Who Invited the Dead Man?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “Two weeks without Miss Gusta? How will Hopemore manage to survive?”

  “Peacefully, probably.” Everybody tittered.

  We didn’t know at the time that Hiram Blaine was giving notice that very day in Atlanta, planning to head back to Hopemore. Poor Hiram, even he had no idea of the trouble he’d bring back with him.

  6

  OCTOBER

  One afternoon in the second week of October, I was working in our back office when Walker came in rubbing his palms together. “I can’t believe I fell for that old trick.”

  Looking at Walker is like looking in a mirror. We have the same brown eyes, the same stocky build, and the same honey-brown hair, except Walker’s is beginning to show some gray and mine, thanks to Phyllis, is not. Busy with the payroll, I scarcely looked up. “What trick?”

  He slumped into his daddy’s desk chair, still rubbing his palms. “Hiram Blaine is back, with that same old electric button he hides in his hand to shock folks with. Must have fresh batteries though.” He held out a palm as pink as boiled shrimp. “That thing nearly sent me to Mars.” As he settled into the chair, he added, “Speaking of space travel, Hiram said he’s come back home because Atlanta’s full of aliens and they’re as slippery as turkey turd.”

  “You don’t have to quote him. Hiram’s got the foulest mouth in Georgia.”

  “Good pun, Mama.” Walker flipped on Joe Riddley’s computer, then flexed his right hand again. “He’s still got that old Yarbrough’s hat Daddy gave him years ago, and the same obstreperous red parrot perched on his shoulder.”

  “Old Joe?” I grinned even though Walker wasn’t looking. “Don’t forget that parrot was named for your daddy, son. Watch how you insult him.”

  “Hiram sent you his love.” Walker spoke without turning around. “His exact words were, ‘Tell Mizzoner I’ll come by to see her soon’s I get time.’ ”

  “Lucky me.”

  The main reason Gusta had objected to Meriwether’s dating Jed was that while he himself was a very personable young man, he belonged to one of the most peculiar families in Hopemore. In the South, “peculiar” can mean anything from a tad eccentric to downright dangerous, and generally we tolerate peculiar folks unless they do bodily harm. But the Blaines came close to being intolerable.

  They had been the despair of Hope County for nearly a century, a shiftless family always more willing to annoy people than to bathe. In our generation the family had finally dwindled to Hector, Hiram, and their younger sister, Helena. Their mother had been a schoolteacher before she gave it up to marry a charming smile and a shock of black curls. She wasn’t the first wife to discover the wrappings were better than the package.

  Our family hadn’t had much to do with any of the Blaines until thirty years ago, when Helena came back from being a civilian worker at Warner Robbins Air Force Base during the Vietnam War. She brought a little boy and no explanation. Just showed up at our store one day with the baby, asking, “You all got any work I could do?”

  Joe Riddley felt sorry for her and hired her to work at the counter, but she was helpless with a register. We tried her in several positions before he found she had a knack for growing flowers. She cared for all our bedding plants, and under her care they were gorgeous.

  Hector was a shiftless skunk who tried to wheedle a loan from anybody he met. He was also convinced the Confederate treasury was buried on their family farm, and for years he’d been arguing with the bank about a loan, using that hypothetical treasury as collateral. He’d been sent to jail several times for minor crimes.

  Most of his fifty years, Hiram had been the less disgusting of the two boys, wandering around with a big red parrot on his shoulder, playing practical jokes. Then a few years back, he took up with our neighbor Amos Pickens, who was convinced earth was in danger of imminent attack from outer space with Venus as the launching station. After Amos died, Hiram saw himself as Hopemore’s only informed citizen. He petitioned the county commission to order everybody to buy black-out curtains so telescopes on Venus couldn’t peer in our windows at night. When they refused, he begged them to magnetize an old steel building down by the railroad tracks to attract any space-ships that attempted to land. The commissioners pointed out that a magnet that size would attract trains, tracks, and every automobile in town, but Hiram didn’t give up.

  One night he was caught by a police officer on top of the water tank with a five-gallon bucket of vinegar. He had three more buckets on the ground, and claimed that putting vinegar in the water was the only surefire way to stop spies the aliens already had among us. “Alien bodies cannot tolerate vinegar,” he explained. “They shrivel.”

  I vividly remember the morning the indignant officer brought Joe Riddley the warrant. “Son,” Joe Riddley said, stroking his jaw with one long forefinger, “carrying a bucket of vinegar is not exactly possession of implements of a crime, and scratching that old water tank a little getting it up there is hardly criminal damage of property. You’re reaching a bit, aren’t you? Let me try to talk Hiram out of this foolishness.”

  But Hiram was so determined about the need for that vinegar, and the commission was so irate, Joe Riddley finally concluded that sending Hiram to jail for six months might be the best thing for everybody. When Hiram got out of jail, he went up to Atlanta, where Jed was already practicing law. Joe Riddley always said Jed was the only good thing to come out of the Blaines in three generations. Hiram had been in Atlanta nearly four years.

  “Has he come home permanently or just to visit?” I asked Walker.

  He spoke over one shoulder, already intent on his computer screen. “Didn’t say.”

  We worked in companionable silence, broken only by a po lice officer coming in for me to sign a warrant of arrest for a man who’d held up a convenience store in a stocking mask but left his wallet on the counter when he drove away. The office at the back of Yarbrough’s was as much home to all of us as our house. Our boys came there every day after school until they were old enough to ride their bicycles home alone. The oak rolltop desks, chairs, and filing cabinets were put in by Joe Riddley’s granddaddy when he bought the store. My in-laws set the big comfortable chair by the window. We added computers and other modern equipment, and I occasionally put up a new ruffle at the window or got the big chair recovered, but the office hadn’t changed much over the years. It was both modern to work in and very comfortable.

  I had always kept the books and done the billing while Joe Riddley supervised the front and ordered inventory. Since Joe Riddley got shot, he might come in for an hour now and then, but you couldn’t call his little bit of thumbing through catalogues “work.” He still couldn’t read properly. Now Ridd came after school to check on the plants and how things were running out front, and Walker had started coming by for an hour or two each afternoon to check inventory and order what we needed. Ridd had always loved plants and being around the place, but Walker never had taken much interest. It was surprising to find that while he didn’t care for plants one way or the other, he was better than his daddy, even, at the business side of things. He was also tactful about not letting Joe Riddley know how much work he was taking on.

  Around three he stopped, stretched, and asked, “You want a Coke?” When I nodded, he fished quarters from the Cane Patch syrup can we kept on Joe Riddley’s desk and went out to get us both a drink. As he came back, he asked, “Do you have any idea where I might have known Slade Rutherford before?”

  I popped the tab from my chilly can as I thought about that. “Maybe he went to Davidson? He’s from North Carolina.”

  “Nope. He took a long swallow of Coke, emitted a belch, and gave me a grin to say it was designed only to irritate his mother. “I checked my annuals. Even hauled down my old high school annuals, in case he attended high school here a year or two.” He flung himself into his daddy’s chair but didn’t turn back to the computer. “I’ve thought about all the logical places—insurance conventions, Rotary, Jaycees. It’s not any of those.
I keep connecting him with huge buildings, but if it wasn’t at college—” He shook his head like he was trying to clear it.

  I turned back to my desk and asked absently, “But you think you have met him?”

  “I’m sure of it. The first time I laid eyes on him, I thought he looked familiar, and when I heard his name was Rutherford, I immediately asked, ‘Slade?’ It’s not exactly a name you pull out of the first barrel.” He gave an embarrassed little chuckle. “The weirdest part is, as soon as I said his name, I wanted to knock him down.” He made a fist and rammed it into his sore palm, then winced.

  Now he had my full attention. Walker had always been a pounder, but he pounded furniture and pillows, not people. “For what?”

  “I don’t know.” He swiveled his chair toward the computer. “Oh, well. We’ve got enough on our plates without worrying about that.”

  I eyed my own screen thoughtfully. It wasn’t like Walker to dislike somebody. Was there something about Slade I ought to know as a magistrate? Walker’s back was to me, so instead of continuing to work on payroll like I ought to, I went on-line and checked the Asheville paper archives. Slade was listed as one of their editors up to six weeks ago, but I couldn’t find a bio.

  As long as I was reading papers on-line, I might as well look up another article I’d been wanting to read. I found the Clearwater paper and the archive article on page one: “Novice Diver Trapped in Coral Rock.” As I read, I squirmed that I’d harbored even a suspicion that Alice killed her sister. The story was worse than she’d told. Several other divers had been interviewed, and the writer pulled out all the stops telling about beautiful young Teresa Civilis frantically trying to release her foot, panicking, fighting off her helpers, ripping off her mask, and drowning right before their eyes. “We could have saved her,” one man was quoted, “if she’d stayed calm. We could have gotten her free. It was panic that killed her, not danger.” Terri had a degree in business administration from Georgia State, but was unemployed at the time of her death. She was survived only by a half sister, Alice Fulton. Half sister sounded distant. It didn’t convey Alice’s obvious grief. Her eyes were always anxious and sad.

  As I went back to my payroll, I sent up a prayer that Gusta wouldn’t be too difficult and Alice would have fun on their trip.

  Then my mind returned to where Walker might have known Slade.

  “Maybe he went to scout camp or church camp with you,” I suggested aloud.

  “Let it alone, Mama. It’ll come to me one day.”

  I didn’t say any more, but it kept niggling at me. Walker’s reaction to Slade was utterly out of character. You don’t build up a good insurance business if you aren’t the kind of man who likes and gets along with almost everybody.

  I looked out the window. The weather was so gorgeous that as soon as Walker left, I’d mosey over to the newspaper office. I needed to take my column, anyway.

  Hopemore is a pretty town, with elevated sidewalks and trees lining all the streets. I paused to admire our own sidewalk display of mums, cornstalks, gourds, and pumpkins, then set off for the newspaper office on foot. It was only a couple of blocks, but stretching my legs made me realize how little exercise I’d been getting lately, except for hauling Joe Riddley’s wheelchair in and out of the trunk. I loitered a little, admiring fall window displays and taking deep breaths of the spicy fall air. One of the nicest parts of living in a small town is that you are near enough to farmers’ fields to smell them right in town. That afternoon the light breeze carried a sweet blend of hay and cotton dust that made me forget all our troubles for a little while.

  Then I heard an unearthly screech, followed by “Not to worry. Not to worry.”

  Hiram Blaine shot out of the newspaper office like a bullet, head thrust forward and fists clenched. Thank goodness he turned in the other direction without seeing me. Whatever rehabilitation Hiram had gotten in jail, he hadn’t learned to wash. Even at that distance I could see that his long grizzled hair was greasy with dirt and flopped beneath a Yarbrough’s cap so filthy it looked rose, not red. His jeans and shirt looked like they hadn’t been washed since I last saw him.

  His parrot, Joe, sat on his shoulder. For those who don’t know, a red parrot is actually a scarlet macaw, and it’s not just red. Joe spread a glorious rainbow of red, yellow, green, turquoise, and navy feathers down the back of Hiram’s yellow T-shirt as he squawked a counterpoint to Hiram’s rage: “Not to worry. Not to worry.” Joe had a loud mouth, but he was a beautiful creature—a lot prettier than Hiram.

  I slowed down so the stink would have time to blow away before I got to the door, but Hiram’s memory still lingered on the air as I went inside. The little front office was empty, but I could hear Slade in the back giving somebody what Clarinda would call “up the country.” I don’t know the derivation of that expression, but it always involves a lot of self-righteous shouting. From what I could tell, somebody in circulation hadn’t entered a subscriber’s new address into the computer and they’d missed a paper or two. To hear Slade going on about it, you’d have thought Mr. Dean Witter himself hadn’t gotten his Wall Street Journal. I could sympathize a little, of course—no matter how small a business is, it’s important when it is your business. However, whoever made that particular mistake didn’t deserve to be cut into tiny pieces and chewed up in public. I smacked the silver bell on the counter to say I was there.

  Slade himself breezed around the corner, a welcome smile already plastered on his face. He had to know I’d overheard him fussing, but he didn’t apologize—just leaned on the counter and said confidingly, “Half the world’s people are below average. Did you know that? And I’ve got most of ’em working for me.”

  “You might be talking to one of them right now,” I warned. I laid out the ad and my column. He read the column all the way through. To keep from watching his face, I looked at his hands. His left pinky was cut off below the nail and twisted at the end.

  When he noticed me looking at it, he stuck that hand in his pocket. “I caught it in a car door when I was four. Took off the end and broke the knuckle.” He set the column down on the counter. “This is fine. You write a good column, Judge. I’ve been told folks look forward to it.”

  “Thank you.” Since we were so chummy, it seemed like a good time to get on with what I’d come to find out. I leaned on the counter like I was just being friendly and said, “Gusta says you’re from North Carolina. What part? I have relatives there.”

  He hesitated just a second. “The Piedmont, but we had a house in the mountains, too, and one at the beach.”

  His folks must have had money if they had houses all over the state, but the Piedmont is a big place. “Not many mountains around here. Where in the Piedmont did you live?”

  Mr. Rutherford was nowhere near as forthcoming about his heritage as a well-bred Southern boy ought to be. “We moved around a lot with Daddys business.”

  “You didn’t go to Davidson, did you?”

  He leaned over the counter and whispered, “Am I under suspicion for something?”

  I could tell he was teasing, so I whispered back, “Should you be?”

  He grinned and spoke normally, “Not that I know of.”

  “I was just wondering if you’d gone to college with our younger son, Walker.”

  “Sorry, no. By the way, did you hear that Augusta and Meriwether aren’t coming back until next week?”

  He’d dammed my stream. First, nobody ever called Gusta “Augusta.” And second, “Where did you hear that?”

  “From a primary source. I called Augusta’s cook this morning to see if they needed me to pick them up at the airport tomorrow, and she said they’re staying another week. She said Meriwether wants to do more shopping, so Augusta and Alice decided to stay with her.” He sounded like extending a vacation was routine for him. If it was, he didn’t begrudge spending pennies like Gusta. This was very puzzling.

  I frowned. “I hope they’ll be back before Joe Riddley’s birthday par
ty next weekend.”

  “They’re coming Thursday, I believe.”

  Like Slade, I prefer primary sources. As soon as I got back to my office I called Florine. “I hear you’re gonna have peace and quiet a few more days.”

  “Yes, ma’am, looks like it. You wouldn’t believe what’s happened. Miss Gusta called yesterday all the way from Kidnap or some such place.”

  “Shanghai?”

  “Yeah, that was it. She said Meriwether’s taken it into her head to stay over there another week, so they gotta stay with her. I don’t know what’s gotten into that girl. Just up and announced she was staying whether Miss Gusta liked it or not.” I could practically see Florine flinging up the hand that didn’t hold the phone. “Miss Gusta can’t do a thing with her.”

  “I’ll bet Gusta wasn’t too happy about it.”

  “Fit to be tied. Said Meriwether dug her heels in like a stubborn mule. Decided to go on some old shoppin’ spree and won’t come home for nothin’. Miss Gusta said for two cents she’d abandon her over there with all them foreigners. But of course she can’t rightly do that.”