Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery

by Barbara Neely

  But was she still starry-eyed enough to miss what Everett's taking a mistress might mean to her, given what had happened to his last wife? Grace also didn't act like a woman with that kind of jones for a man. Blanche decided she needed a cup of tea to mull it over.

  She carried the kettle to the sink and reached for the cold-water tap. A prickly feeling along her arms made her set the kettle in the sink and wheel around. Everett was staring at her through the glass in the top of the back door. She clutched the sink behind her with both hands and made herself stand still, even though her whole body was screaming for her to run.

  For a long moment, he stood with his hands cupping his eyes and his nose nearly touching the glass. He just stood there, looking at her with eyes she could see but couldn't read.

  When Everett finally opened the door and entered the kitchen, Blanche told her shoulders to relax, her arms and hands to give up their tension, so that she could let go of the sink. But the blood, muscle, and what-all her arms and hands were made of didn't pay any attention to her orders. She continued clasping the sink as though it were her last hold on safety.

  He looks a lot bigger out here, she thought. She nodded and relaxed her face into some semblance of pleasantness, trying to look like she wasn't so scared that she was about to lose control of her bladder. “Is there something I can get you, sir?”

  Everett looked around the kitchen as if searching for something he could request. “I'd like a glass of water, please.”

  Blanche was grateful for a task that forced her to release the sink—if she had to run, she sure as hell couldn't drag the sink along. Getting the water also provided her with a weapon. She poured water from the refrigerator bottle into a water glass, dropped two ice cubes into it, and held it out to him with her left hand. She held the tray of ice cubes in her right hand. It wasn't much, but if he tried to grab her wrist, she intended to use the tray to break his nose.

  Everett took the glass of water and thanked her. He took little sips from the glass instead of drinking it right down. The whole time, he watched Blanche. When he'd finished with the water, he handed her the glass and turned toward the back door. “Oh,” he said, his hand just touching the doorknob. “Have you seen Nate?” He turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder.

  Blanche hesitated for no more than half a second. “Not lately.”

  “But he was here earlier.” He wasn't asking her, he was telling her. Blanche said nothing. “Didn't you two have a nice chat this morning?”

  Everett's lips were stretched back and up into something totally unrelated to a real smile. She didn't try to return it. “Nate came in for a glass of water, sir. Just like you.”

  Everett was still looking over his shoulder at her. Now he turned to face her. His movements reminded her of creatures who crawled low to the ground and struck quick as lightning. In her mind, she navigated the route to the front door and the highway. “Anything else, sir?”

  “Oh, yes! I nearly forgot,” Everett told her in a voice that didn't speak of forgetfulness. “Mumsfield and I are off to the barber. We'll have something in town. Or later. My wife has a migraine. She's taken a sedative. I've looked in on my aunt. She's a bit sulky. Best left alone. You understand. She won't be wanting lunch, either.” He stretched his lips at her once again. “When you see Nate, tell him I want to talk to him.” He eased open the back door.

  Blanche didn't answer and didn't move until she saw him walking down the backyard path toward the potting shed. She crossed her fingers and hoped Nate wasn't inside. The thought of Everett alone with Nate in that small, dark shed made her more than uneasy. But Everett only stuck his head in, then walked around the house toward the front drive. Blanche did a dance step to the bathroom when she heard the limousine drive off but sobered once she'd relieved herself. Ardell is exactly right, she thought. This is no time for fooling around. Blanche didn't doubt that Everett had it in him to either kill her or turn her in. Or both. And he'd certainly want her dead if he knew what she'd seen. She went back to the laundry room, unloaded the sheets from the washer, and folded them. When she was through, she wheeled the vacuum cleaner, duster, spray cleaner, and sponge into the living room. She parked her tools in the middle of the floor and chose a chair facing the stairs in case Grace wasn't as indisposed as Everett had said.

  Blanche wondered if Everett had attacked her in the kitchen could she have struck back as she'd planned? Or was she so programmed to be somebody's victim that she couldn't break free to save her own life? The phone rang before she had time to think about her question. She hurried to the kitchen and grabbed it on the third ring. She listened before she spoke in case Grace picked up the phone elsewhere. “Hello? Hello? Is this five-two-two-zero-nine-four-nine?”

  Blanche noticed that Mama was using her most proper tone. Her voice grew warmer and louder when she realized she'd reached Blanche. After she'd answered Blanche's questions about the health, well-being, and whereabouts of the children, she repeated what she'd learned from Miz Minnie about the household.

  “You ain't got to worry 'bout the regular help coming back and interrupting anything. They gone down the coast, to Topsail. Go there every year. Ain't got no phone. Wouldn't talk to the likes of us no way. Live out Mount Airy. Hincty, I hear. Not Baptists. But never mind them. It's that old madame who's a sly, worldly fox.”

  “Emmeline? What about her?” The story her mother told surprised Blanche.

  “Are you sure, Mama?” Blanche interrupted at one point. “This old party ain't sober enough to know a seed from a sow, half the time, let alone make a killing on the stock market. How much money? Damn! Excuse me, Mama, but that is a heavy heap of money. No wonder Everett and Grace were so willing to come live with Emmeline.”

  Still, the idea of Emmeline making big bucks on the stock market was so farfetched that Blanche wondered if perhaps Miz Minnie wasn't beyond her information-gathering prime. “Maybe Miz Minnie misunderstood.”

  Miz Cora laughed. “Girl,” she told Blanche, “trying to hide from the truth is like trying to be invisible. You're right to be worried about yourself, but that don't change what is.

  “And you better stay put for a while,” her mother added. “This ain't the time to call attention to yourself by walking off the job.”

  “Yes, Mama...Yes, I am being careful.”

  And then the children were on the phone, reinforcing all her mother's admonitions to be careful. Taifa and Malik couldn't afford to lose another mother. Blanche listened for the resentment, fear, and distrust that went with feeling abandoned. She found enough warmth and trust and humor to reassure her that they were not feeling rejected. When she got off the phone, Blanche resumed her seat in the living room.

  Funny how nothing is ever what it seems to be, she thought. To her, Emmeline was just a mean old drunk. She certainly didn't fit Blanche's image of a financial wizard. Yet, Mama claimed Emmeline had parlayed fifty thousand dollars of the money her husband had left her into thirty-five million dollars on the stock market. Miz Rachel, who did sewing for Emmeline, had been in Emmeline's room pinning up a hem while Emmeline was taunting Everett with how much she was worth, how she had gotten it, and how little of it he had any hopes of ever touching.

  Blanche looked around. The room was nice enough, but compared to some of the houses she'd worked in on Long Island, this was nowhere near multimillionaire quality. Then she remembered the Jamisons, for whom she'd worked when she first moved to New York. Harold and Christine Jamison had lived in an apartment not much better than the one in which Blanche had been living. But one day, she'd found a statement from their accountant in the trash. The Jamisons had enough money to buy their building and a few others besides. She'd immediately asked for a raise. Now she got up from her chair, plumped some cushions, picked a few pieces of lint off the carpet, and whipped her feather duster around the room. It was time to start dinner.

  When the Rock Cornish game hens, complete with cornbread dressing, the braised leeks, the stuffed
tomatoes, and the crusty rolls were arrayed in the dining room, Blanche went in search of the family. Grace had emerged from being indisposed and was sitting in the living room, not reading, not even looking out the window, just sitting with a listening look on her face, as though waiting for the other shoe to drop. Mumsfield was in the driveway with his head of freshly cut hair in the limousine's innards. Everett snatched his bedroom door open when Blanche tapped on it, and seemed relieved that it was only dinner Blanche had come to announce.

  At dinner, Everett was in a state of high chatter, as though he'd been hired to make sure that no silences seeped into the room. His voice jabbed at Blanche as she served the food. Grace watched Everett, and noded as he went on with his story about the time he and Bill Whoever were on the golf course and it began to rain and...Everett's voice had a chuckle in it, cuing them that at some point they were expected to be amused. Mumsfield looked from one to the other as though he were watching a tennis match, but he didn't halt his eating to listen.

  Back in the kitchen, the first bit of cool evening breeze made the curtains dance. The birds lowered their voices in preparation to giving the airwaves over to creatures who made music with their hind legs. On Blanche's street, the children would be racing wildly up and down, screaming at the top of their lungs, made frantic by impending bedtime. She herself would have been ironing a skirt for tomorrow, or maybe reading the newspaper, or wondering whether she could save enough money to go to Greensboro to see Patti LaBelle next month—just being her own self in her own house, firmly attached to the people, places, and things that made up the thick cable which attached her to what she knew as her life, a life that didn't include living under the same roof with someone who had killed once and would undoubtedly kill her if he felt it would benefit him in any way. She tucked a sprig of parsley beside the Cornish hen on Emmeline's tray and felt herself unmoored in a way she'd never experienced before and hoped evermore to avoid.

  When Grace came to fetch Emmeline's dinner, Blanche was just filling a small pitcher with iced tea, heavy on the sugar and tangy with lemon. Grace complimented her on “the fine dinner,” picked up the tray, and left. It seemed to Blanche that she was hardly gone before she was back with the tray. The food was hardly touched. “She don't have much appetite, does she?” Blanche said, as she took the tray from Grace.

  “She'd old and finicky,” Grace told her. “It hasn't anything to do with your cooking,” she added.

  Blanche emptied the contents of Emmeline's tray into the garbage disposal and glanced at Grace. “She was hungry enough at lunch.”

  Grace didn't respond. She reminded Blanche of a childhood game in which someone spun you around by your arm and released you to hold the pose you fell into. Grace was standing as though the force of her spin had pried open her mouth and left it slightly ajar. Her head was tilted to the left. Her legs were spread and her upper body thrust forward. But while she looked somewhat dopey, her voice was sharp as glass shards when she finally did speak. Her eyes pinned Blanche's with an intense stare.

  “What did she say? What did she tell you?” Grace's pose was broken now. She moved slowly toward Blanche, her eyes never leaving Blanche's face.

  “She just seemed extra-hungry.” Blanche fervently wished she'd kept her mouth shut. She moved away from Grace and put the salt and pepper shakers from Emmeline's tray in the cabinet by the sink.

  “What did she say to make you think she was hungry?”

  “It wasn't what she said, ma'am. She just seemed real eager for her lunch....Course, it coulda been my imagination, since I don't usually take her meals.”

  Grace continued to search Blanche's face. “Did she...did she ask for anything in particular to eat...or drink?”

  So that's it, Blanche thought. “No, ma'am,” she told Grace in a slow drawl meant to convey her lack of concern about the conversation, as evidenced by her lack of memory on the subject. “She didn't hardly say anything at all, that I recall.”

  Blanche turned to the sink, and began running water to wash Emmeline's plate and glass. Tension was rising in the room like heat. Behind her, Grace suddenly folded into a kitchen chair with a thump. She began speaking in a low, rapid voice. “Of course, it wouldn't have happened if I'd been well, if I'd taken her tray up as I ought to have done. It's really my fault. But it's so difficult. So hard. You can't imagine.

  “No one knows, of course,” she went on. “Not even Mumsfield. We've managed to keep it from him, somehow. If only she would stop, or at least cut down. Now she's up there snoring and drooling and...”

  Unlike the last time Grace had attempted to confide in her, Blanche was as interested in getting into Grace's business as Grace seemed to be in telling it. She was tempted to launch into a full-fledged lay-it-on-my-bosom number, complete with wet eyes and hand-patting, but that role was too familiar for a Mistress of the Manor type like Grace. Instead Blanche let her arms fall to her sides and was attentively silent. Her head slightly bowed, she waited for her employer to bestow the privilege of confidence.

  “Are you married, Blanche?”

  Blanche raised her head. “Yes, ma'am,” she lied.

  “Any children?”

  “No, ma'am.” She didn't want even the knowledge of her kids in this house. “That man is more than enough child for me.” She gave Grace a version of that pained, puzzled, and indignant look which is part of all women's male vocabulary.

  Grace sighed, propped her elbows on the table, and rested her head on her hands, as though she couldn't bear the weight of her own thoughts.

  “He's not really insensitive, you know.” She raised her head and looked at Blanche. “He's really quite kind, quite caring. It's just that he doesn't understand how difficult it is. She's not an easy person.” She sighed deeply. “But then, neither is Everett, sometimes...But Aunt Emmeline is wrong about him. He wouldn't!” Grace jumped as though she'd been pinched.

  “What did your aunt say?” Blanche kept her voice as neutral as possible.

  Grace stood up. “I'm talking too much.” She put a fist on either side of her head, as though to keep its halves in place. “And my head is splitting.” She hurried out of the room.

  Blanche slumped against the sink. She was conscious of the dampness under her arms and in her crotch. She chided herself for having frightened Grace off. She'd known her question was a risk, but she thought Grace was close enough to hysteria to be prompted. Too bad. But she'd be back. Blanche was sure of it. She tried to imagine what Emmeline could have told Grace about Everett and how she could possibly know anything, sitting up there drunk in her room. For a moment, Blanche let herself feel what it must be like to be Grace right now, knowing, or at least suspecting, that her husband was a murderer. Not only was he a killer, but she had lousy taste in men. But from what Ardell had said, maybe Grace had married him knowing he was a murderer. Her lips curled into a wry smile at the idea that Grace was a woman who believed she could change a man by marrying him taken to the extreme. She finished washing Emmeline's dishes and put the tray away.

  She wanted to go to bed. She was as tired as if she'd been doing stoop labor all day. But she was chock-full of other people, too, as though Emmeline, Mumsfield, Everett, and Grace had taken possession of her person, with their commands, needs, questions, and fears. She would likely choke on them if she lay down. She opened the back door and stepped outside. Immediately she was wrapped in an eastern Carolina night, moist and gentle, loud with creatures' songs and the whisper of the pines. Blanche sunk down on the doorstep and released her unwelcome inhabitants in a series of deep, slow sighs. She rose, went back in the kitchen, and turned the lights off. Back outside, she let her Night Girl self slip down the yard to walk slowly between the two halves of the vegetable garden, carrots and corn on one side, tomatoes and peas on the other. The cabbage leaves were delicate fans quivering on the bit of breeze that kept the night from being muggy. She felt the darkness drifting down from the sky, passing through her pores, into her bloodstream, her bon
es, and her heart. She breathed deeply, hastening the night's penetration. She smiled at the return of the childhood Night Girl feeling that she could leap as high as the housetops, if she chose, or even ride the stars, as Cousin Murphy had said.

  In this state, her brain was suddenly cleared of all the little bits of worry and commentary that interfered with her ability to latch on to a thought. She stood away from herself and looked at where she was. My whole life could depend on what happens in this house, she thought. She turned to look at the house behind her. It seemed to Blanche to have a kind of worried air, as though it knew that murder had been done by one of its inhabitants. She knew who the murderer was and had some idea of why he'd killed. She could see that this knowledge was dangerous to her, even though no one else seemed to think the sheriff had been murdered. Except Nate. She wondered why he hadn't come back to finish their conversation.

  Maybe he's gone to the police, she thought in the part of herself that was prone to pessimism and panic. But her mind was still filled with the night, which brooked no nonsense. Nate hadn't lived to be an old black man by going to the police and accusing high-toned white men of murder.

  “Nate,” she whispered softly. She laid her open hand on the door of the potting shed. Her fingers, the wood, and the night formed a pattern in shades of darkness. She turned and walked back to the stoop and sat down. I'll wait a bit, she decided. He might still drop by.

  TEN

  She might have slept on the back stoop all night if a mosquito with a stinger as thick as a broom handle hadn't attacked her elbow. She shuffled off to bed to save her skin.