When Will the Dead Lady Sing?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “Forgive,” I said softly.

  “Can you forgive me? Please? I’ll do anything you tell me—What?” Another long pause. “Yessir, I can do that. Thank you. I love you, too.”

  He hung up and turned away. “That was Daddy again,” he said, wiping his nose. He nearly set the tissue on the table, then remembered and took it to the wastebasket. “He said he remembered that part you told me, about him and Pop.” He heaved a big sigh. “He said I need to call Uncle Ridd, too.”

  “Shall I dial his number right now?”

  He lifted his chin. “Might as well get it over with.”

  I called Ridd and told him to come up for a minute. Tad had something to say to him. When he got there, he looked edgy, as anxious as Tad for this to be over.

  Tad threw me a pleading look, but I didn’t say a word. He took a big breath and said, “Uncle Ridd, I’m—I’m sorry I—I burned down your barn. I want you to forgive me.” He had a ways to go—it sounded more like a command than a plea—but at least he went on. “I’ll do whatever you want me to. I could wash your truck,” he suggested quickly.

  Ridd hesitated, then put out his hand. Tad looked at it uncertainly, then put out his own. “I forgive you,” Ridd said solemnly. They shook. “How about if instead of washing my truck, you—” He stopped, and I suspected he was thinking furiously, trying to overcome his belief that Tad couldn’t do a thing.

  “He could help you scrape and paint your house,” I suggested. “He’s a good painter.”

  Tad blinked, probably thinking it was a long way from painting by numbers to painting a house. Ridd thought it over, then nodded. “We’ll think how many hours would be fair, and you can help me scrape and paint the side the firefighters damaged. Fair enough?”

  Tad nodded. “Yessir.” His head was high, his eyes shining.

  Ridd reached out and rumpled his hair. “I wish you’d come on down to our place again. We sure miss you. Aunt Martha was saying not an hour ago that she wished you were there to help her figure out how to do something on the computer.”

  He turned to me. “Could I go now, Me-mama? I mean, if you need me to help you—”

  “I’ll manage,” I told him. “Run and get your things, and you go on down and help Aunt Martha. But anytime you want to come spend the night, give me a call, okay?”

  I watched them go out, Ridd’s hand resting lightly on Tad’s shoulder and Tad’s arm around his uncle’s waist, and thought that confession is like a waterslide. It looks easy when it’s somebody else doing it. But standing at the top of that chute looking down—

  “I’ll get around to it,” I muttered crossly to nobody in particular. “Don’t rush me.”

  19

  I lay there thinking that if Tad could do it, I ought to be able to do it, too. But I wanted to wait until Joe Riddley was real mellow. It’s one thing to confess when the other person knows they’ve been wronged. But to inform Joe Riddley I’d been carrying on with Burlin behind his back—well, I couldn’t do it while I was stuck in that cast. It complicated my life enough already. I’d figure out the best way to tell him once it was off.

  He came in around nine thirty and was delighted when I explained what Tad had done. But he said, “I’ll miss having the kid around. That was a great idea you had, inviting him here.”

  Great idea I had?

  He slung his cap onto a living room chair. “I’m going out to the garage a little while to set up my shop. Call me for the ten o’clock news.”

  I got so interested in my book, I almost forgot the news. When I switched it on, the announcer wore a bright red smile to report that the economy was up, although I doubted if that fact would affect her six-figure salary one way or the other. Then her face grew grave. “We now bring you a late-breaking story.”

  I was so busy wondering if television news reporters practice facial expressions in front of a mirror at announcing school—whether they have a list of looks they have to master, like “caring,” “serious,” “tragic,” “delighted”—that the picture took a second to register on my brain. Then I yelled, “Joe Riddley, come in here! It’s our murder.”

  He arrived in four long strides and sank into the handiest chair. The screen showed the Hopemore water tank in all its faded glory.

  A screwdriver fell to the floor unnoticed as Joe Riddley said out loud what I was thinking. “With all the murders going on around the country, why would national news report on a homeless woman killed under a small-town water tank?”

  The reporter told us in a bland, modulated voice. “Fingerprints have confirmed that a woman found murdered beneath a water tank in Hopemore, Georgia, yesterday morning is the wife of former congressman Burlin Bullock.”

  Now I knew why the barracudas had circled Burlin.

  Neither Joe Riddley nor I said a word as the water tower gave way to a video clip in which a stocky young woman with shoulder-length blond hair and a friendly square face waved to the camera. She could have been the granddaughter of the woman I’d found. How could one woman age so much in less than forty years?

  In the film, she held a small dark-haired boy who clutched her tight around the neck with one arm. It was obvious they enjoyed being so close. Beside them stood a younger Burlin, looking proud, but unfinished, somehow.

  The next clip showed the same woman dashing from a courthouse, shielding her face with a clutch bag. I hadn’t heard a word the announcer had said for some time. I tuned back in as she was saying, “. . . convicted of killing a five-year-old child in a drunken-driving incident.”

  I stopped listening again.

  The camera returned to the water tank, making its pitiful debut on national news. “I hope everybody in town is watching,” I told Joe Riddley, “and that they’ll all notice how tacky that thing looks. I just hate for the whole country to see it looking like that.”

  The clip ended, appropriately, with a shot of a buzzard glaring down from one of the struts.

  During the series of commercials that followed, we sat silent.

  A light rain fell outside, a steady drip, drip, drip. Droplets of sorrow for poor, poor Sperra. I wondered where she had been all those years she was supposed to be dead, who they had buried in her place, how that had happened. Was her “first” death simply a publicity ploy? Had they paid her not to come around again? Or was it an honest mistake?

  I tried, but could not imagine the paths you’d need to travel to get from a congressman’s house to Hubert’s barn. I remembered that Burlin had mentioned she used to be a folk singer and felt I’d drown in sadness as I thought of her perched on Hector’s broken-down porch singing and strumming Helena’s old guitar. Given the state of the rest of Hector’s house, I doubted if the guitar had been in very good shape. The fact that Sperra would play it at all—and accept it as a gift—showed how hungry she must have been to perform. I found myself whispering, “Thank you for giving her that last happy afternoon before she died.”

  Had it been hard to give up her singing? I hadn’t said anything at the time, but it had irked me how casually Burlin had said “she gave it up” in the same sentence with “of course.”

  I looked across the room at my husband in the shadows. “I need to thank you for something.”

  “What’s that?” Joe Riddley bent to pick up his screwdriver.

  “For never thinking I ought to give up who I was because I married you. For letting me be myself, and never expecting me to turn into somebody whose only role in life was to help you become who you could be.”

  He grunted. “Good thing I didn’t. But if I hadn’t liked you the way you were, I wouldn’t have married you.” His dark eyes rested on me briefly. “Let’s stay up to see what they say at eleven.” He headed back to the garage.

  Outside the windows, night closed down around us like mourning. While Joe Riddley puttered in the garage, I lay there thinking how dreadful Sperra’s life had been. Bo perched on the back of a dining room chair, preening his breast feathers and muttering soft obscenities. I
didn’t bother to hush him. For once, he was expressing my feelings exactly.

  After a while, Joe Riddley came back in. “I don’t see how it can be true,” I told him. “Burlin and Georgia both told me Sperra died twenty years ago. Georgia said they had a quiet funeral.”

  He gave a sour grunt. “Now they’ll have to have a public one.” He sat back down in his chair and reached for the remote to change channels.

  This one, too, showed the famous Hopemore water tank. Then the scene changed to Annie Dale’s front porch, where the Bullocks stood in a family tableau. The shot had been taken at dusk, so I presumed they had canceled their evening meeting.

  Lance stood in the center wearing his navy blazer with khaki pants. Georgia was to his right, in her navy suit, white blouse, and patriotic scarf. Renée was behind Lance, next to Burlin, and I couldn’t see what either of them were wearing, but Binky, to Lance’s left, was again in her navy dress and pearls. I wondered if she were one of those women who bought one good traveling outfit and figured she could wear it daily because so few people saw her twice—or noticed her at all.

  I also wondered if they had deliberately arranged themselves artistically, the three tall ones in the middle, or if that was just a familiar way to pose. Edward stood by Georgia, holding her arm. All the men looked appropriately somber. Binky dabbed her nose with a handkerchief from time to time, but Georgia was composed and beautiful. Edward had his full attention on Lance, as if transmitting his speech by mental telepathy.

  “We are as baffled as anybody,” Lance assured the viewers. “We were informed twenty years ago that Mama died in a fire. We’ve never had any reason to believe otherwise. For her to turn up here, like this—” His voice broke. He ducked his head and turned away.

  Burlin reached out to the camera. “Be assured, we will get to the bottom of this. This is terrible for all of us.” He turned to indicate Georgia, Binky, Renée, and Lance, who now held tightly to his wife’s hand. They nodded in unison.

  I held my breath, afraid I’d see that shot of me with my arms on Burlin’s, but it didn’t appear. Instead, the camera shifted to Chief Muggins in front of our police station. He stood with his chest thrust forward, his head held high, and every cap on his teeth bared in a smile. “We are on top of this,” he promised. “I expect to make an arrest in a very short time.”

  Now, there was a promise designed to ruin my sleep.

  20

  Even before I woke Thursday morning, my subconscious started worrying about whether my picture would be in the paper. I came to consciousness ready to do whatever it took to be sure I saw the paper first. It was an hour before I usually got up, so maybe I could camp on the stoop and catch the paper man as he drove past. He might make an exception and bring it to our door.

  I hauled myself and that heavy cast out of bed, hopped by the bathroom to brush my hair and teeth, then shoved the walker ahead of me down the hall. Lulu was delighted to see me, and squirmed around my foot. I obviously couldn’t take her for a walk, but I hopped over to let her out the back door. “Don’t you go out of our yard,” I warned softly, although I don’t know how I thought she could figure out where the property lines were.

  The light rain was still falling. She gave me a reproachful look to say “It’s all your fault,” and squatted quickly on the soaked grass, then dashed back in and shook herself all over me.

  I hopped to the front door and propped on the walker, glumly regarding the paper. It lay in the grass only twenty-five feet away, but it might as well have been a mile. I couldn’t hop down our front steps. Even if I could, I couldn’t hop that far across even short grass, and with all the rain we’d been having, ours was a foot high.

  “Can you fetch?” I asked Lulu, who had come in with me. “See the paper? Go get it, girl.”

  She gave me a look that said “If you think I am going back out in that rain, you can think again.” Then she did her three-legged hop to her breakfast dish to show me that people who lost the use of a leg didn’t have to be helpless.

  “Ungrateful wretch,” I muttered.

  I looked up and down the sidewalk. At barely past five, the street was completely deserted.

  I considered the problem while I started coffee. I couldn’t bear for Joe Riddley to open that paper before me. Could I reach it if I went down to the sidewalk in my wheelchair, then hopped on the grass just a few feet? I hopped through the kitchen and into the garage, got into the wheelchair, pushed the button to raise the door, and headed down the drive.

  I knew it was a mistake as soon as I felt the mist on my head and shoulders. To make things worse, the driveway was a slight incline, and slick. Next thing I knew, I was whizzing toward the street, picking up speed as I went.

  Maybe some people see their lives flash before them in times of danger. All I could see was myself sprawled in the street in my nightgown. I found the brakes about the time I bumped across the sidewalk. By the time I’d jerked them both up against the wheels, I was rolling smack into the lights of an approaching car.

  The wheelchair swerved on a slick spot. The car lights blinded me. I heard the squeal of tires and flung up my arms to cover my head before the crash.

  A white Mercedes stopped five feet from my left wheel.

  Trembling so hard I could not move, I sat there feeling stupid, helpless, and very wet.

  Georgia Bullock jumped out. She wore a pale silver raincoat to match the car. “Mackie?” She clung to the top of her door. “I thought I’d killed you! What on earth were you doing?” Her face was chalky in the dim light.

  I spoke through chattering teeth. “Coming to get the paper. I lost control on the hill.” I wrapped my arms around my chest to keep myself from shaking apart.

  “Hill?”

  I followed her gaze up the drive. The grade was very slight from one end to the other. I tried to laugh, but it wasn’t one of my better efforts. “It felt like a mountain, coming down. Better than a roller coaster.”

  “Whew!” She let out her breath, and I saw she was trembling, too. “Abigail wanted to bring you a note, but she’s so exhausted, I told her to sleep, I’d bring it. We were both lucky I was driving slow, looking for the number.” She shut the car door behind her, took an envelope from her pocket, then stuffed it back again. Her hands were shaking too hard to grip it. “I never imagined I’d find you up this early—much less run you down.”

  “You’re up early, too,” I pointed out.

  “We never went to bed.” As she came closer, I saw dark circles under her eyes. “We’ve been trying to decide what to do. I don’t know if you heard—”

  “I saw you on the news. I’m so sorry, honey. If you’ll push me up the hill, I’ve got coffee made, and Joe Riddley won’t be stirring for an hour or more.”

  “Coffee would be heaven.” She wheeled me into the garage and would have gone in the side door, but I waved her to stop. “I have to use the walker from here on.” I hopped ahead of her into the kitchen. She shed her raincoat as she came in. Under it, she was still wearing the navy pants and white blouse she’d had on the night before, but without the jacket and scarf. Fine lines of weariness fanned out around her eyes. When she reached a dining room chair, she collapsed onto it with a grateful sigh.

  The walker had a tray, so I carried in two coffee mugs, spoons, and a pint of half-and-half. We’d moved the coffeemaker to the dining room table since my accident, so I didn’t have to get up to refill my cup, and sugar and napkins were also on the table. Thank goodness, because Georgia sat at the table as if she didn’t notice a thing I was doing, and my leg would never have survived another trip. I sank into a chair around the corner from her. “Drink up.” I wished I could go put on something dry, but hopping even the short distance to our room was impossible.

  “Thanks.” Georgia filled a mug and held it to her cheek, looking desperate for warmth. “This is so awful! I don’t know what we’re going to do. All these years, we’ve thought Sperra was dead. Now, to find her here, living like that
—” Was she conscious that she was echoing Lance, or was that part of a prepared speech they had come up with?

  I had no idea what it was like to live in a family where every word you uttered could be taken down and published across the country, where every outfit you wore was cri tiqued by the fashion conscious, where you had to watch yourself every second in case some private emotion made its way onto a television screen. I thought of Renée as I had seen her in a few unguarded moments and knew she had better develop a thicker skin and actor’s skills before her husband faced election day.

  Georgia dumped three spoonfuls of sugar into her mug, followed it with a hefty dollop of cream, then gulped the coffee as if she needed the sweet warm brew to survive.

  “Why wasn’t Sperra dead?” I wondered aloud. “I mean, why did you think she was?”

  She sighed. “That was my fault—mine and Abigail’s.” She leaned across the corner of the table, maybe worried that Joe Riddley might show up and hear.

  “Sperra never lived with Burlin after the trial. She was sentenced to a rehab prison that kept her only two years. After that, they let her out, saying she was cured. That was a joke. A week later she turned up on Burlin’s back porch drunk and unconscious. Lance, who wasn’t quite seven, found her and ran screaming into the house that his mommy was dead. It gave him nightmares for weeks.”

  “Poor baby!”

  “You can’t imagine. Abigail and I both begged Burlin to divorce Sperra and get a court order forbidding her to come to the house, but he convinced us that a divorce would mean more publicity, and Sperra had a nasty streak when she was drinking. None of us knew what she might do or say in court. So he opened her a bank account and told her he’d put money in it every month, but he’d close it if she ever came back to the house again. She stormed out and showed up a few weeks later out in Spokane, where she had a college roommate. We told people she had moved to Paris—she’d been a French major in college—and Burlin made arrangements with the roommate to pay her bills. For the next seven years, Sperra bounced between sobriety, drinking binges, and rehab centers. In the rare times she was sober, her roommate looked after her. Abigail kept begging Burlin to get a divorce because she was terrified Sperra would come back and kidnap Lance, but Burlin said he had no plans to remarry and he didn’t want the publicity. Then the roommate out in Spokane called and said Sperra had disappeared. We had a miserable year wondering every day if she’d show up again on his back porch. Can you imagine how awful that was?”