The Three Miss Margarets

by Louise Shaffer

  “I see.”

  “I’m also up on old roses and camellias.”

  “Bet there isn’t too much you don’t know about the Charles Valley Animal Rescue either. Did the subject of Vashti come up at all?”

  “I tried. They let me know that they didn’t feel inclined to talk about anything other than her many accomplishments. They were very polite about it.”

  “Oh, always.”

  “After that, I went to see Vashti’s grandmother at her nursing home. They wouldn’t let me near her. The supervisor seemed to know I was writing a story.”

  “News travels in small towns. Maybe when everyone’s calmed down in a couple of weeks you can try again.”

  “No, I can’t.” He stopped pacing and sat back down on the steps. “I had a call from my agent yesterday. Vashti’s obituary was in The New York Times. He wanted to know when I’m planning to let him see some pages, since obviously I’m not going to be talking to her. And I do have a first draft finished.” He sighed. “He’s a nice boy, my agent. He’s only twelve, but he’s smart. I gave him a song-and-dance about wanting to get some more background down here before I do my final edit. He said I was stalling.”

  “Why? Are you scared?”

  “That’s the theory laid out by the wunderkind.”

  “After all the writing you’ve done? Come on.”

  “I write pieces for magazines—they run five thousand words, tops. This is a book. And not a book the world is panting for. I have been working on it for a year and a half. That’s a hell of a long time to be out of commission in my business. Especially if you’re carrying my alimony payments.” He paused. “And I’m an old guy in a kid’s game. Do you know how young most of the writers are who do what I do?”

  “What difference does that make? You’re not a movie star.”

  “I want to get out before they throw me out, Laurel.” He took a deep breath. “It’s not just that I want the fucking book to be good, I need it to be good. I’m scared shitless.”

  “When are you going back?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “That soon?”

  “I want to do one final edit. Then I’ve got to send the manuscript to my agent and see what happens.” The sun was starting to set; the trees were black against a glowing orange sky. He watched for a moment. She could tell he didn’t want to look at her. “Speaking of which,” he said, “what you told me, the story about your father and Grady killing Richard. I want to use that. I’ll say it was just a rumor, nothing substantiated. Will you be all right with that?”

  A few days ago she would have been angry. But she’d told Denny she wanted to let go.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “It’s time I stopped trying to protect a dead man I never met.”

  They sat in silence and watched the sky do its thing.

  “It is beautiful here,” he said.

  “It has its moments.”

  They were silent again. “You could call me sometime,” he said finally. He turned to her, and his eyes were soft in the fading light. “Or you could come see me.”

  “You want me to come to New York City?”

  “We don’t have any historic outhouses. But the sunsets are spectacular because the pollution from New Jersey refracts the rays.” He looked away again. “Just a thought.”

  “I may take you up on it,” she said.

  “Really?” He sounded downright eager.

  “I’ll think about it.” The idea of being in New York City with Josh showing her around was so appealing it was frightening. “Have you ever had grits?” she asked.

  “That would be the white paste they put on the plate with my breakfast eggs at the resort until I told them not to, right?”

  “I fix mine with cheese. If you’re game, I was planning to have them for supper.”

  “I’d like that.” But he didn’t move. She leaned up against him. For a moment she thought of trying to explain to him that he’d not seen the best of her, because the things he brought up were hurtful and she really could be a lot nicer. She also thought of telling him she was sorry he was leaving. But then he put his arm around her, so she decided, for once, that she would leave well enough alone.

  He wasn’t crazy about the grits, she could tell. But he loved the fried fish she fixed to go with them. And after he helped her wash the dishes, they didn’t have any discussion about him going back to his hotel.

  The next morning she was up and dressed when he came into her kitchen. She poured him a cup of coffee and placed a manila folder full of papers in front of him.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  She made herself busy spreading butter on some toast. “Those are some things I’ve written. I want to know what you think.”

  He groaned. “Please don’t do this.”

  “You’re a professional writer. You have to know what’s good.”

  “I don’t, I know what I like. I’m not a judge.”

  “Just be honest. That’s all I want.”

  “Shit.”

  But he took the folder and started to read. For a while she stayed in the kitchen with him, but he said, without looking up, “I can feel you staring—get lost.” So she went outside with her coffee and tried to tell herself she hadn’t made a pathetic fool of herself. Just when she was about to run inside, grab the papers from him, and throw them in the trash, he came out.

  “When did you write this?” he asked.

  “The short story about the kid throwing the birthday party was when I was in college. The other pieces were for the newspaper, human-interest stuff. Hank never published any of it.”

  “He’s as stupid as he looks.”

  “Really? You’re not just saying that? You really liked them?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Because I can take it if you didn’t. I can take criticism—you haven’t seen that side of me—but I can.”

  “Laurel, I think you can write. You’ve got a nice way with language. You’re funny. What can I say? I liked what I read, but it’s just an opinion. And don’t you dare cry on me. Not after being such a hard-ass all this time.”

  After he left, she drove herself over to McGee’s. Denny was sitting in his usual booth, eating an order of raisin biscuits.

  “I want the box,” she told him.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  ACTUALLY, THERE WAS A BOX and her ma’s guitar. The box was a large cardboard carton Sara Jayne had kept under her bed. The guitar was probably quite valuable. It had once belonged to the great Bill Monroe, who handed it down from the stage into the arms of a giddy teenaged Sara Jayne after a tent concert in Vidalia, Georgia.

  When Laurel got the box home, she put it in the middle of the living room floor with the guitar next to it and eyed them warily, like a house pet circling a nest of snakes. Sara Jayne hadn’t left much in the way of personal effects. In addition to the guitar, there had been a heavily studded denim jacket, some jeans, half a dozen T-shirts, and the box. It contained what her mother referred to as “my case against those old bitches.”

  Laurel had never looked inside it, but when she was small she believed it held magical artifacts that would prove John Merrick’s devotion and the perfidy of the three Miss Margarets. After that happened, she and her ma would make everyone who had ever put them down eat dirt. It was a belief that got her through many a bad day.

  Her ma never opened the thing in Laurel’s presence, but when she was having an attack of the blue devils, Sara Jayne would haul it out from under the bed, crying and cussing. Gradually the battered old carton changed character in Laurel’s mind. She associated it not with miracles but with Sara Jayne being mean. Then it stopped appearing altogether, and Laurel figured it was gone. Until she was cleaning up Sara Jayne’s bedroom after she died, and there it was, crammed into a corner of the closet behind a broken ceiling fan and a stack of old telephone directories. She couldn’t bring herself to throw it away, so she gave it to Denny with the guitar. And now it was back.


  Laurel picked up the old guitar and did a couple of strums. It needed new strings, but old Bill’s name was still written on the neck in shiny gold paint that hadn’t chipped. She took it to a corner of the room and set it upright against the wall. Then, unable to delay any longer, she took a deep breath and opened the box.

  At first she wanted to throw the whole damn thing against the wall. Then she started to laugh. Because she should have known. It was full of junk. No miracles or horrors, just junk. There were three dead flowers tied together with a crumpled silver ribbon and impaled on a rusted corsage pin. There was a blue button that said THE BEACH AT PANAMA CITY, a pink satin ribbon that was too wide for a hair bow, a plastic champagne glass with ancient residue still in the bottom, an envelope with a birthday card in it, another envelope full of movie theater stubs, and a bright red dress with a halter top and a skirt so short it was basically a wide ruffle, made out of some kind of fake silk.

  She lined the stuff up on the coffee table. This was her ma’s big proof, a box full of a teenager’s souvenirs. She didn’t know who to feel sorrier for, herself or Sara Jayne. Probably both of them. She opened the birthday card. Inside was a note written in the familiar childlike handwriting that was on the front page of the books on her wall.

  Baby—

  This is my present to you. I got the job for us. They will put the story in the newspaper. I’m not much for writing, but I want you to know, like it says in the song, I love you so much it hurts me. Happy Birthday.

  Love, John

  Laurel turned over the envelope and looked at the postmark. The card had been sent the November before she was born, three weeks before her father died. So Sara Jayne was right about one thing. John Merrick had gotten himself a new job. One that was splashy enough to warrant coverage in the newspaper.

  Laurel scooped up the whole mess and dumped it back into the box. A pack of pictures held together with a dried-up rubber band fell out of the skirt of the dress.

  The pictures had been taken sometime in the late sixties. They showed her mother and father, young and having the time of their lives at some kind of fair or amusement park.

  Given what a monumental figure he had been in her life, she’d seen relatively few pictures of her father. Sara Jayne had had a snapshot in her wallet that featured a guy with puffy sideburns and a grin that, even as a kid, Laurel had felt carried an awful lot of “screw you.”

  The young man looking out at her from these pictures was laughing. His hair was slicked back, and he wore a white short-sleeved shirt and brown pants with bell-bottoms. He was good looking, in an ordinary sort of way.

  But young Sara Jayne was a revelation. She was wearing the red dress from the box. With impossibly long and glamorous legs stretching out from under a short skirt, a mass of auburn hair, and big hazel eyes, she was a knockout.

  In a couple of shots her parents mugged for the camera together. Then, Laurel decided, they must have lost whatever stranger they had asked to help them, and John took pictures of Sara Jayne alone. She was wonderful: fresh-faced and eager, smiling the sweet smile Laurel had always known was there but could never get for herself. The last picture was of the two of them again. His arms were around her and she was leaning back against him, her head tilted up so she could smile dreamily at him; he looked down at her tenderly.

  Which didn’t matter a damn, Laurel reminded herself. Because while he was looking tenderly at Sara Jayne, he was getting some on the side. And killing a man and ultimately getting killed in the process. She tossed the pictures into the box and started for the garbage pail with it, but she couldn’t make herself throw it in. Telling herself she was a damn fool, she took it into the bedroom and stuck it in the closet. But with the box in the closet and the guitar in the corner of the living room, Sara Jayne was suddenly back in the house, taking up all the oxygen again. Laurel had an old familiar desire to run.

  She went to the bookshelves, pulled out a book at random, turned to the front, and stared at the names written in her father’s handwriting and her own. An image of the radiant girl who had been her mother and the young man looking down at her with love in his eyes floated across the page. She put the book down and went out.

  LAUREL HAD HER CHOICE OF SPOTS in the police station parking lot when she pulled in. The Sabbath was a light day for crime in Charles Valley, and the place was deserted except for the pickup with a GUNS, GUTS, AND GOD bumper sticker that belonged to Sherilynn. On top of all the other indignities she endured, Ed made his token female work on Sundays. Laurel parked next to the truck and went inside.

  Sherilynn was seated behind the counter in front. She was a good ol’ girl with all the heavy eye makeup and big hair normally associated with her type. She was definitely not what one would picture behind the wheel of a squad car—which didn’t dampen Sherilynn’s ambition for highway patrol in any way. Her daddy had been on the force for twenty-two years, his daddy had been there for twenty-six. Sherilynn was determined to carry on the family tradition.

  “Hey, Laurel,” she yodeled cheerfully. “What’re you doing here on the Lord’s Day? I’d’ve thought your butt would be in church, praying for your sins. I know that’s where mine should be.” She laughed heartily at her own wit and Laurel forced a smile. She and Sherilynn had never been pals. If she was honest about it, that had been Laurel’s choice. Throughout the years of her affair with Ed she’d clocked in a lot of hours at the station house, and she’d often seen the sympathy—and sisterhood—in Sherilynn’s Maybelline-fringed eyes. But she never picked up on it. Because she was too humiliated, she’d told herself. But she knew that wasn’t it. Sherilynn’s neck was a tad too red for that free-thinking egalitarian Laurel Selene McCready. Laurel might get high and sing in a bar, but she worked for the newspaper and had gone to college for almost a year. Her daddy might have been trailer trash, but her ma’s people, although bastards, were pillars of their community in the next county over.

  “You give that note to your Yankee boy?” Sherilynn asked casually, but her shrewd eyes were watching Laurel hard.

  Laurel nodded. “And the boy was grateful.”

  “Well, good. Always glad to help the course of true love.”

  “Actually, the Yankee took off for New York.”

  Sherilynn sighed. “Short but sweet—ain’t it the way with visitors? From what I heard he wasn’t bad looking. And he tipped real good over at the Lodge.” Through a vast network of family relationships and friendships, Sherilynn was on top of all major gossip in Charles Valley. Laurel wondered how many people she’d told about smuggling out the suicide note for Josh.

  “In case you’re wondering, I never mentioned you getting that note for him to anyone,” Sherilynn said, reading her mind.

  “Thanks.”

  “Honey, I’d be up the old creek without a paddle myself if Ed knew.”

  “Right.” Laurel took a beat, then started testing the waters. “Isn’t it something, Vashti coming back here to die after all these years?”

  Sherilynn shrugged. “It was still her home, I guess.”

  “I wonder how she got herself here. The way that note looked, she was real far gone at the end.”

  “That was all planned out. When Vashti got sick for the last time, she came east to Atlanta to stay with a woman: Catherine something or other, an Italian name. She’s a nurse, works in a hospice up there. And get this: She’s the niece of some roommate Dr. Maggie had a million years ago.”

  “How did it work? How did Vashti get here?”

  “She decided when she was—well, when it was time to . . . you know. . . .” Sherilynn paused delicately. Laurel nodded. “Then this nurse called the three Miss Margarets, and Miss Peggy and Dr. Maggie flew to Atlanta, rented a car, and drove Vashti back here. They took her to the cabin, and she did what she had to do. If you want, I can print out a copy of that report for you,” she added.

  “That’s okay.”

  “I just thought maybe you were asking all these questions ’cause you w
anted to try writing a story about this yourself instead of Hank. I always liked to read what you wrote in the school newspaper when we were in high school.”

  Slightly dazed by support from such an unexpected source, Laurel murmured, “Thank you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Hank would eat glass before he’d let me do any real writing. Well, you know how that is.”

  “Tell me about it,” Sherilynn said grimly.

  Feeling that a bond had been established, Laurel plunged ahead. “The three Miss Margarets have always been real close with Vashti’s family, haven’t they.”

  “That’s the way I always heard it.”

  “Wasn’t your granddaddy on the force back when”—it took a bit of work to get it out—”back when Grady killed my father?”

  Sherilynn threw her a startled look and nodded.

  “Did he ever say anything about it?”

  Sherilynn eyed her warily. “The case was pretty much open and shut.”

  “Pretty much?”

  “There were some questions. . . .”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “No police questions. Nothing official like that.”

  Laurel felt herself go very still. “But?”

  “It was just . . . my mama knew your . . . she knew John Merrick. They came up together. And a lotta people who did know him thought—” She stopped short. “Look, Laurel, are sure you want to talk about this?”

  “That’s why I asked. People thought what?”

  “It just didn’t seem right. What they said about how he died.”

  The stillness could become a problem. Laurel made herself move a little.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Sherilynn went on. “The way I heard it, John got into fights all the time. Him and Grady would beat the shit outa each other if they’d been drinking. And when it came to women, well. . . .” She paused awkwardly.

  Laurel managed a smile.

  Encouraged, Sherilynn plunged ahead. “Daddy used to say, ‘You get John Merrick partying hard enough, he’d fuck a snake if someone would hold it down.’ But he wouldn’t fight Grady for a woman. More like, they’d both, you know—”