The Almost Sisters(33)

Frank said, “I’m her lawyer. You can talk to me.”

“That dog won’t hunt,” Cody said. “I been questioning you. You don’t know jack-all.”

“I’ll have to do. I can’t let you talk to my client. You were at the Fish Fry, so you know very well Miss Birchie is not competent.”

“Bullpucky. Seems to me like Miss Birchie only spoke some true words at the Fry. If what she’d said was craziness, your wife wouldn’t be living at her mama’s right now, would she?” Cody said, and Frank’s lips went white.

Damn, but that was a low blow in a fresh wound. Why hadn’t God made jackass genes recessive?

“Birchie has Lewy bodies.” I stepped in, trying to sound calmer than I felt. “It’s a form of dementia, and you can confirm the diagnosis with her doctor. You absolutely may not question her.” I shot Martina Mack a look of pure venom. I’d seen Law & Order, too, if only once or twice. It wasn’t really my kind of thing. “You talk to Frank and no one else, and you keep a civil tongue in your head while you’re doing it.” It was a line straight out of Birchie’s lexicon.

Now one of our two police cars was driving slowly up from the square. It looked like the chief, Willard Dalton, was behind the wheel. He was a reasonable guy, older and calmer, worth about fifteen Codys. I willed him to drive faster.

Cody glared back and forth between us. “Get me Wattie, then. She hasn’t gone demented, all sudden and convenient, has she?”

“Miss Wattie, you mean. Who raised you?” I was all Birchville in this moment, speaking for my grandmother and doing it well enough to shame him. He was in our own yard. Hell, he was in our own town. He should have called Wattie “Miss,” given his age and hers, especially in front of his own grandma, and he knew it. “I see your boss coming, and he will talk to Frank, and me, and anybody else who might need talking to. You stand out here in the yard like the dog you are. Let human beings pick what happens next.”

I turned smart on my heel and walked off toward the house.

“Wait here,” Frank ordered Cody, and followed me up onto the porch. He leaned in, talking soft. “Don’t you ask Birchie any questions. She might tell you.”

“Tell me? Tell me what?” I said.

“Anything. You need to be careful what you know. Don’t ask, and do not let her explain.”

I was already shaking my head. “Frank, I have to—”

He interrupted me, quiet but urgent. “Hear me on this. These are old, old ladies, and Birchie is sick. I’m not going to let anybody question her. Not if I can help it. But for sure someone is going to question you. If you know the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, you could do a lot more harm than good. Let me protect y’all.”

I held my hands up in surrender, though it would not be easy. As I went inside, I tried hard not to even think of questions to not ask, and failed. Who was in the trunk? It must be someone who belonged to Birchie in some way. It was her house, after all. Exactly how long had it been up there? I’d only had one look at the bones, but they were old. Old enough to unhinge entirely from one another. Also, the trunk had been buried deep in the back room. When I was a girl, that back room had already been too packed to allow me entrance. Had the trunk been present, moldering and foul, while I played dress-up? It could have been there longer than I’d been alive, the heaps of history growing up organically around it, burying it deeper every year.

I hoped it had been. I hoped it had been there for a century or more, a bad legacy passed down to Birchie from someone long dead. My storyteller’s brain was hunting narrative. Ellis Birch was by all accounts an overprotective father, and also overproud. Perhaps these were the bones of Birchie’s missing suitor, the one who was supposedly run off to the state line. Maybe they were older still, the remains of a Yankee soldier, killed during the throes of Reconstruction. They could have traveled in this trunk with Ethan Birch, the real reason he fled Charleston and founded Birchville. If this was only a box of bad history, then it would all be over soon. Remains that old required anthropologists, not cops.

All I had to do was wait. Let Frank get the story. He would tell me, and tell the police, too, in the best frame possible. The bones were something Birchie knew of, that was clear, but I could not believe for even a breath that they were a thing that Birchie did.

The kids were still in the kitchen. I could hear the clatter of dishes and the buzz of young voices. Birchie and Wattie were alone in the living room. They sat primly side by side on one of the Victorian love seats.

“Are you okay?” I asked Birchie, going right to her and kneeling.

“I suppose. Such a mess!” she said. “I’m so sorry. I never thought—”

“Hush, now.” I kissed her. “Don’t apologize. Don’t talk about it at all. Frank says not to even talk to me, okay?”

She nodded, but I looked into her bright blue eyes until I was sure that she was there and hearing me. I turned to Wattie, taking her hand in mine. I could feel her own live bones, intricate and frail, and they seemed more fragile than her weathered skin.

“You and me, we have to get on the same page now,” I told her.

“I’ve been on your page since the day that you were born, sugar,” Wattie said, but then she added tartly, “Though all this week I wondered if you might be illiterate. Don’t worry. I’m not going to let her say a word.”