A Life for a Life - Lynda McDaniel (whitelam books TXT) 📗
- Author: Lynda McDaniel
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“We’d better get Abit and go to dinner, Alex.” As we went downstairs, Jake ran ahead. Abit managed to avoid his greeting, trying to keep his new togs clean.
“Did Mildred say it was okay?” I asked. He rolled his eyes, letting me know he wouldn’t be standing there in his khakis with wet hair, neatly combed, if she hadn’t. He piled in the back with Jake, and I sat behind the wheel.
“Hey, why do you get to drive the Merc, Della?”
“Handsome here needed a drink after our talk with Lonnie.”
“What kind?”
“Gin and tonic,” Alex told him. “With lime.”
“Sounds good.”
“Well, when you’re twenty-one, I’ll make you one,” Alex said, then quickly added, “But don’t tell your folks I said that.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Abit said, not sounding at all like the boy I’d met last year.
This time there were only three black and whites in the driveway. And I wasn’t getting up from a nap. Honestly, even if I had been, I wouldn’t’ve had any trouble believing my eyes, not after the spring we’d had.
I wondered why Mama asked me after dinner to help her with the garden out back. She just wanted me well away from my chair in the front of the store. Something big was happening, and while I was curious, for oncet I was happy not being in the middle of it all.
I flinched when the bell over the front door jangled. The customer was smiling, ready to say hello, until I held up the hubcap and asked, “Look familiar?”
“Yes. It looks like a hubcap.” So smug, I wanted to slap her.
“Kitt, you drive a BMW, and not many folks around here do. This hubcap was found nearby, right after the fire.”
“I’m not the only person driving through here with a car like that. And I take good care of my car. I don’t have any missing hubcaps.”
“But I saw your car with a missing hubcap when you were out at your mother’s place in Beaverdam. I was riding on the rolling store when we spotted it. And you were there with your mother.”
Her face froze. But just for a second. She was that good. “What’s going on? I thought you wanted to have another one of our little wine and cheese parties.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “Look I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing at. I thought you were kinda cool, but I guess I misjudged you.”
“No, I misjudged you. I never imagined you could be behind at least two of those so-called oatmeal factories in Atlanta and taking—hell, stealing—money from men like Roberto Sanchez. Now does that sound familiar? You know, Lucy’s father? Just like you misjudged that you could get away with murdering Lucy. Why did she have to die? Because she recognized you at the Green Treatise gatherings, and she knew what you’d done to her father? Was she going to tell Brower about your creative financing? You may not have directly killed her father, and who knows how many others, with your lousy oatmeal, but you stole their government checks and any remnants of their pride. And somehow you figured out how to keep drawing on their accounts. But not anymore—sister.”
Kitt glared at me. I stood my ground. “You’ve cheated and killed for the money that paid for that stupid gallery full of crap art nobody cares about. Just because someone has an urge to paint or sculpt doesn’t mean it will look any better than that mush you fed those poor sods.”
“They were a lot safer in my houses than on the streets.”
“Safer from what? They were malnourished, corralled liked chattel, and you were draining them dry. That’s not safe.”
“I gave them a roof over their heads and cooked for them,” Kitt said.
“I can’t quite see you slaving over a hot stove, stirring Quaker oats into a gluey glob, though I bet you looked cute in your apron.”
“You’re crazy. So full of shit. I’m getting out of here.” When she turned to leave, Brower and Lonnie stepped out of the backroom.
“Stay right there, Ms. Scanlon or Scott or Scoggins, whoever you are. We’ve got more questions for you,” Brower said, finally sounding like a sheriff. She picked up a jar of Cleva’s bread-and-butter pickles and threw it at him, hitting him just above his right eye. She threw another one at Lonnie, but missed, then jerked open the door and sent the jingle bells flying. Outside, she faced two SBI officers, their guns drawn, without a pickle jar in sight.
We were all sitting round the woodstove inside the store—me and Cleva, Alex and Della. I was just taking a break from some stocking, and Alex was drinking coffee, explaining how he’d found out all that stuff on Kitt.
“That evening at the Inn at Jonas Mountain, she said something that gave her away. She told me, and I don’t think she realized her slip, that something I’d said reminded her of all the old people she worked with in Atlanta. That’s when everything just clicked for me. I knew she’d done it, but we had to prove it. I started my search with Kitt Scanlon. Nothing except for a North Dakota business license dated last year,” Alex told us, rocking in his chair as though he were born to it. “So then I decided to play with the idea that she might be related to Blanche Scoggins, after you’d discovered their connection, Abit. Nothing for Kitt Scoggins, but hey, Kitt’s usually a nickname.”
“Like Kit Carson was really Christopher Houston Carson,” Della said. A frown from Alex had her adding real quick-like, “Sorry, Sherlock, proceed.”
“So I tried Kathleen Scoggins, and I found some folks in Montana and Tennessee who didn’t match our Kitt. But then Katherine Scoggins, and bingo! The proud bouncing baby of Blanche and Dick Scoggins in Asheville, N.C., December 29, 1956.”
“I guess that’s why I saw them hugging,” I said.
“Yeah, but it gets even more interesting,” Alex said. “When I searched further on Katherine Scoggins, I found a reference to a Katherine Scott in Atlanta, Georgia—which is where Kitt Scanlon told me that night at the inn that she’d moved from, not Raleigh. Not sure why that came up in my search, but that’s LexisNexis for you. Sometimes I think it has artificial intelligence. Anyway, she was featured in an article about working with the homeless. Doing good works to help them manage their meager finances, mostly through Social Security. The woman in the picture was a dead ringer for Scanlon/Scoggins/Scott—and she was posing with a woebegone man named Roberto Sanchez.”
“That’s Lucy’s last name. Were they related?” I asked.
“Lucy’s father. Who, as we now know, Kitt Scoggins/Scanlon/Scott stole from and abused, overtly and covertly, causing his death. I doubt they can pin his murder on her, but there are enough other charges to keep her locked away for years.”
He went on to explain that she’d set up what Lucy’s sister had called oatmeal factories, houses offering down-and-out folks a bed and hot meal—mostly oatmeal. Ugh! I get the shivers just thinking about that.
According to Alex, Kitt was stealing from old folks while living in Atlanta, and later from up here. She used the gallery and her mama’s laundry to run the money through. She kept taking trips back to Atlanta, so she could connect with what she called “her artists,” but Alex said she was connecting with the two con artists—guys running her operation down there. They’d been arrested in Georgia.
Nobody knows exactly how she got Lucy out in the woods. Kitt wasn’t talking. She may have just switched the poisoned syringe in her case—or she might have taken a walk with her, pretending to want to talk things out but really getting her far away from help. And the detectives found enough evidence in the back of her art store to nail her, including a wax kit for making key impressions.
That was when Della said something about how Kitt was using a belt and suspenders. I finally figured out she meant that Kitt faked the suicide note and, just in case that didn’t work, framed the guy Della called Tattoo Man. When Della’s investigation heated up and Tattoo Man didn’t take the fall, Kitt faked a romance with Gregg to help her set him up. While they were dating, she made a wax copy of his office key so she could get inside his office and plant those traced notes. Whew! That was some conniving. And we figured she’d learned her forging skills while faking signatures on all them government checks. She was really good at being bad.
“Thing is,” Alex said, “she says she hated paying taxes to the government, but that’s exactly how she got so much money out of those poor sods—thanks to their government checks. And even though I can’t prove it, I believe her association with the Green Treatise was a lot more involved than that peace-making crap she told you, Della.”
“Wonder what they think of all this?” Della asked. “I bet they’ve disowned her. Or maybe they admire her ripping off the gov’ment. And poor ol’ Gregg. She just used him to deflect suspicion from her and frame him—a gov’ment man.” She said it like them. I wanted to laugh, but it weren’t the time or place.
Earlier, we’d all seen Brower walking round with a black eye. He’d had to get stitches where those pickles of Cleva’s hit him. I swear Cleva was getting a kick out of that, nice as she was. Then I asked what happened to that tattletale Cassie.
“She’s at work—with Gregg,” Della said, while Alex poured each of us a fresh cup of coffee. Della looked up at him and added, “I told you he was a nice guy—he didn’t even fire her. I wished I’d thought to ask her who she called when the computer wouldn’t reboot. Turns out it was none other than Kitt. She’d told Cassie she was a computer whizz and to call her if she ever had any trouble. While Gregg was out of town, Kitt threw the circuit breaker at Gregg’s office and went home to wait for the call. Damn, that woman is a setup artist. It just didn’t pay off the way she wanted.”
“So will Blanche Scoggins go to the slammer, too?” Cleva asked, opening some of her now-famous pickles. No one else seemed to want any. I’d eat just about anything, but even I didn’t think pickles and coffee were a good combination. Cleva munched away, kinda nervous-like as she listened to all these bad things Kitt did.
“We’re not sure,” Della said. “She really didn’t know what Kitt was up to, though she freely confessed to helping her hide her
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