Mee-Maw’s bones spoke to her. She blamed that on the mountain dust caked over them. They told her rain was coming, that they were fixing for a long winter, and that Brandy’s story was a load of bunkum.
The cops had their own reasons for suspecting her. Mee-Maw heard them from Detective Angel Angelov, a soft, blonde woman who’d lived in the mountains about as long as Mee-Maw’d been weaning. Everyone knew Brandy had been seeing the victim, and their only love language had been fisticuffs. She couldn’t account for her location at the time of death, and she knew her way around the gun that killed him.
There was only one problem. Brandy had witnesses swearing she was physically incapable of committing the crime when it happened, including a few in the police department.
They had no choice but to let her go, even as she sat smirking through every interview. She happened to be leaving the Sylva police station when Mee-Maw approached, shuffling her walker down Main Street. Even as fall stepped aside for winter, Brandy wore a skirt above her knees and a cropped tank top. Her arm, covered in a sleeve of inked roses, held a pink vape.
Mee-Maw sighed at the sight, but not out of prudishness or jealousy. She found it pitiable how young folks developed new ways to make the same mistakes their parents already had.
“What you doing out so late, Mee-Maw?” she grinned. “Shouldn’t it be past your bedtime?”
“I’ve always been a night owl,” Mee-Maw said. “If I still had a man to drive me around, I’d be livin it up later than you.”
“You’ve got that Harry Perrier kid you’ve been solving all these mysteries with,” Brandy said. “Did he bring you here?”
Harry was the friend of Mee-Maw’s grandson Roger, who’d become the closest thing Mee-Maw had to family after they solved Roger’s apparent murder together.
“He dropped me off and then went out with his girlfriend—or whatever you young’un’s call your relationships these days,” Mee-Maw chuckled. “I’ve got an appointment with the detective, and unlike you, I’ll be on the right side of the table.”
Brandy narrowed her eyes. Her tongue went exploring the inside of her mouth, and then she smacked her lips and sauntered off.
Mee-Maw had never liked this woman, ever since she started seeing Roger. Even back then, she’d felt something was off about the girl, but a baseless hunch wasn’t worth a penny at market. Once she uncovered dirt that Brandy had been cheating on Roger, she sent her packing quick.
Brandy’s skin was still soft as a baby, while Mee-Maw’s was wrinkled and leathery. Still, Mee-Maw reckoned Brandy’s heart was shriveled up like a prune. It seemed like a few more years had not brought her any wisdom.
What the police didn’t know, coming from out of town as many of them did, was that Brandy’s kin had been nothing but trouble for three generations. Back when Mee-Maw grew up, that was enough to stack justice on, but you had to be more creative anymore.
She watched Brandy strut off. The old woman shuffled into the police station, shaking her head. Seemed like that woman was long overdue for some old-fashioned justice.
***
“We’ll start at the beginning,” Angel sat in the driver’s seat of her cruiser, taking a desperate swig from her coffee cup, and stared out the window at the overgrown, white-painted house. “The call came in at 9 p.m. from a man named Wayne. He claims they were just friends, but he obviously came up to make a purchase.”
“Awful neighborly of him to stick around,” Mee-Maw said. “I suppose you thanked him with a night in a cell?”
Angel brushed aside her long hair and glared at the old woman. Her Barbie-like complexion made it hard for Mee-Maw to trust her.
“He didn’t get the chance to break any laws. His dealer was too dead,” Angel said. “That’s the victim, Jerry Cavanaugh. He served a stint in Raleigh for dealing meth and decided to move his operation here after getting out. Since then, he’s started dating a local named Brandy Miller.”
“And you think she killed him?” Mee-Maw said. “Why?”
“I can’t say for certain, but it seems like their relationship was dysfunctional,” Angel said. “We’re not exactly desperate for a motive. A simple argument might have been enough to make her snap.”
“But that ain’t what happened,” Mee-Maw grinned. “This was premeditated.”
Angel turned away, resting her arm on the open window. She slowly breathed in the fumes from her cup.
“When Wayne arrived, he saw Brandy’s car leaving the driveway,” Angel said. “She claims she found the body first and wanted to grab his leftover supply before calling it in, but you see why I don’t believe that.”
“So why get outside help for this?” Mee-Maw asked. “Seems like you have her dead-to-rights.”
“There’s a sizeable gap in Brandy’s alibi that happens to be right around the estimated time of death,” Angel said. “The problem’s where she was before and after the murder.”
Angel opened the car, stepped over to Mee-Maw’s side, and guided her to the crime scene. The door was closed and covered in yellow tape, but they instead approached the front window. It was smashed and covered in wooden boards, with just enough room to peer inside at a red, cushioned armchair.
“We found Jerry on that chair with the TV still playing,” Angel said. “The killer shot between those boards and hit him square in the forehead.”
“That’s a difficult shot,” Mee-Maw said. “Takes a steady hand.”
“It gets worse. We didn’t find traces of powder burn on the boards. That means the killer stood a few feet back and aimed their shot through the thin gap.”
“Like they were bragging…”
“Brandy’s a card-carrying NRA member. She could do it,” Angel turned, her thick eyebrows knotted. “But not the way she was that night.
“We’ve got witnesses placing Brandy at Innovation Brewing at 8. The bartender and the man next to her watched her down enough shots of Jameson to kill a horse. Then, at 9:30, shortly after the murder, we got another call from some farmers saying a car had plowed through their fence. Of course, it was Brandy, and the officers who took her BAC found her well over the legal limit.”
“So Brandy could have made that shot sober,” Mee-Maw leaned over the walker and folded her hands. “But not while drunk out of her wits.”
“Exactly,” Angel sighed. “We even tested it. Some of our off-duty officers were out drinking, and we had them come back and try it on the shooting range. None of them even got close!”
“Tax dollars workin overtime.”
“The point is, she couldn’t have shot Jerry through that gap after getting so shot up herself.”
“That’s quite the puzzle,” she peered through the gap in the window. “I can see why you wanted me and Harry’s help on this.”
“Of course, we could be on the wrong track here,” Angel leaned against the wall and stared up at the stars. “Maybe her worst crime was really going on a bender and crashing her car.”
“I doubt that. Intuition is nothing without inspection, but it’s almost never wrong,” Mee-Maw straightened up and nodded her head. “Now how about you show me inside?”
Angel unlocked the front door and pushed hard till it slid out of the warped frame with a sickening grind. Mee-Maw had expected the inside to look far worse than it turned out to be. Jerry’s home was surprisingly clean, with no stains in sight, beer bottles lined up neatly in a small recycling bin, and a waist-high bookcase organized alphabetically by author. However, the floor was covered in a carpet of broken glass.
“Was the door locked when you found the scene?”
Angel shook her head. “Anyone could have got in, but they’d make a lot of noise doing it. The real problem is the glass.”
Mee-Maw glanced at the floor, where the shards were piled in a curved line like marks left by a windshield wiper.
“I suppose this happened when the cops came in?” she asked.
“Exactly, and not a single shard elsewhere in the room has been disturbed.”
The glass was from a wall-mounted clock that had probably come direct from the flea market. The front had been blown apart by a bullet, stopping it right at 8:55.
“Surely y’uns didn’t fall for that?” Mee-Maw raised an eyebrow. “It’d be easy to push forward the hands.”
“But not to fake the glass on the ground. We know after that bullet was fired, no one came into the room.”
Mee-Maw pushed her walker forward, cutting a path through the glass. She stood in front of the clock and looked at the window, aiming a finger at the gap.
“Real funny angle on that bullet.”
“A difficult shot, but I think Brandy could have managed it without alcohol in her system.”
“Then that’s a problem,” Mee-Maw said. “The shot that killed Jimmy ain’t nothing to write home about. Brandy could have walked inside and shot him from a few feet away, then put him in that couch facing the window.”
“That’s still a difficult shot to make while drunk,” Angel said.
“But easier than dealing with the gap,” Mee-Maw tapped her forehead with a bony finger. “Problem is the clock, which had to be shot from outside. And no way around it—she had to be sober for that.”
“You’ve about reached the point where my finest officers hit a wall,” Angel said.
“Well, you’re missin the lifetime of wisdom I’ve got,” Mee-Maw grinned. “I already have an idea.”
She shuffled through the house, glancing in each room as she made a beeline for the kitchen. The house reminded her of where she’d grown up—tinged with blood, sweat, and a little desperation. She crossed the recently mopped tile floor and opened the fridge. Everything was sorted by food group and smelled fresh.
“Jimmy was awful put-together for a meth head.”
“I doubt he was a user,” Angel sat on a ladderback chair by the dining table, sipping her coffee. “Most of the successful dealers aren’t.”
Mee-Maw yanked open a drawer and unwrapped a cheese stick.
“You know that’s evidence, right?” Angel said.
“Are you gonna write me up?” the old woman raised an eyebrow behind her large glasses and stuck the cheese in her mouth like a cigarette. She rotated it in her mouth as she sucked on the end and shuffled off to the laundry room.
Jimmy had his own washer and dryer, as well as a large ice chest in the corner like the kind her late husband had always kept stocked. Mee-Maw gently lifted the lid and saw it was just about used up. Only a few slabs of cleaned venison covered the bottom.
“There you have it,” Mee-Maw turned and eyed Angel through the open doorway. “That’s large enough to fit Jimmy. She could have chilled the body to disguise the time of death!”
“So you’re saying,” Angel said. “Jimmy was already dead before Brandy got drunk?”
“She made those shots sober, including the one on the clock,” Mee-Maw said. “Then she only had to come back here and move Jimmy’s body to the chair. That might be hard while indisposed, but it don’t require accuracy.”
“That makes sense,” Angel nodded, then glanced back to the crime scene. “But wait, isn’t that—”
“Still impossible?” Mee-Maw pulled out the cheesestick, which she’d filed almost to a point. “Yeah, I just realized that too. Brandy couldn’t get back in to move the body after shooting the clock, which means she still shot the clock while drunk. That makes moving the body pointless.”
“And it’s not like she could drive Jimmy to another ice chest before going to the bar,” Angel said. “Then she’d have to get him inside over the glass. That window doesn’t open, and she can’t drop him through the ceiling.”
“I reckon we can trust that broken clock,” Mee-Maw said. “Brandy took every step to make sure we knew when Jimmy was shot, because she’d already set up her alibi.”
“Well, once we get the autopsy results we’ll know if the body was chilled,” Angel rapped her knuckle on the table, as if trying to jump-start her brain. “But if not, did Brandy really commit this murder while drunk off her ass?”
“She committed it after drinking multiple shots,” Mee-Maw said. “That ain’t the same thing.”
She walked back through the kitchen and stared at the field of glass. She slammed her walker down roughly, grinding several shards into the carpet.
“If she wants us to bang our heads against this wall she’s set up,” Mee-Maw said. “She’ll have to be ready for me to break through.”
***
Last call at Innovation Station was in thirty minutes, but Mee-Maw showed up anyway. Stools were piled on tables, suggesting that the last few stragglers should clear out, a practice brought in from out of town that would have been unfamiliar to Mee-Maw in her youth, when most stills only closed once everyone passed out or the cops came knockin—whichever came first.
Mee-Maw only wanted to ask a few questions. When she reached the bar, she found the bartender waiting out the end of his shift and Brandy nursing a half-finished stout.
“You’re already back?” Mee-Maw cackled. “Haven’t you drunk enough lately?”
Brandy turned to Mee-Maw, her bright red lips forming a smile that barely disguised a grimace.
“What’d you expect?” she said. “I lost my boyfriend, and I’ll probably lose my license too. I can’t knit myself a scarf to feel better.”
“It’s your own damn fault,” the bartender grumbled. “I wouldn’t have let you leave if I knew you were about to get in your car.”
“I can take care of myself, Miles,” Brandy said. “But it’s gonna be tough getting around now. Maybe I can carpool with you, Mee-Maw. I’m sure Harry would be glad to give me a ride.”
She flashed an ugly grin and downed the rest of her drink in one go. Mee-Maw sat beside her with a groan.
“I take it you served those shots earlier?” she nodded at the bartender.
Miles turned and flipped a hand towel over his shoulder. He wore a jean jacket tied round his waist and a T-shirt for some band Mee-Maw’d never heard of.
“Yeah, and I’ve already explained that to the police countless times. I’m not going through it again for some nosy woman.”
“I’m actually working with the police,” Mee-Maw said. “So you can explain it to me here or in an interrogation room.”
Brandy leaned against her fist, her blonde hair enveloping the empty glass. “There ain’t much to say. He was just doin his job.”
Miles nodded. “She came in and ordered a shot of Jameson. I served her, then she ordered five more. She hung around for half an hour and left.”
“That’s a shocking amount of alcohol,” Mee-Maw said. “Did she explain why she wanted so much?”
“It ain’t even that bad,” Brandy rolled her eyes. “I’m young and hardy. Not my fault you couldn’t sniff a Seagrams without keeling over.”
“I’d be more worried about cost. Surely it would be cheaper to get a bottle from the ABC store?”
“Then I’d drink the whole thing and have a killer hangover. That’s less fun,” Brandy grinned. “Anyway, what the hell are you getting at?”
“I think you came here cause you wanted witnesses,” Mee-Maw folded her hands on the bar. “People who’d testify you got drunk when you were still plain sober.”
“Like I’ve already said, that’s impossible,” Miles sighed. “I served her six shots of Jameson, and I’ve been using the bottle all day. She couldn’t have switched it out.”
“Then she changed the contents of the glass after it was poured.”
“How?” Brandy laughed. “There were folks on either side of me. They would have seen me juggling a buncha little bottles.”
“And besides, what would she switch them with?” Miles asked. “If it was vodka, I’d say you have a point. I’m sure loads of sorority girls sneak that stuff around in their water bottles every day. But Jameson’s a whisky. Its light brown color doesn’t look like much else.”
Mee-Maw narrowed her eyes, thinking the bartender had little imagination. Brandy’s problem was managing the switch, not finding a substitute.
“Perhaps the drink was simply watered down?”
“I hope you’re not accusing me of colluding with her,” Miles snapped. “Because all those shots were whiskey. In fact, the guy on Brandy’s left got concerned after the fourth shot, so he sniffed the drink. He would have noticed if it was anything less than a full pour. Why don’t you go interrogate him?”
“The cops must be desperate if they need escapees from the old folks home to do their job,” Brandy curled her hair around her finger. “Jimmy had plenty of enemies. I’m not sure why you’re still hung up on this theory.”
“You were seen leaving the house.”
“Lordy, I was seen leaving my boyfriend’s house! Maybe that was a scandal when you were born, but times have changed,” She crossed her legs beneath her red plaid skirt. “Sure, I shoulda called the cops before I bolted. That’s on me, but I wasn’t thinking straight, remember? I was drunk.”
She leaned forward and looked Mee-Maw in the eye, lips slightly parted in anticipation. Mee-Maw’s brain was circling, trying to think of a rebuttal, but anything she thought of would sound tinged with desperation.
“Is that all? Then you’d best run along. If you hurry, maybe you’ll still catch the Jeopardy reruns.”
Mee-Maw wanted to tell her those ended two hours ago but doubted it would help her case. She slowly stood, grabbed her walker, and marched out, taking long enough to leave that she could hear Brandy giggling the whole way.
She paused at the door and raised a finger in the air, then turned back to Brandy. “I don’t suppose you’d mind telling me how much you weigh?”
Brandy’s smile evaporated. “Not even Jimmy was good enough to hear that. Get outta my face.”
Mee-Maw smiled and stepped onto the deck, spotting Angel waiting by her car. The detective caught her eye and frowned, seeing that she hadn’t made any headway. She silently opened the car door and climbed in.
Mee-Maw sat beside her. “Any chance Miles and Brandy are working together?”
“We checked into his background, and I doubt it,” Angel said. “He’s been working there about two months now, and he came out to the college from down in Georgia. They would have only met in the bar.”
“She lives nearby,” Mee-Maw said. “Two months is plenty of time for young folk to get frisky.”
“Well, the two of them would still have to fool the other patrons, including the man who smelled the whiskey,” Angel said. “That man’s a campus minister, so I doubt he would have covered for her.”
Mee-Maw fell silent for the rest of the trip back to her care facility, trying to figure out how such a thing could be done. There were any number of things that could have been substituted for Brandy’s whiskey—water with some food coloring, even just a lighter beer—but how could she introduce it to the glass, in a crowded bar, without anyone noticing?
She was still considering the problem in her sleep, and after she woke up and got a call from Angel saying she planned to drop by. Mee-Maw had a nurse help her run some calculations on a computer and printed the results, showing them to Angel when she arrived.
“Now Brandy could use a little meat on her bones,” Mee-Maw said, patting Angel on the shoulder. “So I’m guessing her weight’s a little below average. Maybe 140 pounds. Am I close?”
“Sure,” Angel nodded. “What are you talking about?”
She showed her the page in her hands, a printout from a BAC calculator site.
“So after 6 shots of liquor, she’d be at about .19% an hour later. Obviously, that would impair her motor control. But if all those shots were beer, she’d only be at .008%. That’s a pathetic amount—not even a standard drink.”
“That minister would have smelled the difference,” Angel said. “How could she trick him?”
“Maybe only that one was actually whiskey.”
“Then how’d she or Miles make the swap without anyone noticing?”
“I don’t know,” Mee-Maw glowered across the lobby, where other residents were watching Steel Magnolias for the fourth time that week. “That’s what I’m still stuck on.”
“Well, maybe this will help.”
Angel walked to the nearest table, pushed aside an unfinished Scrabble game, and set down her bag. She pulled out another piece of paper, this time showing a square photograph.
“We’ve been looking for other people who were in the bar around 7:30. Apparently, one table was celebrating a birthday. They took this picture, which happens to show our key players in the background.”
Mee-Maw grabbed the paper, took off her glasses, and peered past the birthday girl to the corner of the picture. Miles held out a shot of whiskey, stepping toward Brandy, who looked like a cartoon caterpillar in her red, puffy jacket. A grey-haired man sat next to her, obviously the preacher. An attaché case sat on the floor beside him.
“That’s strange,” Mee-Maw muttered.
“What?”
“I don’t blame you for missin this, Angel, seein as you’re new around here,” she continued. “But it blows the whole thing open for me. I was on the wrong track this whole time.”
“You mean,” Angel’s face lost some color. “Brandy’s innocent?”
“Not at all,” Mee-Maw said. “But we need to run some errands before I can explain. Would you mind goin for a drive?”
First, Mee-Maw grilled Angel on what the cops found in Brandy’s car. She didn’t mention anything relevant, so she asked for a ride to the Goodwill in Sylva. Mee-Maw went in and asked what clothes they’d been donated recently. She found what she was looking for and handed it to Angel, who promised to take it to the lab.
When they got the results, she knew it was time to visit Brandy one last time.
***
Brandy was sober when she stepped out of the car, but she seemed about to vomit when she met Mee-Maw’s eyes.
She stood at the front of a group of officers beside Angel, all gathered in the parking lot of the strip mall that housed the Goodwill. Angel held up a bag containing a red cylinder of fabric and smiled.
“Looking for this?”
Brandy crossed her rose-covered arms over her chest and bit her lip, eventually dragging a smile from somewhere inside her.
“I ain’t lookin for anything,” she said. “I just wanted to shop for clothes. Nothing strange about that.”
“Who’s that in the car with you?”
Miles slowly stepped out, hands raised in the air. “Don’t get the wrong idea, detective. She needed a ride, and I was coming off my shift—and she promised to buy me Cookout, and—”
“Simmer down, boy,” Mee-Maw said. “You ain’t under suspicion. I know you served Brandy six shots of whiskey, just like you said.”
Miles sighed with relief but didn’t lower his hands. Brandy stepped forward, standing confidently with her fists clenched but still trembling.
“Are you listenin to yourself? If I drank all that, there’s no shot I’m the culprit!”
“If your alibi and the time of death are both true, there’s only one option,” Mee-Maw said. “You drank the alcohol but kept it from impairing you!”
Angel took the evidence out of the bag and handed it to Mee-Maw. She held it to her chest, keeping it tightly wrapped.
“I first caught on when I saw a photo of you at the bar,” Mee-Maw said. “You were wearin a heavy, puffy jacket that obliterated your curves, and that didn’t ring true for me. My momma woulda had a word for women like you, one that don’t bear repeatin. I’ll call you ‘free-spirited.’”
“Is there a point to this?” Brandy snapped.
“When I saw you a few hours later, you were dressed like you usually do, in a tank top and skirt,” Mee-Maw said. “Even though we were outside on a cold autumn night. That had me wonderin: what happened to the jacket? Or better question, why were you wearin it earlier?”
She let go of the top of the fabric, causing it to unfold like a matador’s cape. It was a corset patterned with glimmering roses, with a narrow waist and long black cords weaved through the back.
“I don’t even know how a woman gets something like this,” Mee-Maw said. “But my daughter was given one for a wedding and let me try it on. I’d rank it as one of the worst experiences of my life. If she’d fastened the thing any tighter…I think it’d have shut down my blood flow.”
“It takes a certain kind of woman to wear one,” Brandy smiled.
“Just like it takes a certain woman to kill their boyfriend,” Mee-Maw said. “Point is, the bride told my daughter bout a hundred times to be careful at the reception, because no matter how much wine she drank she wouldn’t feel a drop till she unlaced that corset—and then it would bowl her over like a train. With that big, puffy jacket, you could easily hide a corset.”
“And what if I didn’t tighten it enough and got tipsy too soon?” Brandy asked.
“It’d be easy enough to not kill him,” Mee-Maw shrugged. “Besides, you could shoot him as soon after you left the bar as you wanted. You just had to push the clock forward enough that Jimmy’s next buyer would think he was shot a moment ago.”
She turned and gestured to the building behind them.
“That leads us to Goodwill. You needed to get rid of the corset, but you also needed to get your BAC tested later to perfect your alibi. That’s why you prepared a bag of clothes in the trunk of your car, which you could shove the corset in and leave at Goodwill. You dropped off out back, so no one actually saw you.
“But that was just a temporary measure. You wanted to get the corset back to hide it permanently. That wasn’t easy with all the interviews and losing your license, but I knew you’d show up eventually. You woulda told them you’d let the corset slip in the bag accidentally, but that won’t be good enough for us.”
Angel stepped forward, accompanied by two officers. One was pulling out a pair of handcuffs.
“We found your DNA all over the inside of the corset, and the Goodwill takes notes of when every donation arrives,” Angel said. “I think you’ll have trouble explaining to a jury why you fled a crime scene to donate some old clothes. Still, I’d love to see you try.”
The officers grabbed Brandy’s hands and cuffed them together. She leaned forward, her hair falling in rough streaks over her face. Miles watched with a blank expression, perhaps wondering if this was a good time to ask someone else to cover his Cookout order.
“Oh, and Brandy?”
She glared at Mee-Maw, as if wishing she could turn the woman to dust.
“I was young like you once,” Mee-Maw said. “I lived frantically and made stupid decisions. Those are memories I’ll cherish forever, but—”
“Don’t lecture me,” Brandy snapped. “You know, Jerry was about to leave me! For some woman at the college—probably barely legal.”
“That’s real funny comin from you, after what you did to my Roger.”
“Good lord, Granny, let it go!” Brandy leaned her head back and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I cheated on him, but only with boys his age. It’s men like Jerry getting away with being complete creeps that gets me. I’m not saying I killed him, but it pissed me off. You reach a certain age and people think your life is already over.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t feel that way if you didn’t say the same thing to me.”
“I don’t want to hear it. Old folks always think they know better, but they don’t. They didn’t have to deal with this housing market or live on a burning planet. You don’t know anything about my life, so don’t tell me how I should have lived it!”
“You didn’t let me finish,” Mee-Maw sighed. “I’m not trying to give you platitudes. I don’t like you enough for that.”
Mee-Maw slowly inched forward, leaning in close to Brandy’s face.
“I was saying, I got to live my twenties in style, while you’ll be spending them in a cold gray cell.”
Mee-Maw stepped back as Brandy yanked against her cuffs, practically trying to tear off the old woman’s face with her teeth. The officers held her back and took her to the squad car. Mee-Maw watched with a dull grin and headed back to Angel’s ride, pushing her walker across the asphalt. The clouds broiled in the sky, and something dark lurked on the horizon.
She had a feeling it would rain, and her bones never lied.
[Image Credit : Photo by Jay Rembert on Unsplash]
by 
Stephen M. Pierce
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