On the porch, Peggy finally broke the silence. “That went well,” she said dryly.
“You shouldn’t have said that about her mother and father, Li’l Bit,” said Maggie.
“Her father was a coward and a bully. It’s not our fault her mother fell apart. Every one of us tried to help.”
Peggy poured the last drop out of her thermos. “How hard did we really try? I hate to say it, but I was glad when she turned me down. I just wanted her to go away.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Li’l Bit.
“No, it’s not,” said Maggie, “and we all know it.” She started to get up, wobbling a little from so many hours of sitting still. Peggy jumped up to help and found she had to steady herself. It wasn’t just the effects of Gentleman Jack; she was stiff too. Laurel had called them old. She wasn’t sure she was ready for that.
“What do you think she’ll do?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “I can’t begin to imagine what she’s thinking.” She smiled sadly. “I wonder if that girl knows how vulnerable we are now.”
As she said it, Peggy felt herself shiver a little and she saw Li’l Bit do the same.
“I’ll give you a lift home, Maggie,” she said. And for once Maggie just nodded. There were no arguments about walking home.
Chapter Twenty-six
LI’L BIT WATCHED PEGGY AND MAGGIE go down the driveway until Peggy’s taillights disappeared. Then she picked up the flashlight she kept by the front door for emergencies and walked around to the side of the house to the garden off her bedroom. In the middle of the high hedge that protected the bedroom from the side road to Lottie’s cabin was an empty space, a break in the thick boxwood that allowed an entrance into the garden from the outside. At least, that was what it looked like.
Li’l Bit bent as low as she could over the empty space in the hedge and scraped away the pine needles that were mounded at the base of the bushes. It took several minutes and she finally had to get down on her knees, but she found what she was looking for buried under years of mulch and dirt: the remains of two old boxwood stumps.
“Still there,” she said out loud.
She went into the garden and sat on the stone bench she’d recently purchased from a catalog that did medieval replicas. This night felt as endless as that night so long ago.
AFTER PEGGY LEFT WITH THE GUN, Maggie took Lottie and Vashti to Atlanta. Li’l Bit and Nella told their story to the police, who left with the body of the dead man. After that there was nothing left for Li’l Bit to do except pray to a God in whom she did not believe that they would get away with it. One thing they were all clear on: No one else must know. No family or friends. Before she left for Atlanta, Maggie, who seemed to have developed a brilliant criminal side, had insisted that everyone promise. Li’l Bit, Nella, Lottie, and Peggy had all agreed.
Nella swore she would be all right alone, and Li’l Bit went home to try to get some sleep. But every time she started to drift off, the memory of standing in front of the sheriff and telling her pack of lies pulled her back. Eventually she went into the living room, took A Tale of Two Cities down from the shelf, and read until she dozed off sitting upright in her chair. That was where Walter found her when he came over early the next morning.
“Heard there was a problem at old Lottie’s cabin last night,” he said. “You all right?” Anticipation of this moment had been one of the many things that had kept her awake. She had to lie to Walter, because she had promised the others. And because she didn’t know if she could trust him.
She looked at him standing in front of her, a worried frown on his sun-dark face. She worked with him and made love to him and after all the years she still couldn’t believe how lucky she was to have found him. He made her feel beautiful. She knew no one else would ever do that again.
But there were things she had never discussed with him because he was illiterate and poor and she had her own prejudices about the class he came from and she didn’t want to find out if she was right. Now she had no way of knowing how he would react if she told him what she’d done. Plus, she’d given her word. So she told him the lie she had told the police. After she finished, he gave her a strange look.
“You told the sheriff you were in the bedroom when you saw Merrick’s car drive by the house?” he asked.
“Yes, I was going to get ready for bed—”
He pulled her to her feet. “Has anyone from the sheriff’s office been back down that road since you said that?”
“I don’t think so. No one has come to the house.”
“We’ll have to take a chance,” he said, more to himself than to her.
“Walter, I don’t—” but she stopped because he was already heading out the door.
“Get into your car and park it crossways at the end of the road. Flood the engine or run it partway into the ditch on the side so you get the wheels stuck, do whatever you have to, but don’t let anyone drive up that road until I tell you.” He was racing to his truck. He got out an ax and headed for the hedge. And to her horror, she understood. There was no way she could have seen John’s car if she had been in her bedroom, because long ago it had seemed romantic to close in the garden outside her window by letting the boxwood grow high as a man’s shoulder. Too high to see a passing car on the other side of it.
“Go now, Margaret,” he said. And as she drove off she could hear the sound of an ax cutting wood. Seconds later the sound was drowned in music from the kitchen radio.
Mercifully, no one came to the house. When Walter finally brought her back to see the hedge, there was a break in the middle of it where he had cut down two bushes. “I couldn’t prune the boxwood back enough so you could have seen over them. The insides of the bushes would be too woody; any gardener would know you just did it,” he said. She nodded mutely. “This way you could have seen the car through the break. It looks like it’s an entrance to the garden. And with the pine-needle mulch I spread over the stumps, only someone who’s looking for them will find them.” She nodded again. The enormity of her near miss was just starting to hit her.
Walter was staring at her. He was waiting for her to tell him why she had suddenly started lying to the authorities. He wanted the truth. He had earned it; he had just put himself on the line for her. She wanted to tell him.
But images flashed in her mind. She saw the shame and agony on Nella’s face as she sat in front of the police and choked out the story of sleeping with two men while her husband was still alive. She saw Peggy take the hunting rifle after it had been wiped off and put it on the front seat of her car so she could take it home and betray her husband. She saw Lottie looking like she had just gotten a reprieve from a life sentence. She heard Maggie making them promise to keep the secret. And she saw Vashti’s face as they bundled her into the car and sent her away.
“Thank you,” she said to Walter.
It was like she’d slapped him. For a moment he was hurt and just looked at her. Then the anger started. He walked out without a word.
For the second time in her life she lost a man she loved. But Walter did it fast, in one night. Not like her father, slowly withdrawing. She never could decide which way was better.
But it took her a while to accept. At first she waited for him. She went back out to her gardens and worked and listened for the sound of his truck pulling up next to her house. But he never came. Her gardens were brown, dying in the cold of late fall. The chores she had to do, the mulching and the pruning, would not give her any rewards until spring. The gaping hole in the hedge outside her bedroom window was a constant reminder of everything she wanted to forget. She closed her little door to the garden and put a curtain over the glass so she couldn’t see it.
Finally she admitted that Walter was gone. She got up one morning, dressed herself, and started out. Then she stopped, turned around, and went back to her bedroom. She stayed there all day, fully dressed, lying on her bed in the dark.
She wasn’t sure how many days
she did that. Millie came and went, leaving sandwich fixings on plates and in covered bowls. After she was gone, in the middle of the night, Li’l Bit got out of her bed and ate the food out of the containers in the kitchen by the light from the refrigerator.
Then one morning she was awakened by the sound of curtains being yanked back. Her bed covers were pulled off.
“Get up, or I’ll throw you on the floor!” a voice said. She opened her eyes to see Peggy leaning over her. “If I can get myself out of bed every morning and face another goddamn day, so can you!”
“You’ve been drinking,” Li’l Bit said.
“Yes,” said Peggy, “and I’m gonna keep on. Because it gets the makeup on my face and the clothes on my body and it gets me through breakfast, where I sit and watch Dalt want to die and know I caused it.” She looked years older than she had a few short weeks ago. “I don’t care what it takes to get you out of this damn bed and into some clean clothes. If you think a drink will help, just name your poison and I’ll bring you a bottle. But you don’t get to give up, damn it; you don’t!”
So Li’l Bit got out of bed and got dressed in her work clothes and gave Peggy a drink while she had her coffee. But when she had to go out to the garden, she hesitated. Until Peggy walked out ahead of her.
Peggy stayed all morning, watching while she cut back her roses. At noon they had lunch. Not in the kitchen, on the porch.
Three weeks went by. The sheriff never did send anyone to check out her hedge. Then Grady pled guilty, because Dalt threatened to stop paying for his lawyers if he kept on saying he was innocent. Dalt had finally given up on him, and without his father Grady’s resistance quickly collapsed. So Grady went to prison, even though right up to the day they took him away he was still telling his daddy he was innocent. And because there was no trial, no one had to lie in court. Nella left town to be with Vashti in Atlanta, and Lottie came back to Charles Valley alone. Nella and Vashti would not be coming home again. But the women had gotten away with their lie. They had won.
Li’l Bit saw Walter in the town every once in a while, although he knew her schedule and usually managed to avoid her. Once she saw him at the post office, and she had to keep herself from running to tell him about the new rose cuttings she’d mossed off and the new fruit trees she’d put in. She wanted to tell him how long it had taken her to go into the gardens again. And she wanted to tell him how the perfume from her gardenia still came into her room at night. Most of all she wanted to say she missed him. But she still couldn’t tell him why she had lied. So she let him go by without stopping him. And eventually she got used to passing by without speaking when she saw him. And she got used to being alone again.
For a while Peggy and Maggie tried to keep her company when she worked in her gardens. But Maggie had to work in the clinic and Peggy hated being in the sun, so that didn’t last very long. They took to staying later in the afternoons on the porch, the way they had before Walter started spending the nights with her. She never told them why he stopped coming, although she told them about the near escape with the boxwood hedge. They were smart, so she was pretty sure they put two and two together.
Chapter Twenty-seven
PEGGY MOVED WITH HER DOG PACK into the living room, sat on the couch, and picked up the TV remote control. But the late-night offerings on the tube couldn’t compete with her memories.
PEGGY WAS THE ONE WHO CALLED DALTON and told him about John Merrick. But she waited just long enough so that it was too late for him to help Grady. By the time he was back, the police knew about the gun in Dalton’s case. She braced herself for arguments and yelling, but he just bowed his head and she watched the energy drain out of him. Or maybe it was his spirit.
“Why?” he asked no one in particular. “Why would he do this?”
She couldn’t talk. He didn’t seem to notice.
“It was all for that woman? He said it was about the job. He says he never even went near her.”
“He’s lied before,” she managed.
“He says you’re lying.”
From somewhere she got the strength to look into his eyes. “Which one of us do you believe?” she asked him.
In the end, he believed her.
The high-priced Atlanta legal team Dalton hired said there was nothing for Grady to do but plead guilty. The local good ol’ boy Dalt hired to cover their bases on the home front agreed. Although the testimony from Li’l Bit and Maggie was damaging, they might have had a hope of shaking it. But the gun was too much to fight. So Dalt issued his ultimatum. And Grady capitulated. Dalton went by himself and sat in the court to listen while his son was sentenced and taken away.
When he came back home, Peggy was waiting for him.
“I’ll leave, if you want me to,” she said
He poured himself a drink. “No, I don’t want you to go,” he said. “You’re all I have now.” She had a drink with him, and he didn’t say a word about it. It was the first time she drank before noon.
He quit working and turned over the running of the resort and the Gardens to the trust. He stopped walking the grounds of his home and never even noticed when the gardeners let several of his favorite pink tea roses die. He stayed up late after she had gone to bed and fell asleep watching television. Eventually, he took to sleeping in the guest bedroom down the hall. They stopped entertaining, leaving that to the energetic young man from Vanderbilt who was hired to run the resort in his place. Dalton dropped all his political interests. Except for Peggy’s daily two hours on Li’l Bit’s porch, neither of them went out much.
They lived together in a silence that screamed through the house, bouncing off walls and getting caught in the corners, and the only thing that ever seemed to quiet it was the tinkle of ice in glasses. They lived like that and waited for something to deliver them.
Then Dalton had his first heart attack. In a way it was a gift. Now they had an excuse for the silence. Peggy took over his physical therapy and his diet, devoting herself to him completely. And if he never thanked her, at least he leaned on her arm when they went on their daily walk. And if she missed the vital man who had brought her little presents for no reason except she was so cute, she kept it to herself. Because by then she understood the bargain she had made. And she understood how utterly useless it was to look back.
The only time Dalton left Charles Valley was to go visit Grady in prison. A driver from the Lodge picked him up and returned him. He never suggested that Peggy might want to go with him.
After one of those trips he brought home a stray dog his driver hadn’t been able to miss when she ran out into the road. Her leg was broken and her mange was so bad the vet said it would be a kindness to put her down. But she was about to give birth to a litter, so Dalt kept her alive. When the pups were born, the mother was too sick to nurse. Peggy and Dalton fed them every three hours, wrapping their tiny bodies in blankets and resting them on their chests so the little guys could feel their hearts beat. Three pups and the mother died, but two survived. And when the vet said they were out of danger, Dalton looked genuinely happy for a moment.
The puppies had the run of the house. The screaming silence ended. And every once in a while, as they scrambled and barked around him, Peggy could hear Dalton laughing. She let herself hope that things would get better.
Then the call came from prison that Grady had been killed. And there was the funeral, where she didn’t even try to stop Dalt from drinking; she just did her best to keep up with him. The puppies were banished to the yard and the house was still again. And she and Dalton went back to waiting.
They waited for one more year. Dalt’s second heart attack was a massive coronary that killed him instantly. Li’l Bit and Maggie planned the funeral she could never remember, and Li’l Bit stayed with her for a week afterward. The night before Li’l Bit left to go home, she came into Peggy’s room with the two young dogs on leashes.
“They’ve been neglected,” she said, as the dogs shied and tried to run. “It’ll ta
ke some doing to make them civilized. But you have to find something to take care of. It’s the only way.”
That night Peggy started working with the dogs. Dalt had called them Hunt and Whitey. She renamed them Ricky and Lucy.
Chapter Twenty-eight
SOMEHOW IN THE PROCESS of telling Laurel the story they’d lost the core of it, Maggie thought, as she settled into her big wingback chair. They hadn’t made Laurel understand. And while Maggie wasn’t about to apologize any more than Li’l Bit was, she did want to be understood. She wanted Laurel to realize the cost.
Poor proud Li’l Bit had lost the man who had made her happy for many years. Peggy had watched Dalton die by degrees and lived with the guilt of knowing she had helped cause it.
And what had she lost? Maggie asked herself. Vashti, of course. But then, they’d all lost the child for a long time. No, what Maggie had lost was an innocence about herself. She had never known she could be ruthless.
SHE HAD TAKEN Vashti and Lottie to Catherine in Atlanta. They had to keep the child away from Charles Valley, for her sake and theirs. So Vashti and Lottie stayed with Catherine until Grady pled guilty and Nella could leave Charles Valley. They decided Vashti would finish out her school year in a private academy in Atlanta. After that, they were going to send her north to a prep school in New England. Given her test scores and grades and all the new suddenly fashionable outreach programs for southern black students, it seemed like a pretty sure thing that she would get in somewhere. They all agreed the child had to have a fresh start.
It wasn’t that they were unaware that what they were doing might be bad for Vashti emotionally. They were worried about that. The little girl had been through a major trauma, and to take her away from everything she knew at such a time was not the best way to help her heal. But it was too dangerous to let her stay at home. So they sent her off and held their breath.
The Three Miss Margarets Page 27
