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

by Patricia Sprinkle

  I stood there holding a buzzing phone, wondering how different my life might have been if I’d mastered the fine art of manipulation.

  On my way back to the sofa and my melting ice cream, I grumbled, “Genna’s conned me into picking out a dress for Edie to be buried in. You coming with me in the morning?”

  “I told you, I’m going wherever you’re going.”

  Which is why Genna met us both down at Edie’s the next morning. She unlocked the door, then turned to leave. “I’ve got an aerobics class, but if you’ll turn that little doohickey in the doorknob when you leave, I’ll come back later to lock the dead bolt.” Her fear of crime in the neighborhood seemed to have evaporated now that Edie had nothing left to steal.

  Seeing Edie’s blue Saab in the carport had made me think, for one quick second, that the past week had been a bad dream and she’d be inside wondering why we were barging in without ringing the bell. I left my pocketbook with Joe Riddley, who elected to read the paper at the kitchen table. Just as I reached the stairs, I realized I hadn’t brought anything to carry the clothes in, so I went back to her pantry to hunt for a plastic bag. Like us, she kept a big bag of bags hanging on a pantry nail. As I grabbed one, I saw, behind the bag, a ring holding several keys. I wondered if the sheriff’s men had noticed it. I’d tell him later.

  I climbed to Edie’s room with a heavy heart. It felt odd to wander around in her house without her permission. Before I climbed the last disheartening steps, I smelled the blood.

  I’d smelled blood all my life, of course, growing up on a farm. On frosty autumn mornings Daddy used to butcher hogs down behind our house. Their blood on the breeze made my brother hop around in excitement, anticipating fresh livermush and bacon. This frosty morning, though, the scent of blood buckled my knees. I had to lean against the narrow stairwell wall for an instant to regain enough strength to keep climbing.

  Even Isaac had been shaken by the room as he first saw it. “I’d never seen so much blood in one place,” he’d told me, his ebony face grave. Then he’d hurried to add, “But it’s gone now. The bedding and rug were bagged and taken away for evidence, and Pete’s wife, Daisy, has scrubbed everything, even the ceiling. You won’t see anything except an empty room.”

  He’d forgotten how the smell of blood lingers, clinging to the very air, as if loath to let go of its hold on life.

  I covered my mouth and nose with one hand and hoped the scent of almond lotion would see me through the ordeal.

  I thought about calling to Joe Riddley in the kitchen below. But what would I say? That I was too sick at my stomach to enter a perfectly empty room to perform one last service for our friend? I certainly couldn’t ask him to pick out her burial clothes. We’d be holding a funeral where the guest of honor’s dress didn’t match her shoes—if the shoes matched each other. No, I owed it to her to see her decently buried. “I think I can, I think I can,” I chanted from one of Cricket’s favorite storybooks as I forced myself up the final five steps, wondering why any woman past fifty chose to sleep on the third floor.

  Then I reached the threshold, stopped, and gasped.

  What I saw was not a room of death, but an incredible view. Josiah had given his daughter a magnificent gift. The room rode the treetops like a ship on a green sea, and on a clear day you could probably see Augusta.

  No wonder Edie had come back to this room when her husband died. It should have been her sanctuary, not the scene of her murder.

  Then my eyes refocused on a few dark spots on the windows that Daisy had missed, and my breakfast gave fair warning it was coming back. I barely had time to dash into the dainty bathroom Josiah had installed in half of the back wall, next to the big walk-in closet.

  Afterwards, I soaked a washrag and wiped my mouth. “You weren’t supposed to die,” I muttered angrily. “That wasn’t what we were worried about at all.”

  Only my fury that this had happened to her—and at Genna’s halfhearted grief—sent me back into Edie’s room.

  I stood looking around me, wondering if I might recognize any clues the sheriff’s people had missed. All I saw was a stripped bed, one teddy bear leaning against the wall under the bank of front windows, a jewelry box sitting crookedly on Edie’s dresser, and a collection of Hummel figurines on her chest of drawers. The carpet had been lifted, all the bedding and at least one chair removed. Light squares on the wallpaper showed where pictures had hung. Only the wall with the door to the stairs remained untouched. There, a bulletin board over Edie’s computer displayed several articles describing her winning bridge tournaments, and she kept her trophies in an old oak china cabinet in the corner that had probably held picture book dolls when she was younger.

  Averting my eyes from the spots Daisy had missed on the windows, I raised several to let in fresh, cold air before I headed to the closet. I had only performed this service twice before, for my mother and Joe Riddley’s. Now, as then, I found myself teetering between practicality and respect for the dead. Should I choose a good outfit that somebody else could still get use out of, or pick something old and have people—in this case the funeral home staff—think we didn’t have proper respect?

  Put me in any old thing, Mac, and give the good stuff to people who need it. I could hear Edie saying it. Lately she’d been lobbying for the Magnolia Women’s Club to start a closet of gently used professional clothes for women going back to work. Maybe we could start it in her memory and begin it with her own clothes.

  I was reaching for a navy suit she’d had for years when I heard somebody clumping up the stairs. So help me, my heart nearly stopped. I could tell it wasn’t Joe Riddley. “He had to let them come up,” I reminded myself.

  Olive poked her head around the door. “Hey! I thought I’d find you up here.”

  She paused as I had, but it wasn’t because she was sickened by the smell or entranced by the view. “Why on earth would Edie want to sleep all the way up here? Those stairs are a killer.”

  Her eyes roved restlessly from the bare bed and floor to the lone teddy bear near the windows. “I guess that poor little fellow was too far away to get messed up.” She came to the closet like a slim dark shadow. “I didn’t know Genna was fixing to ask you to do this. You don’t need to bother. I can handle it.”

  Until that minute, I’d have gladly handed the job over to the first volunteer. Now I was bound and determined Olive wouldn’t get it. I held the navy suit close to my chest. “Genna asked me to do it, and I’ve already chosen this.” I pulled out a tailored white blouse with a ruffle at the neck. It was businesslike and feminine, just like Edie. I bent and grabbed her navy pumps, remembering Edie wearing that same outfit to Wick’s funeral just last spring. A lump rose in my throat and threatened to choke me.

  Olive wrinkled her nose. “Those old things? Why don’t you—?” She reached past me to pull out one of Edie’s really nice dresses, a swirl of pink, green, and magenta silk from the days when she and Wick flew to New York for plays. Olive held it up against her sallow face and sashayed over to the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. She preened a little at the picture she made. “Edie had good taste, when she chose to exercise it.”

  That was a bit much from somebody who thought black and gray were the only colors on the color wheel.

  Contrary to what Olive later claimed, I did not snatch that dress from her. I did take it firmly and hang it back in the closet. “Edie wouldn’t want us wasting a good dress to bury her in. I’ll talk to Genna about what to do with the rest of these clothes.”

  “She’ll probably put them in a garage sale with the rest of the stuff in the house.” Olive moved restlessly around the room and stopped to rummage in Edie’s jewelry box with an appraising eye. Only Mama’s good training and my respect for the office of judge kept me from stomping over there to give her a good smack. She picked up a small figurine from the dresser and examined its bottom. “Pity she chipped this. It may be prewar Dresden. But look at all the Hummels on her chest.” She headed in
that direction and began to lift them to examine their bottoms. “These are old enough to be worth a little.” She started setting them on a nearby table.

  “They were Edie’s mother’s,” I said, less than charitably. “Genna may get them and the rest of the stuff in the house”—I emphasized the words she had used—“but she’ll have to wait until Josiah dies. They’re still his—along with the house and the grove. And Genna may not get them when he’s gone.”

  I had her attention now. “What do you mean?”

  I wished I hadn’t let my temper run away with my tongue. “Oh, just that there may be other relatives, that’s all. Edie didn’t have any money, either—you need to tell that to Genna. Her daddy lost every cent he had, and was deep in debt when he died. Edie paid every cent she got to his debtors.”

  She stared. “How do you know?”

  “Never mind how I know. It’s the truth.” I gathered up the suit and blouse and headed for the chest. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find some underwear.” Mama always said, “Honey, don’t you neglect to put underwear on me for my funeral. If they ever have to dig me up, I don’t want them thinking I wasn’t respectable.”

  I thought Edie would want to be respectable, too.

  In the mirror, I saw Olive watching me as I opened dresser drawers. I looked away. When I looked back in a few seconds, I watched her put her hand on the top of the chest and lift it up. There was a tray above the top drawer that I hadn’t suspected was there. I took out some panties. “Now let me find a slip,” I murmured, rummaging around while a slip lay there in plain view.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Olive in the mirror.

  She took out a white case, opened it, and slid a strand of pearls into her pocket. A gold necklace followed, then I saw her lift a letter and examine it with a gloating smile.

  “Well,” she said carelessly, turning away and sliding the letter into her pocket with the jewelry, “I guess I’ll be going if you don’t need any help.”

  She ambled back toward the door and started slowly down the steps. I heard her pick up her pace after two or three steps.

  I followed. “I’m all finished,” I explained as she turned to give me a surprised look at the bottom of the stairs.

  “You don’t have panty hose.” She was moving toward the main staircase.

  “She won’t need panty hose. Do you reckon Genna wants me to take this stuff straight to the funeral home?” I was crossing the upstairs hall right behind her.

  “You might as well.”

  She doubled her speed going down the main stairs and was almost running by the time she headed toward the kitchen. I waited until she was at the door, then called, “Stop her!” Joe Riddley could hold her better than I could.

  Wouldn’t you know, that man wasn’t there? I arrived at the kitchen to find his newspaper lying folded on the table beside my pocketbook. The screened door of the porch slammed behind Olive.

  “Stop, thief!” I dumped Edie’s clothes in an unceremonious heap beside my pocketbook and hared after her.

  When I reached the back steps, Olive was heading to her car. “Stop, thief!” I yelled again.

  She fumbled frantically for her keys, then threw the purse hard at me. Long legs churning, she ran across the drive and down into the grove.

  There was no way I could catch her on foot. We’d come in Joe Riddley’s car, and I didn’t have its keys. But a green tractor stood outside the equipment shed by the gas pumps.

  I used to love to drive my daddy’s tractor as a girl. I’d even driven Ridd’s tractors off and on in recent years, for the fun of it.

  I swung myself up into the cab and saw the keys in the ignition. With a prayer of thanks, I started the engine. Somebody had just filled the tank with gas, and it moved like a charm. I headed through the grove after Olive as fast as that thing could chug.

  If she hadn’t paused to catch her breath, I might not have caught up with her, but there she suddenly was, three trees ahead of me, clinging to the trunk, gasping. When she saw it was me on the tractor, she took a deep breath and darted around the tree and down the next row.

  I followed.

  She ran around another tree and headed back the way she had come.

  I followed. The tractor wasn’t as lithe as Olive, of course, but I could keep her in view.

  Pecans crunched under my tires and flew every which way. The medians were mowed, but Henry’s crew hadn’t harvested this area yet. Down one row at the far end of the grove, I saw the shaker making its funny progress in our direction. I hoped Josiah and Henry would forgive me for the nuts I was destroying in the process of trying to save Edie’s pearls.

  I also wondered what the men operating the shaker must think of the crazy tractor dashing between trees and up and down rows.

  Olive and I both knew she couldn’t hide from me, no matter how many trees she darted around or how many rows she tried. The only thing bothering me was what I’d do with her when I caught her. Where the dickens was Joe Riddley? Some bodyguard he had turned out to be. What if Olive had come upstairs to murder me, instead of to steal what little Edie had left?

  I wondered how she had known about that secret tray in the chest. Genna must have told her. The bedroom furniture had been Wick’s wedding gift to Edie, and I’m sure he showed off that nifty feature to both his wife and his daughter.

  Which brought up a disturbing likelihood: that Olive had killed Edie for the snuffboxes, jewelry, and silver, with jealousy fueling her fire, and this morning had come back for things she’d missed the first time. I’d bet my final dollar Genna hadn’t told her about that tray until after Edie died. I’d have to tell Sheriff Gibbons about it, and about the keys in the pantry. His men hadn’t been as thorough as he expected them to be.

  In that second while I wasn’t paying close attention, Olive pivoted and made a daring lunge past me, heading back down the grove away from the house. I had to stop and turn. By then she had vanished.

  Five trees ahead of me, the shaker and a huge tree were dancing their jig to the accompaniment of a storm of nuts. It takes a shaker two minutes to shake a tree and move to the next one. As they finished the fifth tree and came toward the fourth, I caught an agitated flash of black among the leaves of the third.

  “Stop!” I shouted. They couldn’t hear me above the roar of my machine and theirs. “Stop!”

  I revved that engine and rolled down the row as fast I could go, straight for the shaker.

  To this day I wonder what those men thought when they saw a tractor barreling straight for them, driven by a small woman with a beauty parlor hairdo. None of them spoke enough English to tell me. But at least they stopped. They watched warily as I hiked up my skirt and climbed down.

  I also wonder whether I’d have done better to have let them shake Olive out of that tree. Instead, I cocked my head and called up to her, “You might as well come on down. I know you’re there, and I saw you take the pearls and Edie’s gold chain.”

  The men broke into frantic chatter and shook almost as much as their machine when Olive appeared among the branches. For once she looked like a real French waif. Her cheeks and hands were smudged with dirt, and she had leaves in her wind-ruffled hair. As she sat on the bottom branch and accepted their help getting down, I saw a flash of white cotton through a rip in her slacks. So much for red bikini underpants.

  Once on the ground, she glared. “Now I suppose you’ll want to call the police?”

  “Oh, no,” I assured her. “We’re outside the city limits. I’m going to call the sheriff.”

  My cell phone was in my pocketbook at the house, and I couldn’t ask the men to hold Olive until I fetched it, so I cupped my hands and called, “Joe Riddley? Joe Riddley!” in the voice that used to bring our boys to dinner from our neighbor’s cattle pond two fields away.

  The men immediately cupped their hands and began to call, “Joe Reedley. Joe Reedley.”

  “Mi esposo,” I explained, drawing on my small store o
f Spanish. “A la casa.”

  For all I knew, I was saying I liked my husband on top of a house, like pie à la mode, but one of them grinned and nodded. “Sí.” He started out for the house at a run. The others watched Olive so carefully she didn’t dare run. They obviously thought we were the day’s entertainment.

  Joe Riddley arrived in the backyard the same time the worker did. I saw them jump into his Town Car and head down under the trees. Joe Riddley got out of one side and the Mexican worker climbed out of the other, pausing to stroke the silver finish with his hand. “What’s this fellow saying about you bein’ up a tree?” Joe Riddley demanded.

  “It was Olive.” I’m too polite to point, but I nodded in her direction. “Call the sheriff. She stole Edie’s pearls. She may have killed her, too.”

  The men understood enough of what I said to take a few steps back in a circle of wonder.

  The sheriff came himself. He listened to my story and put Olive in his cruiser. She never said a word except “I want to call my lawyer.” She glared at me whenever she looked my way, but as she was climbing into the backseat of the sheriff’s cruiser and thought I couldn’t see her, she had a funny expression on her face. I would have sworn it was a smirk.

  “Where the dickens did you get to when I needed you?” I demanded when Joe Riddley and I were alone.

  He looked sheepish. “I’d been wanting to get a good look at Josiah’s new sorting equipment. I thought I’d just nip out there and take a gander while you were upstairs.”

  I was about to tell him what I thought about his future as a bodyguard, but a reporter and photographer from the Hopemore Statesman showed up right then. After the reporter interviewed me, that pesky photographer insisted on taking a shot of me beside the tractor. My picture would appear on the second page the following Wednesday, under the headline “A Judge of Many Talents.”