Миранда Джеймс - Claws For Concern

“Come on, Diesel, let’s go to the den,” I said. “Time to check e-mail.” He ambled along beside me as we left the kitchen.

A few minutes later we were comfortably settled on the sofa in the den. Diesel lay stretched out beside me, his head against my leg. I had the laptop open, waiting for my e-mail to finish loading. The process was taking a little longer than usual because Jack had evidently sent me several large files.

Finally the last of them loaded, and I opened the one that had arrived first. Jack had written a brief explanation of the contents of the file, in this case scans of all the newspaper articles he had been able to find about the Barber case. I opened the file and discovered that there were nearly sixty pages of scans. If the other files were this big, I would do well to read them all and digest the information before our meeting tomorrow.

I heard a beep that alerted me to a new incoming message. From Jack again, this time marked with a red exclamation point, denoting that it was sent with high importance. I opened it to find out what was so urgent.

Managed to track down Elizabeth Barber’s best friend from high school. Girl she spent the night with the night her parents and siblings were murdered. Turns out she’s a doctor and lives in Athena. Leann Finch. Know her?

TWENTY-ONE

The ER doctor, Leann Finch, was Elizabeth Barber’s best friend in high school. What an odd coincidence, I thought, like my son-in-law turning out to be related to the Barber family. Frankly, it wasn’t all that unusual in Mississippi to stumble over connections like these. At least, I thought so, after all those years in Houston where the population of the metropolitan area was more than twice as large as that of the whole state of Mississippi. Since I moved back to Athena, I had encountered this phenomenon more than once.

My thoughts focused on Leann Finch. If she and Elizabeth Barber had been such good friends, would Leann have known the Barbers’ hired man, Bill Delaney? In light of this new information, I considered the scene in the emergency room. I never saw any sign that the doctor was acquainted with her patient, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of his connection to the Barbers.

The connection might mean nothing at all, at least in terms of solving the murders. Jack and I couldn’t ignore the possibility that it did, however. We would have to talk to Dr. Finch about the case. We definitely had to go to the hospital tomorrow afternoon, and if Dr. Finch wasn’t there, we would have to track her down somehow.

I fashioned a quick reply to Jack’s e-mail to explain how I knew Dr. Finch and share the rest of my thoughts about the connection. Jack responded a few minutes later, saying that he agreed with me.

With that out of the way I could focus on all the reading material Jack sent. I was tempted to print it all because my eyes tired more quickly from staring at a computer screen than from reading hard-copy printout. I decided, after considering the advantages of having a more portable paper copy as opposed to having to use the laptop, I would go ahead and print.

The process took twelve minutes to complete. One file was sixty pages, another ten, and the final one eight. I put the laptop away and settled down with the pages. I decided to start with the largest one first, all the scans of the newspaper coverage.

Jack had them organized in chronological order, and his sources ranged from the Tullahoma paper to those of other towns and cities, including Jackson and Memphis. The early headlines were lurid, especially one from the Tullahoma paper: Barber Family Butchered in Their Sleep . I snorted as I read it. I wasn’t sure how anyone could be butchered with a shotgun, but I reckoned the editor had wanted to grab everyone’s attention and sell more papers. Despite the headline, however, the article itself was not sensational in tone.

After reading the early accounts of the crime, I had a fairly clear picture of the opening stages of the investigation. Elizabeth Barber had come home around nine in the morning after spending the night with an unnamed friend, who turned out to be Leann Finch. She discovered the bodies and started screaming the place down. One of the hired men heard her and came running. He got her out of the house and called the sheriff’s department to report the discovery. He then took Elizabeth back to the Finch home, where Leann’s mother ministered to the girl.

Suspicion quickly focused on Bill Delaney, who was known to be a heavy drinker with a sometimes violent temper. One of the other hired men, a man named Sonny Willis, had overheard a loud argument between Delaney and Hiram Barber two days before the murders. During the altercation, according to Willis, Delaney threatened Barber’s life if Barber didn’t pay Delaney his back wages.

The investigation limped along after Sylvia Delaney gave her son an alibi for the night of the murders. She could not be shaken, and the sheriff’s department reluctantly (my interpretation) had to start looking for other suspects. The fact that the murder weapon belonged to Hiram Barber but had disappeared wasn’t mentioned until several weeks after the first account in the Tullahoma paper. The sheriff’s department, assisted by volunteers, did an extensive search in the area around the Barber farm but without result. The murderer had apparently taken great pains to make sure the weapon would never be found. If it had turned up at some point in the past twenty years, Jack hadn’t mentioned it.

Reporters had talked to residents in the community where the Barber farm was located. No one had any information to offer on potential suspects but several allowed as how Hiram Barber was extremely difficult to deal with and not highly regarded in the community. The locals liked his wife, however, and generally felt sorry for her and the children. One person, a Mrs. Mitzi Gillon, told the reporter from the Jackson paper that poor Mrs. Barber was always embarrassed about how worn and out-of-style her clothes were. Barber begrudged his family any money spent on fancy things, with the exception of his teenage daughter. Elizabeth, Mrs. Gillon concluded, got most anything she wanted as long as it wasn’t too extravagant, while her mother and brothers had to make do with very little. “They didn’t even have a TV,” Mrs. Gillon said at the end of the interview.

Hiram Barber sounded like a thoroughly unpleasant man, a skinflint of the worst kind. The other farmers in the area who spoke with reporters said Barber’s farm was prosperous enough that the family didn’t need to go without. Barber simply hated to let loose of money.

Such a sad story, I thought. A miserable man who deprived his family—except for the daughter—of ordinary things like decent clothing and a television set. It sounded to me like Hiram Barber was stuck in the 1930s, the Depression era. I wondered if his parents had been like that. He must have learned that behavior somewhere.

His daughter had done well for herself, despite the loss of her family. She had sold the farmland and ended up marrying a man who became a prominent businessman in Tullahoma. She had children of her own and no doubt a nice house with as many amenities and luxuries as they could afford. A far cry from her early life, certainly.

Eventually the press revealed the name of Elizabeth’s friend. Leann Finch and her family provided Elizabeth Barber’s alibi, though it didn’t seem to me that the sheriff’s department had seriously considered her a suspect. According to Leann, the two girls were up most of the night, talking in her bedroom. Leann was home for the weekend from her first semester of college, and the girls hadn’t seen each other in several weeks. Elizabeth wanted to know all about college life, and college men in particular.