The Twelfth Child (Serendipity #1)(15)
I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Every time we’d go to the market, the clerks would call out, “Hi, Destiny!” They’d smile and wave from clear across the store, like they were real glad to see her. When we got home, there’d generally be an extra round of beef or package of fresh baked cookies in our bag. Once the butcher tucked in a twelve pound turkey! It was the same everywhere—the market, the gas station, the post office— people just seemed to take a liking to Destiny. That is, people other than Elliott. He only saw the girl a handful of times, but right off took a dislike to her.
“She’s a fine neighbor,” I told Elliott. “I’m lucky to have her.”
“Oh, sure,” he said, with that condescending look where he raises one eyebrow and lets the rest of his face fall slack. “Her kind is out for what they can get from you.”
“She’s not asked for a dime!” I told him. I figured it would be better to leave it at that rather than reminding him of how he’d borrowed money on eight different occasions and never repaid a cent of it.
Other than Elliott’s snide comments, you never heard a bad word about Destiny – that is until her twenty-fifth birthday, a day when the child should have been celebrating with cake and ice cream, instead of sitting in a police station. Morgan Broadhurst, a genuinely dislikable District Attorney, perched a pair of snobby looking glasses on his big red nose and sneered at her as if she was some low-life white trash. “Miss Fairchild,” he warned, “you either give this investigation your utmost cooperation, or face charges on five counts of grand larceny, forgery, failure to…”
Grand larceny? Forgery? It was no such thing! I signed that car over to her, gave it up of my own free will! It hadn’t been driven since some time after Will died—four, maybe five, years ago. When her old Pinto finally gave out, I said, “Destiny, there’s a perfectly fine Buick sitting in my garage, you take it so we’ll have some way of getting back and forth to the market.” Granted, it was Destiny who filled out the papers and renewed the registration; but you’ve got to remember by that time my hand was real shaky and I couldn’t get around good as I once did. After she signed up for insurance, she polished and shined that car ‘till it looked brand new. She even went out and bought a Saint Christopher medal that was going to keep us safe. I suppose Saint Christopher was looking the other way when Elliott told Detective Nichols that Destiny had stolen the car and forged my name on the papers.
Elliott, who could always make worse of a situation, contrived a slew of accusations as to what Destiny had done; then he handed the detective a typed list of family heirlooms which, according to him, had been stolen. “And,” he said, “my great aunt’s silver tea service is missing as well.” He carried on like every one of those things were treasures of great sentimental value, but I knew what he was really after.
Detective Nichols read down the list of items. “Antique sewing cabinet, mahogany lamp tables, sterling silver ladle, cameo brooch…hmm. This is a pretty extensive list, you sure it’s all missing?”
The way Elliott carried on, anybody would have thought me richer than the Queen of England. The truth is, that so-called tea service was nothing more than a coated over piece of tin—why, I got it with six books of the green stamps they used to hand out at the Bountiful Basket. And the sewing cabinet belonged to my mama, it had a broken hinge and any number of scratches, it meant a lot to me but other than that it wasn’t worth a nickel; still, Elliott led the detective to believe it was something valuable. That was the way he was; he’d take some ordinary circumstance and blow it way out of proportion to fit his grandiose scheme of things.
“Oh, it’s all missing,” Elliott swore. “Every bit of it!”
It was hard to know for sure, but I thought the detective had a suspicious glint in his eye; he seemed a man well-acquainted with lying snakes.
“I’ve the suspicion,” Elliott said, “that if you searched the Fairchild woman’s house, you’d find it all—I know I’ve already seen her driving my great aunt’s car!”
“Destiny Fairchild? She’s the neighbor you spoke of?”
“Yes. I’ve only met the girl a few times, but right off I suspected she was out to swindle my poor aunt. I warned Aunt Abigail, but she was not one to listen.”
“This is a pretty serious accusation,” the detective said. “Are you certain you want to file a complaint?”
“Absolutely!” Elliott answered, “Absolutely!”
“Okay.” Detective Nichols eyed Elliott with a look that gave me reason think he doubted the truthfulness of the entire story. “Now,” he said, “let’s go through this from the start. Tell me what happened, as best you can recall.”
Lord God, I thought, the world has come to a sorry state when a thieving conniver such as Elliott is a person to be listened to. If Destiny had slammed the door in his face, that man wouldn’t know if I was dead or alive. Right then I started wishing Destiny had been called something else, like Lucky or Happy, some more positive name that didn’t leave such an open-ended issue of her future.
I still remember the day I first met Elliott; it was back in nineteen-eighty-six, two years after Will sold the farm and moved to Culpepper. Dear sweet Becky was still alive then and she was the one who telephoned and invited me to Sunday dinner. “Will wants you to come over to meet this Elliott person,” she said. “Supposedly his grandma was a descendant of the Lannigan family.” I caught on to that supposedly and right away knew Becky had certain suspicions. Will’s wife was a good woman, down-to-earth as they come, but at times she could be a bit priggish if a person didn’t strike her just so. “Okay,” I answered, “but I’ll want to start back early.” Culpepper was a good two hours away from Middleboro and I had already reached the point where my eyes didn’t adjust well to nighttime driving.