Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 835 & 836, March/April 2011

Lie Like a Rug by Margaret Maron

Margaret Maron is the winner of several major American mystery awards: the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity. She is the author of twenty-five novels and the New York Times has said: “Every Margaret Maron is a celebration of something remarkable.” The sixteenth entry in her Judge Deborah Knott series, Christmas Mourning (11/10) is no exception. Readers who crave more of the author’s short fiction should check out her podcast of her story “Virgo in Sapphires” (www.themysteryplace.com/eqmm).

One of the last to see Felicia Hernandez Parker before she disappeared from her home near Raleigh was a woman who came by to deliver a bushel of tomatoes that Mack Parker had bought at her roadside vegetable stand on his way to work that morning. She was a stranger to both Parkers and when the case came to trial, her testimony was dispassionate and objective.

“I saw her black eye when she came out to the truck to get the tomatoes. She asked me how to can them. She’d never canned anything before, but her husband wanted tomato vegetable soup like his mother makes. I suggested that she call her mother-in-law and ask her, but she said that her husband wouldn’t have anything to do with his family. They didn’t approve of the marriage and he wasn’t one to take criticism.”

“Objection!” said the defense attorney. “Hearsay.”

“Sustained,” said the judge.

“Isn’t it true that you dated Felicia Hernandez first?” asked the defense attorney on cross-examination. “And that you resented her for dumping you for your brother?”

“Not a bit,” said Randy Parker. “Yeah, Felicia and me, we went out a couple of times, but I wasn’t gonna marry a Mexican, no matter how hot she was.”

“The rest of your family had cut him off, yet you continued to visit him at his house?”

“Me and Mack’ve always been tight, so yeah.”

“Even after he punched you in the nose for trying to kiss his wife earlier that week?”

“He didn’t mean to hurt me. Mack’s always had a hot temper, and Felicia knew how to keep him on a boil.”

“You’re saying she came on to you?”

“Yeah.”

“So why did she tell her husband that you initiated that kiss?”

“Guess she didn’t want another tail-whupping.”

“Instead, you got a broken nose. Did you resent her for that?”

“The way my nose hurt? Damn straight.”

“What happened to her, Mr. Parker?”

“How should I know?”

“About six months before she disappeared, she came in bleeding heavily,” the emergency room nurse testified. “She had a bruise as big as a dinner plate on her abdomen. We couldn’t save the fetus.”

“Did she say what caused the bruise?”

“No, sir. We asked if her husband had hit her there, but she said no. She said she had fallen. Most falls don’t leave a round bruise. Fists do.”

“Objection!” said the defense attorney. “Conclusion.”

“Which this witness is qualified to make,” the prosecutor argued.

“Overruled,” the judge agreed.

“Yeah,” said a stockman who worked for Mack Parker at a hardware chain store in Raleigh. “He’s got a short fuse, and he’d go off like a rocket if Felicia ever answered him back. She was a real lady, but Mack said he wouldn’t have married her except that he wasn’t going to let his family tell him what to do.”

“Did he ever speak of divorce?” asked the prosecutor.

“Not really. He said it would be admitting that he’d made a mistake.”

“Did he say anything about her miscarriage last year?”

“Just that her crying got on his nerves.”

“We were out on our side porch,” said the next-door neighbor. “The lights were on over there and we saw him come storming past the kitchen window. We heard glass breaking and them yelling and then we heard him smack her and—”

“Objection, Your Honor.”

“Sustained.”

“Okay,” said the neighbor. “We heard what sounded like a smack and then we heard what sounded like her crying. That’s when I called nine-one-one.”

“It looked like a slaughterhouse,” said the patrol officer who had responded that night. “Her lip was split, there were superficial cuts on her arms and legs, and she was bleeding like a stuck pig. Broken glass. Tomatoes all over the floor and wall. I thought at first it was blood, too. She wouldn’t let us arrest him, though. She said she’d accidentally knocked over the jars, then slipped on the mess and cut herself and that’s why they were upset and yelling at each other.”

“And you believed her?”

“No, sir, but she wasn’t the one who called in the complaint, so I couldn’t arrest him.”

“No, it’s not that we thought he’d done away with her when he first reported her missing,” said the sheriff’s detective, “but we always look closely at the spouse in cases like these. We found her blood in the kitchen and some more on a tank top and shorts in the laundry hamper, but that could be explained by the broken glass jars the night before. It did not explain how her blood got in the trunk of his car.”

“Was anything missing from the house?” asked the prosecutor.

“Yessir. A six-by-eight rug in the entryway.”

“How big was Felicia Parker, Detective?”

“Everyone describes her as about five-three and small-boned.”

“Could she have been rolled up in that rug?”

“Objection!” cried the defense attorney.

The defense attorney was sympathetic. “Mr. Parker, you admit that you were occasionally violent with your wife, yet you insisted on testifying. Why?”

“Because I didn’t kill her. She was fine when I went to bed. I told her she had to clean up that mess in the kitchen before she could come to bed herself, but she didn’t. She must’ve just walked out of the house.”

“Without taking any of her clothes?”

“She could’ve taken some. Who looks at his wife’s clothes? And she did take that rug and my money.”

“Ah, yes. Your money,” the prosecutor said on cross-examination. “Almost two thousand in cash that no one ever heard you mention. She just walks away with a rug over her small shoulder. No clothes, no toothbrush, no purse, just blood in your car trunk. Where’d you dump her body, Mr. Parker?”

“Don’t worry,” said the defense attorney. “A jury doesn’t like to convict without a body. That’s why the D.A. didn’t ask for the death penalty.”

“Mr. Foreman,” said the judge. “Have you reached a verdict?”

“We have, Your Honor. On the charge of murder in the second-degree, we find the defendant guilty.”

Three years later: Central Prison

“I’m sorry, Mack,” said Parker’s attorney. “The appeals court says there was no error in your trial. Keep on keeping your nose clean and you could get paroled in ten years.”

Six years later: New Mexico

The stockman who had once worked for Parker was now a manager in a different hardware chain. He paused in the doorway to watch his small son push a toy truck around the Zapotec rug, a family heirloom that she had refused to leave behind even though shipping it here to his hometown had cost almost as much as her bus ticket.

The anonymous bus trip had been his idea. Touching her finger to her wounds and then dabbing blood on the mat of Mack’s car trunk had been hers.

“Mama? Daddy’s home!” their son called, but she was already coming down the hall with their baby daughter on one slender hip, a cold beer for him in her free hand, and a loving smile on her beautiful soft lips.

Copyright © 2011 by Margaret Maron