Ridd set down a small canvas bag. “We didn’t bring all his stuff, just enough for a couple of nights. When he’s ready to come on back down to our place, call and we’ll come get him.”
From the look Tad slid in his direction, we would wait for that moment a long time. Ridd clapped him gently on the arm. “Have fun.” Anybody could see that Tad expected to spend the next two days on bread and water.
After Ridd left, Joe Riddley pointed to me on the couch. “Your me-mama is laid up with a sprained ankle, so it’s up to us to make your bed. Come on.” The two of them headed down the hall. Cricket and his Pop would have laughed and cut up until Cricket collapsed with a fit of the giggles. I did-n’t hear a sound until Joe Riddley came back, looking disgusted. “He says he’ll watch television in his room.”
“Tell him I need him to keep me company. Then you go down to the Bi-Lo and get us some lime sherbet. That’s his favorite.”
He shrugged. “There are better ways to waste money, but I’ll go.”
Tad sidled in and sat uneasily on the chair that had already held Burlin and Joe Riddley. I could get used to reclining like Cleopatra and letting menfolk pay me court. “Pop’s gone to the store a minute. Before he gets back, I want to talk to you, because I need you to do a couple of things for me without telling Pop or Uncle Ridd.” I’ve found that two ways to get somebody out of a shell is to ask them to do you a favor or let them in on a secret.
Tad gave me a listless one-shoulder shrug. “What do you need?”
“You’re pretty good with animals, right?”
Interest flickered behind his dark eyes, but his voice was uncertain. “Yes, ma’am. Maybe. A little.”
“I want you to teach Bo some new words. He is driving me up a wall. Most of what Hiram Blaine taught him to say is rude, and I’m sick of having him squawk ‘sic ’em’ or ‘back off and give me space’ all day. He could use a bigger vocabulary.”
A little smile flitted across Tad’s face. “He says ‘Little Bit!’ just like Pop.”
I nodded. “Yeah, like he’s fussing at me. But I wish he could say something like ‘How’re you doing, MacLaren?’ or ‘Here comes Joe Riddley’ or even ‘Bo wants a cracker.’ ”
“He doesn’t eat crackers.”
“ ‘Bo wants peanuts,’ then—I don’t care what. The point is, will you try to teach him?”
One slender shoulder rose in a shrug. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll try.”
“Good, but don’t tell Pop. It will be our secret.”
He turned his head and looked at me from the corners of his eyes. “What was the other thing?” He obviously thought I had a list of dreadful chores on the tip of my tongue, like Cinderella’s wicked stepmother.
“I want you to tell me about the person who was staying in the barn with you.”
He pressed back into his chair and didn’t say a word. I gave him a sharp look. “Did you promise not to say anybody was there?”
He didn’t move a muscle.
“Did you know it was a woman?”
He shifted slightly in his chair. I hated to be the one to tell him, but he’d find out eventually. “You don’t have to keep her secret anymore, honey. Lulu and I found her down at the water tank this morning. She’s dead.”
His face turned so white his eyes looked black. “She can’t be dead! She wasn’t sick.”
I might as well give him the whole story. “Somebody hit her on the head with a pipe.”
“No!” He leaped from his chair, fists clenched. “Nobody would do that. She didn’t hurt anybody.”
“I don’t think she hurt anybody, either,” I reassured him. “I met her only once, but she seemed friendly and happy. Did she help you hide out?”
He hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“How did she help?” It was like picking meat out of black walnuts, one chunk at a time.
“She gave me some food. And she shared hay to sleep on. Mr. Spence left just two bales. I needed one for Starfire.” He sounded resentful. Hubert had obviously failed to do his duty by the vagrants of the world. “And she kept a lookout while I moved Starfire to the pasture to eat, and she helped me rub him down. She said she used to have a horse.” He stopped, then burst out, “She can’t be dead. She can’t!” He pounded his thigh with one fist.
I spoke as cautiously as I’d approach butterflies on a buddleia. “I’m glad it makes you sad, hon. It makes me sad, too. And mad. I want to try and find out who killed her. Will you help me?”
He kicked the rug. “I can’t help. I’m just a kid. Besides, Daddy and Pop don’t like you messing with stuff like that. Uncle Ridd, neither.”
I gave an impatient huff. “I can’t do much messing stuck on this couch. All I can do is think. But to even do that, I need your help. You’re a smart kid. And you knew her—maybe better than anybody in town. I want you to tell me what she was like—things she said, anything you can remember about her.”
“Did Mr. Spence kill her?”
It chilled me to hear him ask the question that matter-of- factly. Has our world so exposed children to violence that they take it for granted people they know can kill? “Why would you think that?”
“He didn’t want her there. She wasn’t hurting anything, but he—he—” He lifted his dark eyes to mine and stammered with indignation. “He—he came down yesterday morning and caught her carrying our garbage to the woods to bury it. She buried the garbage, Me-mama. She didn’t mess his place up! But he yelled at her—real loud. Told her to ‘Git!’ and ‘Git off my propity’ ”—Tad’s accent was a fair imitation of Hubert’s—“until she ran away.”
I felt real discouraged. If Tad hadn’t seen her since Monday morning, we were at a dead end. “So she never came back?” I prompted, when he didn’t say anything more.
“Oh, yes, ma’am, she came back. She just went over to the pond and waited for him to leave. She liked the pond. She stayed over there with Starfire a lot. She said it was a real peaceful place.” He sat back down and sighed. “Nobody ought to have killed her.”
“Did she tell you her name, where she was from?”
“She said to call her Bertie, but the way she said it, I don’t think it was her name. And she said she’d call me Son, so if the police came looking for me, she could say she didn’t know anybody by that name.” He sighed. “She talked funny sometimes and didn’t make sense, and she muttered a lot, but she liked whistling at birds and talking to squirrels, and she hummed a lot. She didn’t hurt anybody. If I’d had a barn, she could have lived there forever and ever!” Tears filled his eyes and spilled out onto his cheeks. He swiped at them angrily.
“Here.” I held out a box of tissues I keep by the couch. He snatched the whole box, then clutched it to him and backed into his chair again like it was the only safe haven in the world.
My own eyes stung. “If I’d had a barn, she could have lived there, too,” I said softly. “Bring me a tissue, too, please.” We sat and cried together, but I didn’t know if I was crying because Bertie had died or because Tad defended her so valiantly.
He sat with his head bowed, tears dripping onto the box, for several minutes. Then he gave a big sniff, blew his nose, wadded his tissue, and left it carelessly on the table beside his chair.
“There’s a perfectly good wastebasket at your feet,” I pointed out. “When was the last time you saw her?”
He dropped in the tissue and muttered, “After supper last night. She went to Myrtle’s and brought us something back. Just cold meatloaf and green beans”—his face twisted in distaste—“but she said beggars can’t be choosers. Then she told me she had to go meet somebody, and she’d be back. But she never came.” His voice dwindled, and his eyes looked far away. Was he remembering sitting in the dark with his horse, waiting for a companion who never returned?
He scrubbed one cheek with his fist, and his voice was angry. “She should have known better than to go wandering around town alone at night. Did somebody rob her?”
�
�What could they have robbed her of?”
He shrugged. “Not much. She just had an old knapsack with some stuff in it—a dirty hairbrush, a few clothes, a couple of pictures, stuff like that. And a battered guitar. Didn’t you see them?”
“They were there. Do you know who she was going to meet?”
He shook his head. “No, ma’am, but she wrote them a letter.”
“How do you know?”
Suddenly he was busy examining the back of one hand.
“I need to know, Tad.”
He sighed. “When she got back yesterday morning, she asked if I had any paper. I told her I didn’t, but she kept saying, ‘A piece of paper. One little piece of paper.’ She kept looking all over the barn, too, like she thought Mr. Spence might have kept paper there. Finally, I told her I’d get her some. Seemed like I ought to do something for her, since she’d done stuff for me. She told me to get an envelope while I was at it, so we went down to Uncle Ridd’s—”
“Nobody saw you?” I knew the answer, of course, before he replied.
“Aunt Martha’s car was gone, so I guess she was working. Everybody else was at school. We didn’t take anything except a pen and some paper and an envelope from the desk in the den. And”—he turned pink and looked down at his hands—“and we made us some lunch. She washed everything real good, so nobody would know.”
“Ridd and Martha would never begrudge you something to eat,” I assured him. “But I wish you’d left a note saying you were okay. We’d have all slept easier.”
He scuffed his feet on the rug. “I was in a hurry, in case Aunt Martha had just gone to the store, or something.”
“When you got back to the barn, she wrote a letter?”
“Yes, ma’am. Then she said she had to go somewhere and went up the road.”
“Do you know whether she mailed it or delivered it?”
“She didn’t have a stamp.” His tone implied that I ought to have known that, since he’d already told me. Then his voice changed and became thoughtful. “But when she got back with supper and I asked if she’d delivered it, she laughed and said she’d given it to the mailman with the purple truck. I don’t know but one purple truck, Me-mama, do you? And it doesn’t belong to a mailman. It belongs to that stinking old nut who thinks somebody buried treasure on his farm.”
“Hector Blaine’s not that old,” I corrected him. He was a good bit younger than me. “But you’re right that he stinks, and he does think the Confederate treasury is buried on his property. That isn’t utterly far-fetched. A lot of folks think it’s buried around here somewhere. It got this far at the end of the War, and there’s no indication it ever left. Hector’s convinced it’s buried on his land. However,” I remembered to add, “I doubt your mama wants you calling any grown-up a stinking nut.”
Tad slewed his eyes my way. “That’s what Daddy calls him.”
“That’s not my fault. I did all I could to raise your daddy right. When you’re with me, I’d rather you called Mr. Blaine a confused man.”
“Yes, ma’am. Is he nuts—I mean, confused enough to kill somebody?”
I thought that over. “He’s devious and mean,” I said, feeling my way as I went, “and he’s done time for various things. But if Bertie called him a postman, it sounds like she didn’t write him the note. I wonder why she gave it to him to deliver?”
“She musta known him. He dropped her off after dark on Sunday.”
It wasn’t surprising that Bertie would meet up with Hector. He was one step up from homeless himself, an unsa vory old codger who never worked for a meal he could get for free. I filed that information for future reference and asked, “What happened after supper last night?”
“She said she had to go out again and it might be late before she got back, but I didn’t need to worry.” His eyes went blank. Was he thinking now that indeed, he had needed to worry? He must have worried as he waited in that dark barn alone all night.
“And you have no idea who she wrote?”
“No, ma’am. She went out under a tree to do it. But she put a picture in it,” he remembered. “She came back and got it out of her knapsack. When she finished, she licked the envelope and put it in her pocket.” Sadness slumped his thin shoulders. “Whoever she wrote is probably who killed her.” He was resigned now. His sadness trailed out in two sentences I wished we could put on her tombstone: “She never hurt a single soul. She just liked being free.”
“Did she tell you why she dressed like a man?”
“Yes, ma’am. She said it was so people would leave her alone. You know how people are, always saying you have to take care of girls—even if girls sometimes beat up their little brothers or play like they’re gonna drown their cousins.” He spoke darkly, from personal experience. Then he heaved a sigh from the toes of his heavy shoes. “I guess she didn’t want people taking care of her. Nobody should have killed her, either. She wasn’t hurting anybody.”
Seeking to distract him again, I said, “After she left, when you were by yourself at the barn, it must have been pretty lonely.”
“That night it was,” he admitted, “but today I was mostly hungry. And I wasn’t by myself very much. Mr. White showed a lady the house, then you and Aunt Martha came.” White’s Realty was handling Hubert’s property and the White family lived down the street from Walker and Cindy. “I nearly got caught, but I didn’t.” I was glad to see color returning to his face. “I had taken Starfire up to the pasture to eat, like I always did in the morning”—to hear him talk you’d think he’d lived in that barn for months—“and I was coming back to clean out his stall when they turned in. I shinnied up a tree so they wouldn’t see me, and it sure was good I wasn’t in the barn, because she wanted to see it. She said she wants to get a horse.” He looked anxious again. “Mr. Spence said Uncle Ridd can keep Starfire in his barn until they get theirs rebuilt, but you reckon he’ll be all right without me? ”
“He’ll adjust,” I promised, without a clue about whether horses adjusted or not. “Do you think the woman and Mr. White noticed you all had been there?”
“I don’t know. I’d buried our garbage from last night, but I hadn’t swept the manure out of Starfire’s stall.” Sounded like Tad had been learning new habits while he was away.
Lulu raised her head from down near my feet and uttered a sharp bark, then jumped from the couch and ran to welcome Joe Riddley. “Go help Pop carry the groceries in,” I told Tad. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t have some lime sherbet in his bag. But don’t you tell him what we’ve been discussing, now.”
“I won’t.” Tad jumped up to obey, looking a lot more his old self. He came back in a minute, carrying a bowl of green sherbet and a box. “This is for you. Pop’s getting ours now. But look what he bought me.” He held out a paint-by-number kit, showing a brown horse. “If I change the colors to black and gray, it will look just like Starfire.” As soon as I took my sherbet, he started tearing off the plastic wrap. “Mama will just love this picture.”
He carried the box to the dining room table. “Be sure you put newspaper under that,” I reminded him. “It didn’t matter down at the other place—that old kitchen table has been beat up and painted on for over a hundred years. But now that we’ve only got this new one, I want to keep it nice as long as possible.”
Tad spread out paper and started painting. His tongue stuck out of one corner of his mouth as he concentrated. His granddaddy leaned over his shoulder and said, “Why, you are a real good artist, son.” He set a bowl of sherbet down on the table where Tad could reach it.
“I like to paint.” Tad set down his brush and moved the sherbet bowl to the newspaper. “But don’t mess up this table, Pop. Me-mama will kill us both.”
How frequently do we say that when we don’t mean it? But somebody killed the homeless woman named Bertie. Was it Hubert? Hector? Another vagrant who had staked out the water tank as his own private patch?
First thing the next morning, as much as the prosp
ect pained me, I needed to talk to Hector Blaine.
16
Hector Blaine was the last of a notorious family. His granddaddy made enough running a still during Prohibition to buy a little farm, but his daddy, deprived of the still by the federal government, refused to stoop to farming, so his family lived mostly on what his wife made teaching. After she died, nobody knew how they survived. Hector’s brother Hiram, a disciple of Amos Pickens, earned a stint in state prison for trying to add vinegar to the town water supply to repel aliens from Venus. Hector had done several stretches for assault and robbery. I didn’t want him coming to our house. He hadn’t bathed in recent memory, and took far too literally that what was mine was his. Anything he couldn’t wheedle out of you, he felt free to come back when you weren’t home to “borrow.”
But even if Hector wasn’t one of my favorite people, I felt sure I could get information from him one way or the other. So I asked Tad at breakfast Wednesday, “How about if you come to the office with me until its time to go to school?” I might need him to prime Hector’s memory.
He turned to his granddaddy. “You got games on your computer, Pop?”
“I don’t know, but I reckon you’ll know how to figure that out,” Joe Riddley told him.
“You and who else?” Bo demanded from his place mat.
I gave Tad what I hoped was a significant look. He handed Bo a piece of apple on one finger. “Bo wants some apple,” he said softly. “Bo wants some apple. Bo wants some apple.”
Bo flapped his wings and squawked. “Back off. Give me space!” Tad laughed and Joe Riddley and I exchanged a happy smile. We hadn’t heard that sound for a while.
As soon as Joe Riddley dropped us at the office, Tad slung himself into his granddaddy’s chair and started pounding the computer keyboard. I was afraid he was deleting our entire inventory, but in a few minutes he had a game up and running. “I don’t have this one,” he said with satisfaction.
When Will the Dead Lady Sing? Page 16
