Рон Гуларт - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 13, Mid-December 1994

“Oh my God,” breathed Raydeen, turning white. Randy, also looking quite pale, said, “Don’t anybody touch anything. I guess I gotta call the crime lab and get them to send out a mobile unit.” Wallace County isn’t big enough to have its own lab.

The next couple of hours became a blur of activity. The state boys arrived and started taking pictures, fingerprinting everything, including me. Then, after the medical examiner arrived, they hauled Eaudelein out of the water.

Randy and one of the investigators from the State Crime Unit, Detective Mertis, made me tell them the whole story, in detail, over and over. They wanted to know who had keys to the store. I said I did and so did Freddy, of course, and Hank, Freddy’s partner. There were a couple of part-timers who had keys, Willie Smith and Jim Roy Learner.

“Did Eaudelein have a key?” asked Randy.

“I really don’t know,” I said. “I doubt it, since she and Freddy are divorced. Maybe she still had a key, but I can’t imagine her coming in here.” She and Freddy hated each other.

“Where was Freddy last night?” asked Randy. Detective Mertis looked curious.

“You know, Randy, he was with me. We saw you at Blockbuster Video last night. We rented a video, went home, and watched it, then we went to bed around ten. Freddy got up around three A.M. so he could go fishing. The large mouth were supposed to be biting, and he’s gettin’ in as much time on the water as he can before the Bass Master Classic. He’s tryin’ to turn pro,” I said in an aside to Mertis.

Randy and Detective Mertis exchanged a long look; then Mertis asked, “Where is Freddy now?” He spoke in a still, flat voice. It was my first indication that Freddy was a suspect. Later, looking back, I could follow his reasoning. But hearing the words come from him, in Freddy’s shop, with Eaudelein lying on a piece of black plastic in the bait room, sent shivers down my spine. They didn’t believe me. I’m about as trustworthy as they come. I don’t look like a liar. Hell, sometimes I wish I did, but I look more like your mama. I’m plump and short, with a fresh-scrubbed complexion and pink cheeks. My hair went grey years ago. Give me a ribbon-racked apron and I could be Betty Crocker. I drive their children to school in one of the four schoolbuses that Wallace County owns. If they couldn’t trust me, who could they trust?

No, they thought Freddy had somehow gotten Eaudelein to meet him at the shop and murdered her. My Freddy may have hated Eaudelein, but he would never have killed the mother of his daughter, no matter how evil she’d treated him.

Raydeen put the word out on the police radio she carried that we were looking for Freddy. Detective Mertis held a low-toned conference with Randy. Randy shot a few worried looks in my direction, then wrote a few more things in his notebook.

Around nine, Freddy and Hank came tearing up to the store in Hank’s old pickup. Freddy rushed through the door. “Patsy, I just heard. Are you all right?” Surely, I thought, Detective Mertis could tell, just from meeting my Freddy, that he was no killer. But that wasn’t the case.

“Fred, I’m afraid we’re going to need to ask you to come down to the station with us,” said Randy. He didn’t say he was sorry, or talk to Freddy like they’d known each other for years. He was Randall Vaughn, Wallace County sheriff. And Freddy was a prime suspect in a murder investigation.

They didn’t tell me or Hank to come to the station. They just took Hank’s prints and asked him where he’d been last night. When he said fishin’, they didn’t say anything about him coming down there. Of course, he hadn’t been married to Eaudelein, but it was the principle of the thing.

As Randy was leading Freddy to the patrol car, Freddy stopped dead in his tracks and whirled around. “Oh my Lord,” he cried. “What about Loretta? Does she know?” No one had thought to go to Freddy’s daughter. “Babe, I hate to ask you, but would you find her? Someone’s gonna have to tell her about her mama.” I quickly figured out that the someone was me.

What else could I say but “Sure, hon, don’t worry. I’ll go get her and bring her back to our place.”

Freddy and I weren’t married. Yet. Freddy’d gotten taken in the divorce. Things were so tight financially that he just couldn’t see getting married. He said he didn’t want to marry me with so much debt hanging over his head. If you ask me, I think Eaudelein burned him so bad he was afraid of its happening again. So, against the town’s better judgment, ’cause you know they judged everybody, I let Freddy move in.

He’d been such a pitiful wreck when we met. Although we both grew up in Barrow, he’d been a few years ahead of me in school and left to join the army as soon as he graduated. Freddy was a Baptist and I belonged to the Methodist church, so our paths never crossed until I stopped in the store to buy bait. Fishin’ was gonna be my new hobby, and Freddy was only too happy to help me find a tackle box.

His divorce had only been final a few months, and he was bitter. He couldn’t cook, didn’t care to, and lived like a prisoner in his tiny apartment. When we began dating, all that changed.

We’d been living together for almost ten months, and in that time Freddy’d come around pretty well. He liked my fried chicken and creamed potatoes, and he’d put on about fifteen pounds. He’d made himself a little workshop in my shed out back and had even joined the softball league. But we didn’t talk about marrying any more. I felt that was best left to time.

Loretta, his fifteen-year-old daughter, had been the one thorn in the side of our relationship. She was a dark-haired, sullen child who took after her mother in looks and attitude. Loretta saw me as the Other Woman, standing between her parents and reconciliation. No amount of talking on Freddy’s part could persuade her otherwise. She tolerated me and rarely spent the night at our house. Of course, Eaudelein had a lot to do with that. She poisoned the child’s mind. She told Loretta that Freddy had started seeing me long before he and Eaudelein separated. That was flat not true. Freddy was living on his own when I met him.

I was going to have trouble with Loretta, I just knew it.

When I pulled up in front of Eaudelein’s house, there were cars parked in the driveway. Folks would have known that Loretta was alone, with no one to break the news to her. It wasn’t their place, however, to come tromping over and interfere. It was just going to make my job harder.

As I walked up the path, I could hear Loretta wailing. She’d been close to her mother, but this was the wail of someone milking it for all it was worth.

Loretta’s aunt, Minnie, Eaudelein’s oldest sister, was sitting on the sofa, patting Loretta’s hand. Tears streamed down both their faces, and a little group of busybodies stood around looking helpless.

They were not glad to see me, but Minnie was at least civil. She only asked, “What are you doin’ here?” instead of “What are you doin’ here, bitch?”

“Freddy was worried about Loretta. He asked me to come over and make sure she was all right. He’s down at the station, helping the police with the investigation.” I was putting the best light on the situation for Loretta’s sake.

“Loretta,” I said, “your daddy wants me to bring you back to our place till he gets home. Then we can sort things out from there.”

Loretta lifted her tear-swollen face and favored me with a malevolent glare. “You did this,” she shrieked. “You killed my mama!”

Minnie broke in, “Now, Loretta, honey, Patsy wouldn’t have killed your mama. And if she had,” she continued, with a warning glance in my direction, “the cops would have her in jail.” Minnie wasn’t defending me. She just didn’t want to end up with Loretta in her custody. Everybody knew that Loretta was trouble. Her mama’d been having a devil of a time trying to ride herd on her rebellious child.