Goose in the Pond - Earlene Fowler [40]
Each of the three main rooms was named for a famous Mississippian. As was expected, the writers and storytellers claimed the Bill Faulkner room, the musicians occupied the Elvis Aaron room, and the visual artists and photographers the Marie Hull room. I ordered an Italian cream soda and told them I would wait for my lunch companion in the Elvis room. I preferred this small but airy back room not because it was usually filled with musicians, as pleasant as their impromptu harmonica and guitar concerts could be, but because it looked out over Ash’s colorful backyard garden of roses, peonies, impatiens, and geraniums.
I grabbed an abandoned Freedom Press newspaper, and like everyone else in San Celina, after scanning the front page of the weekly paper—this week a story about whether coyotes were friends or predators—I compulsively turned to page five to see who the Tattler had skewered this time. The anonymously written column the paper had been running for eight or nine months now and had become the hot topic among hometown folks. The columnist respected no boundaries about whom he attacked—politicians, longtime residents, merchants, local artists, community activists, conservatives, liberals. The Tattler was a nonpartisan gossipmonger. No names were ever mentioned, so thus far the Freedom Press had avoided any lawsuits. More than any column in the newspaper it garnered angry and virulent letters to the editor. Everyone compulsively read and discussed it with the sick obsession of freeway gawkers at a bloody car wreck. This week the Tattler was attacking a local garden club’s benefit dinner/dance to raise money for the planting of a community rose garden in front of the county courthouse honoring their longtime president, a local society matron whose husband was a popular divorce attorney and gentleman rancher.
The Tattler wrote: How inspired and blessed the homeless will be when they gaze upon the splendor of a perfect Sterling Silver Beauty as they dig through the trash bins for their morning meals. Then he went on to chastise a local liberal bookstore for refusing to carry Rush Limbaugh books and then turned around and lambasted Rush for writing such ridiculous claptrap to begin with.
After a quick scan of Elvia’s book review of a storytelling book on special this week at Blind Harry’s, I set the paper down. My eyes rested on the pale peach roses in Ash’s garden, and I mentally ran over my day’s schedule. Listen to Rita and find out her plans, sign my statement at the police station, go to the stable, then back to museum to see how things were faring. Then home and a continuation of last night’s standoff. Remembering Gabe’s request for the festival committee members’ names, I pulled one of the small tablets from the pot in front of me and jotted them down. Peter Grant. Gabe had obviously remembered him and had one of the detectives get in touch with him this morning. Roy Hudson, Grace Winter, Evangeline Boudreaux, Ashley Stanhill, Dolores Ayala, Jillian Sinclair. I scratched my cheek with the tip of the eraser then added Michel “D-Daddy” Boudreaux, though he certainly wasn’t a suspect. D-Daddy, for all his blustering, wouldn’t hurt a fly, I was sure of it.
So who else could want her dead? Except for her storytelling friends, I knew Nora had always been a bit of a loner and that it had gotten worse since her son died a year ago. He’d been in a coma for months after a car hit him while he was riding home from school on his bicycle. Her life, according to Nick, had become a vigil of sitting day after day next to her son’s bed—sometimes twelve and fourteen hours at a time. Gradually her few friends dropped away, Roy left her, and so when her son finally died, she had no one except Nick left in her life.
Maybe it was someone she worked with at the library. I thought about the two children’s librarians, whom I knew casually. Both appeared to be normal, middle-aged women with husbands, children, and mortgages.