Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  After World War II, Joe Riddley’s daddy, J.R., was smart enough to see that soldiers coming home would want to fix up their houses and yards to affirm that life was starting over, so he added a line of lawn mowers and small power tools, and turned some of his acreage into a nursery to carry ornamental trees and shrubs, perennials, bedding plants, and supplies for lawns and home gardens. He was also the first in Hope County to believe that pecans could be grown as a cash crop, and he convinced Josiah Whelan back in the fifties to plant his grove.

  About the time Joe Riddley got out of college and went to work with his folks, subdivisions started springing up all over the region, so he and his parents decided to sell the hardware and equipment side of the business and develop the sizeable nursery we now had outside the city limits, to supply developers and large landscaping firms.

  In one form or another, Yarbroughs had prospered and supplied the needs of several counties for nearly a hundred and fifty years. But none of the former generations had had to face a mammoth company with financial resources to undercut prices until we had to quit. I wished we had sold out years ago. I could be basking on a Tahiti beach instead of figuring another payroll and wondering how long we’d be able to meet it.

  Lest our employees were wondering the same thing, Joe Riddley gathered them together Friday afternoon and told them, “Don’t worry, we aren’t letting anybody go unless we absolutely have to. We’re going to keep on providing excellent service and decent prices. I think folks will come back.”

  I wondered if he knew they all headed to the superstore when they got off work.

  That same weekend several other things happened that I only heard about later.

  Adney went down to Edie’s late Friday afternoon to clean out her computer, since he couldn’t do it Sunday, and found Frank loading Edie’s stereo into Valerie’s car. Frank claimed Edie had sold it to him, but Adney called the sheriff’s department, who sent a deputy to check it out.

  From an upstairs window, Valerie saw Frank spreadeagled against his cruiser and called 911. “Come quick! Somebody’s hurting my boyfriend!” Then she called Edie.

  About the time the first deputy was explaining to the second deputy what was going on, Edie screeched to a stop in her driveway. She blistered Adney and apologized to both deputies, informing them that she had sold Frank the stereo, since she never used it. Adney got so hot under the collar with Edie that he went home without looking at her computer.

  We heard about that when the sheriff came over Friday night to share leftover turkey Martha had sent home with us. He told the story of Frank’s near arrest and concluded, “The deputies thought she was making it all up to protect Sparks, but they couldn’t charge him with theft when the person being stolen from claims she sold it to him.” He finished chewing his turkey sandwich, then asked aloud what I was thinking. “If Edie didn’t sell him the stereo, and lets him get away with this, who knows what he’ll be ‘buying’ next?”

  Sunday, we invited Walker and Cindy to go with us to a fish camp down by the river for an early supper. The country club was closed for the weekend, so we’d missed the Friday seafood buffet, and there’s a limit to how many times in a row Joe Riddley is willing to eat turkey. It seemed funny to have only four of us, but Martha, Ridd, and their kids had gone down to see her family for the day, and Cindy’s parents had invited their kids up to Thomson for the weekend and would return them later that night.

  As we followed the waitress toward our table, I watched Cindy’s chic rear in a long rayon skirt and wondered if I ought to get me a long skirt or two. Joe Riddley bent to mutter, “No, Little Bit. You wouldn’t look like that. You’d look like a mushroom.”

  “When your husband starts reading your thoughts, you’ve been married too long,” I muttered.

  “Stop bickering, you two,” Walker said, pulling out a chair for me, “or we’ll ask them to seat you at a children’s table.”

  Everybody ordered fried catfish. Cindy and I agreed to meet for coffee Thursday morning to double-check our Christmas lists, and then, to make conversation while we waited for our order to come, I asked Cindy if she’d heard from Genna about what happened Friday. “I sure did,” she said. “Wasn’t that awful? Genna knows good and well Edie never sold Frank that stereo. Why would she?”

  “Maybe she needed the money,” I suggested, to see what Cindy would say.

  She laughed. “Yeah, right. But did you hear what happened yesterday? It was worse!”

  She scarcely waited for me to shake my head. “Adney went down again while Edie was at work, to see what he could do with her computer, and found Henry Joyner, bold as brass, sitting at her kitchen table eating his lunch.”

  “How’d he get in?” Joe Riddley asked for the rest of us.

  “Adney asked him. Henry said his daddy and Josiah always ate lunch there together, and he’d just kept it up—that he used his daddy’s key. Can you imagine?” Cindy never gave her maid a key. Whenever they went out of town, I had to go over and let the maid in.

  “Clarinda has our key,” I pointed out, reaching over to smack Joe Riddley’s hand. He was working his way through the basket of hush puppies intended for the four of us.

  Joe Riddley moved the basket of hush puppies so I couldn’t reach it, took the last two, set it beside Cindy, and added, “And Mary, Pete’s mother, cooked for Josiah’s mother, so Pete and Henry were both raised in that house.”

  “Henry should have turned in the key.” Cindy reached for a hush puppy, looked puzzled, and handed the basket to Walker. “Can you get more of these?” She continued as if she hadn’t interrupted herself. “Genna never imagined he had one. She said Adney asked Henry to give it back, but Henry said he works for Edie and she’ll have to ask him herself if she wants it. When Adney warned him he was going to tell Edie he had it, he said the look Henry gave him would have peeled paint.” She looked up and exclaimed, “Why, there’s Olive!”

  Olive came in wearing her usual cheerful combination of black and gray, but today she also wore an unusually big smile. “Congratulate me,” she commanded as she stopped by our table. “I just came from Edie’s bridge party, and I won!” She pointed the fingers of one hand toward her chest and did an affected little dance. “That means I’m in the lead for the January tournament.”

  “Congratulations,” I told her, since it was expected.

  “You must have gotten all the good cards,” Joe Riddley suggested.

  Olive smirked. “It’s skill, not cards. Of course, Edie did seem a bit distracted. Who could blame her, with all that’s been going on?” She pulled up a chair and proceeded to fill us in on what we already knew.

  Monday afternoon, I took Cricket to return library books and found Alex staffing the desk. She was dressed for the holiday in her trademark black pants, a silky red blouse, and a tapestry jacket covered all over with candy canes and sprigs of holly. More candy canes dangled from her ears. “You look too gorgeous to be working the desk,” I greeted her. “Besides, I thought you didn’t do overdue books.”

  She gave me a disgusted grunt. “I don’t, as a rule, but we’re shorthanded. I have two folks down with flu. Olive worked this morning and is to come back this evening, but she had a dentist appointment this afternoon. Donna’s needed at the children’s desk after school. And Edie, who was supposed to work this afternoon, called around noon real upset and said she had to go see her daddy right away and doesn’t know when she’ll get back.”

  “Go see Miss Donna,” I instructed Cricket, giving him a little push. He skipped happily away. I turned back to Alex. “Is Josiah worse?”

  Alex rested her arms on the desk so our eyes were level and spoke softly so other patrons couldn’t hear. “I asked that, first thing, but she said he’s fine, she just needed to ask him about something important. Now, how does she expect that man to answer her?”

  “Not easily,” I agreed, also speaking softly. “But Edie was upset? And didn’t say why?”

  “No, but she was in a h
urry and not real coherent. I’m telling you, Mac, something is going on down there. Maybe it has to do with that fellow we saw the other day.”

  “Henry?” I was so startled I spoke too loud. Several people looked our way, so I lowered my voice. “Why should you think that?”

  Alex spoke softer. “Saturday afternoon, I was out front here after a visiting-author event, and Edie was on the desk. She took a call and talked real angry, so after the author left, I spoke to her about it. That’s not like Edie. She usually keeps her cool and never forgets her manners. But I can’t have patrons hearing my staff talking like that, no matter how upset a staff member gets. Edie apologized and admitted she got carried away. She said it was Adney calling, saying Henry had a key to her house and wouldn’t return it unless Edie asked for it back. The funny thing was, she wasn’t mad at Henry, she was mad at Adney for upsetting Henry. Can you imagine? That man has no reason to have Edie’s key!”

  “My cook has our key. And Henry grew up on the place. His family has probably always had keys.”

  The look Alex gave me said real clear that is not the way people act in Chicago. “I cannot think of any reason why he needs to be in her house when she’s not there.” She stood up straight and arched her back to stretch it. “Don’t you get tired of looking at things from way down there?”

  “Just when I get a crick in my neck from looking up at the rest of you.”

  “Speaking of looking up—” She nodded to where Cricket stood at my elbow, proudly holding up four books. Donna Linse stood smiling behind him.

  “Look, Me-Mama, I picked four books, and I can read one of them all by myself, can’t I, Miss Donna? ’Cause Elephant Buttons doesn’t have any words.” He was prancing in his excitement. When did I lose that delight in learning something new?

  I examined the books he’d chosen and promised we would read them to each other as soon as we got back to the store, then sent him off to look in the display cases while I checked out the books.

  When he was out of earshot, Donna asked in her sweet, soft voice, “Were you all talking about Edie and Henry Joyner?” When we nodded, she said, “I didn’t mean to listen in, but Edie did ask for her key back Saturday. I heard her, because we were both on the desk right then. She called and told Henry that with her daddy away, she’d rather not have keys in the community.”

  “What did he say?” Alex asked the question before I could.

  “He hung up on her.”

  I felt sorry for Henry right then. “I guess he was hurt.”

  Alex snorted. “He’s got no reason being hurt. A woman’s house is her house. No man’s entitled to have a key to her house unless she gives it to him.”

  There was that word again. “Entitled.” Since the superstore had opened, the word had been stuck in my craw. I knew what it felt like to have something I felt entitled to taken away. There are some things you deserve to have, dang it! Like life, liberty, and the pursuit of your own business without somebody coming in from outside and taking away everything you’ve worked for all your life. Or the key to a house where your grandmother cooked and cleaned and your own parents cared for a demented old woman, so you can eat lunch at a table.

  “People are entitled to respect from the folks they work for,” I insisted.

  Donna nodded. “He had to feel like she didn’t trust him anymore. Well, I have to get back to my desk.” She drifted back to the children’s section.

  “It has nothing to do with respect or trust. It has to do with safety,” Alex insisted.

  My funny bone suddenly got a jolt. “Does this argument seem odd to you? I mean, here are two white women worrying that a black man didn’t get enough respect from a white family and a black woman arguing that he was out of line.”

  “It’s not about black and white,” Alex said firmly. “It’s about women being safe.”

  I shifted my pocketbook on my arm and hefted Cricket’s books. “You’re probably right. And the fact that the issue is women and men rather than black and white may be progress, but this whole conversation still feels strange.”

  Alex shook her head. “Lotsa things are strange around here right now, girlfriend. I don’t trust anybody except you and me, and I’m not always sure about you.”

  10

  The replacement bear arrived Tuesday morning. Dressed in a pink tutu and ballet slippers, she looked more like a four-year-old dancer than a Mama Bear. I introduced her around the store, and she created a diversion we all badly needed, for we had no customers.

  The bear was soft and dark brown, with two bright brown glass eyes and a pink flower on an elastic band circling her head. I was tempted to keep her. She’d look real cute in the wing chair, and she’d be somebody to cuddle when Joe Riddley got grumpy. He was real grumpy at the moment, because he’d ordered more poinsettias than I’d advised him to buy, and they weren’t moving.

  I was forced to change my mind, though, when a deputy came in while I had the bear on my lap. The look he gave me reminded me that a judge needs to act like a judge.

  I wrapped the bear in Christmas paper and took her with me when I went home for dinner. Joe Riddley came in a few minutes later, and we ate Clarinda’s chicken and dumplings in such glum silence that she told us, hands on her ample hips, “I’m gonna go look for me a job with pleasant people. Why don’t you all go get yourself nighttime jobs diggin’ graves?”

  I called later to be sure Edie was working. She was, so I headed to the library again. The gorgeous weather was still holding, so I walked, glad of a chance to get out and see Oglethorpe Street and the courthouse square. Downtown looked real festive, even without customers.

  When I got to the desk, I scarcely recognized Edie. She’d shrunk, or maybe she looked that way because of the way her shoulders slumped under a gray wool suit and white blouse that looked more appropriate for chairing a board than for checking out books. Her face seemed to have wrinkled overnight. Dark half-moons connected her cheeks to her eyes. What was worse was the expression looking out of those eyes: fear, anger, despair, and a sort of fierce determination to hold it all together when her world was clearly falling apart.

  “I brought you a present,” I told her, handing over the bulky package.

  “Thanks.” She started to drop it behind the counter, unopened.

  “Don’t you want to see what it is?”

  When she saw the tutu, she exclaimed, “Oh!” She tweaked the pink flower, then clutched Mama Bear to her chest.

  “That’s how she makes me feel, too,” I admitted. “It took all the willpower I have not to keep her. You think Papa Bear will like her?”

  “He’d better.” Edie buried her face in the fuzzy spot between the bear’s soft ears, then sighed and propped the bear on the counter against the computer monitor. “Poor Papa Bear. He’s still lying on the couch in his Pilgrim costume, not a stitch of Christmas clothes to his name.”

  “Valerie said she bought material to make him some.”

  Edie turned so I couldn’t see her face. “Valerie has other things on her mind.”

  You’d have to be a braver woman than I to ask questions after that tone of voice. Edie bent to retrieve returned books from the bin beneath the counter, and I turned to go. “Thanks,” she called softly after me, with a pitiful attempt at a smile.

  Before I had gone five steps, Genna passed me, heading toward the counter with such purpose that she nearly ran me down. She looked pretty in khaki pants and a sweater the color of eggplant. Her hair was fluffy, her makeup perfect. I wondered how early I’d have to start to look that good by noon.

  As she caught my eye, she flushed. She carried a white poinsettia in a pot wrapped in green paper, when we both knew Yarbrough’s poinsettias were wrapped in red.

  In spite of what Joe Riddley may tell you, I did not pause at the bulletin board to eavesdrop. I stopped to read a poster about free breast cancer screenings, because my mammogram was overdue. It was pure coincidence that I overheard what went on next.

&nbs
p; Genna set the poinsettia on the desk. Then she touched Mama Bear and smiled. “Cute.” She leaned on the counter and said, “I came to say I’m sorry for what Adney said Saturday and what I said at your place last night.” It didn’t take much detecting skill to guess Adney was out of town again and Genna had spent the night at Edie’s.

  Edie shifted the flower over to one side, out of the way of people returning or checking out books. “Sorry isn’t enough.”

  “I was upset.”

  Then Genna must have realized an apology is not the time to defend your position, because she added, in a meeker voice, “I tried to call early this morning, but you had gone. I left messages both here and at your house, but you didn’t return my call.”

  Edie started processing the books she’d retrieved. “I’ve been busy. I haven’t listened to messages.” Genna started to reach out toward her, but when Edie added, “I just got here,” Genna froze with one hand half extended, like a child flung away in a game of statues.

  “Where were you?” Her voice was breathless, almost frightened. When Edie didn’t answer, Genna stood on tiptoe and pulled herself up so she was lying across the counter. “Did you go see Shep? Was it about changing your will?”

  Edie turned so her back was to the counter. “That’s none of your business.”

  Genna’s hot reply could be heard by anybody in the room. “It is, too, my business.”

  “Shhh!” Edie commanded.

  Genna looked around, embarrassed, and lowered her voice, but not enough. I could still hear every furious word. “You got everything my daddy had. He didn’t even leave me the snuffboxes, until after you—” She broke off, with the decency to be embarrassed.