“Can you help me get reports like that?” asked the officer.
“I can do it if I have a case open on someone,” said Jack. “Otherwise, those reports are off limits. But you can request them yourself if they’re crucial to a case you’re working on.”
“That’s great,” said the officer. “I’ll do that.”
“Wonder what all that’s about,” Jack told Earl after the officer left. Then noticing Earl’s demeanor, he added, “You okay, Earl?”
Earl, with the normally flat-line emotions, was leaning forward in an antique chair, looking as if he were about to jump up and punch someone.
“I was doing alright until now,” said Earl. “But anger’s set in. When I think what someone did to my sister. …”
Earl got up suddenly. “Let’s get out of here. Come with me to my shop, and I’ll give you the gun you found yesterday. Ann would want you to have it.”
The family viewing was at 3:00. We gathered in a room next to the viewing room, waiting for everyone to arrive. Then we walked in together.
I pulled Jack aside and squeezed his arm tight. “Honey, we can’t let people see her this way. She was too beautiful and feminine. Her features were soft. What’s in that coffin looks harsh.”
“It doesn’t look anything like Anna Mae,” Jack agreed. He pulled his mother aside. “People don’t need to remember her this way.”
Iva Ray nodded, but we knew she wouldn’t speak up. She’d go along with whatever the others chose to do.
“Change the lipstick,” Janet told a funeral home employee. “Ann wore a lighter shade, more of a pink.”
The employee wiped off the red lipstick and put on some pink. The staff had done their best with Ann’s battered body, but the wounds were ghastly and they had been unable to artistically cover them. But the family wanted to, had to, believe she looked fine.
“There,” said Janet with finality. “That’s better.”
And so Anna Mae Winstead Branson’s loved ones and friends said good-bye to what seemed to me a harsh caricature of the real Ann. Unfortunately, the curiosity seekers had ample reason for assumptions and speculations about the covered parts of her body.
Before long, hundreds of people streamed into the funeral home. We stood near the coffin to greet the endless procession of mourners. Over and over we heard “you don’t remember me, do you” as we were reacquainted with people we’d known nineteen years earlier when we moved from Madisonville. And all I could think was that any of these people could be Ann’s killer.
Russell brought his three sons from his first marriage. The oldest was twelve. His twin boys were nine. The twins seemed nervous about approaching the body. Russell placed his arms around their shoulders and they walked together to the coffin. I realized again how scary Ann’s body appeared.
Pastor Tom Branson and his wife, Connie, nearly filled a row with their children. Tom was not the appointed minister for the next day’s service, though he was leading a prayer. However, he and Connie were so used to their ministerial role that they moved among the mourners, greeting and comforting them.
Suddenly a distant family member was beside me.
“Can you imagine!” the family member whispered. “Someone had the nerve to ask me if Ann had been violated.”
She leaned even closer and shuddered. “And someone asked if her fingers had been severed.”
She waited for my response. When I remained silent, she pressed, “Were they?”
By early evening, I found a place alone in a back row of chairs. But soon someone eased into the chair beside me.
“Hi, I’m Russell’s wife.” I reached out to shake her hand.
“You look as tired as I feel,” she smiled. “This is so hard on all of us. I sure wish we’d met under different circumstances. Russell speaks so highly of you and Jack.”
Russell’s second wife, Terri, was the first person I’d talked to all evening who hadn’t sapped my strength. She had a relaxed way of interacting that helped me slow down and take a breath. I liked her immediately.
Slim, attractive Terri was elegantly dressed in a fitted knee-length black dress. In spite of her careful hair and makeup, she struck me as a natural beauty who didn’t fret over her looks. I liked her immediately and wished I could hide in the back row and talk with this easy conversationalist all night.
I felt that Terri would have liked to hide as well. Though she and Russell had been married for several years, I could tell she felt like an interloper, a concerned person on the fringe, a non-blood relative. Russell was spending time with his sons, and they’d come to the funeral home with his first wife, Denise. Terri stole occasional glances at Russell and his first family, and I sensed a slight rise in her voice and a subtle shifting of body language when she watched them.
When Judy, Ann’s housekeeper, entered the room and stood alone and uncomfortable near the door, I knew I had to make her feel welcome. Reluctantly, I told Terri, “There’s someone I need to speak to. But let’s talk some more. I’d like to get to know you better.”
Judy seemed relieved when I approached her. She was glad to see someone she knew and was eager to talk about the murder. Being one of the people who knew Ann best had elevated her to near-star status. But in spite of her readiness to talk, I sensed that Judy was deeply and truly grieving.
“I know you loved Ann,” I told her. “And I know you did a lot to make her comfortable.”
Judy’s demeanor brightened. “Oh, I did. She loved to go and do and have parties and lunches. And I tried to take some of the work off her. Every week, we’d sit down and talk about her plans. Then I’d put it all together for her.
“I loved Miz Ann. She was so good to me, and to my daughter, too. She’s fourteen. Miz Ann would give her big old boxes of makeup. When I told my daughter what happened, she cried and cried.”
“Thanks for the information you gave us the other day,” I told Judy.
“I’m glad to do it,” said Judy. “I want her killer caught. And I think it’s Wayne. He’s not even coming to the funeral home. Don’t you think that’s strange? When I asked him why, he just said he doesn’t do funerals. He doesn’t even seem sad about Miz Ann. He just told me, ‘Great. Here I am living alone in the country and I don’t have any alibi.’
“He tried to make his mom be his alibi, but she wouldn’t do it. He stopped by her place and ate some chili and biscuits and left at 8:30. He tried to get her to say it was 9:30 but she wouldn’t.”
Judy was insistent. “Wayne has a terrible temper. I think he did it. He’s got memory lapses. And he’s got this heart condition that makes him have blackouts.”
“How were Ann and her fiancé doing?”
Judy was solemn. “She wasn’t going to marry him, at least not right now. She told me a couple of times. She told me, ‘Judy, I just don’t feel good about marrying him while Grace is alive, and I told her, ‘Then don’t you do it.’”
I squeezed Judy’s arm. “Judy, after we go back to Georgia, will you contact Jack or me if you think of anything else?”
Judy