Laura Childs - Death By Darjeeling

Burt Tidwell sighed, reached down to his midsection, fumbled for his belt buckle, and released it one notch. There. Better. Now he could draw breath. Now he could even begin to contemplate stopping by Poogan’s Porch for an early lunch. Perhaps some shrimp Creole or a bowl of their famous okra gumbo.

Tidwell turned the key in the ignition. The engine in the big car caught, then rumbled deeply. Theodosia Browning had proved to be highly resourceful. True, she was snoopy and contentious toward him, but she had made some interesting connections and suppositions.

Best of all, she’d rattled more than a few cages here in Charleston’s historic district. That had certainly served his purpose well. After all, Theodosia was an insider. He was not.

“Did you let the police fingerprint you?” Theodosia paced back and forth in her small office while Bethany sat perched on a chair. Bethany’s knees were pulled up to her chin, and her hands worked constantly, nervously twisting her long skirt.

“Yes,” she said in a small voice. “Leyland Hartwell said it was okay. Anyway, the police explained that it was to rule me out.”

“Bethany, you don’t have to be so defensive. I’m not cross-examining you.”

“No, that will come later,” replied a glum Bethany.

“We don’t know that at all,” said Theodosia. Honestly, she thought to herself, the girl could be positively maddening.

The phone on Theodosia’s desk buzzed, and she snatched up the receiver, almost welcoming a diversion. “I understand you had some excitement last night,” said Jory Davis. “The security company called you?” said Theodosia, surprised. “Of course. I hired them.” There was a long pause, then Jory Davis asked quietly, “Theodosia, are you in over your head on this?”

She waited so long to reply that Jory Davis finally answered his own question. “Sometimes no answer is an answer,” he said.

“I promise,” Theodosia said, “to share absolutely everything with you tonight. And to listen carefully to any lawyerly advice you choose to impart.” She paused. “Truly.”

“Fair enough,” said Jory Davis, seemingly appeased by this. “I await our evening with bated breath.” His voice was tinged with faint amusement.

“Can I please go back to work?” Bethany asked. She noted that Theodosia had long since hung up the phone but was standing there in the strangest way, staring down at her desk, seemingly lost in thought.

Theodosia looked up. “What? Oh, of course, Bethany.”

Bethany jumped up to make her escape.

“You don’t have any idea what Tidwell was talking about, do you?” Theodosia called to her back.

Bethany spun on her heel. “About my fingerprints? No. Of course I don’t.” She gazed at Theodosia, the expression on her face a mixture of hurt and humiliation. “I think... I think this should probably be my last day here,” sniffled Bethany.

“Bethany, please.” This was the last thing she wanted, to upset Bethany in any way, to foster more bad feelings.

“No. My being here has become entirely too problematic.”

“As you wish, Bethany,” said Theodosia. She waited until Bethany pulled the door closed behind her, then sat down in her chair and sighed. What in her wildest dreams had told her she could possibly solve Hughes Barron’s murder? She had followed her leads and hunches and ended up...nowhere. If anything, there were more unanswered questions, more strange twists and turns. Now some mysterious object had been found at Hughes Barron’s condominium, something the police had run tests on and found smatters of Bethany’s fingerprints!

Theodosia pulled her desk drawer open and hoisted out the Charleston phone directory. As the book thudded on top of her desk, she quickly flipped through the front pages. Just past the directory assistance and long-distance calling pages, she found the number she wanted. The Charleston Police Department.

She dialed the number nervously, knowing this was a long shot.

“Cletus Aubrey, please,” she told the central operator when she came on the line.

“Which department?” asked the disinterested voice.

“Computer records,” said Theodosia.

“You don’t have that extension?” The operator seemed vexed.

“Sorry, I don’t,” said Theodosia, feeling silly for apologizing to an operator whose job it was to look up numbers.

Cletus Aubrey was a childhood friend. He had grown up in the low-country on a farm down the road from the Browning plantation. As children, she and Cletus had spent many summer days together, romping through the woods, wading in streams, and tying pieces of string around chicken necks and trolling creek bottoms to catch crabs. Interested in law enforcement early on, Cletus had received encouragement from her father, Macalester Browning. And when Cletus graduated from high school, he went on to a two-year law enforcement program, then joined the Charleston Police Department.

“Mornin’, Cletus Aubrey.”

“Cletus? It’s Theodosia. Theodosia Browning.”

She heard a sharp intake of breath and then rich, warm laughter.

“As I live and die, I don’t believe it. How are you, Miss Browning?”

“Cletus, exactly when did I become Miss Browning?”

“When you stopped running through the swamp barefoot and started running a tea shop. Listen, girl, it pleases me to call you Miss Browning. Reminds me of how you followed in the graceful footsteps of your Aunt Libby. And, by the way, how is Aunt Libby?”

“Very well.”

“Still treating her feathered friends with all manner of seed and millet?”

“She’s extended her generosity to woodchucks, raccoons, and opossum, too.”

Cletus Aubrey chuckled again. “The good things in life never change. Theo, Miss Browning, to what do I owe this blast from the past, this walk down memory lane?”

“Cletus, I have a favor to ask.”

“Ask away.”

“You used to work in the property room, am I correct?”

“For three years. Before I went to night school and turned into a computer nut.”

“How big a deal would it be to snoop around in there?”

“No big deal at all if I had a general idea what I was on the lookout for.”

“Let’s just call it a mysterious object found in the home of a Mr. Hughes Barron.”

“Uh-oh, the old mysterious object search. Yeah, I can probably pull that off. What was the name again? Barron?”

“Yes. B-A-R-R-O-N.”

“The first name is Hughes?”

“That’s it,” said Theodosia

“One of the guys who works in property owes me twenty bucks from a bet he lost on last week’s Citadel game. I’ll harass him and have a look around. Kill two birds with one stone.”

“Cletus, you’re a gem.” “That’s what I keep telling my wife, only she’s not buyin’ it.”

Theodosia was deep in conversation with one of the sales reps at Frank & Fuller, a tea wholesaler in Montclair, New Jersey, when the other phone line lit up. It was Cletus calling back.

“You ain’t gonna like this, Miss Browning,” he began.

“What was it, Cletus?”

“Some tea thingamajig.”

“Describe it to me,” said Theodosia.

“Silver, lots of little holes.”

“A tea infuser.”

“You sell those?” asked Cletus.

“By the bushel,” Theodosia said with a sigh.

The last six months of sales receipts were laid out on Theodosia’s desk. Haley had tried to stack them, month by month, in some semblance of order, but there were so many of the flimsy paper receipts they kept sliding around and sorting into their own piles.