Joan Hess - Mischief In Maggody

"Of course not," I said soothingly. "Once you got home, all you could do was let them in for the night. It was admirable, considering how exhausted you must have been."

"Drinking a beer doesn't require much exertion," he said.

"At Ruby Bee's Bar and Grill?"

"Why're are you asking me all this? I thought we were friends, Arly, so if you've got something to say, just go ahead and say it."

I leaned back and tried to look pained, which wasn't all that hard. "The sheriff ordered me to ask where everybody was that night. It seems there was a holdup in a convenience store just this side of Starley City. Man in his thirties or early forties, blond hair. I know perfectly well it wasn't you, but Harve made me swear I'd get everybody's whereabouts." I was already hating myself before I asked the next question. "Were you at Ruby Bee's having a beer?"

He wasn't convinced by my fanciful story of collecting alibis, but I suppose he thought it was due to my injuries. "That's right, but I don't know if I can prove it. It's always so darn crowded and noisy on Saturday nights that you can't talk to anyone, and the only lights are those dreadful pink things over the dance floor. I don't know that many of the regular customers."

He also didn't know Ruby Bee's had been closed because the proprietress and her sister in crime were climbing the hill to Robin Buchanon's cabin. He'd seen the two earlier in the day, so he had no reason to think they had disappeared shortly thereafter. His lie made me feel a little better.

"I'll assure Harve that you're not a holdup man," I said. "If he insists, we can always dig up some of the regulars; somebody must have seen you. I'm sorry I had to ask."

"No problem," he said, visibly relieved.

I touched Hammet's arm. "So how's it working out with your siblings? Is everybody making friends with his newly found father?"

"That preacher man sent Bubba and Sissie to his cousin's house in the next county, but they were right pleased. The lady has a big house and cooks good. He's just an old fart. Who'd want to live with him?"

"Not I," I said, grinning at him. "How about Sukie and Baby?"

"They're at the holyfied lady's house. Sukie said the lady's been locked in her bedroom since they first got there, and her pa stands at the door and talks to hisself. They got some other woman what cleans and cooks. It din't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me, but Sukie don't mind, and Baby don't know better."

"And your pa?"

Hammet gave me a long-suffering look. "This social worker woman says she's a-gonna find him if she has to look under every rock between Emmet and the state line. She's likely as not to find him under one."

I glanced at David Allen. "I feel really badly about all this. The worst thing is that we may never learn who Nate's partner was. It had to be someone local, you know. Whoever it was telephoned Nate the minute I was out of the way. They were up and back in less than three hours."

"If we didn't know it was impossible, I'd say they had you under surveillance," he murmured.

Hammet swallowed the gooey mess in his mouth. "How'd they know you was up there to begin with, and how'd they know when you left?"

"A very good question," I said. I limped across the room and poured him a glass of milk. When David Allen declined a beer, I limped back and sat down, hoping I wasn't trembling so hard he could see it. "The first problem, Hammet, is that no one should have known about the murder. But the dispatcher blabbed to Mrs. Jim Bob, who blabbed to you and to David Allen, who blabbed to Ruby Bee and Estelle. I doubt it went any farther than that." I looked across the coffee table. "You didn't tell anyone else, did you?"

"No, I only told those two because of Baby. I didn't realize it was a secret, but I spent the rest of the day fooling around in my garage."

"And then went to the bar?" I said, inviting a repetition of the lie to remind myself not to feel so damn guilty. When he nodded, I continued. "Well, let's presume this partner found out some way and realized that I was staking out the marijuana patch. The next problem is that he seemed to know the minute I started to drive back down the road." Hammet wrinkled his forehead. "How'd the sumbitch know that?"

"That is the zillion-dollar question. At one point I asked myself if I was an airplane being tracked on a radar screen. But I'm not an airplane, am I?" Hammet shook his head, eyeing me warily in case I really did think I was one. "But," I added, "I did have something sort of like an airplane. Earlier I told my mother I spent the night with bugs and my beeper, but I was wrong. I spent the night with a bugged beeper."

"What's that?" Hammet gasped.

I kept my eyes on him. "Well, a beeper has all these circuits inside it. One of them is called an oscillator circuit, and it can be modified with one little chip. Not a corn chip, mind you. A computer chip."

"Why'd someone be fool enough to modify this oscillator chip?"

"Because then the beeper would emit a special radio frequency that could be tracked just like it was a tiny airplane-or a model rocket. You'd need a radio directional finder, but some people with expensive hobbies have them so they won't lose their toys. Since the beeper was always on my belt, I could be tracked, too."

Hammet's eyes narrowed. "But it weren't always on your belt."

"I know." I forced myself to look at David Allen, who'd turned pale during my electronics lesson. "You took it while we were at the drive-in, and kept it until the next afternoon."

"Yeah," Hammet growled, scooting next to me in a show of strength.

"That doesn't prove anything," David Allen said. "It stayed in the glove compartment right up until I remembered to return it to you."

"That's good to know. That means there's no way your fingerprints might be found inside my beeper, doesn't it) They won't be on the chip or on the inside of the case. It means my theory is the product of shell shock from the explosion."

He looked at his fingertips for a long while. "I didn't even know about the booby traps. The guy was flipped out, a real paranoid."

"You bugged the beeper before Robin's body was discovered."

"I had no idea Robin's disappearance had any thing to do with the…ah, agricultural venture, but I was worried about you wandering all over the ridge and stumbling onto the marijuana patch by accident."

"I told you that I had given up."

"And then you told me that you were going to ask the sheriff to bring in a posse. I figured you'd dog them every step of the way."

At last someone with a high opinion of my dedication-to-duty level. "I might have tagged along," I admitted.

"After I dropped you two off that night, Nate came by to discuss the details of the sale to a student in Farberville. I told him how worried I was, and he said it was a damn shame we couldn't keep track of your movements on the ridge, since we wouldn't know whether or not it would be safe to go back to the patch to harvest. I said it would be easy if I could convince you to carry one of my model rockets in your pocket. One thing led to another, I suppose. But I didn't put your beeper in the glove compartment with any evil intent; I did that because it was bothering you."

"How'd the dope end up in the chicken house?" I asked.

"Nate spotted it several months ago, when he was driving the pregnant girl to see the midwife. Listen, Arly, he was a classic case of paranoia, right out of a college textbook. I didn't know he was going to pull that stunt with the light bulbs in the chicken house anymore than I knew he had booby-trapped the clearing. You know I would have told you about the booby traps if I'd known about them, don't you?"

I told myself he would have. "If he hadn't put in the booby traps, none of this would have happened. But he did, and two women died because of it. That makes you an accomplice."