woman who motioned us to sit down in her royally purple and blue brocaded living room was red-haired, bone thin, and bitterly confident that her rank in life was several notches above us.
“Caroline was adopted,” Sophia Browning told us. They were the first words out of her mouth after Come on in. She waved away a uniformed maid who set down a pitcher of raspberry iced tea that belonged on the cover of Southern Living. At least that part ran in the family.
“I’m not that surprised she ended up this way. Caroline had psychological problems.” She smiled at Mike, bringing to life ugly creases around her eyes and mouth. An enormous square-cut emerald hung loosely on a skeletal finger, poised to fall down a kitchen drain if Sophia Browning ever deigned to stand over one. Maroon fingernail polish startled translucent white skin, making me think of Dracula’s bride.
“I heard from some woman in your town yesterday. Was it Libby? No, maybe she said she was Patty. Her last name escapes me. Anyway, she wants to handle the funeral arrangements. Claims to be a descendant of General Lee. She seemed to think that qualified her to be the one in charge of Caroline’s burial. I told her to go right ahead. You know what, I think I’m going to need a real drink. Would you like one?”
Mike shook his head. Did Letty trace Caroline to Sophia on her own? Or had she known all along?
“The tea is delicious,” I ventured. Tarted up with lemon mint, sweet but not too sweet, three plump raspberries resting at the bottom of the glass.
“Taluhlah! Bring me my afternoon delight!” Sophia yelled it out, uncrossing toothpick legs, swallowed up in gray linen slacks. “Gin and tonic,” she informed us. “I thought I could wait, but I didn’t realize this was going to be quite so hard on me.”
As far as I could tell, the conversation wasn’t the slightest bit hard on her. Sophia seemed to be thoroughly enjoying herself. Her eyes wandered over Mike, predatory. “I suppose you want to hear all about Caroline.”
“Anything you can tell me could be useful in finding her killer,” Mike said.
“I doubt that. I haven’t seen her since the reading of Daddy’s will. A fifty-fifty split.” Venom laced her voice. “My parents died young. Daddy passed from a spell with cancer. Mama fell off a horse the year after and got pneumonia recuperating in bed.”
“I’m sorry,” Mike murmured. “How old was Caroline when they adopted her?”
“Four, almost five. She was already set in concrete, everybody warned them. Daddy toured an orphanage in Lexington as part of a church elder event. He complained about going but when he spotted Caroline, he had to have her, just like one of his horses. Daddy was a compulsive collector. Caroline wasn’t by any means a purebred, but she was a pretty little thing with a tragic story.”
The maid slipped back into the room with the “afternoon delight,” and she offered me a half smile, which I returned.
“Thank you, Taluhlah.” Sophia removed a thick crystal tumbler off a tray weighed down by a decanter of gin, a half-empty bottle of tonic, a china plate of lime wedges, and a fresh pack of Marlboro Lights, the brand of choice for supermodels and, apparently, rich Kentucky anorexics. “Just leave the tray, Lula. I hope you’ve got the chicken on for supper. Mister wants to eat at five.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I felt like I’d fallen back in time. Sophia eagerly resumed her story. “Caroline came from the mountains. Her family’s little lean-to burned up, killing her baby sister and her mother. Caroline’s real daddy had fallen asleep with a Lucky Strike in his mouth-but, of course, he lived to tell, like all drunks do. He dumped Caroline in an orphanage with second-degree burns on her feet that hadn’t been treated. My daddy spent a pretty penny on her plastic surgery at Duke.”
Sophia pulled the first cigarette out of the pack on the tray, removed an engraved silver lighter from her pocket, and lit up.
“Mama wasn’t too happy about the idea of adopting, but once she realized it wouldn’t be any more work for her, that our maid Aida could just raise Caroline, too, she bought in. As long as she could go right back to her drinking and socializing, Mama was OK with it. My parents liked to show off what fine people they were, and Caroline was their long-shot Kentucky Derby horse. The little Appalachian girl they turned into a winner. They even set up a painting of her in the front hall and threw a cocktail party under it every year to raise money for orphans. Obscene really. Daddy told me while they hung it that she looked more blueblood than I did.”
I used the armrest to push myself out of the deep-feather couch cushions and wandered over to the window. I was struggling to fit these pieces of Caroline with the others, while staring out at a back veranda supported by white colonial-style columns as big around as my current waistline, Gone with the Wind-style. The fields spread out before me, lush and green, perfectly groomed by cattle and horses better fed than most of the children in this county.
Mike glanced at his watch. Sophia jangled the ice in her empty glass, then poured herself another. Our plane left in three hours and an hour’s drive stretched ahead of us. Mike had thought my feminine presence might loosen up Sophia, but he’d guessed wrong. She barely acknowledged I was in the room and seemed plenty loose already.
“Am I going too slow for you, Chief Page?” she drawled. Her tongue might as well have been in his ear.