“Everyone’s cell phones are still out,” she said. “Last night’s storm took out power all over town and the cell towers aren’t back up yet. But we have some land lines at the station that were still working when I left. Are these local calls?”
“Not sure.” I pulled out my notebook and glanced at the numbers Stanley and Annabel had given me. “Both toll-free numbers actually.”
“That’s fine, then.”
She led the way up the steps. The station’s front door was propped open. Just inside, at the desk, was a trim, middle-aged black woman whose tan uniform still looked surprisingly well-pressed in spite of the heat and humidity. She was fanning herself with an old-fashioned cardboard church fan.
“You doing okay?” the chief asked.
“Hanging in there.” She handed the chief a small stack of pink WHILE YOU WERE OUT slips.
“Thanks,” Heedles said, patting the woman on the shoulder. Then she led the way back to her office and pointed to the phone on her desk.
“I don’t want to tie up your line,” I said. “I want to make those calls, but neither is urgent.”
“It’ll give me a chance to triage these,” she said, waving the message slips as she sat down in her battered leather desk chair.
And a chance to eavesdrop on my conversations, I thought, as I sat down in one of her guest chairs and reached for the phone. But it wasn’t as if either call was private.
The generator installation company was, understandably, swamped with both requests for new generators and service calls on existing ones, but promised to come out as soon as they could. Stanley’s security expert promised to be out the next day, but wasn’t sure how much he could get done if Miss Annabel didn’t have power.
The chief looked up from her stack of message slips when I’d finished my second call.
“Miss Annabel feeling nervous all of a sudden?” she asked.
“Wouldn’t you if someone tried to poison you?” I asked. “Not to mention the fact that she’s got dozens of strange people in her backyard, any one of whom could have done the poisoning as far as she knows. I wanted to get the contractors out there before she changed her mind.”
“Sensible,” she said. “She’s pretty far out of town, and there’s only so often my officers can cruise by. Anything else I can do for you?”
“No,” I said. “Unless you have any inside scoop on when the power’s coming back.”
She shook her head. Then she just sat there, waiting for me to speak, holding the message slips in her hand.
“Then I should let you get back to your work.” I took my time stowing my notebook back in my purse. I was trying to think of a way to start a conversation about Cordelia’s murder, but she didn’t make it easy. “And thanks again for letting me use your phone,” I said, as I stood up. “As I said, it wasn’t an emergency, but I did want to be able to tell Miss Annabel that I’d made those calls.”
“And you have to keep Miss Annabel happy if you don’t want to lose your campground,” the chief said. “I understand that. At least you have her to deal with, not Ms. Delia.”
“You didn’t like Ms. Delia?” I asked.
“I liked her fine,” she said. “Even if she was a bit bossy. Miss Annabel is just much easier to deal with. At least she was before her agoraphobia or anthrophopobia or whatever it is got so bad. She was always the mellow one.”
“Good grief,” I said. “If Annabel’s the mellow one, Cordelia must really have been something.”
“She was a pistol all right,” the chief said, with a chuckle. “But she always did a lot for the town, so people would overlook it if she was a bit high-handed.”
“High-handed?” I echoed.
“There was a time when the Lees and a couple of other families pretty much ran this town.” The chief leaned back, clasped her hands behind her head, and stretched out her legs so that I could see the toe of one sturdy work shoe beneath the bottom of her desk. “And sometimes it did seem as if she and Miss Annabel thought they still should be running it.”
“For example?” I asked.
“For example—the old emu ranch. The land used to belong to their family—eighty years ago. Some of the locals used to work up there, making bits of pottery for the Lee family.”
Bits of pottery? I nodded, but it seemed to me that she was trying to downplay the importance of the pottery works. Or had the book, written by a Lee, exaggerated when it said that half the town had once been employed there?
“That’s an interesting fact,” the chief went on. “An interesting bit of town history. But it doesn’t give them any more rights than anyone else to the property now.”