The Missing Chapter

Eleven

The twisting, two-lane blacktop took me southeast out of Mercer past small farms; all their houses and barns cried out for fresh paint and a handyman. Any dude from the city who feels the American farmer whines too much about his lot would be advised to take the route I did on that rainy April afternoon.

Following Barbara Adamson’s neatly drawn map, I turned right onto a stretch of gravel called Bailey’s Road and, after leaving a wake of dust for a quarter-mile, found the house, which was as Barbara had described it: two stories, faded yellow clapboard, with an almost-dead oak in a front yard that was more dirt than grass and a sway-backed barn off to the left. The mailbox, which had meeker hand-painted on it in faded red letters, perched atop a spindly post that didn’t figure to survive the next strong wind.

I steered my car into the ruts that passed for a driveway and pulled up behind a grimy pickup truck of indeterminate color with more dents than a Manhattan messenger’s bicycle. I climbed the three sagging steps to the front porch, which actually was just a stoop covered by a small roof. Finding no bell, I knocked on the screen door, which rattled with each rap of my knuckles.

After thirty seconds, the front door was pulled open. A chalk-white face with jet-black eyes and black hair pulled back against the sides of her head peered warily at me from behind the screen. “Yes?” she said in barely more than a whisper. Her skin was unhealthily pale.

“Are you Melva Meeker?” I asked, giving her what I hoped was an earnest smile.

“Oh, no, that’s my mother,” she replied with reverence. “What do you want?”

“My name is Goodwin, and I am investigating the death of Charles Childress.” I held up my P.I.’s license, realizing that I sounded like somebody reading a grade-B movie script. “I would like to talk to Mrs. Meeker.”

The woman, whom I guessed to be in her early to middle thirties, frowned, did an about-face, and silently dissolved into the murky interior of the house.

“It’s a man about Charles,” I heard her say. Another voice responded, but the rest of the conversation was muffled. Then footsteps grew louder on the creaking floor, and a second face materialized behind the screen. “I’m Melva Meeker,” the woman said tentatively. Her broad face, framed by white hair that was pulled tightly back like her daughter’s, had all the animation of her offspring’s. “Why are you here, sir?”

Give both of them points for being direct. “As I told your daughter, I am an investigator from New York. My name is Archie Goodwin.” I held up the license again. “There is suspicion that your nephew may have been murdered, and I’d like to ask you a few questions about him.”

She twitched her shoulders and sniffed. “You with some insurance company?”

“No, I work for the private detective Nero Wolfe, and he has been hired by a friend of your nephew.”

“Huh. That television woman he was supposed to marry?”

“No, but she — Debra Mitchell — also believes that Mr. Childress did not commit suicide.”

“Why?” she snorted, hands on hips.

“Both Ms. Mitchell and our client say that Mr. Childress had no reason whatever to kill himself. Do you know of any reason he would want to end his life?”

“Mr. — what is it? — Goodwin, Charles had been living in New York for years and years,” she said icily, rubbing her palms on the light blue apron she wore over a print dress that reminded me of ones my own aunt back in Chillicothe fancied. “He wasn’t one of us anymore. We almost never saw him, except when he came back to Mercer to be with his poor mother during her last days.” She looked down and shook her head. “I have no idea what his life was like in that place or who his friends were. I mean no disrespect, sir, but why someone would want to live there, I have no idea. You couldn’t pay me enough to even make a visit.”

It was clear that I was not about to be invited into the Meeker domicile. “Was there anybody here who had any reason to want him dead?” I asked through the screen.

“That’s a fool question, a fool question,” she snapped, her face still expressionless. “Of course not. As I just got done telling you, if you were bothering to listen, Charles hadn’t lived in these parts for years. If someone did kill him, and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to, the answer must be in your New York, where people murder each other every day for no good reason and don’t give a second thought about it. Now I’ve got work to do,” she huffed, taking a step back. The door was shut firmly. So much for Mercer’s vaunted Hoosier hospitality.

As I went to the car, I looked over my shoulder. The white face of the younger woman peered out behind lace curtains at a first-floor window. It disappeared when I smiled and nodded my good-bye. I drove back along the gravel road after consulting the map again. Charles Childress’s other aunt, who, I had learned from Barbara, also was a widow, lived another mile farther out of town. Her name was Louise Wingfield, and like Melva Meeker, she was a sister of Childress’s mother.

The Wingfield farm was in far better shape than the Meekers’. The two-story brick-and-white-frame house, which hunkered on a knoll several feet above the main road, boasted a front porch that ran the full width of the house. The yard was green and neat, with tulips and other flowers I couldn’t identify lining the base of the porch and two shade trees flaunting their new leaves. And the barn, unlike most of its neighbors, wore paint that looked like it would last through several more Midwestern winters.

I climbed the steps and was eight feet from the front door when it swung open and a tall, elegant-looking, gray-haired woman in a white, open-collared man’s shirt, blue jeans, and brown cowboy boots tilted her head at me. She was not smiling.

“Mr. Goodwin — stop right there.” The voice made it clear that there was no room for discussion. Her index finger was aimed at my navel. “Melva just called. She told me you had been there — and the reason why you were there. Hear me now — I have nothing, nothing at all, to say to you. If you do not leave my property immediately, I will call the sheriff, who is a personal friend, and has been for more than twenty years.”

“Mrs. Wingfield, I—”

“Enough! I told you to git, and I mean it.” With that, another Indiana door was slammed on me. What would the Mercer Chamber of Commerce say about this treatment of a visitor?

I took the motel clerk’s advice and was glad that I did. The fare at Bill’s Old-Fashioned Steak House — or at least the prime rib I ordered for dinner — was more than tolerable, it was first-rate, and at prices that New Yorkers haven’t seen for at least twenty years. While I feasted in a booth in one corner of the dimly lit, half-filled dining room, I read Gina Marks’s two-year-old feature story on Charles Childress and also the Mercury’s obituary on him. Barbara Adamson had photocopied both for me before I left the newspaper offices. Neither piece told me anything important that I hadn’t already known, although the Marks feature quoted Childress as saying that “I have never — not for one minute — lost sight of my roots in Mercer. The experiences I had growing up in this area affect and color every thought that I have, every word that I write. Gilmartin County imbued me with the values I continue to live by, even though my home today is as far removed from these green hills and quiet roads as one could conceive.”

I don’t doubt that Gina Marks set down the words just as Childress said them. Whether she did it with a straight face is another matter.

I got back to The Travelers’ Haven a few minutes before nine and peeled off my suitcoat and necktie. What had I accomplished today? I asked the face that stared back at me in the bathroom mirror. Damn near nothing, that’s what. I’d flown across parts of five states and driven close to a hundred miles through the Indiana countryside for the privilege of having two widows tell me to mind my own business and slam doors in my face. The local newspaper editor, although cordial and engaging, obviously thought I was on a fool’s errand, and his star reporter pegged me as a scandalmonger from Gomorrah on the Hudson.

I sat on the side of the bed, rereading both the feature story on Childress and the obituary, trying to find something — anything — that would justify this trip. But I didn’t, and I threw down the photocopies in disgust, wishing I had a scotch and soda.

What I got instead was a soft tapping at the door. I was on my feet in an instant, turning off the nightstand lamp, the only light on in the room, then moving to the door in three noiseless strides. I had no gun — the airlines frown on passengers who carry pieces — so I braced the door with one foot as I eased it open a few inches.

Her colorless face was essentially the same as it had been when I saw it through the screen door in the afternoon — wide-eyed and almost totally without expression. However, I detected something that I hadn’t seen or hadn’t noticed before — fear.

“Mr. Goodwin?” she said in the same whisper I had heard a few hours earlier.

“Hello again. You have the advantage of me,” I responded, grinning and drawing the door back a few inches. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours, except that you are a Meeker, correct?”

She nodded, swallowing and making a pathetic attempt at smiling. “Yes — I’m Belinda, Belinda Meeker. Can I come in?” Her voice had a faint, almost undetectable stammer.

Standing in the shadowy glow of the overhead light outside my door and wearing a brown zippered jacket and corduroy slacks, Belinda Meeker appeared as guileless as the Holstein calf I had seen following its mother in a field along the road that afternoon. But I have a policy against letting calves or any other beings into the room where I happen to be residing at the moment unless I know them well — real well. “I’ll come outside,” I countered, closing the door behind me. “What brings you here, Belinda?”

She took a deep, shuddery breath. “Ma doesn’t know I came; I told her I had to get some stuff at the drugstore, which is mainly true, see?” She held up a bag from Mason’s All-Purpose Pharmacy. “There’s only the two motels in Mercer, and I figured you’d be staying here. It’s the best one by a long shot. Tall Tom — he’s the one who works in the office, we went to high school together — told me which room you was in. Are you angry?”

“Depends,” I told her, eyeing a redwood bench along the wall a few doors to my right. “Let’s sit over there.”

The evening was mild, with a clear sky and a breeze that smelled of blossoms I couldn’t name. It was more like late May than April, at least by New York standards. But then, this was farther south, not many miles from the Ohio River. Belinda and I sat side by side a foot apart on the bench watching cars and an occasional truck whirr by on the old highway. I knew she was having trouble getting words out, so I waited. After five silent minutes, however, I revised my tactics. “Is there anything you want to tell me?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” she answered softly. She didn’t take her eyes off the road. “Uh-huh, there is. You won’t say anything to Ma about my coming to see you, will you? I already made Tall Tom promise not to say anything, and he won’t, I know that for sure. He’s okay.” The stammer got a little worse when she became anxious.

“No, I won’t utter a word to her.”

Belinda slouched down on the bench, jammed her hands into the pockets of the brown jacket, and made a sucking noise with her lips. Then she was mute again for another two or three minutes. It was all I could do to keep from shaking her by the shoulders until her teeth rattled.

A loud sigh told me the silence was about to end. “I heard what you told Ma this afternoon, so I know why you’ve come.” Her whisper had me straining to hear her. “I think I probably know who it was.”

“Who what was?”

“The one who killed Charles.”