Who Invited the Dead Man?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  Walker’s head jerked up and his eyes got wide. He leaned over and murmured, “Mama, can you see that man’s left hand?”

  “No, why?”

  Walker’s nostrils flared and his face flushed. I wondered when he’d had his blood pressure checked. “I’d like to know if part of his pinkie is missing.”

  “I can tell you that much. It is. He caught it in a car door when he was little. Why?”

  Walker pounded the table beside him lightly. “I know who he is! And why I don’t like him!” He picked a roll from the basket and started picking it to bits like he used to pick the stuffing from my cushions.

  “Care to share the knowledge?”

  He gave me a lopsided grin. “Sure, but it’s silly. Remember that trip my class took to Washington in fifth grade, when I worked my tail off earning half the money and you and Daddy put up the other half?”

  “Yes.”

  “And remember how we had one too many people going, so I volunteered to room and buddy with somebody from another school, because I thought it would be cool to get to know somebody who wasn’t from Hopemore?”

  “Yes.” Surely this couldn’t be heading where I thought it was. I took a roll, too, and spread it with a lot of butter. I crave cholesterol when I’m nervous.

  “And remember how I came home and told you I had a terrible time, because my roommate and buddy turned out to be a bully from Columbus, two years older than everybody else, who was so awful nobody from his own school would room with him?” Walker lathered the remaining roll with a lot more butter than his arteries needed, and took a savage bite.

  “Slade’s not from Georgia,” I reminded him. “Maybe he just looks like that boy.”

  “No, it’s him. He used to say that very same thing about anybody and everybody. ‘Half the world’s below average.’ He embarrassed me to death everywhere we went.”

  He’d done a lot more than that. Walker came home complaining that they’d had to stay with their buddy the whole trip, and his would never stop to look at anything he wanted to see. He wouldn’t even go to the bathroom when Walker needed to. I’d been real upset back then that the teachers hadn’t assigned Walker another buddy, or added the two of them to another pair. Now he added something he hadn’t told us then. “He flat-out refused to sleep in a double bed with another boy. He’d have made me sleep on the floor if the other two boys in our room hadn’t told him I had paid for my bed, and he could jolly well sleep on the floor himself. He did, but said he’d break my arm if I ever fussed to the teachers about him. He could have, too. He was big, Mama. Lots bigger than I was back then.” He chewed with the contentment of a man who has finally grown as big as the bullies.

  I must have sat for a full minute trying to absorb all that. I found I was still furious with that child who had ruined Walker’s trip. “You’re sure?” I finally asked weakly.

  “Danged sure. He hasn’t even changed much, now that I know who he is. Except he had real long hair then. He still struts like the king of the universe and is charming with folks he wants to impress, but treats little people like dirt. Back then he sucked up to all the teachers.” He gave a low chuckle. “As one of his best advertisers, I hope he finds out one day I’m that little kid he bullied all over Washington.”

  He hadn’t spoken loudly, either, but he’s got a carrying voice, and the last part of his sentence filled one of those silences that happen at meals. Slade slid back instantly and came toward us with a big grin on his face. He laid one hand on Walker’s shoulder. “Are you my old roomie from the fifth-grade Washington trip? I thought you looked familiar.”

  I suspected he’d been waiting for the right minute to trot out that line, because I knew the very minute he’d found out who Walker was. It was the Sunday on Meriwether’s porch, when Gusta said something about Walker Crane Yarbrough. That’s why he dropped his paper in Alice’s lap, causing her to kick over my tea. Back when Walker was ten, he experimented for a few months with being called by his middle name. He’d gone on the Washington trip as Crane.

  To me, Slade no longer looked like a charming newcomer who might be the answer to our prayers for Meriwether. He looked like the louse who spoiled my son’s class trip.

  When Slade stuck out his hand, I braced myself. I’d done my best with Walker’s manners, even paid good money to send him to what Joe Riddley insisted on calling “a gentlemen’s finishing school” instead of to the University of Georgia. But Walker wasn’t always predictable, and anybody with any sense could read in his eyes that the memory of that trip wasn’t all sweetness and light.

  Slade wasn’t dumb. He dropped his hand to Walker’s shoulder. “I owe you an apology, buddy. I was a real brat as a kid. Forgive me?”

  Walker made his mother proud. He stuck out his own hand. “Hey, it was a long time ago. No hard feelings.” Both men laughed like men do when they are saying nice things and not meaning a word of it. Slade went back to Meriwether and bent near her—probably to explain. She looked our way, but not at Jed.

  I don’t know what Walker saw on my face, but he leaned over and said softly, “Smile, if it kills you. But there’s still something in me that wishes I could knock him down just once. It would feel so good.”

  I gave him a big smile and murmured, “I’d like to knock him down for you.” My heart twisted to remember what Walker wrote in that year’s Christmas letter: I worked very hard to earn my money, but the trip was pretty awful. I would not encourage anyone else to do this.

  I called Sheriff Gibbons when I got home and suggested he run a complete check on Slade Rutherford’s background. He sure hadn’t mentioned Columbus, Georgia, in any of the stories he’d told around town.

  23

  Two mornings later I left Joe Riddley at physical therapy long enough to run a van full of potted plants over to the new town center auditorium where we hold large meetings, wedding receptions, and business seminars. That day, the Junior League was having its annual fund-raising luncheon and fashion show, and I’d offered to donate ten plants for them to auction off.

  As I pulled into the lot, Meriwether stood by her silver Mercedes looking uncertainly at a silver BMW and a green Saturn already parked in the lot. “Looks like we’ll have some muscles to help with these plants,” I called cheerfully, ignoring the way she was glaring at the BMW.

  We each carried in a plant and found Jed and Maynard setting up mikes and a podium at the front. The room was set up for a luncheon much smaller than the Junior League’s, and there was no stage for the fashion show.

  Meriwether put down her plant with a thump. “What are you all doing?”

  Maynard spoke over a mike he was carrying. “Getting ready for Rotary.”

  Ignoring us, Jed called from the far end of the room, “You want three mikes up front?”

  “I think two will be enough,” Maynard called back.

  “The Junior League has this room today,” Meriwether said in an icy voice. “We’ve had it reserved six months.”

  Maynard shook his head. “Daddy’s president of Rotary, and he reserved it last year.”

  Meriwether whipped out her cell phone, but we could tell at once that the news was not good. “We can’t both meet here. You’ll need to help Maynard find another place.”

  Meriwether held out the phone, but Maynard hadn’t spent ten years in New York for nothing. “Sorry, but we’re staying. Maybe you all could meet up at the motel by I-20.”

  “Their meeting room wouldn’t hold us all. Besides, it smells of cigars. Why don’t you all move up there?”

  “It wouldn’t hold us, either. And we’ve got guests coming from all over the state. This is a real important meeting.” He adjusted a chair to stake his claim on the room.

  Hopemore isn’t like Atlanta. We don’t have meeting rooms all over the place. This could get real serious. Meriwether looked mad enough to spit—except she’d never spit in public. “It’s our fall fashion show, and we’ve sold two hundred tickets.” They were getting nowhere fast. />
  “Is that poor woman still holding on the other end?” I asked.

  Meriwether gave a snort of impatience and said into the phone, “We’ll get back to you.”

  Jed called, “Hey, we’re gentlemen. Let me use your phone, Meri, and I’ll see if the Country Club is available for you ladies. I’m sure your grandmother still belongs.”

  Meriwether clutched her phone to her chest like it would get cooties if he touched it. “Never mind.” When she put her chin in the air like that, she was the spitting image of Gusta. “I’ll call them myself.” She went out in the hall, but all of us could hear her wail, “Can’t you rearrange things to accommodate us?”

  “Could we meet in the church fellowship hall?” Jed asked Maynard softly.

  I contributed my two cents’ worth. “The women’s sewing circle has it today.”

  “Uh-oh.” Jed shook his head in defeat. “Nobody would ever get it, then.”

  Meriwether overheard him as she came back. “Get what?”

  Jed shrugged, to show her it was a dead idea. “Nothing. I suggested you might use the church fellowship hall, but the women’s sewing circle has it. There’s no chance they’d move.”

  Her eyes flashed. “They’d move for me.” She punched in another number.

  It took her three calls, but she got the sewing circle to agree to meet the next day instead. “My hat is off to her,” I muttered to Jed, who was standing near me. “Nothing is harder to shift than a group of church women who have staked a claim.”

  “She’s got what it takes,” he said sourly. “The hardest head in Georgia. The hardest heart, too,” he added, after she called the church to tell them the Rotary would meet in the fellowship hall that noon.

  To my surprise, Meriwether dropped by the office that afternoon. I was balancing our personal checkbook, but gladly pushed the right button to finish reconciling the account and stuffed the checks back in their envelope and into a pigeonhole. She sank into the chair by the window like she was tired to death. She had small crow’s-feet around her eyes, and her hair wasn’t as fluffy and soft as usual. “Good meeting?” I greeted her.

  “We made a lot of money, but it was an enormous amount of work. Why, Mac, do people have to be bribed by a fashion show, a banquet, or an auction to be generous?” She rested her head against the high back of the chair and asked, “And why is it that every time I pass Pooh’s house, Jed’s car is there? He must be worrying her to death.”

  “He’s worried about her. And Otis said it does her a lot of good to have company.”

  “Yeah, but Jed?” You’d have thought the man tracked in foot-and-mouth disease.

  I leaned forward. “Have you all gone out at all since he got back? For old times’ sake?”

  Her laugh was as short and sharp as a stake through his heart. “For old times’ sake I ought to shoot him. I don’t know why he keeps hanging around, embarrassing me to death. I’m trying to start a business. I don’t have time to be worrying about him.”

  “How’s that business coming?”

  “We’re going to send out our first catalogue in April, if I live that long. I have to run up to the Merchandise Mart to see what’s available besides what I bought in China.”

  “You aren’t going around the world in eighty days, looking for exciting things?”

  She shook her head with regret. “The consultant said it’s too much trouble to deal with individual suppliers in various countries. I can see that just by the trouble I’m having getting one shipment out of China. I don’t know the laws for all the countries, either, and some of them expect bribes. It’s a lot more sensible to buy from the Mart where I know I can get what I order, but I’ll run the risk of everything looking like every other catalogue.”

  “Will you take the pictures yourself?” Meriwether was the photographer of choice for a lot of Hopemore organizations. She owned the best camera in town.

  She laughed like I was making a joke, and some of her old sparkle returned. “You wouldn’t believe what goes into taking those pictures. They create whole fake rooms to display a couple of pots. It takes days, even weeks, to shoot a catalogue. I found a photographer in Atlanta. He said he’d like to come down and shoot some of the pictures at Nana’s, and I might want to use some of your rooms, too—and your barn, for the country look. What do you think?”

  First, I thought it was interesting that both the Merchandise Mart and the photographer were in Atlanta, where Jed lived. Second, I thought she’d better think again if she thought Gusta would permit her home to appear in a catalogue. What I said, truthfully, was that I would be delighted to be in her catalogue. “But we aren’t so much country as comfortable,” I added

  “That’s exactly what I want to show. My pots make people’s lives more comfortable.”

  “What about the warehouse? I hear you’ve got men working on it.” Even a town as small as Hopemore has a few abandoned buildings. Our biggest ones were lined up down by the railroad track, where trains no longer ran. Several, built of weather-beaten boards, were rotting and falling where they stood. One, of corrugated steel—the one Hiram begged the town council to magnetize—was slowly rusting away and watched constantly by Chief Muggins so drug dealers didn’t claim it. But down at the end of the row, next to her granddaddy’s old cotton gin, securely padlocked and still in pretty good shape, was a brick warehouse he’d built in 1920 to store local cotton until it was ready to ship to their mills.

  Meriwether’s green eyes danced with excitement. “It’s going to be perfect. You can’t imagine how much space there is inside—”

  “I’ve been in that building many times with my daddy, delivering cotton. The warehouse always seemed mysterious—no windows, and that great big door where they could back a whole wagon inside to unload the bales. If I stop and think about it, I can still feel that cold concrete floor under my bare feet and the smell of cotton tickling my nose.”

  She laughed. “I used to love to go down there when I was little, too—for the very same reasons. And it’s perfect for what I need, with the addition of heat, air conditioning, shelves for inventory, and a few lockable storage rooms for valuable merchandise.”

  “You sound like your daddy’s daughter. Practical, wise, brave, and a little crazy. That’s what Joe Riddley says a person has to be to run a business. I think you’re going to make it.”

  For a minute she looked very young and vulnerable. “I hope so. I’ve never done anything as big as this.” She closed her eyes and rested a minute. Then she asked without opening them, “Has Jed taken up permanent residence at Miss Hubbard’s? They’ve had the funeral. Why doesn’t he go back to Atlanta where he belongs? Looks like he’d get fired.”

  “He said he’s got a lot of accrued vacation. I think he’s waiting for the sheriff to find out who killed Hiram.”

  “They may never find that out. Will he stick around forever?”

  “Oh, I think he’ll go back eventually.”

  For a girl who was falling in love with Slade, she sure talked a lot about Jed.

  24

  NOVEMBER

  November blustered in with gray cloudy skies and rain. I got soaking wet putting Joe Riddley and his walker in and out of the car. Darren kept telling him he could walk without the walker, but he refused to try.

  One day, driving through a neighborhood built back around 1950, I saw a “For Sale” sign in front of a one-story brick house. I slowed enough to notice a shallow step to the front door and an attached garage, and backed up for another look. No eaves to paint, no big halls to heat or cool, a dry walk to the house from the car, and a tidy little yard with two big trees. Ridd could rake or mow it in half an hour. Heck, Walker’s nine-year-old, Tad, could rake and mow it. I found myself thinking about that house off and on for the rest of the day.

  Sheriff Gibbons dropped by that afternoon, still convinced Darren committed the murder. “We’ll get him eventually. Meanwhile, about our new editor. He’s not got a criminal record, but he’s told a
lot of whoppers. He was born in South, not North, Carolina, in Orangeburg. His daddy was a Ford mechanic. Daddy drank and Mama called the police when he got violent. When Slade was nine, she got a divorce and moved to Columbus. Slade went to West Georgia College and worked for the LaGrange paper until he was hired by the one in Asheville.” A smile flitted across his bloodhound face. “With all the lies he’s told, he’d be a real good suspect, except he was in his office with three other people from seven that morning until he came to the party.”

  Slade being cleared as a suspect didn’t make him a good marriage prospect, and Meriwether seemed headed that way. Wherever they went it was “honey” this and “sweetheart” that until it nearly made me sick. It didn’t matter to me that Slade was the son of an auto mechanic, but I’ll be darned if I wanted the granddaughter of my oldest friend to marry a liar.