Bad To The Bone by Katy Munger Page B

obvious blue-collar status of Tawny's
ex-husband Joe Scurlock had perplexed me when I interviewed him. He
hardly seemed to satisfy Tawny's cashmere-and-fur tastes. But one
look at the home where Tawny had been raised told me that she had
come from far humbler roots than blue collar. At the time she
married him, Joe Scurlock had probably been a step up.
    The Worth home was a sagging clapboard
structure barely set back from the highway. The land was muddy and
rutted, the house sinking on its foundation, the exterior badly in
need of paint. It was a piece of property good for nothing except
hanging on to.
    As I picked my way over puddles and patches
of gravel, a light went on in an upstairs room. There was a flash
of white as someone shoved a curtain aside. I caught a glimpse of a
face peering out into the twilight before the curtain was pulled
shut again.
    I climbed the concrete steps to a rickety
front porch and reached my hand through a torn screen door to
knock. I knew someone was home, but no one answered. I knocked
again, and this time heard odd scrambling noises inside. There was
a small window to the right of the door, so I wiped a patch of the
surface clean with a corner of my coat sleeve and peered through
the dingy glass.
    A shrunken head topped with wisps of gray
hair peered back at me, its toothless grin and vacant look
terrifying in the deepening twilight.
    I almost peed in my pants from the shock. I
still hadn't recovered when the door flew open a moment later. A
small man well into his seventies and dressed in denim coveralls
stood in the doorway. There was no sign of the creature I'd just
seen.
    "Got no money to buy nothing," he said in a
gravelly voice as he started to shut the door on me.
    "Wait," I told him. "I'm not selling
anything. I'm a private investigator. I want to talk to you for a
few moments. You are Mr. Worth, aren't you?"
    The old man's face turned fearful. His chin
was stubbled with whiskers that made a rasping sound when he drew a
weathered hand across them. "What's this all about?"
    "It's about your daughter, Tawny," I
began.
    "Ain't got no daughter named Tawny," the old
man informed me. A crash echoed in the house behind him, followed
by an eerie howling. "Got to go now." The slam of the door was
final.
    I turned to go, perplexed. Had Bobby gotten
the address wrong? Who the hell was that awful shrunken face in the
window?
    Darkness had fallen during our brief
conversation and there was no porch light to guide me back to my
car. I bumped my shin on a discarded refrigerator littering the
yard and cursed. As I stopped to rub my leg, I heard the groans of
a window being opened after years of disuse.
    "Pssssttt," a voice floated across the yard.
"Wait. Don't go yet."
    I looked up at the second floor. A round
face seemed to float in an upper window. "I'm coming down," the
voice called out.
    Nothing about this house was restful,
nothing about it inspired confidence. But there was no way I was
going to walk away. My curiosity has gotten me in trouble many a
time, but I'd rather be curious than bored.
    A minute later, a heavyset woman with brown
hair permed into frizzy curls stepped out onto the porch. She was
wearing tight purple leggings and a screaming pink sweatshirt
decorated with a plastic decal of yawning puppies. Her cheap tennis
shoes were neon green. If I had been dead, I would have come back
from the grave to keep from being buried in an outfit like
that.
    "I'm Tawny's sister," she whispered as she
walked toward me. Her voice was one of those whiny country drawls
that lets the whole world know that you were lucky to have squeaked
your way through high school. "I heard what you said to my daddy
and I want to talk to you."
    "Okay," I said. "I'm listening."
    "Can we go somewhere first?" she asked.
"Anywhere but here?"
    I appreciated her sentiment. "Sure," I
agreed. "Let's go get a beer. I'll drive." A battered Dodge Dart
was parked in the front yard, but the back bumper was held on by
clothes