If anybody could get Terri in and out of an emergency room in record time, Martha could. But her brown eyes were worried when I got there, and she shook her head when she saw me. “She’s not good, Mac. Not good at all.”
“Can I see her?”
“The sheriff’s got a deputy at the curtain, but we can ask him.”
He stepped aside to let me in. “Sheriff said you’d probably be here. Her boyfriend’s in there already.”
I found Darren in a chair holding one of Terri’s hands. Her head was bandaged, her face white beneath it. An IV went in one arm and a monitor overhead graphed her heartbeat. It was, I saw, erratic and fast. Her head was restless on her pillow.
Darren turned, his eyes enormous and accusing. “What happened?”
I breathed a prayer for wisdom before I answered. “She was trying to outrun a deputy, and had to swerve to miss a slow car in her lane. She lost control and wound up in a gully.”
“She didn’t kill anybody,” he insisted. “I know she wouldn’t.” His orange hair blazed like a torch in the room. “Alice wouldn’t!”
“She isn’t Alice, Darren. She’s Terri, Alice’s sister. It was Alice who drowned.”
“No way!” He breathed the words like an angry dragon.
“Yes, way,” I said automatically, echoing little Cricket’s favorite response.
“Darren?” The word was little more than a breath on the wind. We both bent to the bed. Terri’s eyes flickered open. “Don’t hate me,” she whispered. “I had to kill him. I had to. He—”
“Don’t talk,” Darren urged. “Rest. You can talk later.”
She shook her head. “No. Now.” She closed her eyes and seemed to gather strength, but tears squeezed between her closed lashes. “I thought he’d ruin everything.” A sob tore itself from her throat. She took a couple of deep breaths. Behind me, I felt the deputy come into the room.
“Why did you choose my house?” I simply had to know.
“I didn’t know. I meant to take him . . . deserted road. Say we were going to my spaceship. I went to Bi-Lo for plastic gloves.” She stopped and spoke in short raspy phrases. “I saw him . . . walk down a road. . . . I followed . . . picked him up . . . told him . . . show him my spaceship.” She paused again to catch her breath.
“That’s weird,” Darren muttered. “This whole thing is weird.”
Terri opened her eyes and gave him a special smile. “You’re not weird. Just me.” She rested so long I thought she was finished, but she was just gathering strength again.
She looked pleadingly at me. “He said . . . not your name . . .” Again she stopped.
“ ‘Mizzoner’? Is that what he said?”
“Yeah. Mizzoner . . . said he promised to mow. Made me stop at a house. I saw your name . . . on mailbox. He said he had to go in to say he’d be back . . . gone a long time . . . I went in, too, and . . . dining room screen . . .”
Again her head tossed on the pillow. Martha came in to put something in the IV. “She’s tiring. You all need to go.”
“Wait!” Terri raised one arm and winced with pain. Her chest heaved with the effort to breathe. “. . . told him. . . . lie on mail . . . close his eyes . . . I’d beam him up. He never knew a thing.”
She sighed again, and her head flopped to one side. Martha hurried to take her pulse. “Out!” she said. “All of you. She must rest.”
Terri’s eyes fluttered open once more. “Darren’s good. So very good. . . .” The last word was no more than a sigh.
We had turned to leave when we heard her give a sharp little cry. “Mama!”
Teresa Civilis was gone.
31
DECEMBER
The first Sunday in December, Gusta called to say she was coming to see me. She surprised me by arriving in a taxi. “I’ve decided not to buy another car,” she said, unbuttoning her coat. “I don’t know a thing about buying cars, and who would drive it? Otis’s license has been pulled, and he refuses to drive again anyway—he’s certain that everything that happened was his fault for leaving the keys in the car. Pooh and I have decided we’ll take taxis from now on.”
That day was unusually warm, so I suggested we sit on the side porch, out of the wind but in the sunshine. We each chose a rocker, and I handed her a mug of coffee.
“I still can’t believe that girl was taking my money.” Her gnarled hands shook at her own incompetence. “Do you know that she had deposited all of that month’s rent checks into her own account that afternoon? Over in Sandersville. Meriwether says she was planning to leave in a day or two, close her account, and vanish.”
“You’ll get the money back,” I reminded her. “And you’ve still got her computer with your ledger entered into it. Once you learn to use the program, you can enter checks yourself. You can stamp them, and you can deposit them. You won’t need an Alice or even Meriwether.”
“She didn’t even have an aunt in Jacksonville.”
“She must have gone out of town to deposit checks in different towns.”
“And have a holiday at my expense.”
Something in her tone made me ask, “You miss her, don’t you?”
She sipped her tea, then confessed. “I do. I’d gotten used to having her around.”
“You paid for her funeral, too, didn’t you?”
Her gray eyes slewed my way. “How’d you know that?”
“I know you.”
“Somebody had to. They buried her in Macon, beside her mother and sister.”
I looked down the drive, where Joe Riddley and Darren were coming back from a slow walk to Hubert’s pond. “I don’t know how long it will be before Darren recovers. He wanders around here like a shadow of his old self.”
“But Joe Riddley’s getting stronger every day, isn’t he?”
“Yes. Once he gave his brain permission to let him walk, he started getting stronger at once. He even thinks more clearly.”
“But he looks old. We’re all getting old.”
I started to remind her that I was sixteen years younger than she, but I didn’t. I couldn’t remember the last time Gusta came to my house and acted so human.
“Have you heard what Pooh’s doing now?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “She’s taking in boarders. Hubert’s moving in with her, and she’s using his first year’s rent to put in an elevator. Makes her whole upstairs accessible.”
“I deserve a little credit for that,” I boasted. “Martha and I worked on him some, getting him to admit his big house was expensive to keep up when he wasn’t using half of it.” I didn’t tell Gusta, but I also told Hubert that Joe Riddley and I might be buying a smaller house in town. I hadn’t made up my mind to do it, but I’d told him I was considering it.
“Why did you suggest he move in with Pooh?” Gusta demanded.
I laughed. “We didn’t. Martha suggested he let Maynard fix him up a place in Maynard’s new house in town, so Maynard and Selena could get married. Hubert said he’d move to town, but he wasn’t living with lovebirds. Then one day he went to fix Pooh’s television. They got to talking about rattling around in big houses, and the next thing we knew, they had it all fixed up between them. He plans to move right after Christmas, and brags he can see the roof of his store from his new window.”
Gusta gave what started out as a disdainful huff and wound up a sad little sigh. “Now that Otis doesn’t drive, Pooh doesn’t come to see me much anymore.”
“Why don’t you move in with Pooh, too?” I spoke without thinking, but once I said it, it made a lot of sense. “She’s got lots of room. And Martha says that if Pooh had five people in her house, together they could hire a full-time nurse, housekeeper, and a cook cheaper than they could eventually all go into assisted living facilities.”
“Life isn’t only about money, MacLaren,” Gusta told me severely. “What on earth would I do with my own house? And Florine—” Did I detect a wistfulness behind the protest?
“Florine could help Lottie. And Maynard
is drooling to turn your house into a first-rate antique shop. You could stipulate that he call it Wainwright House.”
She gave an impatient huff, but she had a thoughtful look in her eye.
Meriwether and Jed got married a week before Christmas, as soon as she could walk again. She was a radiant bride. I didn’t see any crow’s-feet. Jed was a happy groom, too, and when the minister said, “You may kiss the bride,” he did it rather thoroughly.
Darren agreed to go, although he was still fragile. I expected him to sit with us, but just as we got to the church, Kelly Keane joined him. “Will you sit with me? I don’t know many people.”
Maynard and Selena sat in front of us, and I don’t think they even knew who was getting married. Selena had a gorgeous diamond on her finger, and the way they kept looking at each other, I think they viewed the whole process as a rehearsal for their own wedding in January.
Joe Riddley walked into the church without a walker, and held my hand during the whole ceremony. When the preacher asked, “Will you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?” he leaned over, kissed my temple, and whispered, “I sure do.”
Everybody seemed to have a good time at the reception except Gusta, who was heard to remark acidly that once a girl decided to throw herself away, there wasn’t a thing anybody could do about it.
After the reception, Jed and Meriwether went to change into their going-away clothes. They sent an usher to ask if I would join them in the church parlor in ten minutes.
They looked splendid together, she in dusty rose wool and he in gray, but so nervous that I joked, “It’s already legal. I don’t have to marry you again.” They smiled, but they were still jumpy as kittens chasing butterflies.
Jed reached into his pocket and brought out an old envelope. “We have a big favor to ask. I’m going to give you something, and after we’re gone, I want you to show it to Miss Gusta. But only after we’re gone. Do you understand?”
“Not yet, but I’m working on it.”
“Remember the Virgil you gave me last month? This was in it.” He took two yellowing sheets from the envelope and handed me one. It was a birth certificate for Jedediah Lafayette DuBose, born to Mary Helen Whitsett and Zachary Lafayette DuBose.
My eyes widened. “What—” He interrupted by handing me the second paper. Now, his eyes were brimming with tears.
Dear Jed, Helena wrote in her large, sloppy scrawl,
I ought to of told you sooner, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Plese forgive me. I know I’m selfish, but I think of you as mine and want to die with you at my side. The fact is, honey, you are not my child. Your daddy was Zach DuBose, son of Mr. Lafette and Miss Pooh. Your mother was the only nice boss I ever had before Miss Mac. She and Zach loved each other a lot, but he didn’t think his daddy would take to her. She was not only a Yankee, but kin to General Sherman. When Zach got killed in Nam, Mary was so upset, you came early. She got so sick the Army hospital kept her, so she asked me to take you to her house and look after you until she got there. But she died.
She had told me she was an orfan, and I didn’t know what to do with you, so I took you back to Hopemore. I tried to give you to Zach’s folks, but Mister Lafette ordered me off the porch before I could tell him about Mary. I got so mad I took you home with me and did a terrible thing. I kept you. I have tried hard to keep you clean and nice, but I’m sorry you didn’t have all you could have. I did love you. Please forgive me.
At the end she had written Mama, then scratched it out and put Helena Blaine.
I stared at him through a haze of my own tears. Poor Helena. But how could we have missed that line of Zach’s jaw, the clear blue of Pooh’s own eyes? Once you knew, the signs were there. We’d just none of us ever looked at a Blaine that way. “Helena tried to tell us near the end. It wasn’t ‘sack’ she was trying to say, it was ‘Zach.’ Oh, honey!” I held out my arms to hug him.
He held me with one arm and Meriwether with the other. “Don’t cry, Mac. Do you realize what this means? I get to take care of Pooh!”
But then I got so upset I had to back into a convenient chair. “You should have known years ago. If we hadn’t forgotten the books—but it never occurred to us she might have put anything in them. I am so sorry. How can I ever make it up to you?”
He grinned. “You are about to. You are to wait until we get out of here, then you are to sit Miss Gusta down and tell her.”
“You don’t want to tell her yourself, right now?”
He shook his head and grinned. “Nope.”
“What—” I had to clear my throat to get my voice working again. “What about Pooh?”
“We’ll tell Pooh when we get back from the honeymoon.”
Meriwether touched his arm, and he nodded. “I didn’t forget.” He pulled a second envelope out of his pocket. “Give Miss Gusta these. They are copies. Don’t you dare let her touch the originals.”
“And you’re sure you don’t want to tell her now?”
He and Meriwether shook their heads simultaneously. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “I found these the night you gave me the books, and I knew Hiram was right. Miss High and Mighty would come crawling, begging me to marry Meriwether, if she knew I was Pooh’s grandson. But I won’t have her fawning all over me on my wedding day.”
They departed in a shower of rice.
I decided to take Joe Riddley home and be with him a little while before I went back to tell Gusta. She’d need a nap after the wedding. Besides, she looked so sour, watching them go, I decided she’d enjoy a little more misery.
After we got home, Joe Riddley and I sat for a while on our porch, Joe on his shoulder and Lulu at my feet. The doctor had ordered Hubert to walk every evening, so he moseyed down to our place and sat a spell, too. He told us he often went over to Pooh’s for lunch now, and she joined him on his walk in her motorized chair. “We went as far as the square not long ago,” he bragged, getting himself together to head back home. “I figure by spring we’ll be able to walk as far as your new house.”
“Not to worry. Not to worry,” Joe advised, preening his left wing.
“We don’t have a new house,” Joe Riddley objected. But after Hubert left, he caught my hand with a thoughtful expression. “You know what, Little Bit? When we get old—real old, like Pooh and Hubert there—I think we ought to get us a littler place. Let Ridd and Martha have this big house, and get a little place, just for us.”
“We’ll do that,” I promised, squeezing his hand, “when we get as old as Hubert.”
Read on for an excerpt from Patricia Sprinkle’s next thoroughly Southern mystery
Who Left That Body
in the Rain?
Coming from Signet in December 2002
I don’t know how long we’d been napping when the phone rang. I was so groggy and the room was so dim, I thought it was the alarm until Joe Riddley reached over me and carried the receiver to his ear. “Yeah? Yarbrough’s.” He, too, sounded half-asleep.
Weighed down by the telephone cord, I heard the first four words: “This is Isaac James.”
That’s all I heard. Joe Riddley sat up and pressed the phone to his ear; then his voice went from concerned to gray in one second flat. “What? Where?” He listened. “Do they know who?”
I couldn’t hear a thing, even though I got up on one elbow and tried. I felt a drowsy spurt of resentment—if this was magistrate business, Joe Riddley was no longer the magistrate. Then I remembered he knew that as well as I did. If the call had been for me, he’d have given it to me.
As he listened, he rubbed one hand up and down his cheek as if he was trying to massage his brain into working right. Finally he said, “Of course we will. We’ll go right now. Thanks.”
He handed me the phone, already fumbling for his shoes. “Charlie Muggins is on his way to the MacDonalds’ and Ike thinks we ought to be there when he arrives. Skye MacDonald’s been killed.”
“But how?” I was groggy, shocked and bewildere
d.
“Hit by a car, apparently. Let’s go, Little Bit. Gwen Ellen’s gonna need us.” Joe Riddley was already by the bedpost, reaching for his pants.
Nothing wakes a person up like a sudden death—so long as it’s not your own. My feet were on the floor and my denim skirt half on before I drew another deep breath. “Where?” I demanded, pulling a green turtleneck over my head and reaching for a green-and-blue plaid jacket.
“Ike said it happened out on one of those farm roads just inside the city limits.” Joe Riddley’s voice was a bit crooked, because he was tying his tie. That answered my next question, which was why it was a matter for the city police instead of the sheriff. I was real sorry, because our sheriff, Bailey “Buster” Gibbons, is an excellent lawman and a personal friend, while Police Chief Charlie Muggins is one of those people I think the world could stagger on without.
Who Invited the Dead Man? Page 28
