Sharyn McCrumb - MacPherson's Lament

“How’s it going, Tug?” she asked. “Are you getting enough to eat?”

He shrugged. “Not too hungry anyhow. Not with all this hanging over me.”

“The charges are very serious. The prosecution is saying that you killed Misti Lynn Hale and put her in the trunk, intending to take the body off somewhere and bury it. They say that if you hadn’t been put in jail on the bad-check charge, you’d have ditched the evidence, and maybe they wouldn’t have caught you. You need to tell me your side of the story so that we can begin to build a defense.”

Tug Mosier put his head in his hands. “You won’t believe me.”

“It’s my job to believe you. It’s the jury you have to worry about.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you. What the hell. You know I’ve been laid off from my welding job; that’s why I had trouble paying the bills. And those collection-agency people just kept calling and calling and nagging us about it and making Misti cry, so I wrote them dud checks just to get a little peace and quiet. Figured they’d leave us alone-at least till they bounced.”

“I can certainly see the temptation,” A. P. Hill agreed.

“I thought it would make me feel better, but I was still miserable, ’cause I knew it was just postponing the flak. So I got tanked up to try to put it out of my mind.”

His attorney raised her eyebrows. “Define tanked up.”

“I did some coke and some shine. I was with some old boys I been knowing for a long time, and by the end of the evening we were purt near blasted.”

Defendant used cocaine and bootleg liquor and admits to a state of complete intoxication, A. P. Hill wrote on her yellow legal pad. She looked up and nodded for her client to continue.

“So I don’t remember too awful much about that night at all. I know I went home. The next thing I knew, I was sort of coming out of it-somewhere between waking up and walking out of a fog-and there was Misti Lynn, laying on the floor, not moving.”

“Was she dead? Could you see any injuries?”

Tug Mosier frowned with the effort of remembering. “She wasn’t moving. I couldn’t see no blood.”

“All right.” There would have been no blood. Misti Lynn Hale had been strangled. “Was there anyone else present?”

Tug Mosier rubbed his scalp as if he were trying to massage his brain cells. He squinted at the bare green wall beyond the table. “That’s the funny thing,” he said at last. “Seems like I sorta remember somebody going home with me. Helping me, like. ’Cause I wasn’t in no shape to do much walking on my own. But when I came to and saw my Misti on the kitchen floor, there wasn’t nobody around.”

“So what did you do once you realized that she was dead? Did you call anybody?”

Tug Mosier looked shocked at his attorney’s naïveté. She probably would find a dead body on her floor and call somebody about it, his expression seemed to say. “No,” he said wearily. “I didn’t call nobody. I’ve had a run-in or two with the cops before, and I didn’t think I’d have too much luck making them believe in my innocence.”

“What did you do, then?”

“I picked up Misti Lynn and I put her in the trunk of my car. I couldn’t just leave her laying there. I don’t know what I was fixing to do with her. Maybe take her to the hospital, or just leave her somewhere. I don’t know. I kind of blacked out again. We had some pills in the medicine cabinet, and I think I took a couple of them. Anyhow, next thing I knew, the cops were banging on the door with their warrant about those damn checks, and it just plain slipped my mind about her being in the trunk.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about her when I first talked to you about the check charge?”

He shrugged. “Figured maybe they wouldn’t find her. I guess I was hoping I dreamed it.”

Powell Hill stared at her client. There really were people in the world who could forget about having a woman’s corpse in the trunk of their car. Or if they dimly remembered, they might ignore it, hoping that it would go away. His story rang true. It wasn’t much help with his defense, though. As far as she could tell, not even he knew if he had killed her or not.

Flora Dabney looked at her watch. It was time to start getting ready to go. At least it was time to tell Anna Douglas to start getting ready, because she always took twice as long as anybody else. It wasn’t really vanity on Anna’s part, Flora decided; it was just that Anna was a methodical person, and the good Lord had only given her first gear, so there was no use in trying to speed her up. Anna had lived in the Home for twenty years now and her housemates hadn’t found anything yet that could make her hurry. After a long spell of getting upset and angry over Anna’s slowness, Flora and the others had learned to give her an extra hour’s notice whenever they wanted her to do anything. It saved worry all the way around.

They had all been together for such a long time that they were like family now. At eighty-three, Flora had outlived her own sister by a dozen years, but they hadn’t been close since childhood. Flora married late, staying home to care for her invalid father, while her pretty younger sister had married a man from Alabama and moved far away. Finally their lives did not touch at any point. Common circumstances and decades of living together had made these seven women more her sisters than blood ties ever could. Flora felt responsible for all of them, even the exasperating Julia Hotchkiss, who looked like a bird but could eat more than a mule. They needed someone who could take care of them, and after time’s winnowing, Flora was left as the strongest in body and mind; so it fell to her to look after the others. Dolly Smith was her closest friend and she was certainly no fool, but arthritis had nearly crippled her, weakening her fighting spirit. She needed better health care than they could afford.

The others needed tending as well. Mary Pendleton was too trusting for her own good, and Ellen Morrison would rather let people walk all over her than risk offending them. Lydia had lost interest in everything in the world except her precious family tree, and Jenny Wade Allan was all but an invalid. Without Flora they would be at the mercy of any sharpster or bureaucrat who came down the pike.

Until recent years there had been other people that they could rely on: Mr. Bowers, their attorney, who was overseer of the Home for Confederate Women trust; a housekeeper-manager who supervised the running of the property; and a couple of daily maids who saw to the cooking and the cleaning. But Mr. Bowers had died, and inflation meant that prices kept going up while their income stayed about the same. Then the housekeeper resigned, so now there was only one aging maid to look after them. She cooked a little and cleaned every now and then, but it wasn’t enough. The house had begun to take on a general air of neglect and they were powerless to stop its decline. The limited income from the trust would not stretch to more than basic maintenance, at least not if they wanted to keep purchasing food. A broken furnace or a leaky roof would spell disaster for the eight remaining residents of the Home. Really they were running out of choices, just as they had run out of people to help them. Flora felt that it was up to her to take care of the others.

She looked around the spacious, sunny bedroom that had been her lair for more than twenty years. The wallpaper was faded and the ceiling a road map of plaster cracks, but still she loved it. It was familiar and comfortable, and still bore traces of a bygone elegance-like a grande dame who had fallen on hard times. The best bits of the Dabney family furniture were displayed about her, and on a mahogany chest sat her mother’s tea service of Mexican silver. Flora wished that she could continue to live there, but modern times being what they were, that wish was a pipe dream.