IT HADN’T TAKEN ME MORE than an instant to figure out that Belinda Meeker’s visit to my motel was hardly a casual social call, but even so, I was not prepared for her pronouncement. When it came, I kept my gaze straight ahead and nodded, as if her words were precisely what I had expected to hear.
“I see,” I responded in a voice that I hoped was unemotional. The last thing I wanted to do was scare her off, and she looked like the type that scared easily. I was mentally composing my next sentence when she saved me the effort.
“I prayed before coming to see you,” she intoned, looking at the scuffed toes of her beige cowboy boots. “I prayed for a long time—a real long time.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” I told her, still treading on verbal eggs and trying to avoid making an omelet. “The weather’s nice tonight, warmer than New York.”
“After you left our place, did you go over to see my Aunt Louise?” Belinda asked.
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
“Mama said you would, if you hadn’t already stopped there before you came to our place. The second you drove off, she was on the phone to Aunt Louise, telling her you was probably headed out there.”
“Your Aunt Louise was expecting me, all right,” I said with a smile.
She actually reacted with a tiny grin of her own, if only for an instant. “Yeah, I just bet she was. She’s a pistol, that one is.”
“Based on what little I saw of her, I’d have to agree.”
Belinda made a clicking sound with her tongue. “She say anything to you about Clarice?”
“No. Should she have?”
“I’da been surprised if she did, to tell the truth.” She fell silent.
Clearly, this was going to take a while. But then, time was something I had lots of. “Who’s Clarice?” I persisted.
“My cousin—Aunt Louise’s girl. She’s younger’n me, by what, seven, almost eight years. And a heck of a lot better looking, I’ll tell you.” She smiled again, this time sheepishly.
“There’s nothing wrong with the way you look,” I said to her. “Does Clarice live with her mother?”
“No.” She studied her boots again, wiggling them. “She did up till she got married, and then again after her divorce! But she doesn’t now.”
In case you’re wondering, it had occurred to me by this point that her cryptic answers might be Belinda’s way of having sport at a city slicker’s expense, but I quickly dismissed the thought. Neither humor nor guile appeared to be in this country girl’s repertoire. “Where does Clarice live?” I asked.
“Don’t know for sure, but we all think New York.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where Charles was,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“I see. How long has she been gone?”
“Well … over a year now, I guess it is. Didn’t surprise me one bit when she left. Both Aunt Louise and Mama acted shocked, but I really don’t think they were. They knew Clarice had to do something,”
“Why did she have to do something?” I asked, advancing the conversation only as fast as Belinda’s measured responses dictated.
She made that clicking noise again. “Quite a few unmarried girls and women around Mercer go and get themselves pregnant, but hardly any do it by their first cousin. Clarice didn’t want to stay around town and have everybody watch her get bigger, especially because people would figure out who the father was. Besides, she wanted to marry Charles, real bad.”
“How did he feel about her?”
She kept looking straight ahead at the highway. “Far as I could tell, Charles didn’t give two hoots about her. She was the one who pushed it; she was after him almost from the minute he came back to town to look after my Aunt Marian—that was his Mama.”
“You said Clarice was married before.”
“Yeah, she was, all right,” Belinda sneered. “For less than two years, to Wendell Avery. Thank the Lord they had no kids. He was a bum before they got married, he was a bum when they was married, and he’s a bum now. Drove a truck, whenever he was sober, that is. Lives in Evansville, last I heard. He left town right after they split up, which is pushing three years ago now. Far as I know, he hasn’t been back to Mercer, good riddance.”
Things were looking up. She was getting more talkative. We might not be here all night. “So when Charles stayed here caring for his mother, he and Clarice saw a lot of each other?” I asked.
Belinda made an unpleasant sound that came out as a cross between a chuckle and a cough. “Uh-huh. Like I said, she started chasin’ him the minute he got to town. Said she wanted to help look after her aunt, but before he came, she hadn’t been out to see Aunt Marian more’n maybe three or four times, if that. My mama and me, we were there almost every day, and so was Aunt Louise.”
“Did Clarice have a job?”
“Same as me, she clerked in the mini mart that’s part of the big gas station out at the Six Corners just south of town—you went right past it on your way to our place. We each worked four days a week, on different shifts from each other. Clarice always acted like she was too good for that kind of stuff, though. Wanted to be an artist. She was forever painting pictures at home, of flowers and trees and even their barn and cows, if you can believe it. Can’t tell you whether the stuff was any good or not.”
“How did you find out she was pregnant?”
“Aunt Louise told Mama. She told Mama that Clarice wanted to marry Charles and go back to New York with him. Thing is, he never asked her, though.”
I nodded. “How long after his mother died did Charles stay in Mercer?”
“Oh, maybe two weeks, maybe three. We all helped him clear out the house, and then he put it on the market. His Mama had sold the land around it to another farmer a few years back. It took at least six months before the house sold, and at that, Charles didn’t get nowhere near his asking price. Nobody does around here these days, especially the farms.” She fell silent, maybe pondering the price of local real estate, and I had just about decided we would never get to the point when she spoke again. “Anyway, when he left town, Clarice was really low. She was maybe two months along, so she didn’t show yet. And then one day, it was probably about three weeks after he went back to New York, she packed a few suitcases and was gone—just like that,”
Belinda clapped once for emphasis, but her facial expression stayed eerily unchanged.
“And you’ve never heard from her?”
“That is God’s truth,” she whispered, finally turning to face me. She shook her head. “Can you believe it? If Aunt Louise had gotten some word, any word, I know she would’ve told Mama, and Mama would’ve told me. In fact, Aunt Louise telephoned Charles in New York three or four different times, and he always told her that he hadn’t heard from Clarice. But she didn’t believe him—she told Mama that each time, he was real short with her on the phone, and that wasn’t like Charles. He’s always been real polite to Aunt Louise—and to all of us.”
“Do you believe what he told your aunt?” I asked.
“No sir, I do not,” she said quietly but very firmly. “A few days before Clarice disappeared, or whatever you want to call it, she told me she was going to marry Charles en and where is this going to happen?’ I asked. And she said, ‘Soon.’ That’s all she said. She wouldn’t tell me nothing else, but she sure sounded positive about it.”
“Did Clarice’s mother make any attempt to find her, other than the calls to Charles Childress?”
“Aunt Louise phoned Information for all the area codes around New York City—there must be about six—and none of ’em had a number for Clarice Wingfield or Clarice Avery—she took back her maiden name after she and Wendell split up. And she’s never gotten a letter or even a postcard—nothing.”
“Was your Aunt Louise upset about Clarice’s pregnancy?”
“Yeah, I’d have to say so. Aunt Louise is the most religious one in the family. She goes to church every single Sunday. Not like me and Mama—we hardly ever go, except at Easter and around Christmas. And she’s even been both an elder and a deacon. When Clarice got divorced, Aunt Louise was real unhappy for a long time, even though she didn’t care for Wendell herself. Mama said she told Clarice that she was terrible, terrible disappointed in her.”
“Miss Meeker, I’d like to go back to what you said first when you came to see me: Who do you think killed Charles?”
I got a look that suggested I was not playing with a full deck. “I thought that was pretty obvious to you by now,” Belinda stated, folding her arms across her chest with finality. “Clarice killed him. He wouldn’t wed her—his obituary in the Mercury said he had a fiancée in New York—so she shot him. Clarice had a temper, that’s for sure. I saw her take a shotgun one time years ago and fire away at a cat on their farm who’d knocked over a pitcher of lemonade on a table out in the yard. She missed the poor animal, but that shows what she could be like when she was angry. Besides, who was the only relative who didn’t come to the service for Charles at the Presbyterian church in town? Clarice, that’s who. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“Wherever she is, maybe she didn’t know he’d been killed,” I put in.
“She knew, Mr. Goodwin,” Belinda Meeker said, getting to her feet as though it were an effort. “She knew only too well.”
“Do you know if Mr. Childress had made a will?”
“Mama said he did, and that he’d left a little money to her—she didn’t tell me how much—and a little to Aunt Louise. That’s all I know.”
“One last question,” I said as I stood to face her under the dim yellow light. “Did you mention your suspicion about your cousin to anyone else?”
She tilted her head up at me and shook it vigorously, her face expressionless.
“Why not?”
“Ah, ah, that makes two questions,” Belinda answered, one corner of her mouth twitching slightly. Okay, scratch what I said earlier about her having no sense of humor.
“When we got the word that Charles had died—killed himself according to your police in New York—I knew right away it had been Clarice who shot him in a bad rage. No way Charles woulda done that; he was the kind who liked himself too much. But I figured, hey, if she got away with it, that’s life. And besides, she’s got herself a baby to raise. At least, I suppose she’s got a baby, and that she kept it.
“But then you came around today,” she said, and the stammer worsened, “and I knew that the suicide idea had gone out the window. That meant somebody was going to get charged with murder, and I said to myself, ‘What if you people back in New York pick the wrong person, someone that’s innocent?’ That’s when I started praying. I never liked Cousin Clarice all that much, and that’s God’s truth, Mr. Goodwin. But I wouldn’t wish her ill, except that it would be even worse if somebody who didn’t do it got blamed. That would be a sin, wouldn’t it?” This time she looked directly up at me, her eyes dark and unreadable.
“I guess that’s as good a word as any,” I responded. “Before I forget it, do you have a picture of your cousin?”
“Yeah, I do, I got one here. I thought you’d ask for one.” She reached into the rear pocket of her slacks and tugged out a billfold. “It’s getting old now, three or four years at least, but she still looks pretty much like this—at least she did when she left to go off to New York.”
Belinda handed me a frayed, wallet-sized photo of a fresh-faced young woman with bangs, light brown hair, wide blue eyes, and a turned-up nose. The face was easy to look at, but the smile appeared forced, as if she’d had to hold it too long, waiting for the photographer to push the button.
“What would you guess her height and weight to be?” I asked.
“I don’t have to guess on the height—it’s exactly the same as mine, five-three in her stocking feet,” Belinda declared. “Weight—well, I’m one-twenty-five, and Clarice was always thinner than me, small-boned, you know? I put her at maybe one-ten or so, unless she kept weight on after the baby.”
I fingered the photograph. “I’d like to keep this for a while, if you don’t mind. I promise I’ll return it.”
She sniffed. “Don’t care anymore if I never get it back.”
“Would I be pushing my luck if I asked you something else?”
She hunched up her shoulders and looked down at a crack in the concrete. “Aw, heck, I was just kidding before about that second question. Go ahead.”
“Do your mother and your aunt also think Clarice killed Charles?”
“It’s never been talked about, at least not around me,” she said after drawing in air. “If I was to guess, I’d say they both are probably darn suspicious. They wouldn’t ever say anything if you asked them about it, though. You won’t tell them I came here, will you?” She sounded scared again.
“No, I won’t tell them. But I do appreciate your coming.”
Belinda shook her head. “It wasn’t easy to do. Nobody likes to think one of their kin is a murderer, even if it’s true. I never felt worse in my whole life than I do right now.”
She turned and walked swiftly toward the battered pickup truck. I wanted to say something to comfort her, but I couldn’t find words that would even begin to help. Maybe there were none.