Who Let That Killer in the House?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “You tell her, Judge,” joked a man behind us. Joe Riddley was no longer a county magistrate, but he had served thirty years before he retired the previous fall, so folks were still apt to give him the title. I’d been a magistrate myself for nearly nine months, but a lot of folks were still apt to call me Mac or Miss MacLaren.

  Another ball flew from the pitcher’s mound. “Swing, dammit!” yelled Brandi’s dad.

  Bethany swung.

  She hit it so hard, I thought her bat had cracked. The ball rose in a perfect arc above the diamond, eluded the left fielder’s mitt, and dropped with deceptive humility behind the back fence. Nobody made a sound. Even Bethany stood, mouth open, gaping at that fence.

  We all soared at that moment, but like the ball, we would soon fall back to earth.

  2

  Cricket broke the spell. “Run, dummy! Run!”

  Bethany took off with a spurt of dirt.

  She and Hollis pounded around the bases, across home plate, and into a jumping, squealing, hugging mass of teammates. I was jumping up and down so hard, I felt like I might fly. Even Garnet noticed something was going on. She stood and dutifully clapped, but when she saw Hollis break away from the mass and fling her arms around DeWayne Evans’s neck, and saw DeWayne squeeze Hollis back, Garnet sat down abruptly and opened her book. Buddy bent to speak in her ear, but she shook her head and kept reading.

  The rest of us yelled ourselves hoarse. Brandi’s mama jumped up and down so hard her whole front jiggled. Cricket was fascinated. Martha quickly gave him a box of juice to distract him. I wished I had a juice box for Joe Riddley.

  The crowd sat down again just in time to see the next batter—usually our best—hit a fly ball straight to the pitcher’s mitt. The Honeybees merged into an ecstatic swarm and somebody started a chant: “We’re county champs! We’re county champs!” The other team’s parents trickled down their half of the bleachers in a disappointed stream.

  Cricket swallowed the last of his juice and heaved an enormous sigh. “Poor Uncle Walker is sure gonna be sorry he missed this game.”

  Poor Uncle Walker—our younger son—had sold so much insurance last year, he’d won a month’s, all-expenses-paid vacation for his whole family at a Hawaiian resort. “Yeah,” Clarinda agreed, “he’s prob’ly cryin’ his eyes out right this minute.”

  Joe Riddley peered at me around Clarinda. “You sure look smug, Little Bit.”

  “You look pretty smug yourself.” We beamed at each other, happy as worms after rain.

  “Ronnie’s plumb slaphappy.” Clarinda peered down at her grandson, a brand-new accounting graduate from the University of Georgia and the third assistant coach. He was slapping every shoulder in sight.

  Ronnie had grown into a tall young man, good-looking in a skeletal kind of way, but to me he’d always be the thin five-year-old with huge, bewildered eyes who stood in my kitchen a week after his daddy shot his mama—Clarinda’s daughter, Janey. I had told Clarinda to bring Ronnie on down to work with her. Our house felt empty without children.

  Ridd, home from grad school that summer, had been enchanted by the child. Every morning he took Ronnie out on his tractor to the fields. By August, Ronnie was bragging, “Ridd’s taught me to drive as good as him!”

  When Bethany was born a year later, Clarinda kept her after Martha went back to work. To hear Ronnie tell it back then, he raised that baby. I’ll never forget the day he came in the store—skinny, eight years old, and the color of fudge icing—carrying a squirming, pink, two-year-old Bethany, and startled a tourist by assuring her, “This here’s my baby.”

  He had missed very few of her ball games through the years, and he was delighted when DeWayne asked him to help coach that season. As we watched, Bethany left the others and flung her arms around him.

  Hollis, meanwhile, was squinting toward the stands. When she found Buddy—who was still whooping and hollering—she raised one fist and pumped air. He raised both fists over his head and yelled down, “What-a-go, girl! What-a-go!”

  Nobody would have guessed to look at them that Hollis and Buddy were related. Her eyes were bright blue, his hazel. Her lively copper hair was flecked with gold, green, and purple, his was walnut brown. Hollis’s body was sturdy, square, and strong; Buddy had the lean physique of an avid tennis player. As he nimbly started down the stands toward the field, I saw a lot of single women and a few married ones giving him the eye. At thirty, Buddy was one of Hopemore’s most eligible bachelors—if he’d had time to date. Martha must have been thinking the same thing, because she said indulgently, “Lots of women are gonna be glad when Hollis and Garnet are grown and Buddy gets free time again.”

  For six years—ever since Fred Stanton had died and left Buddy’s sister a young widow—Buddy had helped her raise the two girls. She had used Fred’s life-insurance money to open a small store, and because she couldn’t get away in the afternoons and Buddy was a self-employed CPA, he was the one who left his office to drive the girls to after-school activities. I couldn’t remember him ever missing one of Garnet’s piano recitals or Hollis’s games.

  He was certainly a lot more interested in this particular game than her sister was. The whole time he’d been jumping up and down and hollering, Garnet had kept on reading.

  Down on the field, DeWayne, Ridd, and Ronnie were pounding each other’s backs like kids. Although Ridd was forty, DeWayne twenty-eight, and Ronnie scarcely twenty-two, the three of them were great friends. They often played a round of golf or drove down to Dublin for a NASCAR race. Ridd, who taught math at the high school, had led the campaign for DeWayne to coach the team after our former (and spectacularly unvictorious) coach retired. Ronnie, who used to pitch for Hopemore High, seconded his choice. In DeWayne’s favor, at a previous school he had coached a high-school fast-pitch team to state finals. But Coach Evans was black and single while the Honeybees were young, female, and predominantly white. We’re making progress in Middle Georgia, but we still have a ways to go.

  “Let’s go join the party,” Joe Riddley told Cricket. He swung him onto his shoulders and headed for the field. I watched anxiously to be sure they got there safely. Joe Riddley had been shot in the head ten months before1 and hadn’t been walking without a cane very long. He was getting more confident in his abilities every day, but it was taking me a little longer to accept that he was almost back to normal.

  Cricket wasn’t worried. He snatched his granddaddy’s cap from his head and waved it, with no fear of falling whatsoever.

  Brandi’s daddy and brothers also headed to the field, leaving her mother surrounded by a mess of candy wrappers and soft-drink cans. She said to Martha, “That child sure looks like you.” He did. Both were plump, with round faces, soft brown hair, and light brown eyes.

  Martha grinned. “It’s only fair, considering how much Bethany looks like her daddy. Mac and Clarinda, do you all know Shana Wethers, Brandi’s mother?”

  We all extended sticky palms. I said, “Weren’t those girls terrific?”

  “They sure were. I nearly had a heart attack while Brandi was running her bases.” I couldn’t place her accent, but it wasn’t Southern.

  While Martha and Shana rehashed some of the plays, Clarinda and I gathered up our little bit of litter. Down on the field, Yasheika joined the other coaches. Ronnie shifted so he was around the circle from her. Those two were as tall and as slim as two swords and about as friendly. Seemed like they couldn’t be on the same patch of earth without clashing. Bethany said they got along fine on the ball field, but I suspected that was because both respected DeWayne. Any time they weren’t coaching, they were saying mean and hateful things to each other. Clarinda muttered so only I could hear, “That girl may know softball, but she don’t know men from nothin’. Men need time alone together, without some baby sister all the time hangin’ round.” “She’s not just a baby sister, she’s a coach,” I reminded her.

  “Whatever she is, Ronnie can’t stand her. Says she’s all the time pushing hersel
f in where she’s not wanted.” She bent and picked up the small cooler she’d brought. “Well, I gotta be gettin’ home. We got a dinner after church tomorrow, and I still have to do my cooking.” She made her way down the bleachers and stopped by the fence to call to Ridd and Bethany.

  I thought fondly that nobody could see those two and Joe Riddley without knowing they were related. They had the same long legs, lanky frame, and way of walking like their joints were connected by rubber bands. They even had the same tinge of cinnamon under the skin from Joe Riddley’s Cherokee grandmother. The primary difference between them was hair. Joe Riddley’s was coarse, almost black, and straight. Bethany’s was softer and a slightly lighter brown, while Ridd, like my daddy, had lost most of his before he was thirty.

  I saw another patch of scalp down there, so when Martha stopped talking to Shana and began to gather up her stuff, I asked softly, “Is Buddy losing his hair?”

  Martha gave a gurgle of laughter. “Hollis says he is. She claims he mousses it, to make it look fuller.”

  “She ought to be ashamed to tell other people. Not many handsome bachelor uncles spend afternoons and weekends carting nieces around.”

  “And until she started driving, that niece needed a lot of carting.” I’d heard that criticism from Martha before. She and Ridd didn’t permit Bethany more than two activities a semester, but Hollis played several sports, sang in both the school chorus and the church youth choir, and was in the school drama group. “She’s teaching swimming and life-guarding at the city pool and taking voice lessons this summer.” Martha made voice lessons sound like the very last straw.

  “It’s something to do besides hang around the house,” I pointed out. “That big old place could seem real empty with Sara Meg at work and Garnet’s nose always in a book.” Sara Meg and the girls lived in the house Sara Meg and Buddy had grown up in, an enormous Victorian.

  Poor Sara Meg. That house and its furniture were about all she had from her ancestors, although the Tanners had been right prosperous for several generations. Josiah Tanner founded a general store in 1845 that evolved into Tanners’ Clothing. For more than a century, three generations of Tanners dressed Hope County and places beyond. Unfortunately, Sara Meg’s daddy, Walter, inherited neither his daddy’s business sense nor his excellent taste in clothing. Once the interstate was built, folks preferred to drive to Augusta to shop. Walter went bankrupt the year before he died and would have lost the house, too, if his lawyer hadn’t urged him earlier to put it in the children’s names. Walter, an impractical, self-centered man, decided to give it to Sara Meg, with the stipulation that he could live there all his life and she’d take care of him. To his son he left “the rest of my estate”—which turned out to be nothing.

  After Walter died, Sara Meg came home from college and went to work at a construction company to support herself and eight-year-old Buddy. When she met Fred and they fell in love, he treated Buddy like his own kid brother. After they married, he insisted they have the house appraised and pay a sum each month into the bank to buy what he and Sara Meg both called “Buddy’s half of the house.” That fairness was what put Buddy through college—including the year he wasted in architecture before he decided to become a CPA. Now, since Fred’s death, Hollis was real blunt about the fact that, “If it weren’t for Uncle Buddy, we couldn’t belong to the country club, Garnet couldn’t take piano, and I couldn’t play sports.”

  Down on the field, Buddy grabbed Hollis in a bear hug and swung her around and around.

  Brandi’s mother propped her fists on her hips. “That young man is far too old for Hollis. What are her parents thinking? They are never around.”

  I spoke sharper than I intended, because I was a tad annoyed at how she jumped to conclusions without getting the facts. “That’s her uncle Buddy. Her mother can’t afford to leave work on Saturdays.”

  “That’s the busiest day of the week at Children’s World,” Martha added.

  Shana shaded her eyes against the sun. “Is that where she works? I haven’t been in. We just moved here in March, from Chicago.”

  Maybe she didn’t mean to sound like the move hadn’t been her idea and she thought Hopemore had tacky little stores, but I felt another spurt of indignation. Granted, Hopemore isn’t as big as Chicago—we have about thirteen thousand people in what our Chamber of Commerce calls “Greater Hopemore.” But we’ve got some fine people here with reason to be proud of their family businesses. Sara Meg Stanton was one of them. She started that store with nothing but Fred’s life-insurance money and was making a go of it by sheer hard work. “She owns the business,” I informed Shana, “and it’s a great store.”

  Martha picked up a candy wrapper Cricket had dropped. “Southern Living said last year that Sara Meg has one of the best collections of hand-painted children’s furniture and smocked children’s clothing in the South. She paints the furniture and smocks the clothes herself.”

  “She’s a great painter,” I bragged. “She studied three years at the Savannah College of Art and Design.”

  Shana primped up her mouth. “That’s nice, but children need their parents around. She could at least shut down for her daughter’s games—or hire more help.” She bent to retrieve a shirt one of her boys had left under the seat and started stuffing it into a canvas carryall.

  I opened my mouth to tell her how hard it is to get and pay good help in a store with a small profit margin, but Martha touched my arm in warning. As an emergency-room nurse, she’s had a lot of training in anger management and keeping things calm. “Sara Meg would love to be here,” she assured Shana, “but she can’t afford to close the shop or hire help. There’s a rumor that a big superstore is going to be built just outside of town, and—”

  “Those old boll weevils!” I muttered to myself.

  Shana stopped stuffing the shirt into her carryall. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Boll weevils are bugs that suck the heart out of cotton and leave it dead. They plagued the South years ago. Now, superstores are doing the same thing to little towns across the country.”

  She propped one hand on her hip, her face as pink as her shirt. “My husband was sent here to build that store. It will eventually provide a hundred jobs in Hope County.”

  My mama didn’t raise me to be rude to strangers, but this woman had pushed my button once too often. “Not at the management level, it won’t. It may employ a lot of people at minimum wage or a little above, but business owners and managers will lose their jobs, local stores will go under, and all the profits will leave the county. Stockholders in California and Michigan may smile, but folks in Hopemore won’t. Our whole downtown will dry up into antique stores, thrift shops, and cell-phone offices.”

  “It’s the wave of the future, sweetie. Get used to it.” Shana hefted her cooler and smacked it down on the bleacher like she’d rather whack me on the head.

  I felt like she already had. For weeks we’d been hearing a rumor about the superstore, but nobody had confirmed it until now. Martha’s worried eyes met mine. A superstore would not only put Sara Meg out of business, it would hurt the nursery side of Yarbrough’s. We could offer better-quality plants and advice, but we could never match their prices. Joe Riddley and I had no mortgage and both our kids were grown and married, so we could support ourselves selling fertilizer, seed, and animal feed, but we’d have to let people go. The thought made me ill.

  Maybe Shana noticed how quiet we’d gotten, because she offered us a sop. “The new store won’t be carrying hand-painted furniture and hand-smocked dresses.” She wadded candy wrappers and set them beside ten drink cans and three water bottles on the bleacher.

  I heaved a sigh from my toes. “Sara Meg can’t support two girls and put them through college on painted furniture and smocking. Most of her business is school clothes, birthday party presents, and toys.” My throat clogged with tears. “She’ll never survive.”

  The woman shrugged—which she shouldn’t do, dressed that way—and s
aid tartly, “My mother used to say God shows how much He loves us by giving us burdens to make us stronger.”

  That raised even Martha’s hackles. “Then Sara Meg ought to be the strongest woman in Georgia. Her mother died when she was fourteen and her brother two. She raised him until she went to art school. Her senior year there, their daddy died leaving them without a penny. She quit school without complaint and came home to work in order support herself and Buddy.”

  “Well, she’s done all right for herself. She lives in one of the biggest houses in town. I asked about it when we were looking for a place—it would have been perfect for us. But the Realtor said she wouldn’t consider selling.”

  “Of course not!” I wanted to shake her until her eyeballs rolled. “Sara Meg’s great-great-granddaddy built that house, and besides, it’s paid for.”

  “She could sell it for a bundle and buy a smaller place. Then she could hire help and come to her daughter’s games. Support is so important to a child at this age. And where’s Hollis’s father? He’s never around.” The woman’s blue eyes were wide and hot, framed by sticky lashes. If she didn’t already know her mascara had run down one cheek, I wasn’t going to tell her.

  “Hollis’s daddy is dead,” I snapped.

  “He was a fireman,” Martha explained, “and got killed in a fire. Her uncle Buddy’s been the only daddy Hollis has had for the last six years.”

  At least Shana had the grace to look ashamed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Well, I gotta be going.” As she picked up her cooler to leave, she suggested, “Maybe Ms. Stanton can get a job in the new store.” She clomped down the bleachers, leaving her trash.

  When she was out of earshot, I told Martha, “She’s got a mighty peculiar notion of God.”

  Martha laughed, sat down, and stretched her short legs onto the bench Shana had left. “As if God needs to bring trouble on us, the way we’re so willing to bring it on ourselves. And what we don’t bring on ourselves, other folks are generally happy to provide.”