Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?: A Thoroughly Southern Mystery

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “You can always contest a will. Whether she won or not would depend on what she could prove.” I didn’t think Edie had been incompetent to handle her affairs. Overwrought and stressed out, but not incompetent. “If Edie was revising her will this week, though, it’s unlikely she got it signed before she died. And if Valerie and Frank were the beneficiaries, they’d be foolish to kill her before she signed it. I’d advise Genna to stop making suggestions like that. It could backfire. After all, if a new will wasn’t signed yet, the person with the best motive would be Genna.”

  Cindy lifted one hand and pressed her lips. “Maybe that’s why the police came back the last time. Adney hadn’t been home fifteen minutes when I left, but the police were pulling in again as I drove away. Do you reckon they know something about the will already?”

  “I doubt it. They probably only wanted to talk to him.”

  “It’s all so awful!” Cindy laid her head back against the wing chair and closed her eyes. “I keep thinking about poor Edie, dying out there all alone, and I can’t stand it. Thanks for being here. I couldn’t bear to face the kids without this breather.”

  “Come anytime.” Why had it taken me fourteen years to learn to appreciate this woman?

  She stood. “I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put up wet.” We both grinned at that old saw. Then she winced. “A machete. I cannot bear to think about it, and I can’t seem to think about anything else. They have to find out who did this, or nobody will feel safe in this town.”

  She paused at the door. “Will you stop by Genna’s sometime tonight?”

  “I hadn’t planned to. I scarcely know them, except as friends of yours.”

  “I wish you would, if you can bear it. Nobody else is going over there. They don’t have many friends.”

  I could take care of that. As soon as Cindy left, I called a member of our church who was active in several clubs Genna belonged to and also coordinator of a group in the church that takes meals to families in case of sickness or death. I hung up with the comforting knowledge that Genna and Adney would have enough food-bearing visitors to know the community cared.

  When I left work for the day, I stopped at Bi-Lo for some fruit, swung by the house for a pretty basket, and tied a jaunty red bow on its handle. Armed with a condolence gift, I headed to High Mortgage Lane.

  The subdivision had been built six years before, one of the clones springing up all over America. Genna and Adney’s house was gray stucco with a high arched window in front and steep gables that looked like a roofer’s nightmare. Their lawn, I was glad to see, was thick, green, and weed-free. Yarbrough’s lawn service keeps a pretty yard, if I do say so myself.

  I noticed, however, that Genna had set two terra-cotta pots of pansies in the shade when I had specifically told her they needed sun, and she’d planted camellias right in front of her low dining room windows when I’d warned her they would grow ten feet tall. However, they probably wouldn’t live long enough to obscure her view. The short hours of December sun wouldn’t harm them, but by August the western sun would burn them up. Why don’t people find out how big a bush will get before they plant it, and plant it where it gets the proper light?

  On the other hand, I could hear Joe Riddley reminding me, “Replacing bushes puts bread on your table, Little Bit. Let them plant where they want to.”

  I tried the brass knocker with “Harrison” engraved on it, but nobody came. Shivering in the wind, I waited a decent interval, then punched the doorbell. It rang a full Westminster chime, so they had to know somebody was there. By the time I heard feet running down the stairs, I was wishing I’d brought hot coffee instead of heavy fruit.

  When Adney opened the door, I got a whiff of aftershave and saw that his hair was damp and he was barefoot. I hoped I hadn’t dragged him out of the shower. Poor thing, his eyes were red and bloodshot, like he’d cried all the way home, and he had bags under them as big as kiwis.

  “Genna’s dressing.” He leaned against the doorjamb and made no move to invite me in, in spite of the cold wind. “Shep Faxon’s coming over in a few minutes to talk. We’d have gotten dressed sooner, but you wouldn’t believe the string of nosy people we’ve had by here in the past hour, bringing food like we were invalids or something.” He caught sight of my basket and had the grace to turn pink.

  “Here’s one more,” I joked, thrusting it at him. “You can eat this or give it away.”

  “Oh, no, we like fruit. That’s great. I didn’t mean—” He set it inside the front door.

  I cut short his misery. “Folks are just trying to say how sorry we are about all this.”

  He ran one palm over his hair and down the back of his neck. “I know, and I do appreciate it, really. It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? I keep thinking I’m having a nightmare. Edie—” His voice broke. He gave a little cough and said, “Edie was a special lady. I loved her very much.” His mouth creased in the familiar warm grin, but the bloodshot eyes above it did not smile. “That may sound corny, but I don’t have any family except Olive, and since Genna and I moved here, I think I’d gotten closer to Edie than Genna had.” He exhaled a huge sigh. “I keep thinking that maybe if I’d been in town, or if we’d persuaded her to move into a safer place—”

  “Don’t beat up on yourself,” I warned him. “You can’t bring her back that way, and you’ll only feel worse.”

  He nodded. “I know.” He reached out and gave me a bear hug. “Thanks for coming.”

  I hugged him back, then stepped away. “I won’t keep you. I just wanted to say how sorry Joe Riddley and I both are.”

  “You folks are great.” He smoothed his hair back again. “I don’t know what Genna would have done without Cindy.” He shook his head. “I know I’m repeating myself, but it’s unbelievable, isn’t it? One week you’re having Thanksgiving dinner together, and the next—” He shook his head.

  “I’m sure the police will soon find out who did it.”

  Adney went from sorrowful to sarcastic in one second flat. “They think they already have. They think it was Genna. Or me. Or both of us taking turns, maybe. Aside from the fact that I loved Edie, they keep forgetting I was in a meeting in Birmingham—six hours away—last night until eight, and got a wake-up call at eight this morning. And I have to log in the odometer reading every time I get in or out of my car, so I can get reimbursed. Genna—” He gave a short laugh. “Anybody who knows Genna knows she couldn’t do something like that. Even if she could or would, she wouldn’t do it at night. She’s scared of her own shadow after dark. She actually locks herself in our bedroom when I’m gone, if she’s not staying over—” He broke off, pinched his nose, and took a deep breath through his mouth. “I’m sorry, Mac. I still can’t believe Edie’s gone.” He squeezed his eyes shut to hold back the tears, but a couple escaped to spill over onto his cheeks. “I hope they fry whoever did this!”

  “They have to find them first,” I reminded him.

  15

  I spent Friday alone in my office, catching up on work I had neglected lately and refusing to let myself dwell on Edie’s death. The only people I talked to all day were an Augusta television station and the weekly Hopemore Statesman, both wanting to interview me about finding the body. I turned them down. Joe Riddley said he didn’t feel like seafood that night, and I was glad not to have to talk to people at the club about Edie. I scrambled some eggs, and we watched television, then we went to bed early.

  I felt better when I woke Saturday. I was still brokenhearted, but I felt like I could get up and go on. Joe Riddley had men’s cleanup morning at the church, getting ready for the Christmas decorating committee, so I decided to walk to the store.

  With the general capriciousness of Georgia weather, this was a gorgeous day, though still cold. You’d never have known Thursday was bitter, windy, and gray. Today’s sky was blue, with faint wisps of clouds over to the west. Bundled in my coat and a corduroy suit, I enjoyed the cold air on my face and took deep breaths when I caught a whiff of
somebody burning leaves—although I hoped they were outside the city limits, or I could be seeing them soon in front of my bench. A sudden breeze picked up a small pile of leaves at my feet and spun a miniature tornado down the sidewalk ahead of me. The air seemed alive with sound—the yips of two puppies on a porch playing I-dare-you-to-jump, music somebody was sharing from a car radio, and the buzz of chain saws as men in a cherry picker trimmed trees down the block. As I waved at two old codgers in Yarbrough caps leaning against their pickups, my eyes blurred. I’d remembered that Edie ought to be alive to enjoy all this. Josiah, too. Shut up in that airless room, he was as dead as she to this gorgeous world. I sent up a prayer for each of them as I walked, aware of the sheer blessedness of being able to feel a cold wind on my cheeks and hear birdsong in the treetops. It was the same feeling I get after visiting somebody in jail.

  At the office, my day didn’t start going downhill until just before ten, when Sheriff Gibbons knocked and stuck his head in. “I need to talk to you.” He tramped in like he was carrying thirty pounds of extra lead in his britches, sank into my wing chair, crossed one ankle over the other leg, and sat slapping his hat against his boot.

  “Put down that hat,” I ordered. “You’re driving me crazier than I already am.”

  He set it on the floor by his chair. After that, conversation came to an unprecedented halt. Bailey Gibbons and I have known each other since we were playground kids. Never had we run out of things to say. Today, though, he peered around the office and finally asked, “Joe Riddley down at the nursery?”

  “Supposed to be over at the church for the men’s workday. Of course, he could be gallivanting with some floozy.”

  Even that didn’t get a smile. He was slouched so deep in my chair, I figured I might have to call for a hydraulic jack to extract him. That same jack might be needed to get words out of him.

  “Is something wrong? Something more than Edie’s murder, I mean.”

  He chewed his lower lip. “Clarinda’s a cousin of Daisy Joyner, right?” He barely gave me time to nod. “In the next week or so, I may need a preliminary hearing for Henry’s arrest.”

  I held up both hands in protest. “I can’t hold that hearing. Clarinda would never forgive me. You’ll have to ask one of the other magistrates.”

  He nodded. “I figured that, but thought you ought to know.”

  “Know what?” Neither of us had noticed Clarinda sticking her head in the office door. I’d failed to teach her to knock for nearly forty years, so it wasn’t worth mentioning now.

  She came in shedding layers: two cardigans under her jacket and a scarf over her head. As soon as the weather dips below forty, Clarinda bundles up like we live in the Yukon. Once it tops eighty, she complains she’s “gonna die of heat prostration.” I keep threatening to fly a flag on days she’s satisfied with the temperature, to let the weather angels know.

  “It’s tryin’ to rain out there.” She nodded toward the window.

  All I saw were a few white clouds. “It’s a nice day,” I disagreed.

  “You wait,” she predicted. “It’s gonna come down bucketfuls. I hope you brought your umbrella from the car when you walked over. You’ll need it, if you plan on goin’ out for dinner.”

  Sheriff Gibbons picked up his hat and offered her his chair. “I was just fixing to leave.”

  She shook her head. “No, you sit back down. I’ll take this chair, here.” In Joe Riddley’s big leather chair, her feet dangled several inches off the floor.

  “Know what?” she repeated to the sheriff. “What does she need to know?”

  She annoyed me so much, butting in like that, that I decided to tell her. “Know that he may have to arrest Henry for Edie’s murder. If his machete turns out to be the murder weapon—”

  “Pshaw.” She interrupted with a snort of disgust. “He ain’t gonna arrest Henry for that. Anybody could have used that thing. Did you find his fingerprints on it?”

  Sheriff Gibbons sat back down, perched on the front of the chair like a man hoping to make a quick escape. “Whoever did this was real careful and clean.”

  “Henry’s real careful and clean, but he didn’t do this thing,” Clarinda assured him. “Was she—raped?” She said the word bravely, but we both stopped breathing until he answered.

  “No, we think it was a robbery gone wrong. A valuable collection—at least Ms. Harrison assures me they were valuable—of snuffboxes was taken from a cabinet in the living room, and all Ms. Burkett’s jewelry and her watch. Her diamond, too. And a couple of pieces of silver from the dining room sideboard.”

  Clarinda screwed up her mouth, which she does when she’s thinking. Then she pontificated. “She probably heard whoever it was and went down to investigate, then whoever it was chased her up the stairs and killed her.”

  “Now why the Sam Hill would anybody run up two flights of stairs when she could run out the door and through the grove?” I demanded. “You haven’t seen those stairs. They nearly did me in, walking up them.”

  “You ain’t in shape like Miss Edie was.”

  The sheriff spoke quickly. “We may never know exactly what happened, but we do know a couple of things. First, while it looked at first like the back door was opened by somebody breaking the windowpane in the door and turning the lock, there’s a dead bolt that has to have a key on both sides, and the glass was broken from the inside, so somebody opened the door with a key, then tried to make it look like a break-in.”

  “That means it had to be somebody who had a key.” Clarinda’s powers of deduction can be amazing. She sounded so satisfied, I hated to burst her bubble.

  “Which only leaves Genna, Valerie, Henry, and maybe Adney. But Valerie moved out last Tuesday. Did she take her key with her?” I asked the sheriff.

  “We haven’t talked to her yet. She’s staying with her aunt, down near Waynesboro. We’ll see her today or Monday.”

  Clarinda was still back a few paces. “Henry? Henry’s got a key?”

  “He did. Donna Linse, over at the library, said Edie asked him to give it back last Saturday. Maybe he did.”

  The sheriff shook his head. “It was still on his ring when I talked to him yesterday.”

  “What about an alibi?” Clarinda demanded, like she knew more than the sheriff about police procedure. “Where does Henry say he was?”

  Poor sheriff, he looked like he wished he could dash for the door. “Same place everybody else says they were. Fast asleep. She died sometime after midnight. But whoever it was needed not just a key to the back door, but also one to the shed where the machete was kept. In his first interview, Henry claimed he has the only key to the shed and said he’s careful about locking it, because he’s not familiar with the men on this year’s crew and doesn’t want to put temptation in their way. In a later interview, he said maybe he forgot to lock it Wednesday afternoon. But that’s a pretty odd coincidence—him leaving the shed unlocked on the very night somebody else wants a machete.”

  “Coincidences do happen,” Clarinda maintained. “Maybe whoever it was went looking for Henry, found the shed open, and decided to use a machete to kill her.”

  Actually, she had a point. “Or the shed could even have been left open another day,” I added. “Henry kept the machetes hanging behind the door. Maybe one was taken several days before, and he hadn’t missed it.”

  “Maybe.” The sheriff didn’t sound real convinced.

  Clarinda slid to her feet and started gathering up her sweaters, jacket, and scarf. “You can’t arrest a man because he thinks he has the only key to a shed.” Satisfied she’d put a spoke in the sheriff’s wheel, she turned to me. “The reason I came by was, I went by your place and put my wash in.” We’d offered several times to buy her a washer, but she preferred to do her wash over at our place. Occasionally she didn’t get around to it during the week, and stopped by to do it on Saturdays. This wasn’t the first time she’d asked—or, rather, commanded, “Put it in the dryer when you go home. Don’t you
let Mr. Joe Riddley do it, now. I don’t want him handling my unmentionables.” By which she meant her out-sized bras. She headed for the door, then added, “I’ll get it Monday.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I murmured.

  She slammed the door as she left.

  I looked up at the sheriff, who had politely stood when Clarinda did. “The machete isn’t all you have on Henry, is it?”

  He sat back down and gently fanned his hat back and forth between his knees. “No. We found a pair of orange coveralls under some bushes down at Whelans’ yesterday evening. They’ve got Henry’s name on them and are smeared with what looks like blood. We’ve sent them up to the state crime lab in De Kalb County and asked for a rush, but even so we probably won’t hear for a week.”

  It took me a couple of minutes to recover from that. For one thing, I kept seeing Henry in his overalls, looking real good, the day he fixed Alex’s car. I also had to swallow a couple of times to keep down the picture of Edie spurting blood all over the coveralls. Then I remembered something else. “But he was wearing them in the grove Thursday morning. I saw him when I was driving down to Edie’s.”

  “He claims he has three pairs. He was wearing one when we talked, and at first he said the others were home in the wash. When we asked him again a little later if he was sure where they were, he suddenly ‘remembered’ ”—the sheriff’s hands sketched quotes around the word—“that one pair was missing. Said he’d left them hanging on the shed door Sunday afternoon because he’d only worn them half a day and figured he’d wear them Monday. But they were missing Monday, so he had to go back home for a fresh pair. He couldn’t offer any explanation for how they could be missing if he had the only key to the shed.”

  I thought that over. “Maybe whoever took the machete also borrowed them—which would argue for an earlier theft.”