When Will the Dead Lady Sing?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “No, I can’t.”

  Georgia was talking more to herself than to me by then. I got the feeling she had been needing somebody she could tell this story to for a very long time. “Then Abigail got a call. It was for Burlin, actually, at his office, but he’d taken Lance skiing in Switzerland for his sixteenth birthday. The caller ran a homeless shelter in Atlanta, and said that during a routine drug search of his residents, he’d found a gold locket engraved ‘With Love, Burlin,’ and some identification cards for Sperra Bullock in a woman’s backpack. The woman wouldn’t say where she’d gotten them, but he’d recognized the name and thought Burlin ought to know.”

  She paused to heat her coffee from the pot and take a swallow. I reached for the pot and refilled my own cup. “Abigail and I were both terrified it was Sperra. Abigail was dithering about whether to go see or to call Burlin, but I told her we should just go—although I had no idea what we’d do if it was. When we got there, though, it wasn’t her. We explained to the woman that Sperra was our sister-in-law and gave her the story we’d concocted on our way down—that Sperra was living in Paris, had come home for a visit, and been mugged. We said her purse and all her jewelry had been taken. The woman insisted she ‘hadn’t mugged nobody.’ ” Georgia’s voice took on the cadence of country Georgia. “She said that she’d gotten the things in New Orleans during a fire. She’d been in the bathroom of a homeless shelter in the middle of the night when the alarm went off, and she’d snatched up the backpack and run out the back door. She claimed she was ‘real glad to give us the things, but she could use a little something to reward her for finding the locket.’ I wouldn’t have given her anything, but Abigail gave her twenty dollars.”

  Georgia bit her lower lip and exhaled years of frustration and anger. “I got on the phone to the New Orleans police, and asked about the fire. They had to check, but eventually called back to say it had happened over a year before, and they gave me the name of the woman who ran that shelter. She said the fire started in a women’s dormitory, and while they were able to save most of the building, all the women sleeping in that one room had died of smoke inhalation and their bodies were long buried. When I asked about Sperra, she confirmed Sperra had slept in that room. She uses the nickname Birdie.”

  “Birdie,” I murmured, “not Bertie.” I reckoned it was the man’s suit that had made Tad and Hector hear her wrong.

  Again, Georgia didn’t seem to hear me. “Can you imagine how it felt to know a member of your family had been living in a homeless shelter? We couldn’t let the papers get hold of that. And we didn’t want to exhume thirty bodies to make sure one was hers. We were certain enough to plan a small memorial service and to put up a memorial stone in the family plot in Oakland City Cemetery. All the way home from her service, I whispered, ‘Thank you, God. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.’ As far as we were concerned, years of fear and worry were over.” She set down her empty mug as if it had become too heavy to hold. “They have been, until now.”

  “But if one woman was in the bathroom, Sperra could have been, too.” I was thinking out loud, trying to work it out. “She probably was, in fact, if her backpack was there to snatch. From what I understand, theft is common among homeless people, so they keep their belongings close by, wherever they go.”

  “You are amazing!” Georgia told me. “Abigail said you do a little detecting. Her note asks if you’ll help us. I think it’s an imposition for us to ask, but if somebody doesn’t find out pretty soon who killed Sperra, Lance can kiss this election good-bye.”

  I was tempted to say I’d help, but I know my limits. Right then they included a cast, Joe Riddley, and a serious lack of knowledge. “You need a professional. I don’t know a thing about this. The murders I’ve helped to solve have all been local, except one, and that one was literally dumped in my lap.”4

  “Here.” She cupped her hands around air and held them out toward me with a trace of the old twinkle in her eyes. Then she said, “No, I’m just kidding.”

  I sighed. “I’d help if I could, but I didn’t know Sperra, and don’t have any idea who could have killed her—or how to set about finding out.”

  She sipped her coffee again and looked out the window into the rain. “We’ve talked about nothing else all night, as you can well imagine, and I’m inclined to believe it must have been Hubert. Chief Muggins said he’d been threatening her because she’d been living in his barn. Can you imagine that? Living in a barn?” She wrinkled her nose, then went on without giving me a chance to reply. “For the life of me, I can’t think of any other reason for Hubert to ask me to walk down by the tracks that night. Frankly, it made me a little nervous, it was so deserted down there. But it was still light, and people were not far away.”

  “You were scared of Hubert?” I was astonished, and didn’t mind if she knew it.

  She laughed. “Heavens, no. But I was scared somebody might bother us, and Hubert had told us he’d had a heart attack. He wouldn’t be much protection.”

  She lifted her mug and set it down immediately. I knew the coffee had to be stone cold, so I hopped to the sink, dumped it, then brought the mug back. “I don’t believe it was Hubert. I’ve known him all my life.”

  She gave me a grateful smile, but her gray eyes grew serious again as she refilled her mug. “Then why did he insist on our going to the water tank? He told me he had climbed up there back in high school to paint somebody’s name on it, and he wanted to show me how he’d done it. But what if he wanted to go and leave evidence he’d been there, so if he dropped something later when he went back to kill Sperra, I could testify that he’d been there earlier? Edward said last night that anybody who commits a murder leaves some evidence at the scene. What if Hubert was planning it ahead of time?”

  “Hubert’s not that devious.” But I couldn’t help remembering that he’d managed to paint my name on that tank nearly fifty years ago and I’d never known it until this week. “He told me you wanted to go to the tracks,” I remembered.

  She’d been about to sip her coffee. She set it down, puzzled. “What on earth for? I hate trains. You can ask anybody who knows me. Agnes Scott is near the tracks, and the trains nearly drove me batty. Everybody else got used to them, but I never did. And I can’t conceive of any reason why I’d want to see a water tank, can you?” She sighed. “But maybe Hubert did just want to show it to me. I said I wanted a walk—I needed exercise. We’ve been eating too much and sitting too long on this trip. But we walked too far. I barely had time to shower and change before the meeting.” She got up and paced back and forth several times, then went to the front window and stared out through the blinds, like the rain might provide some answers. She asked, without turning around, “If Hubert didn’t kill Sperra, who did?”

  I’d been doing some thinking while she was talking, and I had a question of my own. “You all didn’t stay up all night because you were afraid Hubert did it.”

  She turned and looked at me for a while, like she was also thinking. At last she said, “You are smart, Mackie. Burlin always said you were. We—” She blinked several times, pressed one hand to her lips, and shook her head, warning me she couldn’t speak right then. She came back and sat down, and started drawing a little design on the tabletop with one finger. I couldn’t tell what it was, but she traced three of them before she swallowed hard and said, “We’re terrified they’re going to say Lance did it.”

  That dammed my creek. I had to take several breaths before I could ask, “Why on earth would anybody think that? He didn’t even know who she was, did he?”

  She nodded. “He admitted last night that Sperra sent him a note Monday afternoon, asking him to meet her at the water tank between eight thirty and nine that night. We all saw Annie Dale deliver it. We were meeting in a sitting room she’s let us work in. Lance read it and stuck it in a pile of papers he was working on. We figured it was from some gushing female—he gets a lot of those. We never imagined it was from her. We thought she was dead!”
/>
  “Why was he sure it was from her, then, and not an im poster?”

  “He said she drew a little bird at the bottom, like this.” She reached for a pencil I keep near the table for doing the crossword and traced a design on her paper napkin: a figure eight lying on its side, with three V’s making a beak on the small end, a tail at the other, and two legs. “It was a joke between them when he was little. He could draw it by the time he was three. It stood for Sperra—sparrow.” Georgia shoved her manicured fingers through her bangs, leaving them in disarray. “I wish Burlin had never married her. We all begged him not to, the first time he brought her home. She came from a good family—her granddaddy was a senator—but her parents died when she was young, and she had all sorts of weird friends. Burlin met her when she was singing in a nightclub.”

  “I thought he said it was a folk club.”

  She gave a slight, one-shoulder shrug. “Same difference. She was earning her keep strumming a guitar. She wore long hippy skirts and hair down to her backside, and she looked and talked like Mother Earth. None of us could see what Burlin saw in her.” She frowned at me. “Frankly, I think he was still on the rebound from you.”

  I refused to take the blame for whomever Burlin had married. “She looked all right in the videos they showed last night. Short hair, nice clothes—”

  Georgia’s lip curled. “Oh, she cleaned up pretty good. And she’d grown up in political circles, so she knew how to behave—when she wasn’t drinking. We figured out later that must have started while Burlin was in the Georgia legislature, a couple of years before Lance was born. It’s a miracle he wasn’t born with fetal alcohol syndrome—although, to give Sperra credit, she tried to be good while she was pregnant. I always thought the reason she didn’t want any more children, though, was that she couldn’t bear to give up liquor for nine months again. Oh, why am I going on like this? The poor woman is dead. Whatever she did, it’s over. But she put Burlin through years and years of hell, and now Lance—Lance—”

  I shoved the coffeepot her way. “Have some more.”

  She shook her head. “I’m over my limit already. And I really ought to be going, or they’ll be sending the police looking for me.” She stood up and reached for her raincoat.

  “But you haven’t finished the story. What happened when Lance met her Monday night?”

  “He didn’t. Hubert asked them to stay after the meeting, remember? There were a lot of people who wanted to talk, so by the time Lance got home, it was past nine. He says he went to his room and read.” She headed for the front door.

  “Did anybody see him come back to the inn? Annie Dale, for instance?”

  She paused. “He stopped by Abigail’s room for a minute, I think. But he can’t prove he didn’t swing by the tank before he went home. Nobody was with him.” She gave a little laugh that wasn’t the least bit funny. “For that matter, none of us can prove we hadn’t recognized Sperra, or where we were when she died. Renée and I were lost in the wilds of Hopemore. Burlin stopped by the inn to change clothes before he went out with some guys, but nobody saw him, so he can’t prove he didn’t nip out and kill Sperra while he was there.”

  “What about Edward and Binky—I mean Abigail?”

  She gave me the first real laugh I’d heard from her all morning. “She told me she’d asked you to call her that. That darned kid just won’t grow up. She was probably the only child in history to give herself a nickname—that’s how she said ‘Abigail’ when she was two, and Burlin and I started calling her that, to tease her. Pretty soon, she wouldn’t answer to anything else. She didn’t become Abigail again until she went to work for Burlin, and he and I insisted. He didn’t want a secretary named Binky. But I think she secretly calls herself Binky still.” Her spirits seemed lighter as she opened the front door, then turned back once more for what Mama used to call “some tarrying talk.”

  “I forgot to answer your question. Abigail was working in our sitting room all evening, and Edward drove straight from the meeting to Augusta, to meet with some members of Lance’s committee there. They had to finalize details for the rally the next evening. Lance was supposed to go with him. Edward was mad as blazes that he wouldn’t, and now we all wish he had. But I doubt if either Edward or Abigail can prove they were where they say they were, any more than the rest of us can.” She rubbed one cheek with her hand and heaved a sigh that came from her toes. “Who knew we all ought to document our every move? You don’t expect something like this.”

  I got myself to my feet and reached for my walker to see her out. “But like you said, nobody commits a crime without leaving evidence. The police are probably sifting every square inch of dirt by now. What about Annie Dale? Can she help alibi anybody? Has Chief Muggins even talked to her?” Probably so. Since this was now a story worthy of national attention, Charlie would be interviewing everybody with any connection to the newsworthy Bullocks.

  Georgia nodded. “Last night. But she wasn’t home Monday night. She’d told us earlier that since we wouldn’t need dinner, she was going to spend the evening with somebody with the improbable name of Smoke.”

  “Not smoke, it’s S-m-o-a-k,” I told her. “Smoak Wilson is her mother-in-law. She’s ninety, but spry as can be. Annie Dale goes over there a couple of evenings a week.”

  “It’s too bad Monday happened to be one of them.” Georgia usually had excellent posture, but right then, her body drooped in weariness. “Well, I’d better be going. I didn’t think you could help us, but I promised Abigail I’d deliver the letter. Oh—I almost forgot!” She dragged it from her pocket again and handed it to me. It was limp and a little damp, addressed to “MacLaren C. Yarbrough” in a sprawling hand.

  I opened it and read two scrawled sentences: “Mackie, we need you to help us, please. Can you come see me this morning?”

  I shook my head. I was saying, “I really can’t think of a single way I can help you,” when Georgia finally lost her excellent control.

  Tears filled her big gray eyes, and her shoulders shook with sobs. She leaned her head against the doorjamb and bawled. I hopped to the tissues by the couch and put one in her hand. It left smears of mascara down both cheeks. “I can’t bear this, Mackie.” Her words came out in gasps. “I can’t! To get this close—this close—to the governor’s mansion and lose it because of a homeless drunk!” She scrubbed her eyes again, but still they poured tears. “Lance has worked so hard. We all have. But if this thing doesn’t get solved soon—” She ran out of words and could only shake her head. She reached out and clasped one of my hands with a valiant attempt to smile, then pulled up her hood and dashed out into the rain.

  It was falling harder now, heaven’s tears covering the sad streets of Hopemore.

  Near the sidewalk, Georgia picked up my paper, then ran back through the rain to thrust it at me. “Here. But I doubt it’s worth getting run over for.”

  As she hurried away, anybody seeing that silver raincoat might think the moon had dropped by our place for a visit. To me, it looked like one big teardrop.

  I was relieved I hadn’t made the front page. All the Bullocks had, though, standing in the same tableau that had appeared on the eleven o’clock news. I was about to lay the paper down when I thought to turn the page.

  There I was, under the headline “Old sweetheart offers condolences.” It looked for all the world like Burlin and I were about to embrace.

  21

  I didn’t care if Joe Riddley was grumpy that early. I didn’t care if he would be more mellow after he ate. I snatched up the paper and hopped down the hall at record speed. Shoving his legs over, I sat down beside him. “Joe Riddley? Wake up. I have to tell you something.”

  He muttered from beneath the covers.

  “Wake up.” I shook his shoulder.

  He didn’t bother to open his eyes. “Is the house on fire?”

  “No.”

  “Has somebody gone to the hospital?”

  “No. But—”

  “Is
somebody dead?”

  “You’re gonna be dead if you don’t wake up and listen to me. I have to tell you something.” I shook him again.

  “Will I like it?”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Then wait until I’ve had my breakfast.” With a mighty heave, he turned his back toward me, practically pitching me off the bed straight onto my bum leg.

  I scrabbled back up and wiggled to make him give me sitting room. “I can’t. I have to tell you now.” If I didn’t, my courage would desert me.

  He heaved a sigh and turned back over, again jerking the covers from beneath me and nearly spilling me onto the floor. He put both our pillows behind his head and shoved himself up so he was propped and comfortable. “This had better be good.”

  “It’s not. It’s terrible.” Tears clogged my throat. “It’s—I don’t know how to begin.”

  He glowered. “You wake me up at dawn to tell me something that is so infernally important it can’t wait, then you don’t know how to begin? How about, ‘I’m sorry I woke you up, honey—why don’t you go back to sleep’?”

  I took a deep breath. “How about, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t faithful to you after you left me up at college?’ Or ‘I did date Burlin Bullock for a while up there. Can you ever forgive me’?”

  He punched the pillow behind him to get more comfortable. Then he closed both eyes and didn’t say a word for two hundred years.