Who Invited the Dead Man?

by Sprinkle, Patricia

  As Joe Riddley tied his shoes, I hurried to do something with my sleep-flattened hair. I was freshening my lipstick when he announced, “I’m going, with or without you.”

  I hurried out after him. I grabbed my pocketbook and disentangled myself from Lulu dancing around my feet.

  “Wait. We have to put Joe in the barn and Lulu out in the pen.”

  Outside, I saw why our room had been so dim. The dark clouds had convened overhead.

  Joe Riddley carried our parrot, Joe, to the barn while I dropped our dog, Lulu, over the fence like a sack of potting soil. The bird dogs woofed a halfhearted welcome.

  The clouds began to spit fat drops. They were pelting the windshield so hard as we turned into the MacDonalds’ long curving drive that we could hardly see, but we knew the way to the big brick Tudor house trimmed in cream stucco and dark brown half-timbering. It sat on two acres of lawn surrounded by a narrow belt of virgin forest. Close to the house, camellias glowed like rubies and garnets among emerald leaves. A tea olive bush near the drive would be giving off a rich scent in the rain. Skye’s wife, Gwen Ellen, had a love of gardening that kept her yard fragrant and lovely in every season.

  “Oh, dear,” I exclaimed when we got close to the house. “Charlie beat us here.” Chief Muggins had pulled his blue-and-yellow cruiser behind the door that concealed Gwen Ellen’s powder blue Thunderbird. The only other car on the drive belonged to Gwen Ellen’s maid.

  Skye had rebuilt their garage when his kids were in high school so it would hold all four cars. Then when their daughter, Laura, came home from grad school, he’d converted the space above the garage into a suite for her. Each car had its separate garage door, and today all were shut except the one for Laura’s white Taurus. She must have come home fast from the motor company, but her daddy would fuss if he knew she’d left it open. Skye fussed at Gwen Ellen and the children all the time about keeping those doors closed, and at us for leaving our cars sitting out most of the time. He could cite statistics about how many thefts occur because people leave garage doors open.

  Joe Riddley pulled in behind the place where Skye parked his black Crown Victoria, with its dealer tags. “You’re blocking his car,” I said without thinking.

  “He’s not gonna be needing it.” Joe Riddley’s voice was grim.

  That’s when it hit me. My eyes filled with scalding tears, which mingled with rain as we dashed to the garage without bothering to put up the umbrella. Skirting Laura’s white Taurus, we headed to the kitchen door, which was the only one we ever used.

  The door was answered by Tansy Billings, Gwen Ellen’s maid. “Oh, Miss MacLaren, we’ve got trouble here today, for sure.” Most folks in town didn’t have help on Saturdays, but Tansy took Tuesdays off when Gwen Ellen volunteered all day at the hospital. Tansy was short, round, and comforting, the color of rich dark coffee. Her flat face with high cheekbones made me suspect she, like Joe Riddley, had an Indian ancestor. Today, her grizzled hair was netted as usual and her starched pink uniform rustled as she moved, but tears rolled down her cheeks and she swabbed them with a paper towel.

  “Hello, Judge and Judge.” Chief Muggins stepped from behind her, a smirk on his face.

  I do not dislike Chief Muggins because he looks like a cross between a polecat and a chimpanzee, with the least attractive features of each. Many people are ugly and still likable. I do not dislike Chief Muggins just for the gloating look in his mean little blue-green eyes whenever I get myself in a mess, or the fact that he’s a pigheaded bigot whose wife left town after one too many visits to the emergency room. I dislike him primarily because he makes up his mind about a case within five minutes of arriving at a crime scene, then spends the rest of his time shaping facts to fit his conclusions.

  For once, he surprised me.

  “We got ourselves a mysterious situation,” he announced. “Skye MacDonald was found this afternoon out on a farm road just inside the city limits. He’d been hit by a car hard enough to kill him, but we don’t know what the dickens he was doin’ out there.”

  Tansy moaned and reached out her hand to clutch mine. She was shaking.

  I held her plump hand as I asked, “How long was he dead before he was found?”

  “Initial estimates are that he was killed sometime between nine and twelve last night.”

  “Last night?” Joe Riddley sounded as worried as I felt. Last night Skell drove off threatening to talk to his daddy. Today he showed up without ever having changed his clothes. This did not look good. Except I couldn’t imagine why they’d have gone out there to talk.

  “Killed last night, not found until this afternoon,” Chief Muggins confirmed. “Two boys were out walking and found the body. They ran back home, but they didn’t have a phone, so their uncle jumped in his truck and came to town. We got the word around two.”

  “Gwen Ellen must have been frantic when he didn’t come home.” I pushed past Chief Muggins and hurried to the living room.

  Joe Riddley claimed that being in Gwen Ellen’s living room was like being in the center of a camellia bush. She’d decorated around a rug she bought in China, painting the walls the soft green of the rug’s border and the woodwork to echo its creamy background. Creamy silk drapes had braid in the deep green and dark rose of the center medallion, and her chairs were covered in the pale pink and dark green of flowers woven into the border. The couch was creamy silk, too, with throw pillows in green, rose, and pink. There was an arrangement of yellow roses on the coffee table, placed there every Friday so Skye could enjoy them all weekend. He loved yellow roses. This week’s buds had just begun to open and share their soft scent.

  Gwen Ellen huddled on one end of the sofa, hugging herself like she was freezing. Laura stood by one long window with her back to us, holding on to a drape. Neither was crying. Laura was staring out into the rain and Gwen Ellen was staring at the end of her world. When I sat beside her, she turned and spoke in a voice so calm it froze my gizzard. “Skye’s dead, MacLaren.”

  “I know, honey. That’s why we came.” I reached for her hands. They were very cold. “Turn up the heat,” I ordered Joe Riddley, and he loped out to the hall.

  Even in grief, Gwen Ellen was beautiful in a gold twin set and a plaid wool skirt. Laura looked blurred around the edges—larger and vaguer than ever in a rump-sprung gray tweed skirt, gray wool jacket, and white turtleneck. When she turned to greet us, I saw that her eyes and the end of her nose were pink and the hand that held the drape was clenched into a fist that trembled. When Joe Riddley came back from the hall, he went to stand behind her. He didn’t touch her, but she stepped a fraction closer to him.

  Gwen Ellen shuddered. “Skye’s dead.” This time she emphasized the last word as if trying to make herself believe it. “He got hit by a car. Last night.” She uttered the last two words as if reproaching the world for not finding him sooner.

  “I know, honey. What happened?”

  She took a deep, ragged breath, and I saw that all that control was a sham. “They found him out on a dirt road.” Poor Gwen Ellen, she couldn’t think fast at the best of times. Today she was like an actress who couldn’t remember her lines. “He . . . I . . . Everything’s a muddle. We went to the new Mexican place for dinner—you saw us.” I nodded. “But I had a dreadful headache.”

  “You looked like death warmed over.” I wished I’d chosen another comparison, but she didn’t notice a thing.

  “I took a sleeping pill when I got home, and went straight to bed. Maybe the phone rang—or the doorbell. I’m not sure.”

  Chief Muggins had come to stand in the doorway, a predator ready to pounce. Always more eager to find a culprit than to console the grieving, he shot his question like a bullet. “Why aren’t you sure? Don’t you have a phone in your room?” He leaned against the doorjamb.

  Gwen Ellen looked at him blankly. “What? Oh, no. I don’t always sleep well, and Skye doesn’t want me bothered. But there’s one in Skell’s old room, next door.” She wrinkled her forehea
d, thinking. “I’m pretty sure I heard it ring. I think I heard Skye shouting at somebody, too, but maybe it was the television. He talks to it, you know.”

  Chief Muggins might not know, but Joe Riddley and I did. Watching televised sports with Skye was almost like being there. He jumped to his feet and cheered for good plays, yelled at the umpires and referees, and urged on his favorite players at the top of his lungs. Joe Riddley swore that the University of Georgia played better if Skye watched the broadcast.

  Gwen Ellen went on in that pale, lost voice. “Maybe I dreamed it. I’m not sure. I know I heard a car in the drive. I figured that was Laura coming in. I didn’t look at the clock. . . .” Her voice followed her empty gaze to nowhere. Then her dark eyes flashed with anger. “Why didn’t you find him sooner?”

  Chief Muggins had not a drop of compassion in his veins. “Why didn’t you miss him when you woke up this morning?”

  “I thought he was at work. I slept late. Because of the sleeping pill. Tansy was here when I came down.” Her sentences were choppy and short, maybe like her thoughts. Her hands had begun to tremble.

  “What did you do then?”

  “Worked in the yard. The rain had stopped, and I needed to spread chicken manure on my garden.” She stopped because that’s all she had to say, not because she fathomed that nobody cared about manure right that minute. Joe Riddley claimed Gwen Ellen was a good gardener because she lived at the same pace as plants, slow and steady. Skye hated to see her all hot and dirty, but Gwen Ellen was never happier than when digging in the dirt.

  “I find it hard to believe you got up and spent a whole morning in the yard without wondering where he was.” From the gloat on his face, he’d already decided Gwen Ellen had taken Skye out on that deserted road, persuaded him to stand in front of her car, run over him, then gone home to bed. In a minute he’d be asking to examine her car.

  I was about to point out he was talking to a woman who not only loved her husband but who was so tenderhearted she had made Skye take their infants for their shots because she couldn’t stand to see them in pain. Then I caught Joe Riddley’s glare and shut my mouth.

  “Skye likes—liked—” Again Gwen Ellen struggled for control.

  Laura spoke over her shoulder, her voice deep and gruff. “We open early. Daddy often leaves—left before Mama got up. She’d have no reason to miss him.”

  “Why didn’t you miss him at the office?” Now Laura had drawn Chief Muggins’s fire. I could see the cogs that pass for his brains churning out a case against her instead of her mother.

  She fumbled in her pocket for a tissue and dabbed her nose before she answered. As she spoke, she turned toward him, but only slightly. “I was over at our Hopemore Nissan all morning. We’re training a new manager there, and I worked with him until after noon. When I got back to MacDonald’s and found Daddy wasn’t there, I assumed he’d come home for lunch. He does—did that sometimes, especially on Saturdays, and stayed to watch sports on TV. Then he came back to close up.” She bit her lip and turned back to the window.

  Gwen Ellen gripped both my hands and her eyes were tortured. “He had to lie out there all night in the rain. Wouldn’t you think somebody could have found him sooner?”

  1 But Why Shoot the Magistrate?