Mama Pursues Murderous Shadows Read Free Page A

could tell that Sarah’s plea had struck a chord with Mama, and I didn’t want her tied up with Ruby Spikes’s suicide, apparent or otherwise—I wanted her to help me plan her party!
    “The paper is lying, Bobby Campbell is lying, Abe—” Sarah sounded absolutely frantic.
    “Sarah, I really don’t see that there is anything I can do,” Mama said, getting to her feet.
    I let out a breath, one that I didn’t know I was holding. Mama appeared to have shaken off the inclination to dig into Ruby’s death, and I was glad!
    But Sarah grabbed for Mama’s hand. “Candi,” she pleaded, “you’ve got to help me.… I
need
that five thousand dollars.” She hesitated. “I need it to pay my property taxes.” Now she looked ashamed, like a small child who had just been caught stealing. “You see—”
    “Sarah did a foolish thing—she used the money she’d saved to pay her taxes to play a lottery that a man sold her over the telephone,” Carrie interrupted.
    Sarah sat up straight in her hospital bed. “The nice young man talked so sweet. You’d have believed him, too.”
    The glint in Mama’s eyes I dreaded so much was back. She was interested in this drama that I was sure Sarah was playing out just to get her all tangled up in Ruby’s death. “What did he promise you?” she asked Sarah gently.
    “He told me that I’d already won three times what I needed to pay my taxes. I just knew the Lord had heard my prayers and sent me a blessing.”
    Mama looked surprised. “You sent your tax money to a stranger simply because he told you you’d won the lottery?”
    “There was more to it than that, Candi,” Sarah tried to explain. “You see, the first thing I got was this notice in the mail that said I’d won the lottery in Canada. Just a few days after that, I got this call from a very nice young man. He explained to me that I’d won the money, that it was mine fair and square.He told me that all I needed to do to get the check was to send him fifteen hundred dollars for the paperwork.”
    “And you sent it!” I exclaimed, incredulous.
    “Over six weeks ago,” Sarah confessed. “I ain’t heard a word since then and I don’t have no way of getting in touch with the young man I talked to over the phone.”
    “No telephone number? What about an address?”
    “The only thing I’ve got is this letter.” Sarah pulled a crumpled paper from under her pillow and handed it to Mama. I read it over Mama’s shoulder, and my heart sank. It was the standard swindle letter, promising big winnings. Sarah started to cry. “Candi, I sent him my tax money. If I don’t pay my taxes by the end of August, I’ll lose my place. So naturally when I heard that poor Ruby had died, I remembered that I had this little policy that I’d been paying on since she was sixteen, so I called Bobby Campbell. Candi, I’ve got to get that money,” she sobbed. “I’ll lose my place, my home. I’ll lose everything I own!”
    “Sarah’s heart couldn’t take the strain of the thought of losing her place,” Annie Mae told Mama. “She carried on so last night, it took two doctors and three nurses just to try to calm her nerves.”
    “Promise me you’ll prove that Ruby didn’t kill herself, that somebody killed her,” Sarah begged my mother as she hung on to Mama’s arm like the hospital bed was the
Titanic
and she was about to sink under icy waters.
    Empathy swept across Mama’s face, and to be honest, I didn’t like the look. You see, Mama is a caseworker at the county’s Department of Social Services. She enjoys fitting together the puzzle pieces of other people’s lives, and she becomes positively euphoric when her mind is deducing.
    The problem that faced Mama now was that Sarah Jenkins desperately needed money. Sarah could get that money if Ruby Spikes had not committed suicide but had been murdered. To me, there was no mystery: Ruby Spikes had killed herself, just like the coroner and the newspaper said. But the