53
An alibi
I left the Windy Run Diner minutes later. Now I had something else to discover and that was what else Ben Queen was doing in Hebrides besides getting his truck fixed. People who would know this would be his brother and sister-in-law, the ones who lived in the big yellow house I had visited once. I had taken Mr. Root along as a reason to go, for Bathsheba Queen had once been his “girl,” he said.
Today I stood outside their house trying to make up what I would give as the reason this time for visiting. My mind was as blank and smooth as an eggshell. It was still blank five minutes later when George Queen, Ben’s older brother, came out on the porch with a newspaper, meaning, I guessed, to sit and read. I thought about the newspaper.
“Hello, Mr. Queen!” I called, as if I had just then been passing by. I didn’t want him to find me skulking outside his house. I waved as he got up from his chair and kind of squinted down the path between fence and steps. “It’s just me, Mr. Queen. Emma Graham. I guess you don’t remember me.” I’d found that the elderly don’t like it if you suggest their memories are slipping, so that comment might get him up and going. Mr. Queen came right down the path and unhooked the garden gate.
“I sure do remember you. Come on up to the porch. I bet Sheba will rustle up some lemonade and cookies. You just sit yourself down and I’ll be back in a flash.”
I hoped Sheba would produce store-bought cookies, as her own were so bad. I settled into an old wooden rocking chair and waited for him to come back. I saw he was reading the Cloverly paper, which was a daily. Our own Conservative was a weekly, out every Thursday. I don’t know how much was in it now about the White’s Bridge murder, but I didn’t need to read the paper to find out, as I knew more than the paper did. I looked through the first two pages of his paper but saw nothing about the murder or about Ben Queen. I folded the paper back carefully and returned it to the seat of his chair.
Mr. Queen came out then with a pitcher of lemonade on a little tray with three glasses, which meant his wife would be joining us. “Sheba’ll be out in a minute. She’s taking the cookies out of the oven.” I winced as he drew over a round table and set the tray down. “Nothing like fresh-baked cookies, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
Depends who baked them, I didn’t say. “I surely do, Mr. Queen.”
He poured out lemonade and handed me a glass and sat down with his own.
“This is really good,” I said, which it was. Then for some reason I remembered the girl with the Kool-Aid stand. It was only two streets up and over from here. I pictured her there with a drink nobody much wanted and with nobody much passing her way. I wished she had some of this lemonade to sell. I looked at the paper and asked, in an offhand way, if there was anything in it of interest.
“Not much. I was looking for mention of Fern—you know. The city paper thinks it’s old news.”
Cloverly hardly rated as a “city.” I said, “I’m really sorry about her, Mr. Queen. And I’m sorry about your brother, too.”
Just then Sheba Queen came out carrying a plate of the same kind of cookies she’d served before. “Well, hello, Em‘ly. How are you? How’s your mother? You came just at the right time. Here I was baking cookies and only us to eat ’em.”
“Thank you, ma‘am.” “Ma’am” was a word I was never to use, as my mother considered it common; so in her honor I corrected myself. “Thank you, Mrs. Queen.” I took a cookie, the smallest I could find, wondering why Sheba Queen seemed so much more friendly than the last time. But I guess people can have on-Em‘ly-days and off-Em’ly-days. I wondered where I could slip the cookie.
Sheba Queen sat down in the third rocker and munched her own cookie. I bit into mine and gave her a big smile back.
“We were talkin’ about there not being any news.” George fluttered the paper a little.
Sheba put on her hrr-umph look as she resettled her shoulders. “Police ain’t done a lick. That sheriff of yours is just dragging his feet.”
“I think he’s really trying, Mrs. Queen.” Even though the Sheriff and I were on the outs, I would still defend him. I made a note to tell him what we said here to show how objective I could be.
“Well ... maybe,” said George Queen. “Depends how hard he’s looking for anybody besides Ben.”
That was a good point. I would add this to my defending him. “Yes, sir. I know what you mean.” I did, too. I could have kissed him for bringing Ben up, but settled on another bite of the cookie to express my gratitude. There was a silence into which I dropped Rose’s name.
Sheba stiffened, for she had always disliked Rose Devereau ; I had learned that plain enough from my visit here with Mr. Root.
George just shook his head in a woebegone way. “That poor poor girl. Ben never did that, and I’ll say it with my dying breath.”
“ ’Course he never did it.” Sheba looked away, out over the garden.
I took the opportunity to break my cookie into little pieces as I pursued my point. “I was overhearing some people talk about it in the Windy Run Diner—”
Sheba had to butt in and comment about the customers there. “That Billy and Mervin and Don Joe. All’s they do is sit around and talk silliness.”
I winced. “Anyway, they were saying your Ben went to Hebrides that day.”
“He was in Hebrides, that’s right,” said George. “He always went on Thursdays.”
I waited. To do what? I silently urged. I was afraid to get too technical on them, as that might make them wonder about my reasons for coming. “They said in the diner he had to go to get his truck fixed.” George set down his lemonade glass as I dropped some cookie bits between the slats of the chair.
“Not exactly. His truck got something wrong with it while he was there in Hebrides. So he took it into the shop.”
I frowned. “But if he was in Hebrides, how could he have been in Cold Flat Junction and killed Rose?”
“They said at the trial there was time after he picked up the truck to get to the house here and after he killed Rose to go back to Hebrides. They claimed Ben had used the truck as an alibi, but the alibi didn’t work, as it turned out. Those police doctors can figure times pretty good. Anyway, they didn’t have to do much figuring out because Sheba saw Rose go out to the barn to feed the chickens and after an hour or more when she never came back, I went looking for her.” As if the vision were rising up before him, he closed his eyes against it. “Blood everywhere. Awful.” He dropped his head. “Poor Ben. What they say in ninety percent of the cases where a man or wife is murdered, it’s the spouse that’s guilty. That’s what started ’em in thinking about Ben.”
I could understand how it might have started them, but not how they could have ended with thinking it was Ben Queen. The Sheriff once told me that when you’ve got a homicide staring you in the face, you begin by going for the most obvious explanation, for nearly all homicides can be explained that way. You don’t do what mystery writers do: you don’t hit on the least obvious, or one that’s so all-fired complicated only a damned fool would try it. So here we were: the police hit on what struck me as the least obvious explanation. Ben was in Hebrides, but others were here. So why not Sheba Queen, who was known to have taken a powerful dislike to Rose? Why not Fern Queen, who was in a rage over being sent to an institution and who was kind of crazy anyway? As far as I was concerned. Fern was the obvious choice. She had a motive; Ben didn’t.
I guessed in the end you couldn’t blame the investigation if Ben Queen never denied he’d done it. But you’d have thought his own lawyer could have worked out that he was protecting someone. Then, again, maybe the lawyer did figure it out, only Ben Queen told him to keep his mouth shut. There’s only one kind of person you’d do that for and that’s someone you feel responsible for. It leaves out, of course, how good Ben Queen’s judgment was to let a homicidal killer run around free.
But I just couldn’t tackle the matter of Ben Queen’s judgment right now. Right now I wanted to know what he’d done in Hebrides. “You said your brother always went into Hebrides on Thursdays. Was it some kind of regular thing he had to do?”
George said, “Well, he always picked up the feed Thursdays. Always went to Smitty’s outside town.”
“Did he get it that day? I mean with the truck acting up. did he have time?”
George frowned, concentrating. “Yeah, I think he did.”
Sheba had to butt in again with her thoughts. “That day, that day will live in infamy.”
She could live in infamy with it as far as I was concerned. Why hadn’t they done something? If they’d believed their brother Ben’s innocence so much, why hadn’t they questioned the times? Maybe it was from hanging out with the Sheriff so much and listening to him talk about past investigations that made me suspicious of conclusions. You’ve got to be sure you have every scrap of available evidence before you can draw your conclusion. (I wish he’d reminded himself of this in my case.)
I asked, “Flow long after it happened did he come back?”
“Couple hours, I guess. Of course, police said he came back before. You recall, Sheba?”
“Three o’clock. I remember because I noted the time that sheriff came.”
“So she was killed like around noon?”
“Well, police put it at between eleven and three. But of course we knew closer than that. I saw her at noon when she went to the barn. George here went out to the barn around one-thirty.”
George nodded. “That was the time all right. I never saw such a scene in my life. It was terrible, terrible. I tried to keep you from goin’ out there, Sheba, but you would insist.”
“Well,” was all Sheba said as she rocked more intensely.
“He got the truck fixed okay, though?”
“Yeah. Carl’s one of the best mechanics around.”
Carl. “My mother’s in need of a good mechanic. I guess he’s not there any more. It’s been so long.”
“Sure is. Carl’s had that Sinclair station for fifty years and his dad before that. But you got Slaw’s over in Spirit Lake. That Wayne ... what’s his name?”
“Dwayne Hayden?”
“That’s the one. Nobody’s better’n him. Not in Hebrides, Cloverly, or any place in a hundred miles.”
“I’ll sure tell my mother about him. We’re looking for a good feed store, too. We’ve got a mess of chickens out back.” We did have four, actually.
“What you been feedin’ ’em?”
“Ah, corn. And stuff. See, I don’t actually do it myself.”
Sheba said, “Well, you should. It’s good for youngsters to get a start on finding out what the real world’s like.”
They thought this was the real world?