Free Murder in the Hearse Degree by Tim Cockey Page A

you a few questions about Sophie,” I said. “You see, she—”
    “Come in, come in, come in.”
    She swung the door wide open and ushered us in. She made a big fuss about inviting us into the parlor. That’s what Stella Gibbons called it. She popped her p when she said it. “The p arlor.” I might have called it a walk-in closet. It turned out to be a stuffy wood-paneled room that absolutely slaughtered what little natural light came in through the small windows. On one wall was a pair of carved wooden ducks frozen in flight. The wall opposite held wooden cutouts of a crab, a lighthouse and a ship’s anchor. The couch that Pete and I took looked like it had a body stuffed into it. It was all about springs. Pete sat first and when I followed, Pete gently elevated.
    Stella Gibbons turned out to be all about springs, too. At the slightest provocation she was up on her feet and fetching something for Pete and me to take a look at. A Chesapeake Bay retriever had nothing on this woman. There was a photograph we simply had to see, of her late husband, Randall, and herself, posing together with a twenty-pound bluefish that the two had hauled in during a fishing excursion in the bay. The photo must have been at least thirty years old as best I could tell. Stella Gibbons claimed to have fetched it so that we could see her late husband (“May he rest in his peas,” she cackled), but it was my guess she was showing it to us more for the leggy charm that her younger self had been able to pull off. Randall Gibbons was wearing a large floppy hat that totally obscured his face. The woman fetched us cookies and lemonade. She fetched a book of photographs by A. Aubrey Bodine, turning to a dog-eared page that included a black-and-white picture of three naked boys diving into a river from a wooden bridge. Stella placed her finger directly on the skinny butt of one of the boys. “Jeremy Lynch. First boy I ever kissed. And not the last!” We got another sample of her laughter with that one.
    “You caught me on pinochle day,” Stella announced, flouncing down on the couch between Pete and me. We rose and fell like a calliope. “On Friday the witches all get together for pinochle and mint juleps.” She winked at Pete. “You ought to catch me after pinochle.”
    We finally crowbarred the conversation around to the subject of Sophie.
    “You rented a room to Miss Potts for several months this summer, isn’t that right?” Pete asked.
    “That’s right. Bath down the hall. Kitchen privileges. Why? What’s wrong? That little girl rob a bank?”
    “That little girl is dead,” I said.
    Stella’s face froze. “What do you mean, dead?”
    “Miss Potts was pulled from the Severn day before yesterday,” Pete said. He shot me a look before continuing. “It appears that she jumped off the Naval Academy Bridge. The police aren’t sure when. It might have been as long as a week ago.”
    “That little scamp? I just can’t believe it. Why in heaven’s name would she want to do something like that?”
    “That’s exactly what we’re trying to figure out,” I said.
    Stella shook her head slowly. “Isn’t that the silliest thing in the world?”
    “So the police haven’t been by to ask you anything about Sophie?” I asked.
    “The police? Not at all.”
    Pete asked, “What can you tell us about her?”
    “About Sophie? Well, sweet little girl. Wouldn’t know how to have fun if you wrote it on her forehead.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “Just that. Cute little thing once you fixed her up, but as homely as a rug when she first got here. I’d tell her, get out there and have some fun while you’re young. Get yourself a boyfriend. Not that it was any of my business, of course. But the girl would much rather hole up in her room and read her damn romance books. I’d tease her. I’d say, ‘Sophie, while you were out Mr. Fabio himself was here to see you. He was right here in the parlor, honey, wearing that tattered