“Didn’t waste any time, either. She came home that very day and went after him with a pistol. The sight of the gun scared him so bad, he backed up his wheelchair – backed it right down the grand staircase. But he didn’t die right away. He was lying there all broken up and screaming in agony. Augusta decided it would be a damn shame to put him out of his misery. So she stayed with him until he died. It took the better part of two days.”

“Are you telling me she didn’t call a doctor?”

“No, she didn’t. But she had the presence of mind to call a lawyer. That was my father. That’s how I happened to be in the room the night she finished the old man off. I was five years old.”

“Your father brought you into a thing like that?”

“He had no idea what she wanted him for, and it was late at night. He couldn’t leave me at home. The housekeeper was gone, and I didn’t have a mother. So I was there when Augusta hurried up Jason’s demise. Half the bones in the old man’s body were broken. My father called for an ambulance the minute we got there. I suppose Augusta was afraid her father might pull through. So she leans down and tells Jason she’s gonna bury him in the family plot where he can have a good view of the house he loves so much. The old man smiles. And then she yells, ‘So you can watch it fall down! I’m gonna let it rot!’ Well, the old man turned red, and then he turned blue and died.”

“But you said she confessed. How could the coroner’s jury bring in a verdict of accidental death?”

“It was a bit of a stretch, but their reasoning was pretty sound. They figured if she was gonna lie about him backing his wheelchair down those stairs, then she would have lied about her original plan to kill him with the gun. So they decided she was truthful about that fall. And it was sort of an accident, if you look at it with a legal squint.”

“But she let him lie there in agony for two days.”

“Now that did trouble the jury. So my father solved that problem for them. He swore under oath that Jason Trebec, late in life, had converted to Christian Science and didn’t want a doctor – so Jason and Augusta had spent those two days praying together.”

“And the coroner’s jury bought that?”

“Don’t you see? They wanted to believe it. They were smiling the whole time Dad spun that lie. But then, when he finished his testimony, Augusta burst out laughing. Well, Dad stepped down from the stand, cool as you please, and he slapped her face. He told the jury she was hysterical with grief. And then he strong-armed her right out the door before she could do any more damage.”

“Your father was in love with her, wasn’t he?”

“And fortunately, so was her doctor. He backed up my father’s story on the witness stand. So, you see, she could have killed Babe Laurie. But I don’t ever want to know that for a fact, so I never asked.”

“She had no motive to kill him.”

He liked Charles’s loyalty, and he was satisfied in the man’s character. Augusta’s friendship spoke well of him, considering that he had no feathers or fur.

“Augusta presides over every matter of life and death north of Upland Bayou,” said Jessop. “I don’t think much has got by her since Cass was murdered. She took that killing very hard. She blocked off Finger Bayou and the road to the mansion, locked up her land just like you or me would lock up a house. So there was Babe on that road to Cass’s place, lying in wait for Kathy. And I know that’s what he was doing. I found three of his cigarette butts near the spot where he died.”

“But how would Augusta know that? You would have to assume that she knew all the events leading up to the death. That’s really reaching, isn’t it, Sheriff?”

“If she didn’t do it, I’d bet good money she knows who did. Don’t you understand it yet? Augusta can see everything from her attic window and she spends a lot of time with that spyglass. You think she’s only watching her birds? We’re all part of Augusta’s aviary.”

CHAPTER 23

Jimmy Simms sat tailor fashion on an old plaid bedspread, hunched over his book, and resplendent in his new-old clothes. His feet were encased in Ira’s castoff socks.

The wooden crate beside Jimmy’s cot held the rest of Darlene Wooley’s charity. T-shirts, jeans, a sweatshirt and a denim jacket were neatly stacked in laundry-faded stripes of red and blue. Jimmy was a rich man now. Beside his cot were shoes that fit his feet perfectly.

The rough surface of the crate held one can of soda, a pack of doughnuts, and a lamp with no shade. The bare light bulb was warm as a hand on the back of his neck, and this illusion of human contact counted as an additional creature comfort.

His small room had once been a storage area for books, and now it was home. Disowned and unhoused at seventeen, he had taken to making his bed alongside the sleeping drunks on the streets of Owltown. One chill night, as winter was coming on, the sheriff had picked him up off the sidewalk and dropped him into this safe harbor at the back of the library. For the past thirteen years he had been content in this place. Augusta Trebec had given him the first odd jobs, and Tom Jessop had scared up more work. Between the all-seeing eye of Miss Augusta’s attic window and the gruff attentions of the sheriff, Jimmy had lived with the delusion of aloof but constant parents.

Now, beyond the door, the telephone was ringing in the main room of the library. He ignored it, taking the call for a wrong number. It was always a wrong number in the evening hours when the library was closed.

When he was still a teenage boy, he had run into the main room each time it rang, believing his mother was calling.

But she never called.

When he missed her terribly, he would show up on the front steps of the house, and she would bring him inside quickly, lest the neighbors should see him and tell his father. Then his mother would give him hot soup and a warm meal – mother food. And she would wash his clothes just like a mother, and give him more clothes, miles too big, to take away with him. She would pack extra food in a paper bag, the way she had once packed his lunch for school. But once he was gone, she forgot him again. She never called. So he had learned not to answer the library phone in the night.

His eyes went back to the page of his book. But the ringing was persistent, and there seemed no way to end it but to take the phone off the hook. The main room of the library was not heated, and so he pulled on Ira’s denim jacket as he left his bed and walked out to the front desk.

Wind came through the old window frames in a gusty sigh, and he could feel the room’s cold breath on his face and neck. The century-old building creaked with elderly joints of wood and plaster, and he could hear mice creeping in the walls.

Jimmy stood by the ringing telephone, keeping one eye on the dark rows of bookshelves. The headlights of a passing car made the globe by the window cast a moving shadow the size of a child. He looked away quickly and picked up the receiver of the ringing telephone. Before he could lay it down to break the connection, a woman’s voice said, “Jimmy?” He stared at the receiver and the voice called out again, “Boy, are you there?”

He held the phone close to his ear now, caressing it. “Mom?”

“No, Jimmy, it’s Augusta Trebec.”

Of course.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I got a small job for you. It has to be done tonight. Shouldn’t take more than an hour. I’ll pay you ten dollars for your time. Does that sound about right?”

“Yes, ma’am, ten dollars sounds just fine.” And he could use the money.

Jimmy was staring at the library window facing Dayborn Avenue. The light of the streetlamp was haloed with misty fog. Not a night to go walking, especially if he wanted to skirt the cemetery, and he did. The new shoes would be ruined by the alternate route over rain-soaked ground, and he had thrown his father’s old pair away.